Women and Political Representation in Canada

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

The 12 chapters in this volume explore women’s involvement in Canadian
political life on the 25th anniversary of the appearance of the Report
of Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970). While women’s
political achievements over the last quarter-century may have fallen
short of the ideal of equality, however defined, the sophisticated
analysis displayed here suggests that women have come a long way since
the late 1960s when, as Jane Arscott documents in her discussion of the
commission’s activities, it was difficult to find anyone to conduct a
background paper on women in politics.

The authors of these papers, mostly university professors and policy
analysts, agree that women are still second-class citizens. In exploring
the structures and processes that sustain such inequality, they raise
intriguing questions about the role of the state (in the past and in its
current neoliberal incarnation) in organizing women’s interests;
deconstruct the strategies of the Royal Commission on the Status of
Women and the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women for
empowering women; detail the experiences of women in a variety of formal
political settings (most interestingly, the affirmative action efforts
of the Ontario NDP); and develop new notions of “women’s politics”
that help to move policy beyond the goal of simply adding women to the
present political mix. As the editors note in the introduction, one of
the advances in feminist thought since 1970 is the recognition that
women are a diverse and complex political force, not a monolithic block.
It is also necessary, as L. Pauline Rankin and Jill Vickers argue in the
concluding essay, to “look beyond the numbers” to understand the
breadth and diversity of women’s political action, which is often
conducted outside of the formal political arena. To get the most out of
this book, readers require a passing knowledge of feminist and
poststructural theory, but it is worth wrestling with the occasionally
dense prose. The gender gap that has been identified in electoral
politics is but the tip of the iceberg of one the most significant
political movements of the 20th century, and this volume is a valuable
guide to how it has been played out in Canada.