Women and the Canadian State

Margaret Conrad is the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair of Women’s Studies
at Mount Saint Vincent University, editor of Intimate Relations: Family
and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800, and co-author of The
Joy of Ginger.

The 25 papers published here were delivered by feminist academics,
activists, and government bureaucrats (“femocrats”) at a conference
held at the University of Ottawa in 1990 to mark the 20th anniversary of
the publication of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of
Women. Because it has taken seven years for the papers to appear in
print, they serve two functions: (i) they assess, very effectively, the
changing relationship between various groups of women and the state from
1970 to 1990; (ii) they reveal, by their preoccupations and assumptions,
the deep and dramatic shifts that have occurred in the relationship
between the state and civil society in the 1990s.

While feminist scholars in the 1980s had begun to mount a critique of
government initiatives with regard to women, few anticipated the success
of the neoliberal agenda in calling into question the very foundations
upon which their arguments rested: women’s needs and the welfare
state. The stalling of the feminist agenda in the 1990s has had the
unintended effect of making the issues raised in these papers—the
concerns of First Nations, francophone, immigrant, and minority women;
family law; pay equity; violence against women; health and reproductive
issues—as relevant now as they were nearly a decade ago.

As the editors acknowledge, there is little discussion here of some of
the problems not on the Royal Commission agenda—ablebodiedness, class,
and sexual orientation, for example. Had such omissions been addressed
in this volume, it might have helped to underline both the distance
traveled since 1970 and the challenges still ahead in making the state
more responsive to the needs of all women. Nevertheless, this book has
many strengths, including thoughtful reflections by Florence Bird and
Monique Bégin (two women intimately involved in the Royal Commission)
and the perspective of women of racial and ethnic minorities. It is a
carefully edited book with an introduction in both English and French
and abstracts for each paper in the “other” official language.