Women & Children First: A Provocative Look at Modern Canadian Women at Work and at Home

Betsy MacKenzie was a graduate student in community health at the University of Toronto.

Michele Landsberg is currently an award-winning columnist with the Toronto Star. Her 20-year career in Canadian journalism has included seven years with Chatelaine magazine. Living in Toronto, she enjoys her three children, husband Stephen Lewis and, judging from this book, a potentially key voice in the development of feminism in this country during the next 20 years.

This book includes many and sometimes lengthy excerpts from Landsberg’s column, woven together with more explanations, anecdotes, and analysis. She turns her attention to a wide range of subject matter from emotional bonding with children, through domestic violence, rape, and pornography and on to waging war with personal addictions to food and nicotine. In all cases, she investigates and evaluates the position of women and children in society — the pictures are sometimes not pretty.

There is a great deal of subjectivity in her treatment, ranging from potent political observations to hilarious domestic comedy. It is Landsberg’s remarkable combination of intelligence, honesty, and unpretentiousness which makes the whole thing very palatable even when she does seem a little unfair (in her descriptions of current medical practice, for instance).

Landsberg describes herself as a contradiction: a feminist with one foot on the left bank but happily married with three children, neither a radical nor a traditionalist. Readers may disagree. In a very radical sense, she exemplifies the possibility that exists for many women to bridge the so-called gap between feminism and family life. In articulating this, she is obviously far more interested in communicating, in actually getting at her reader, than in relishing her own rhetoric. Her willingness and ability to talk to women through the sphere of ordinary daily experience may be her greatest tool as an unusual change agent for women and children in Canadian society.