Émigré Feminism: Transnational Perspectives

Margaret Kechnie is head of the Women’s Studies Program at Laurentian
University and the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in Northern
Ontario.

This challenging collection of 14 essays brings together the views of
expatriate, exiled, and émigré feminists who have lived in countries
with political systems ranging from democracies to military
dictatorships. Their reasons for immigrating to Canada vary as greatly
as their political and cultural backgrounds. Heitlinger herself was
vacationing in Britain when the Warsaw Pact armies invaded
Czechoslovakia in 1968 and her parents urged her to stay in that country
and receive her education there; her first job brought her to Canada.

Some émigré feminists find that the distance of time has blunted the
reality of women’s lives in their homeland, and that they are not
always able to accurately interpret events taking place there. Others
struggle with issues of identity and feminism in their adopted country
and question their understanding of the lives of women in their native
country. Still others have much to teach Euro-Canadian feminists about
cultural diversity; in “Coming to Terms with Hijab in Canada and
Turkey: Agonies of a Secular and Anti-Orientalist Йmigré Feminist,”
for example, Sedef Arat-Koc rejects the simplistic view that the
increased use of the hijab (veil) among Muslim women is nothing more
than a return to fundamentalism.

This valuable contribution to the study of transnational feminism will
be of particular interest to teachers in disciplines such as sociology
and women’s studies.