Biographical Work History
Cindy Baker
WGST 5010a, Spring 2013
Women’s Work: Social and Political Perspectives
Carol Williams
carol.williams@uleth.ca
April 22, 2013
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Family Background
The mythological work history of my grandparents loomed large in my imagination as a child, as my
parents had, to my young mind, the relatively boring jobs of schoolteachers. Though my parents taught me that I
could be whatever I wanted, since I got good grades I just believed that I’d follow in their footsteps. But I
fantasized about my grandparents’ lines of work and always wanted to have a job more like theirs than my
parents’. My paternal grandfather and grandmother immigrated to Canada from England in 1922 when the
Alberta government was offering quarter sections of land for ten dollars to Western European settlers (heads of
households, notably) who could clear and work the land and build a home within three years. They did, and my
grandfather raised their nine children alone when his wife died shortly after the birth of their youngest son. My
paternal grandmother had done all of the reproductive labour for their family and was the volunteer community
midwife, so beloved by the community that after she died the local women took on the motherwork when my
grandfather refused to foster the children out. Basically the community adopted many of the reproductive
responsibilities of the family until the children left home. (Of the nine, only two were girls, and they were two of
the youngest, so while many of the boys were old enough that they were expected to work on the farm, there was
no one that was automatically expected to take on the domestic duties of the household in the traditionally
Western European gendered division of labour mindset of their home and community.)
My maternal grandmother was a hairdresser and businessperson who owned her own beauty salon. My
maternal grandfather was a licensed electrician, carpenter and plumber whose secret work on the Mid-Canada
Line during the cold war sparked my childhood imagination. Their household and family had very traditionally
gendered reproductive roles, and my grandmother’s beauty salon was always talked about as something she did
as a hobby rather than part of the productive labour of the family economy, a toy her husband bought her to
make her happy while he was away working on the line. Even as a child, however, I romanticized both of their
jobs, and loved to play hairdresser in the small shop she had set up in the back of their home to service her
regular customers once her salon had been sold.
Meeting in university, my parents set up what they expected to be an egalitarian family economy. After
both completing their teaching certificates, my mom worked as a teacher full time to put my father through
school to finish his degree, after which he was supposed to teach full time to allow my mom to complete hers.
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Near the end of his degree, however, my mom got pregnant, and when he got his job she left hers to have my
brother, and never went back to school. Once she was ready to work again, a certificate was no longer good
enough to land a full time job, and she remained a part time substitute teacher and stay at home mom for the next
34 years, until their 4 children had moved out and she retired.
Despite my parents’ best efforts, my family adopted a domestic labour structure that modeled a typical
male-breadwinner family economy; though she worked outside the home as well, my mom did basically all of
the reproductive labour while my dad worked full time. As the principal of his school, he also worked long hours
outside of his scheduled work time and volunteered extensively as the long-term president of the local Fish and
Game Association. As a substitute teacher, my mom performed waged labour only part time, but she was very
popular and throughout my childhood worked an average of half time. It was a difficult job since she could never
make lesson plans, yet had to be prepared to teach any subject at any grade level, and never knew from one day
to the next if she’d be working the next day, so she could never plan her days in advance. She never even knew
from morning to afternoon if she’d get a call to work a half-day, yet she always had to be up and ready to go in
to work every morning, because if she did get a call that a teacher didn’t show up for work, she’d have to leave
the house immediately. Mom never liked traveling much and preferred staying home, and although I know she
appreciated her time alone when all 4 kids were in school and she had a day off, she was still working hard to
keep the house clean and keep the family fed, clothed and bathed. For the first 12 years of my life until he died,
my elderly paternal grandfather lived with us in the winters, so my mother had a lot of work in her triple day.
My parents both retired early (at fifty five), choosing quality of life over quantity of money. (Having
mortgaged their home several times to provide for their family, the brand new fifteen thousand dollar home they
bought in 1972 is still not paid off.) My mom has enjoyed time alone at home without children, elderly parents
or pets to take care of, and my father got restless and took a full time job in a company that supplies parts for the
oilfield. My father also has two independent businesses teaching boat safety and gun safety courses across
Northern Alberta and in the territories, and is an outfitter taking people on guided horseback tours through the
mountains. These jobs also double as his leisure pursuits, allowing him to travel and spend time outdoors in the
company of others while making money, and my mom happily stays at home. She administrates these businesses
for my father, taking on the less-appreciated and less-acknowledged invisible labour of his enterprises that takes
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place inside the home. In her leisure time, my mother knits hats and scarves for homeless shelters, women’s
shelters and other charities, taking donations of yarn from people and businesses and providing cards with her
donations asking that any thanks be directed to those individuals who provided her with the yarn. She estimates
that in the past ten years she’s knit upwards of 3000 hats and 500 scarves for charities across Alberta.
Childhood Labour
My mom and dad both volunteered a lot, working bingos, casinos, and other fundraisers multiple times
per month my whole childhood. As soon as we were old enough, we were conscripted into this work too,
working bingos at 12, and working the recycle bins as soon as we were old enough to walk. (In the mid-1970s,
the Leduc Fish and Game Association purchased the rights to recycling in Leduc from the city, which was not
interested in recycling at the time.) This was their major source of funding, and all the children of the association
members were expected to contribute by going door-to-door monthly to collect recyclables - primarily
newspaper - and, quarterly, going to the recycling bins in the industrial park to empty them out and fill the large
semi-trailer. Children could get into the bins more easily than adults, so our job was to get in the bin and lift out
piles of paper to the adults who would throw them into the trailer. The older children’s job was to stay in the
trailer and haul the paper to the far ends, piling it as neatly as possible to the ceiling and trying to avoid causing a
paper avalanche. None of this work was compensated with money, of course; however, as older children, our
reward for working in the trailer (a dangerous job that sometimes saw one of us fall into a paper sinkhole or get
caught in a paper landslide) was that we could each take home one box or bag of whatever we found. Direct
payment for working a bingo was a pizza dinner immediately afterwards, but we all understood that indirect
payment for helping fundraise was that the work of the organization (and the fun events that they put on) could
continue; we learned that our participation in community redistribution affected us both individually and as
members of the community.
When I became engaged in my own pursuits, I involved my parents in the fundraising endeavours of the
organizations of which I was a part. As their participation in the organizations of their younger years waned, my
parents were happy to diversify their interests and their social sphere while helping out their ambitious daughter.
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They still volunteer for organizations I used to be involved with in Edmonton, and it makes them feel close to
me while they keep my old friends and colleagues regaled with tales of my life these days.
In the summertime when my parents were off of their jobs at school, we operated as a family work unit,
living and working at my paternal grandfather’s farm. During my childhood, the farm had no animals, only grain,
a modest potato field, berry bushes and a vegetable patch. I loved picking berries, so that was my job. I also
loved tending the garden, and eventually I was given my own piece of land to start a small vegetable patch of my
own. As children we were expected to weed the garden and help the neighbours in their gardens and household
chores; we all worked to pay back the families that raised the Baker children after my paternal grandmother died,
and my family has remained very close to many of the families that live nearby. On the farm there was less
obvious gendered division of labour as we each took care of ourselves more than we did in the city and we all
had responsibilities with regards to farm work, food prep and cleanup, but men still worked the machines and it
was primarily women who tended the gardens.
My parents were terrible disciplinarians and they always put their children first; giving us every
opportunity to be successful was extremely important to them. We were encouraged to take part in
extracurricular activities and those interests took precedence over any household chores. Because they weren’t
good at disciplining us, we often not only failed to practice our musical instruments, sports or crafts but we also
neglected our chores, and there were rarely any consequences other than my mother having to pick up the slack.
This is my biggest childhood regret. As a child, I took lessons in piano, guitar, ukulele, marching band (snare
drum), writing, drawing, and painting, but above all I wish I had helped more around the house, and learned to
better discipline myself. We had an allowance that grew from five to twenty dollars per month over the course of
my childhood, which was supposed to be tied to completing our chores, but that rule was never enforced. My
parents were heavily involved in the reproductive labour of the extended family, as evidenced by my grandfather
living with us but also by the fact that my parents adopted the daughter of my dad’s brother when his wife died,
having already essentially become her surrogate parents during tough times in my uncle and aunt’s lives. Their
soft spot for my adopted sister’s situation led them to be perhaps too lenient with all of us. My mother
occasionally introduced a chore wheel or some other system designed to allocate responsibilities, but besides
setting and clearing the table, and filling and emptying the dishwasher which all four children were expected to
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do every night at dinner, I can recall doing other jobs around the house such as vacuuming only rarely, and never
did I learn how to use the washing machine while I lived at home. However, I appreciate the importance they
placed in education and their love for my passions, encouraging me to pursue my art though it did not hold much
hope of a financially successful career.
Because my parents brought home barely enough money to keep the family running, with no luxuries, as
children we were all encouraged to find work, not to contribute to the family economy as much as to relieve
pressure on them for our indulgences. Once we had a job, our allowances stopped permanently, as we had
“entered the work force” and could no longer expect our parents to give us money for nothing. They still bought
us clothes, school supplies and gifts, but they didn’t give us unallotted cash anymore.
Entry Into the Workforce
I started working when I was ten; as a well-known responsible child of a pair of school teachers, my
labour as a babysitter was in high demand. When other kids were taking the babysitters course at age twelve, I
had already been working for two years, bypassing the official training and vetting system. I made two dollars an
hour for shifts of anywhere from two to thirty six hours, one to three days a week. Standard hourly wages grew
during my time babysitting from two to five dollars when I stopped babysitting at age fourteen to take my first
“real” job in the legal workforce as a salad girl at Bonanza. Though I had wanted to be a cook and work behind
the scenes, those jobs were reserved for men; the gendered division of labour was strictly enforced. Women were
hostesses, waitresses, and salad girls. Men were cooks, busboys, and managers. I had to wear a skirt and
pantyhose, which I abhorred; the labour was hard, the restaurant unsanitary and the management irresponsible.
Shocked by my introduction to the waged workforce, I quit after nine months.
After that and until I graduated from high school, I did very little labour in the formally-recognized
workforce. I worked at a garden centre belonging to my best friend’s father for a summer before he sold the
business, ran the scorekeeping clock for the Leduc Old Blades Hockey League in the winter, and for a couple of
summers worked as a “pull girl” at the local trap shooting range. We were called pull girls because when the
shooter was ready to take a shot they’d yell “PULL!” and we’d press the button to release a clay pigeon target
into the air. The range, which was run by staunch misogynists with clear investment in enforcing a masculinist
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worldview, preferred to hire girls to work the button because the (primarily male) shooters would supposedly be
less likely to yell at a girl than they would at a boy, though we were still at the receiving end of a fair amount of
vitriolic language whenever someone missed an easy shot, and I’m fairly certain that the real motive behind
hiring girls was that the shooters could more easily blame their bad marksmanship on us. The pay was far below
minimum wage and it was under the table, but it was physically easy work, if emotionally taxing.
I much preferred the householding/recirculative labour my younger sister and I would perform together,
baking and making crafts, jewelry and art to sell at local fairs. In our free time, my siblings and I also used to
enjoy organizing and running small fundraisers for charity. We once held a carnival for muscular dystrophy in
our backyard and raised over a hundred dollars from neighbourhood children. I found this contingent labour
based on my passions to be much more rewarding than any of my waged jobs ever were. With this in mind, I put
myself partly through university (with much help from my parents, scholarships, bursaries and student loans) by
doing magic shows and fortune telling performances for local schools and parties.
My only union job to date was during the summer after my first year of university, when I worked at a
Superstore garden centre. Though I will always support unions, the job was in reality horrible – they broke every
rule in the union handbook – I never got a break, and there was only ever one of us outside in the garden centre
when there should always have been at least two. I never received an escort when carrying my cash box in from
outside, and the lock was broken, ensuring that when it was inevitably burgled I took the blame even though
anyone could have taken the money. There was no phone or intercom outside so I had no way to communicate
with the rest of the store if there was a problem, and if someone didn’t relieve me at the end of my shift, I had no
recourse but to stay outside until another staff member came into the garden centre to check on me, sometimes
hours later. I was only there through the summer, so I never saw the benefits of union membership, not even
making it through the end of the probationary period even though I paid my dues.
Career-Building
Vowing never to take another job that wasn’t in a field I was wholly committed to, my short-lived
employment at Superstore in 1994 was my last job outside of arts, culture, and nonprofits. I spent the
extracurricular hours of the remaining three years of my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree volunteering for The
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Works Visual Art Festival, various community arts organizations, and the Fine Arts Building Gallery (which
hired me in my fourth year as a paid gallery attendant) as well as organizing visual arts student fundraisers to
start a legacy fund for renovations to the gallery. After graduating, my commitment to the art community started
paying off in spades. The director of Latitude 53 artist-run centre sought me out to offer me a summer job, which
transitioned into a board position. A full time volunteer job for the University of Alberta’s Sightlines
Printmaking Symposium was retroactively parlayed into a paid gig when they realized how much work I had
done, and my annual Works Festival volunteer jobs transitioned into a paid consultation gig. I got a job as
Gallery Assistant at Harcourt House Arts Centre where after a year I earned a promotion to Programmer that
involved a lot of unpaid overtime and advocacy work, during which I also landed a job as Volunteer Coordinator
and House Manager at Metro Cinema Film Society, where I wore many hats, and was severely underpaid.
During this time I was also starting to exhibit my artwork and continuing to volunteer many hours in the nonprofit arts field. In 2000 I moved to Saskatoon where I had been offered a job at AKA Gallery; over the eight
years I worked there I was involved in a lot of advocacy work, my salaried hours bleeding over into my personal
time more and more as I became the founding President of ARCCC/CCCAA (the national artist-run advocacy
organization) and national representative of PARCA (the regional artist-run advocacy group) - jobs that in other
provinces/regions were paid positions but because our region was small had to be taken on as part of my
underpaid artist-run centre job. The programming job I was hired to do slowly morphed into primarily
fundraising and organizing a million-dollar building purchase, move and renovation; this job was ultimately
rewarding in that I was able to make a huge difference in the long-term life of the organizations involved and
leave a legacy, but it took its toll on me mentally, physically and emotionally, and by the time of our grand
opening in the new location, I was burnt out.
In Saskatoon I also took on a lot of volunteer work outside of the arts: for the Gay and Lesbian Health
Services as a phone line counselor, at AIDS Saskatoon, Metamorphosis festival, and as a founding board
member of Saskatoon Diversity Network, all the while working as a professional artist and dealing with a newly
diagnosed disability. Through this my reproductive work suffered, becoming nearly non-existent.
The one change that happened to me while in Saskatoon that has made the biggest impact on my work
life was meeting my partner Megan. The first six years Megan and I were together I had a full time paid job and
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she was unemployed – for the first two because she was completing university, and for the following four she
could not legally work because her visa would not allow it. She volunteered full time, however, gaining
connections and experience, and doing under the table web design, mostly bartering for in-kind services. Once
she achieved permanent residency, she got a full time salaried job at AIDS Saskatoon, and I left my job to pursue
my artistic practice full time while she became the primary breadwinner for almost four years. During those four
years I did small jobs within the non-profit art world, selling ads for Blackflash Magazine, and doing consulting
for artist-run centres undergoing moves and renovations. I have a strong belief in community redistribution; in
Saskatoon I was the local art community hairstylist, cutting hair for free for artists that could not afford it or
wanted something they could not find at other local stylists, and I was the local art tax return preparer, doing
taxes for local artists that could not afford help. I have been through periods in my artistic practice where I had
studios outside the home but I always return to in-home studios where I can spend time with Megan and the cats
and help in home labour while working on art; I also combine artmaking with leisure pursuits, for instance
watching movies with Megan while I hook rugs. Importantly, an art career is not only the work of artmaking but
also involves the invisible labour of administration, which takes much time and energy on top of my paid labour,
reproductive labour, and artwork. My art gigs basically pay for themselves and bankroll more art production and
non-paying but career-essential gigs outside Canada. Last fall, Megan and I moved to Lethbridge so that I could
pursue my MFA, and I have continued consulting and taking on art gigs.
Reproductive Responsibilities
Megan and I both decided early on that we were not interested in having children, though we have
always had cats. Social time with friends in the art world and queer community is important to us and we spend a
lot of time at/hosting dinner parties, averaging once a week except in the summer when we get together much
more often. We share the labour of these gatherings whether we’re hosting or not. Megan and I travel a lot for art
shows; some years I calculate that I am away more than I am home. This career-related work is taxing on my
home life and relationships, but pays off in the form of more gigs, attention, academic writing and scholarly
research being done about my work, and more grants and awards. Megan and I are each other’s primary partners
in a polyamorous family. Maintaining a polyamorous family is a lot of work; because we don’t have a one-
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household family, the reproductive work is not divided among many (Megan and I live together). There’s double,
triple and sometimes quadruple the work to be done in regards to planning special occasions and celebrating
important events. Of anyone in our extended poly family, I do most of the domestic labour of planning for
holidays and get-togethers, letter-writing, sending cards, and buying presents. All of us (Megan and I, our
secondary partners, and their primary partners) have other partners, who oftentimes overlap in complicated ways.
Honesty and safety are of great importance in all of our relationships, and that takes a lot of emotional labour.
At home, Megan certainly does more of the day to day reproductive labour of the household than I do,
taking on most of the traditionally Western female sex-typed jobs such as cleaning and cooking while I take care
of the yard/garden, repairs, and vehicle maintenance. I do most of the banking, taxes, and bill-paying. What
looks like a heteronormative division of labour split down gendered lines is coincidental and practical in our
household as it takes advantage of our relative strengths and weaknesses; Megan does daily work that my
physical disabilities make difficult, and frees my energy up for artmaking and paid work, and I do the more
sporadic work that can wait until my body can handle it, work that triggers Megan’s social anxieties, and frees
her up to do her artmaking and paid work. Our low-paid white collar relatively comfortable jobs have provided
us with a lifestyle that does not afford us many luxuries but allows us to live and work our beliefs, making art,
volunteering, being activists, and having active social lives.
When we visit either of our parents’ homes, Megan does a lot of the cooking; she has consciously taken
on this food-provisioning role as her way of gaining power within the family and also a way of diverting her role
in other arenas such as the emotional labour that I perform in the family. Megan works in the kitchen while I
negotiate family politics in the living room with parents and siblings.
Conclusion
Our household currently has no paid labour outside of my teaching assistanceships at the University of
Lethbridge and scholarships as well as the grants and art gigs that Megan and I get. Grant-writing, scholarshipwriting and applications for art shows are the full-time work (that sometimes result in payment) that Megan and I
engage in daily. It’s a stressful and inconsistent source of minimal income, but it makes us happy and allows us
to live the lifestyle we are committed to.