group host / statement of purpose

[iverglas]

21. ah, third wave

hits same barriers as second wave.

My experience was novel. I got drawn into formal "women's liberation" in 1969 through the campus Trots, with whom I hung out for a few months until they told me to go away. I didn't seem to be good comrade material. They saw it, at the time, as a way of extending their reach, in true Trot fashion.

My earliest encounters with the formal form were my French teacher giving me a copy of The Second Sex a couple of years before, and the Canadian magazine Chatelaine during the 1960s when I was in high school. Doris Anderson was given Chatelaine and told to make a profit in two years or it was dead. It had previously resembled Family Circle or Woman's Day. She turned it into a feminist organ aimed at ordinary women -- it had cooking and health, but it had articles about the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, and reproductive choice, and you name it in terms of the emerging women's issues. It has lost its way in recent years, but it was probably the most significant public influence on Canadian women's lives for the decade starting in the mid-60s.

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/187861

Anderson and her team of writers looked at everything from abortion to sexism and made it appealing to everyone from the "prairie housewife to the Toronto sophisticate," Landsberg said. "She brought forward all the key issues for women and made them palatable and understandable ... To her, equality just made sense. It was a question of human rights and fairness."

Anderson had a profound impact on the face of Canadian feminism.

She agitated for the creation of a Royal Commission on the Status of Women through the 1960s. That commission's report eventually launched Canada's feminist revolution.

And she was responsible for women getting equality rights included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Landsberg said.

Anderson resigned her position as chair of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women over the issue. Her resignation prompted a wave of protests and lobbying by women for their rights to be included in the Charter.

I've told my favourite anedote here before I imagine: two things I read separately. Someone asked Steinem why Ms. carried makeup ads and the like. She spoke at some length about how women like to make themselves look nice, blah blah. Anderson was asked the same question. She said: because we need the money.

Anderson ran for Parliament as a Liberal ... which obviously I think awful. And she is decried as a "liberal feminist" by some. But to deny her outstanding and enormous contribution to the welfare of women in Canada because she didn't have a class analysis ...

I'm off on a tangent, but I can't resist. I have been googling to see how Chatelaine addressed sexual orientation.

http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/download/1692/1822

... and it's a protected pdf and I can't copy it, having lost track of my unlocker when my hard drive went boom ... a little:

<1960s> With regard to lesbian content, Chatelaine was North America's trend-setter when, under editor Doris Anderson, it published the first, cautious but informative article that focused on lesbians ... <1970s> Part of the reason for Chatelaine's delayed reaction might have been the conservatism of many of the magazine's readers, who tended to react quite strongly to articles on sexuality in general, and abortion and lesbianism in particular. Anderson recalls that when there was a strong backlash against a Chatelaine article, she would assume the magazine had gone too far and drop the subject for a time.

Anyhow, things were different here. I don't recall experiencing the same male domination of left politics (not that there weren't problems), and Canadian society in general became and still is far, far less patriarchal than the US, and feminism here has never actually died.