Women and Social Change: Feminist Activism in Canada

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and editor
of They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada.

This book comprises 19 essays focusing on feminist activism in Canada.
While primarily concerned with the “how” of feminist activism, the
book tells a fascinating story of successes and failures in a movement
characterized by growing pains and the neo-conservative challenges of
the 1980s.

Women and Social Change is divided into three sections: models for
social change, case studies of feminist activism, and teaching and
research activities that link theory and practice. In the first section,
Linda Briskin describes the two poles that characterize feminist
activity—disengagement and mainstreaming—and calls for creative
integration. This theme is further explored in essays by Janice Ristock
(on feminist collectives), Angela Miles (on the experience of women
activists in Antigonish, Nova Scotia), and Jill Vickers (in her
discussion of political processes).

In the second section of the book, nine essays offer an excellent
introduction to the variety of activities inspired by the “second
wave” of the women’s movement in Canada. While some of these groups
proved short-lived, others grew from strength to strength, and many
became members of the National Action Committee (NAC), Canada’s
coalition of more than five hundred women’s organizations. Lorraine
Greaves’s discussion of recent organizational problems within NAC
highlights the difficulties of wielding such a diverse movement so that
it becomes a force for national political action.

The final section looks at the efforts of feminists within and outside
traditional academic disciplines to mobilize teaching and research for
the cause of women. For many feminist activists, maintaining community
involvement means a triple day—housework, paid labor and community
voluntarism—but as Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, a long-time participant
in the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, argues,
bridging the gap between creating knowledge and applying it is a crucial
part of the feminist agenda.

Overall, this is a useful book, that documents the state of feminist
activism in the early 1990s. Because of the sophisticated theoretical
discourse that informs many of the essays, they will, no doubt, remain
largely inaccessible to the average activist—who, like “first
wave” feminist, Nellie McClung—will “just get the thing done and
let them howl.”