From the outset of second-wave feminism in Canada, women have advanced analyses of employment inequality that embrace their labour in both the public and domestic spheres. Through campaigns, task forces, and direct engagement with government departments, activists have argued that only when the Canadian state takes account of their roles as care-providers can women's full potential as worker-citizens be realized.

In the late nineteenth century, most jobs were strictly segregated by sex. And yet, despite their separation at work, male and female employees regularly banded together when they or their unions considered striking. In her groundbreaking book, Ileen A. DeVault explores how gender helped to shape the outcome of job actions—and how gender bias became central to unionism in America. Covering the period from the formation of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 to the establishment of the Women's Trade Union League in 1903, DeVault analyzes forty strikes from across the nation in the tobacco, textile, clothing, and boot and shoe industries. She draws extensively on her research in local newspapers as she traces the daily encounters among male and female coworkers in workplaces, homes, and union halls. Jobs considered appropriate for men and those for women were, she finds, sufficiently interdependent that the success of the action depended on both sexes cooperating. At the same time, with their livelihoods at stake, tensions between women and men often appeared. The AFL entered the twentieth century as the country's primary vehicle for unionized workers, and its attitude toward women formed the basis for virtually all later attempts at their organization. United Apart transforms conventional wisdom on the rise of the AFL by showing how its member unions developed their central beliefs about female workers and how those beliefs affected male workers as well.

Annis May Timpson demonstrates how Canadian women's calls for family-friendly employment policies have translated into inaction or inappropriate action on the part of successive federal governments. She focuses on debates, public inquiries, and policy evolution during the Trudeau, Mulroney, and Chrétien eras, contextualizing these developments with a discussion of the changing patterns of women's employment since the Second World War. Drawing on a wealth of interviews and close analysis of primary documents, Driven Apart explains why federal governments have been able to implement employment equity policies but have failed to develop a national system of child care. Driven Apart was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE and was awarded The Pierre Savard Prize by the International Council for Canadian Studies.