Several men's groups were involved in discussing women's proper roles. Clergymen preached and wrote about the issue of how women were viewed in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. There were two possible roles for women within the Catholic Church which consisted of wife and mother or member of religious order. Women who organized charitable associations were told to bring them under the control of the church. These organizations in which the women started, responded not only to the church but to the women who were involved. Male clergy continued to believe that they were to say what women's roles were, both inside and outside the church. A French Canadian priest stated that women were "naturally" separate and different from men.

"Equality, whatever it is before God, in no way implies that parity of roles is society. One forgets that woman, by her very sex, by her physical structure and her moral qualities, by her tastes, talents, and tendencies, absolutely differs from man, and that this radical difference between the sexes results in no less a difference in their duties." (Prentice, Bourne, Brandt, Light, Mitchinson, and Black, 1988:145)

Protestant clergymen also felt that women should have minimal rights. They felt that they should not speak out at meetings. Christian women's employment was to be kept in silence, their place was " in the home." Women who's children turned out to be delinquent were blamed with the reasoning of "bad" mothering. Also, women who went to work were blamed for their children's bad behaviour.

Physicians were a second group who had much to say about women's roles. They tended to stress women's physical weakness. The weakness began with puberty. As women's bodies began to change, there were many focuses on the female reproductive system. They claimed there was little energy left in the young women, especially no energy for education and sports. Doctors declared if women were to engage in any physical or educational activity because their energies would go to their brain and not to their uterus, therefore their reproductive systems would be in danger. All of these precautions were mainly seen as necessary for women to successfully bear children. They were seen as child bearers and nothing else. If they remained virgins or practiced birth control, they risked physical breakdown.

Physicians avoided discussing the causes of women's emotional disabilities. It was simply accepted that women were weaker and less emotionally stable than men.

A Toronto journalist Goldwin Smith argued that the practice of politics was men's business and inappropriate for women. He also claimed that women did not need the right to vote, they already had equal opportunities in professions as well as equal access to education. An economist, Stephen Leacock, argued that women's true and only role was motherhood and that society should accept this.

From the time period of approximately 1890-1930, most Canadians remained convinced that women place was in the home. Men were always in favour of employment, even after the war ended, women were enforced to hand over their new found jobs to the returning men. Women were frequently reminded that "No other work that a woman can do is as important to Canada as making a home and taking care of children." (219)
 
 

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