Lament for a "Patriarchy Lost"?: Anti-Feminism, Anti-Abortion and R.E.A.L Woment in Canada

Janet Money is a writer and policy analyst for the Canadian Cystic
Fibrosis Foundation in Toronto.

This essay began as a seminar presentation for a graduate Women’s Studies and Political Science program at Carleton University, and it has emerged as the first in a series of papers published by the CRIAW intended to explore women’s experience and concerns.

Dubinsky is correct in terming her work a “very preliminary attempt to discuss not only the relationship between pro-life ideology and the right, but to assess the right in Canada itself.”

But in the short space of some 50 pages she does an excellent job of placing the Canadian anti-abortion and anti-feminist movements in a political context. Dividing anti-abortion arguments into humanist and moralist categories, she links each to the rising new right. Her examination of R.E.A.L. Women is unfortunately brief, and likely to infuriate its members, suggesting as it does that the group is a cog in a larger rightist ideological machine.

Dubinsky concludes abruptly and without optimism, suggesting that anti-abortion and the new right forces are still on the rise in Canada. Saying that the current abortion struggle is only “the thin edge of the wedge,” she questions whether Canadian feminists can rise to a challenge from other women.

It should be noted for those unfamiliar with the CRIAW that the essay is admittedly not unbiased — its author is pro-choice, feminist, and leftist.