- University of Alberta
chapter two
Activisms
In the current context of neo-liberal and neo-conservative politics, women’s movements in Canada have experienced a decline in influence. Because feminist organizations continue to push governments to ensure social equality through greater expenditures and new and more effective social programs, they have increasingly been cast as “special” interest groups—antithetical to the public good as defined by prudence and deficit reduction (Brodie 1995; Bakker 1995, 1999). But this has not always been the case. Canadian feminist organizing enjoyed a certain amount of influence and political legitimacy for a time in the 1970s and early 1980s; the current period, by contrast, is characterized by marginality and new challenges. During the era of the second wave, feminist organizations proliferated and some dominant groups have since become more internally diverse and inclusive, while the emergence of third wave feminism has more fully integrated anti-racist feminist politics into their efforts for social change (see Pinterics, Chapter 1).
In 1966, a number of Canadian women active in mainstream women’s organizations1 and an elected parliamentarian, Judy LaMarsh, were instrumental in calling for a Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW). Upon learning of the government’s resistance to this demand, Laura Sabia (later president of Canada’s national women’s organization, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women [NAC]) issued a public ultimatum threatening to “march two million women on Ottawa” (Prentice et al., 1988, p. 347). The Royal Commission was formally established in 1967 and delivered its final report in 1970. The Commission focused broadly on women and the economy, education, the family, taxation and child care, poverty, the participation of women in public life, immigration and citizenship, and criminal law and women offenders. When considered alongside comparable reports released in other Western countries in the 1960s, the RCSW can be viewed as quite radical, especially in its recognition of systemic sexism enforced by policy, and in the challenges it made to the public/private divide. In hindsight, however, there were also significant omissions; for example, the failure to define violence against women as a central problem, and the neglect of racism (see Williams, 1990, and Andrew and Rogers, eds., 1997).
The RCSW has been viewed as a formative event in the history of feminist organizing, both because of intense mobilization around its hearings and because of the organizing it produced. Canadian feminist organizing benefited from the federal government’s decision to provide funding for women’s groups, which was a key recommendation of the RCSW. In order to ensure that politicians acted upon the RCSW, the national umbrella group NAC was formed in 1972. Also important was the formation of a bureaucratic network to provide research and policy advice on women’s issues (the establishment of agencies such as the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women and the Women’s Bureau of the Secretary of State). This internal bureaucratic network has now been effectively dismantled. While there have been some critiques of the Royal Commission (see Williams, 1990; Arscott, 1998; and Andrew and Rogers, 1997), there can be no doubt that it significantly shaped the direction of the mainstream Canadian women’s movement.
Almost forty years after the RCSW, Canadian feminist activisms have simultaneously retreated and expanded, continuing to struggle with legitimacy and with their work in affecting social change. In our last edition of this book, we included a range of texts reflecting on the Canadian women’s movements. However, in preparation for this edition, we were surprised that there are fewer articles and books on the Canadian women’s movements; as a matter of fact, they are almost non-existent. Why has there been little commentary on the women’s movements in Canada? What is the relationship between context and activisms? How would we characterize feminist activisms in the 21st century?
In the realm of structure and systems, Trimble and Arscott (“Conclusion: Halfway to Equal?”) demonstrate why and how we need to make our public institutions, particularly the Canadian state in terms of its policy-makers and elected officials, more accountable—that in 2004 numbers still matter. They argue “ . . . without equality in political representation, women as a group are denied equal chances to plan and live their lives without having to endure the effects of disadvantages that result from gender bias” (p. 97). Analyzing the roadblocks to women’s political representation in party politics, Trimble and Arscott remind us that we must not retreat from engaging with the Canadian state at the policy-making and electoral levels. In a context in which the decreased provision of social services from the state disproportionately affects women of colour, women with disabilities, and women who live below the poverty line, achieving equality in partisan politics is a crucial strategy for feminist activists.
A central feature of Canadian feminist activism outside the realm of partisan politics in the 1970s and 1980s was its engaged relationship with the state, particularly through the activities of its national feminist umbrella organization, NAC. NAC was considered a legitimate lobby group with entitlement to consultation in the policy-making process, gender-designated funding, and special points of access within the federal bureaucracy (see Vickers et. al., 1993). But since the mid-1980s much has changed. With the embrace of neo-conservatism and the erosion of governmental commitments to ensuring social equality, the women’s movement has been placed on the defensive. In the national debacle of the 1992 Charlottetown constitutional agreement, NAC’s active presence in the “No” Campaign earned it the label, “the enemy of Canada.” In this context, the representational claims of organized feminism have been undermined. Governmental cuts in funding for women’s groups have affected the movement’s ability to advocate for social equality. Rebick and Roach consider the future of Canadian feminist organizing in “The Next Stage: Canadian Feminism.” Set within a conversation about NAC, they argue that we have been seduced by the equality gains made by some white women who have moved into elite positions. The success of these women has been generalized to all women. Hence, other issues such as accessible child care and pay equity are viewed as extras, not as part of economic and social equality. Their complex conversation charts the current contradictions that face feminist organizing and points towards the future.
Janine Brodie has been a significant chronicler of the development of neoliberalism, and has offered insightful analyses of its relations to feminist activism in Canada.2 In “The Great Undoing: State Formation, Gender Politics, and Social Policy in Canada,” Brodie maps the ways in which state provision of fundamental social services has been eroded and shifted back to households, where the burden of much of this caring work is done by women. Brodie argues that feminist activists must be vigilant in their attention to the structural and systemic dimensions of inequality.
Diana Majury, in “Women’s (In)Equality before and after the Charter,” analyzes the use of equality litigation as a vehicle of feminist struggle. The focus on litigating equality that arose after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) represents a crucial shift in Canadian feminist organizing. In 1985, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) was founded to spearhead feminist Charter equality claims. At a time when feminist political organizing at the national level is in decline, LEAF, though impeded by declining governmental funding, has continued to mount crucial Charter cases. As we witness equality-enhancing public policy being erased with the vestiges of the welfare state, rights-based and constitutional struggles assume new importance. They assume importance because it may be that the courts and constitution provide a forum for articulating the ongoing necessity of substantive equality projects when political actors are resistant and hostile. Majury analyzes the contradictory nature of Charter decisions, focusing on how the courts have interpreted the meaning of equality. Majury argues that we “may have a shared commitment to equality, but we do not have a shared understanding of what equality means, and we do not have a shared commitment to the elimination of inequality.” (p. 116).
While the mainstream Canadian women’s movements have had to reconfigure themselves in an era of cutbacks, the shifting of certain social services from the state back to the family, and the tying of government funding to specific projects, Aboriginal women have been organizing in significant ways. Recently, there has been both an increase in the literature exploring Aboriginal women’s lives and activisms, often by Aboriginal women, and a marked increase in their leadership in First Nations’ communities (Monture-Agnus, 1995 and 1998; Fiske, 2000; Anderson and Lawrence, 2003; Luther, Whitmore and Moreau, 2003).3 Grace Ouellette, in “The Aboriginal Women’s Movement,” provides us with an overview. Important to the struggle for Aboriginal women has been the articulation and analysis of the colonizing practices specifically manifest in the government of Canada’s Indian Act and the “cultural colonialism”4 of the Church in its missionaries and residential schools. Ouellette argues that Aboriginal women have been more concerned with racism, classism and nationalism than sexism (p. 123). Ouellette explores how Aboriginal women’s political organizing has been informed by an indigenous world view that places women at the centre of a wheel of life. As the Canadian women’s movements have begun to recognize and integrate analyses of racism and classism, we may begin to aspire to Ouellette’s vision of “co-existence.”
It is quite ironic that Canadian feminist organizations are being constructed as unrepresentative at the very moment when previously silenced groups of women have gained a greater voice and assumed leadership positions. In 1993, Sunera Thobani was the first woman of colour to be elected as NAC’s president. This elicited a range of criticism both from within the organization and from anti-feminist politicians and political commentators. One Tory MP even suggested in the House of Commons that Sunera Thobani, a South Asian Canadian, was an illegal immigrant—“The incoming president of NAC . . . first is not a Canadian, and second does not have a work permit for this country . . . [should] the taxpayers of Canada be funding an organization with an illegal immigrant at its head?”5 Almost a decade later, Sunera Thobani garnered unwarranted national racist commentary in response to her address to a Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres’ conference in Ottawa, one month after the September 11th, 2001, bombings in New York. In “War Frenzy,” Thobani mounts a feminist and post-colonial critique of U.S. foreign policy and calls for solidarity with women’s organizations in Afghanistan. In response to her hard-hitting speech, elaborated in this article, Thobani’s citizenship status was invoked again; she was challenged for being anti-American and told to “go home.” The media distortion shifted national debate from Thobani’s dissenting and insightful reflections on the September 11th bombings to questions of her citizenship status, reminding us how feminist and anti-racist voices are de-legitimized in the post 9-11 context.
Sedef Arat-Koc, in “Imperial Wars and Benevolent Interventions? Reflections on Global Feminism Post September 11th,” poses important considerations for feminists organizing in a global context, and in particular the real challenges U.S imperialism has had on our international and global feminist efforts. She argues that the representation of the women of Afghanistan as “victims” of the Taliban reveals how the mainstream media and some of the women’s movements still do not take into consideration the complex “national, regional and international issues and context.” Moreover, Arat-Koc warns us that we need to be mindful of the ways in which freedom, tolerance and democracy get invoked in these times of increased security, new international laws affecting people’s movements, and racist attacks on minorities (p. 130).
There has been a range of tensions that continue to challenge the Canadian women’s movements—how to organize, where to get funding, and what issues to prioritize. Should the women’s movements continue to work in existing structures? What do “we” mean by inclusion? What kind of relationship do we want to have with governments? How do we make anti-racist, anti-heterosexist and class politics central to our movement? These questions are part of an ongoing conversation within Canadian feminist activisms. Our conversations must continue in order to meet the many new challenges of feminist organizing in the twenty-first century. As feminist struggles increasingly face hostile political climates, greater representativeness, a strong commitment to anti-racist feminist politics highlighted throughout this reader, and new forms of activisms are needed.
Endnotes
1. In 1966, a 32-member Committee on the Equality for Women, made up of groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Voices of Women and the National Council of Jewish Women, supported a brief calling for a Royal Commission (Prentice et al., 1988, p. 346).
2. Brodie defines neo-liberalism as a new “philosophy of governance” that values and practices “ . . . decentralization, privatization, individualization, and the elevation of the market over the public sector” (p. 87).
3. For example, in the 2003 election for leader of the Assembly of First Nations, Roberta Jamieson, while not elected, led a strong campaign with women’s issues on her agenda.
4. “Cultural colonialism” is a term developed by Kellough (1980).
5. Hansard, House of Commons Debate Official Report, April 23, 1993, p. 183–84.
The Great Undoing: State Formation, Gender Politics, and Social Policy in Canada
Janine Brodie
Janine Brodie is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta, where she served as Chair from 1997–2003. In 2004, she assumes a Canada Research Chair in Political Economy and Social Policy. Her research foci include Canadian political economy and politics, gender and politics, and social theory and policy.
. . . As Canadians enter the twenty-first century, they, like their counterparts throughout the western world, have been ushered through a paradigmatic shift in the dominant philosophy of governance. The latter term is meant to capture the historically shifting and politically negotiated (and enforced) relationships among the three principal domains of a liberal-democratic polity—the state, civil society, and the market—as well as the ways in which citizens understand themselves, articulate their interests, exercise their rights and obligations, and mediate their differences (UNDP 1997:11). Philosophies of governance, if well conceived and widely supported, tend to have long shelf lives. For example, the consensus underlying the post war years, variously described as “the postwar compromise,” “embedded liberalism,” and “the welfare state,” shaped Canada’s political geography for thirty years. Since the early 1980s, it has been gradually and progressively replaced with a new set of assumptions of governance. This new philosophy of governance, neoliberalism, represents an amalgamation of policy postures including decentralization, privatization, individualization, and the elevation of the market over the public sector . . . .
Governments, Governance, and Gender
The emergence of the neoliberal state in Canada and elsewhere has been marked by a growing income polarization between the rich and the poor (both within countries and between the North and the South), an acceleration and intensification of the feminization of poverty, and the marginalization of already marginalized groups, especially single mothers, persons with disabilities, and visible minority women, to the fringes of the labor market and of society. At the same time, the political muscle and tangible accomplishments of the second wave of Canadian feminism during the 1970s and 1980s have all but disappeared. In only a few years, gender and the equality agenda generally have been virtually erased from public discourse and public policy. This magical disappearing act does not signal a victory over gender-based inequality in Canada. Indeed, almost every measure of economic and social well being demonstrates the opposite. Instead, the undoing of the gender equality policy agenda in Canada (indeed, all structurally-based equality claims) reflects the way in which the concepts of gender and group equality have been de/reconstructed within the neoliberal governing paradigm. This becomes apparent when this paradigm is contrasted with the assumptions underpinning the postwar welfare state.
Liberal Progressivism and the Welfare State
. . . Feminist interpretations of the welfare state have consistently pointed out that its liberal-progressivist discourse of universality, unconditionality, equality, and neutrality was decidedly gendered. Social citizenship rights were premised largely on full-time employment. This definition of citizen-worker, combined with the postwar construction of the appropriate gender order as male breadwinner and dependent wife and children, meant that men gained the entitlements of social citizenship. They could claim social security as a right. Women, in contrast, were cast as dependent citizens—dependent either on individual men, family, or state-funded and delivered social welfare which involved surveillance, conditionality, social stigma, and lower levels of compensation (Bakker 1994a; Young 1990b). In other words, social rights were neither universal nor unconditional but, instead, highly gendered, casting the male breadwinner as the social citizen and women as dependents or clients of the state . . . . Public policy included women under the umbrella of the state primarily as wives and mothers.
Although accurate and appropriate, this popular assessment of the gendered underpinning of the welfare state does not tell the whole story. Liberal-progressive discourse also provided for women and a nascent women’s movement to pronounce themselves as something different from and more than dependents, wives, and mothers. This new governing philosophy, especially the priority it attached to social rights, equality, democracy, social planning, and progress, provided a different political space for women which was outside the confines of the home. Women were encouraged and, indeed, empowered by the state to make claims on the state as citizens who had been actively denied the promise of equality and progress, although all too frequently it was white middle-class women who had the loudest voice (Brodie 1995) . . . . Liberal progressivism held out the promise that the many strains of structural and systemic disadvantage rooted in the postwar world could be minimized through social planning and public policy.
The second wave of the Canadian women’s movement grew up beside and, in many ways, was shaped by the welfare state and its liberal-progressivist governing philosophy. Central to this relationship was the federal government’s acquiescence in 1966 to the demands of a small group of influential women to appointment of a Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW). Its mandate was to identify the major impediments to the achievement of gender equality in almost all walks of Canadian life and to recommend policy responses which would break down these barriers. Reporting in 1970, the RCSW made over 150 recommendations for federal government action. One unintended outcome of the royal commission was the consolidation of a growing and increasingly politicized women’s movement, especially in English Canada, which fixed its eyes firmly on the federal state and its promise of planning and progress. In 1972, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), second wave feminism’s key frontline organization, was launched for the precise purpose of monitoring the federal government and pressuring it to implement the recommendations of the RCSW . . . .
The 1970s and early 1980s were empowering days for the women’s movement. The goal of women’s equality crept up the ladder of policy priorities, especially after the United Nations declared 1975 the International Year of Women. It was followed by the Decade of Women (1976–85) when governments of all countries were encouraged to put sexism and gender inequality squarely at the center of national and international policy agendas. These years saw the proliferation of strategic sites for women within the federal state—among them, the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labour, the Office of Equal Opportunity in the Public Service Commission, the Status of Women branch of the Privy Council Office, a minister responsible for the status of women within the federal cabinet, and, most important, the Women’s Program in the citizenship branch of the Secretary of State. The placement of the latter was not accidental. It reflected the linkage drawn by liberal-progressivist discourse between democracy, equality, and inclusion. The Women’s Program was specifically mandated to pursue “the development of a society in which the full potential of women as citizens is recognized and utilized (Burt 1994:216). To this end, federal funding for the Women’s Program mushroomed from a meager $223,000 in 1973 to a peak of $12.4 million in 1985.
The mid-1980s marked the apex of political influence for the second wave of the Canadian women’s movement. In only a few short years, it had witnessed an exponential growth in the number of women in elective office, a proliferation of provincial and federal policy initiatives aimed at the elusive goal of gender equality, the entrenchment of a sexual equality clause in the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unprecedented attention from the major political parties both in speech and in platform, a televised federal leadership debate devoted exclusively to women’s issues, and, in the early 1980s, the emergence of a gender gap which suggested that ordinary Canadian women were prepared to choose among political parties on the basis of what they were saying about and doing for women, especially in the social policy field. Throughout this period, indeed currently, pollsters found that women were much more likely than men to support social programs and an activist state.
Yet, these victories proved both vulnerable and short-lived. The mid-1980s also witnessed the election of the first overtly neoliberal government which promised, albeit with characteristic Canadian moderation, to chart the federal state along the path already carved by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Since the election of Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government, Canadians have witnessed political parties of all stripes systematically undo the very foundations of the welfare state and replace it with a leaner and meaner neoliberal alternative. This transformation in governing philosophies is now essentially complete. What vestiges of the postwar welfare state that remain have been so undermined and altered that they would be unrecognizable to their creators. The proportion of federal spending currently directed to social programs is lower than in 1949, before the welfare state was set in place. The vast majority of Canada’s unemployed no longer qualify for benefits while the federal government funnels the growing surpluses generated by the employee-funded program into general revenues. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened, the poor have grown poorer and are increasingly isolated in urban ghettos, and poverty is now more often the fate of a select groups of Canadians. “High risk” groups, in the federal government’s current terminology, primarily consist of lone parent families, families headed by a disabled person, immigrants arriving during the past decade, Aboriginals, and senior women living alone (Canada Privy Council Office 1999). Deepening poverty and other measures of social exclusion are increasingly gendered at the same time as the goal of gender equality has been erased from public discourse and the formation of public policy. The next section of this chapter, which explores the foundational premises of neoliberal governance, fleshes out this paradox.
Performativity and the Neoliberal State
. . . From the mid-1980s onward . . . the women’s movement, in coalition with other progressive groups, fought against the implementation of what they termed the “Mulroney” or “Tory” agenda. The women’s movement was a frontline opponent of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (FTA, 1988), the extension of this agreement to include Mexico (the North American Free Trade agreement, NAFTA, 1994), and two failed attempts to constitutionally recognize Quebec’s unique position in the Canadian confederation and realize greater autonomy in areas of provincial jurisdiction (the Meech Lake Accord, 1987, and the Charlottetown Accord, 1992). In each case, the objections of the women’s movement centered around both preserving the gains that had already been achieved and defending the power of the federal state to fund and shape social policy and enforce minimum national standards. Not surprisingly, the women’s movement was increasingly reviled, by the federal government and neoliberal ideologues generally, as a selfish coalition of “special interests” that threatened Canadian consensus. At the time, journalists commonly joked that feminism had become the new “f-word” on Parliament Hill.
The collision between the federal government and the women’s movement during the Mulroney years (1984–93) increasingly became centered on the federal government’s growing embrace of the principle axioms of neoliberalism. In simple terms, this philosophy of governance emphasizes the importance of removing government from the economy, especially with respect to regulating business. Indeed, this fundamental tenet is encoded in NAFTA, which effectively exercises quasi-constitutional authority over the Canadian state and its electorate in important policy areas. Neoliberalism also downplays the importance of expending public funds to promote social well-being and equality agendas and it was precisely on this terrain that the government’s repudiation of the women’s movement centered. The dominant current of the second wave of the Canadian women’s movement in the postwar years, responding to liberal-progressivist discourse and practice, consistently linked the achievement of women’s equality to state intervention in the economy whether through social policy, the courts, or through the regulation of the private sector. Key feminist policy demands, constitutive elements of the postwar women’s movement in Canada, such as universal and affordable childcare, income security for sole mothers and elderly women, affirmative action, and pay and employment equity, all called for more government, not less government. The undoing of the welfare state obviously threatened both the identity and the strategic agenda of the dominant current in the women’s movement. These diametrically opposed worldviews leave little room for political compromise.
The governing philosophy of the neoliberal state has been termed performativity (Yeatman 1994). This term points to the increasing tendency for the state to fashion itself as a market player rather than as the embodiment of the public sphere, the source of public goods, the greater equalizer of structural inequalities, and the expression of democratic consensus . . . . Public goods are privatized while the public sphere embraces as its governing logic market principles and measurements (Brodie 1997).
. . . The idea of performativity marks the ascendancy of the market over the state and inside the state. This embrace of the logic of the market atrophies the public, closes political spaces, and further marginalizes the economically and socially marginalized who depend on the state to redress the most adverse consequences of the capitalist economy. A performative philosophy of governance engages with those who do not fit neatly into a market model in one of two ways: either they are treated as inadequate or dysfunctional market players or they are completely erased from the public agenda.
Performativity, being grounded in the assumptions and language of neoclassical economics and laissez-faire liberalism, also explicitly rejects the policy relevance of gender or any other systemic barrier to equality . . . Moreover, neoclassical economics brackets out women’s reproductive and caring labor because it has no market value. As Isabella Bakker reminds us, “markets operate without recognizing that the unpaid work of reproduction and maintenance of human resources contributes to the realization of formal market relations” (1994a:2) . . . .
Liberalism, in turn, asks individuals to bracket out their particular social location such as those structured by gender, race, and class. This formula blinds us to the daily realities of living in gendered, raced, and classed bodies and to the fact that these bodies are treated differently and unequally across the entire spectrum of social relations. Within this barren discursive terrain, performativity sees only one social agent—one good citizen—the atomized market player who recognizes the limits and liabilities of state provision and embraces his/her obligation to work longer and harder to become self-reliant . . . .
. . . In stark contrast to liberal progressivism, performativity provides little discursive or institutional space to make claims on the state on the basis of morality, fairness, collective difference, or structural inequality.
. . . The performativity philosophy of the neoliberal state rests on three fundamental pillars—privatization, decentralization, and individualization—all of which act simultaneously to intensify gender inequality and to erode the political relevance of gender.
Privatization
Privatization (and its ideological handmaiden, deregulation) is a key governing instrument of the neoliberal state which serves both to valorize market mechanisms over the public sector and to diminish the terrain of democratic accountability . . . .
Privatization involves much more than simply removing things from one sector and placing them in another. It is a profoundly cultural process in which the thing moved is itself transformed into something quite different. Objects become differently understood and regulated. The deinstitutionalized (privatized) schizophrenic becomes a street person and is more often attended to by the police than by mental health professionals. Citizens become gender-neutral shareholders and are asked to assess their government in terms of its credit-ratings and fiscal bottom lines rather than how it promotes collective well-being and democratic decision-making . . . . Of course, government downsizing, privatization, and deregulation all have gendered underpinnings as the examples of health care and pay equity demonstrate.
The crowning achievement of the Canadian welfare state was the implementation of a universal public health-care system in the mid-1960s. It also represents a formidable hurdle for a complete conversion to neoliberal performativity in Canada. Health care consumes a significant proportion of both provincial and federal expenditures. It also represents a potential gold mine for the private sector as the profit margins of American private health-care providers readily attests. At the same time, Canadians have made its abundantly clear to government that its obsession with the market does not and will not extend to public health care . . . .
Privatization nonetheless has crept into the public system incrementally and imperceptibly . . . . Systematic cuts to health care, however, have intensified the privatization of the health-care system in a number of ways, including:
• privatizing costs of health care by shifting the burden of payments onto individuals (for example, refusal to recognize an illness or treatment as insured by the public system);
• shifting the burden from public institutions to community-based organizations and private households (for example, cost-cutting has resulted in shorter hospital stays which, in turn, shifts the cost of patient recuperation to the home and most often to the unpaid caring work of women);
• privatizing care work from public health-care workers to the growing for-profit caring industry; and
• privatizing management practices within the health-care system by adopting systems developed for the private sector (for example, the “efficiency” of nursing staff is now measured in terms of time allocation per patient rather than in terms of quality of care, trust, and interpersonal contact) (Scott, Horne, and Thurston 2000:1).
Each of these privatizing gestures has disproportionately affected women insomuch as they are less able to buy drugs or for-profit services and more likely to assume the role of caregiver, either informally in the home and community or formally as health-care workers . . . .
The negative impact of privatization on women also can be viewed from the perspective of privatizing employment opportunities which were once the purview of the public sector. The welfare state was of critical importance to women as an employer and as a regulator of gender relations and employment practices in the workplace. The federal government was and remains the largest single employer of women in Canada and, in the postwar years, took upon itself the task of being a leader in setting standards for women’s employment. Government downsizing and the privatization of public sector jobs obviously closes career options for women, especially young minority women, in an era of persistently high un- and underemployment . . . .
Decentralization
In its simplest terms, decentralization is a governing instrument that transfers power, responsibility, and accountability from a single center to smaller units. Some of these units are more easily identified than others and some may not be subject to direct democratic control. Decentralization is generally applauded on the grounds that it enhances democratic accountability and corrects for the worst bureaucratic excesses of the welfare state. This was the case advanced by equality-seeking groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Decentralization, they argued, allowed for more control in the design and delivery of social services and for more integrated community-based and administered programs. Presumably, too, local administrators would be more easily held accountable by the objects of social programs. This depiction of the benefits of decentralization, however, was premised on . . . assumptions which quickly lost validity in the 1990s . . . .
The Canadian experience, however, is that the democratic potential of decentralization can be quickly offset by fiscal constraints. The rhetoric of decentralization, in fact, has masked a demolition derby—a scurry of fiscal off-loading onto newly designated “shock absorbers” . . . .
By the end of the 1990s, the predictable effects of the neoliberal assault on social programs was clearly evident in the daily lives of Canadians and in official government statistics. The homeless and food banks have become a familiar part of the social fabric when only twenty years ago they would have been exceptional. The income gap between the rich and the poor has widened while the poor have become poorer. The poor are also more likely than a decade ago to be concentrated in urban ghettos. According to a report of the Canadian Council on Social Development released in 2000, the number of poor people living in cities increased by 34 percent between 1990 and 1995. One third of the children living in Montreal and Toronto are now classified as poor (Globe and Mail, April 17, 2000, A5). Moreover, poverty is increasingly the fate of a few identifiable groups. Women are more likely to be poor than men and visible minority women are more likely to be poor than the “invisible” majority of Canadian women. One quarter of the former group is classified as poor compared to 13 percent of the latter. The federal government has recently identified five groups which, the government suggests, are at “high risk” for a life of poverty— single mothers, disabled persons, recent immigrants (predominately persons of color), Aboriginal peoples, and elderly women living alone. This notion of “high risk” conjures up medical images which stigmatize and decontextualize poverty in the same way that, for example, medical officials talk of gay men as being a high risk group with respect to HIV infection or Aboriginal peoples as a high risk group with respect to alcoholism. Again, this contrasts sharply with liberal progressivism’s underlying moral code that everyone is at risk and everyone is responsible for everyone else.
The rates of poverty among these groups are startling by any measure. In 1997, a full 43 percent of families headed either by lone parents (80 percent of whom are women), recent immigrants, or persons with disabilities were, according to official measures, poor, compared to 9 percent of other families (HRDC 2000:1). Single mothers and their children are especially vulnerable to poverty as the following statistics amply demonstrate:
• 61 percent of single mothers live in poverty;
• 83 percent of single mothers under the age of twenty-five live in poverty;
• 45 percent of all children living in poverty are in lone parent families; and
• 33 percent of social assistance recipients are single parents (Canada Privy Council Office 1999:27–29).
The experience of Canada and other advanced industrial countries that have embraced neoliberal governance is that wealth trickles down to some and not others. The growing gulf between the rich and the poor is partly attributable to changes in the global economy and the labor market, to the persistence of structural barriers rooted in class, race, and gender, and to the undoing of the welfare state. In Canada, the residualization of social policy and the abandonment of the idea of collective responsibility for the structurally disadvantaged has been intensified by decentralization and governing instruments which discourage even minimum public provision for the disadvantaged . . . .
Individualization
At the heart of the new governing philosophy is a tidal shift away from notions of collective values and shared fate to those of family and individual responsibility. The central operating principle here is that it is up to families to look after their own and it is up to the government to make sure that they do. In a sense, the affirmation of family and individual responsibility is simply another manifestation of privatization and decentralization. But it is also more than this. First, it is an attempt to recast both the individual and the citizen in the abstract and decontextualized language of neoclassical economics and classic liberalism. Individualism valorizes the rational economic actor and market relations which, as we know, have particularly insidious consequences for women, children, and other marginalized groups. Women are assumed to take up the slack in the new order, particularly with respect to caring activities (Bakker 1996). The rebirth of abstract individualism represents the systematic erasure of structural factors in the formation of social policy. The poor become responsible for their own plight while the state becomes preoccupied with using its powers to enforce the individualization of the social costs associated with neoliberal public management and economic globalization more generally . . . .
The Canadian experience is replete with examples of this shift in thinking about social policy. The new “active” welfare model, which informed the federal social policy review in 1994 and is now being implemented by the provinces, is premised on a human resources model that sees poverty as an individual defect rather than as a product of social structures which, by definition, create winners and losers. Instead, poverty is attributed to individual skill or motivational deficits which lead to dependence on the state. The idea that social assistance recipients are dependent on welfare carries with it a barrage of negative images which stigmatize the poor and make them appear to be personally to blame for their condition. Welfare dependency, similar to drug dependence, is a mark of individual weakness, irresponsibility, and immaturity and, most of all, is avoidable (Fraser and Gordon 1994).
. . . One obvious disciplinary measure is to cut welfare benefits to a level below minimum subsistence; another is to force welfare recipients to work for their benefits. The most populous province, Ontario, has adopted workfare and has passed legislation to ensure that workfare will not be subject to the minimum protections provided other workers by employment standards legislation. Workfare, snitch-lines, and extraordinary surveillance are all affronts to the basic civil rights of welfare recipients. Obviously, too, these disciplinary practices are focused on some groups more than others. The systemic bases of poverty in Canada mean that women, persons with disabilities, visible minorities, and Aboriginal people have become the primary objects of the individualization in social policy.
At the same time, neoliberal governments are busy crafting legislation which attempts to reconstruct the patriarchal nuclear family and its distinct lines of responsibility and power relations. Youth have been cut from welfare rolls under the assumption that they will be cared for by their families. Disregarding the reason why children leave home in the first place, among them, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, the result is often street kids, juvenile prostitution, addiction, disease, crime, and despair. Women’s shelters have been closed, thereby forcing abused women to stay in or return to abusive homes. Perhaps the most obvious example of the reconstruction of the patriarchal family is the federal government’s new child support legislation designed to discipline the so-called deadbeat dad —the father who refuses to support the children he has left. Although long a reviled figure in feminist discourse, the deadbeat dad’s centrality to the neoliberal state has been more recent. The federal government has passed legislation which standardizes child support payments and sets penalties for parents who fail to make them. While few would disagree with the intent of the legislation, it fails to address the realities of child poverty in Canada. The federal government’s own research, for example, indicates that few separated fathers fit the stereotypical image of the deadbeat dad. A great many separated and divorced fathers recouple and remarry and simply do not have the income to support two families. This policy also marks single mothers who can or will name fathers (deserving) and those who cannot or will not (undeserving).
The single or sole mother provides a more vexing case for neoliberal policymakers because often she cannot be wedged into the heteropatriarchal model of privatized social provision. Under the welfare state, single mothers were primarily seen as mothers who were unemployable, at least until their children entered school. These mothers are now framed in policy as potential employables who need surveillance and discipline in order to make them take personal responsibility for their children or find a man who will. To this end, the Ontario government has revived the “spouse in the house” rule, which dictates that single mothers lose their benefits when they live with a man . . . .
The idea that the single mother should take care of herself and her children at the same time as the government is systematically withdrawing support for her to do so would seem to be, at best, counterintuitive. However, neoliberal policymakers seem unconcerned about realities of sole parenting or the material conditions of women and children caught in the distortion of extreme poverty in a highly unbalanced gender order. Single mothers, as we have seen, are the poorest among the poor in Canada. Nevertheless, they have been erased in the poverty debate through the federal government’s child poverty initiative which constructs children as deserving independent of their family or community condition. Poor children just float out there completely decontextualized from the circumstances that surround and shape them . . . .
Conclusion
In 2000 the federal government boasted that for eight consecutive years the United Nations named Canada the best country in the world to live by placing it first on the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines measures of life expectancy, education, and income. Policy-makers were less vocal about the fact that Canada ranked eighth on the gender empowerment index and slid to eighth on the human poverty index. The government was decidedly silent about the fact that Canada would have been lodged among developing nations if the UN only took account of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples (UNDP 2000). These, nevertheless, should be worrying trends for social policy-makers.
. . . The past two decades have witnessed the reinvention of the Canadian state and the implementation of a new philosophy of governance. Neither of these processes can be divorced from gender (or race or class). In contrast to the era of the welfare state which spoke to and helped form an undifferentiated category of women and advanced a state-driven gender equality agenda, the politics of gender is far more complex under the neoliberal state. Poverty has become increasingly feminized but it is not borne by all Canadian women. There is also increasing income polarization among Canadian women themselves, enabling some Canadian women, usually white middle-class professionals, to buy caring work from other Canadian women who are marked by economic, racial, and ethnic disadvantage. Women and men who have benefited from the new economic and political order, moreover, are increasingly likely to interpret both their prosperity and others’ poverty as a measure of the individual rather than as resulting from a fissure in the social fabric. The systematic erasure of structural considerations in popular understandings as well as in the formation of social policy has profound implications for the formation of political identities and alliances under the umbrella of the neoliberal state. Blinkered by the requisites of performativity, “the economic fates of citizens are uncoupled from one another and are now understood and governed as a function of their own particular levels of enterprise, skill, inventiveness, and flexibility” (Rose 1996b:339). This individualized and distorted vision of ourselves, our families, and our communities both erases recognition of the systemic underpinnings of gender inequality (as well as that of race and class) and intensifies its manifestations because systemic solutions to these inequalities are discounted as irrelevant. This is the fundamental paradox confronting all equality seeking groups in the new millennium. It is a paradox which, if left unchallenged, will continue to marginalize and stigmatize many “different” women and, ultimately, exact great costs to all.
Halfway to Equal?
Linda Trimble and Jane Arscott
Linda Trimble is a Professor in Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include Canadian government and politics, and women and politics. She has authored and edited numerous books, including Reinventing Canada: Politics of the 21st Century with Janine Brodie.
Jane Arscott works as an Assistant Professor at Athabasca University. With Linda Trimble she co-edited In The Presence of Women: Representation in Canadian Governments and co-wrote Still Counting: Women in Politics across Canada. She is working on a book about the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.
Anyone concerned about women’s equality must still count numbers, although numbers certainly are not all that count. Attention needs also to be given to policy issues, as well as to broadening the range of people selected and the diversity of political perspectives aired. Until the numbers of women elected approach gender parity, however, the quality of representation will remain constrained by sex and race bias and the discrimination and artificial narrowing of viewpoints that implies. Equality between the genders remains an important political goal because it remains a key indicator of social change. Much work remains to be done if equality is to be realized.
Now, a few years after the turn of the century, fundamental political equality has yet to be achieved in Canada, a country championed as one of the world’s leading examples of democratic governance. At present, women occupy about 20 per cent of the seats in this country’s legislatures. We have demonstrated that inequality in political representation continues to disadvantage women by denying them half of the seats, posts, appointments, and honours that would be theirs in a society in which gender was neutral. We conclude, then, that there continues to be a problem: without equality in political representation, women as a group are denied equal chances to plan and live their lives without having to endure the effects of disadvantages that result from gender bias . . . .
. . . [W]e [argue] that renewed attention to women’s overall capacity to win elected office in record numbers is needed for the following reasons.
BOX 1
Reasons for Requiring Women’s
Success in Electoral Politics
• Women’s presence in elected life has social meaning more generally for women’s place in public life and Canadian society. Women’s access to top jobs in public life is an important indicator of how a society values the status of women.
• Very real limits constrain prospects for further advancement in terms of women’s electoral success for at least the next ten to 15 years.
• A leadership vacuum continues to underrepresent women. High ranking political positions remain a male preserve.
• Political life continues to exude masculinist and racialized assumptions, norms, and behaviours, which have the effect of excluding women, thereby denying them full opportunities for the exercise of political power.
• Despite all the constraints and obstacles, feminist and non-feminist women alike do make a difference in politics and will continue to do so.
• The addition of many more, and more diverse, women in public life will enrich the social and political fabric of our country.
Taken together, the effect of the first four factors lead us to conclude that in the next 15 years the Canadian public is unlikely to see the changes needed to bring parity to Canadian political life.
BOX 2
Electoral Changes Required to Bring Parity
• Women elected to 50 per cent of the seats in Canada’s legislatures.
• Female legislators who reflect the full sociodemographic range of diversity among Canadian women.
• At least one, and ideally several, woman elected to be first minister from among the current female legislators.
• Women as leaders of political parties at roughly the same rate that women are legislators.
• Women in 50 per cent of the positions of top jobs that give a human face to Canada at home and abroad.
. . . Women have their foot in the door and can sit among the country’s leading political decision-makers, but they are not positioned to assume leadership of political parties, regardless of their personal qualities.
The political environment remains masculinist, much to the peril of any woman who dares presume to be able to do what other women politicians have failed to do. Women remain unlikely to attain leadership positions that actually entitle the winner to govern. Based on years of study of women who had a shot at such a role, we predict that in the next ten to 15 years, women’s aspirations for political leadership will not be achieved, although a full century has passed since many women became eligible to vote and stand for election.
While political life has had a handful of women leaders, the structural sexism that prevents many more women from making a career in electoral politics is due, we maintain, to three factors.
BOX 3
Factors Leading to the Lack of Women in Political Life
• The length of time it took to move from eligibility for some to electability for a few: 50 years.
• The short 20-year span in which the underrepresentation of women in politics received attention as an identifiable problem on the public agenda worthy of policy solutions, that is, from roughly the mid to late 1960s to the mid to late 1980s.
• Current complacency with the status quo.
In short, the existing gendered leadership gap indicates gross under-representation by women, and this pattern will continue unless there is a concerted effort to address the problem. This gap is important for two reasons. First, it affects women’s overall access to power; secondly, it shapes their ability to use political power to achieve social and political change. The absence of women in powerful decision-making positions has been explained time and time again in terms of collective success in getting elected to the House of Commons . . . .
Increases in the numbers of women elected in the last 15 years tend to overshadow the fact that now, more than 80 years after some women were eligible to stand for election to legislatures, Canadian women as a group are only halfway to equal. When we look at specific categories of women, it is plain that even less progress has been made. Aboriginal, poor, disabled, lesbian, and racial minority women are not even halfway toward the goal of fair and equitable representation. The truth of the matter is that going the distance to achieve equality with men in elected public office remains a formidable challenge. Energy for the struggle is flagging, although recent gains sustain continued hope that the rest will look after itself in due course. We will be happy if that turns out to be the case. However, our studies of the first leg of the race to equality leads us to conclude that the finish line is nowhere in sight.
Not Even Halfway to Equal
. . . [Canadian] women are markedly, severely, and grossly underrepresented in key positions such as prime minister or premier as well as in cabinets and legislatures. These social facts present a public policy problem because they provide consistent and damning evidence of a gendered democratic deficit that reproduces systemic bias, thereby lending additional support to the opinion that women are entitled to less than men by virtue of their gender.
Redressing the gender skew in legislatures will go a long way toward ensuring that women take their rightful place in all areas of human endeavour. Reducing the gender imbalance and inequity will increase fairness by addressing a gendered democratic deficit. Women’s place is in the legislatures, the courts, the government, and every walk of life. Ensuring that all citizens can make their life plans and realize them without being hindered by gender discrimination would go a long way toward eliminating other bases of discrimination as well.
BOX 4
Underrepresentation of Canadian Women
• Gross Underrepresentation: Less than 15 per cent * Women’s presence in leadership of political parties, 1916 to the present
• Severe Underrepresentation: 15–30 per cent * Women’s presence in most legislatures, including most Cabinets, barely achieved and only in most recent years
• Marked Underrepresentation: 30–45 per cent * Not achieved at any level of public life by women, including the Senate
Women legislators encounter glass ceilings, sticky floors, and revolving doors at the entry to leadership positions; uncertain opportunities for alliance building within and across parties; and attitudes and conventions of behaviour that constrain their capacity to act effectively. Their feminist, non-feminist, or anti-feminist identification is used to pit feminist women against humanists when any woman legislator can be one or both or none. At present, feminism divides women legislators along ideological lines, despite the fact that most female legislators believe that Canadian women, and men, have been well served by the presence of women in Canada’s legislatures. Even if we disagree with any or all long-serving women legislators about their views, how they vote, or, even if they think women are important in public life, they deserve our thanks and high praise for persevering in a difficult, often ruthless, and highly competitive work environment . . . .
For young women to choose politics as a career, a great deal more information and analysis is required. Without basic information on women’s chances of electoral success, the pattern of severe underrepresentation by women will continue for at least the next three elections. Public education, media interest, and many more “uppity” women are needed to break the current impasse.
Canadian women demand equality that is real and meaningful. Legislatures with substantially less than half women further reproduce and intensify the disadvantages already experienced by girls and women by virtue of being female. Equality will be achieved once 40 to 60 per cent of seats in legislatures are held by women. Reaching that goal is a matter of fairness and equity for all Canadians. In the absence of the achievement of basic fairness for women we are . . . still counting.
The Next Stage:
Canadian Feminism
Judy Rebick and Kiké Roach
Judy Rebick is the first Canadian Auto Workers Union’s Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University. Ms Rebick was the former President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. For the last decade, Rebick has been working as a TV host, columnist, and author.
Kiké Roach has worked with many organizations, including the Black Students Network of McGill University and the Women’s Coalition for Employment Equity. A former executive member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, she has led numerous anti-racism workshops and appears frequently as a media spokesperson on social justice issues.
KR: The term “Feminism” keeps travelling through a revolving door of meaning . . . . [F]eminism is about men and women sharing power equally. And so it necessarily transforms the world for the better for women and men. If women change, men have to change too. And we’re still in that process of change. We’ve won the right to vote, but we don’t run the country. We’ve got two women Supreme Court justices, but more and more women are living in poverty. There’s a feeling that women can do anything we want, but we’re still harassed on the job, paid less than men, ignored by history. And the list goes on. There’s the famous cigarette ad that targets women with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Recently I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that said, “We haven’t come far enough. And don’t call me baby.”
Feminism has always gotten a bad rap in mainstream society, but the difference today is that there’s money to be made from the dissing. We’ve seen a rash of books and articles about “the feminists” who squander taxpayer dollars to fund our pet projects while we work tirelessly to champion victimhood. And we’re still dealing with the nonsense that feminism is dead, bankrupt or irrelevant. The fiction that feminism has run its course.
With all these attacks, it’s no surprise that feminists get defensive, but we need to get critical and strategic, too. We’ve got to do a better job at countering the conservative claptrap. And we shouldn’t let a right-wing climate shut down open and honest debate about the state of our movement.
Women still really need organized feminism, especially in this time of backlash. And there are some important questions we should be asking. How do we encourage the leadership and participation of a whole new generation of women? How do we deal with the cutbacks that are shutting our organizations down?
JR: I agree that those are important questions. While it is certainly true that women have made enormous strides in the past generation, it is also true that gender oppression is still very much with us. And while some well-educated, professional single women have come close to achieving economic equality, limits on reproductive freedom, lack of affordable child care, violence against women and the glass ceiling—the male domination of politics, industry and academia—persist. When we look at women who face additional barriers, whether because of race, social class, sexual orientation or disability, there is more inequality. On the international level, women are just beginning to make progress. Feminists have never looked only at the issue of women’s inequality. From the suffragists who fought for social programs to the modern-day feminist movement, which has been part of every progressive struggle, whether to improve pensions or save medicare, feminism has always been about improving the quality of life for everyone in society. And today, women’s groups are involved in a broader series of issues than ever before. That’s why I find these attacks on feminism as male-bashing so bizarre. The women’s movement in Canada, and from what I can see internationally, has never been more closely aligned with other movements for social change, like the labour movement, the anti-racist movement, the Third World solidarity movements, what have you, all of which include men.
KR: Well, that’s the thing about the backlash arguments: they’re illogical. If feminists concentrate strictly on fighting for our own rights, then we’re accused of ignoring or hating men, but when we locus on labour, the economy or war, then were accused of dividing women, because inevitably these issues divide women politically.
JR: When you’re fighting for social change, you’re always vilified. Students have sometimes asked me why we insist on using the word “feminist” when feminism has such negative connotations in the mainstream media. I tell them that we didn’t used to call ourselves feminists, we used to call ourselves the women’s liberation movement. Then our critics called us “women’s libbers,” so we changed the name. But it’s not the name, it’s the struggle for equality that is being vilified.
The inequality of women is structural. It is embedded in the system. And unless you transform the system, then what happens is what is happening in Canada today . . . .
KR: And of course the cutbacks will hit poor and working-class women hardest of all. I think the tensions that exist in the women’s movement today have to do not only with our struggles to make our organizations inclusive of all women but with figuring out what our starting point for action should be. We’re moving from asking to be included in the system to saying the system has to change.
JR: In the 1980s, the women’s movement focussed on what I call single issues. There was a pro-choice movement, a child-care movement, an anti-violence movement, an employment equity movement. What is happening now, with globalization, with the rise of neo-conservatism, with the economic attacks we have been under, is that it’s become clear you can’t just fight on single issues. You have to look at the overall picture. I think most feminists understand that now.
KR: I don’t agree. A lot of privileged women are just now grappling with this idea of feminism as an all-encompassing kind of politic, with understanding that oppressions are interconnected. Global structural adjustment programs, continued militarization, the unequal distribution of power: all these are tied to sexism and racism. Feminists of colour have been saying this for years. But this idea is still very much under attack. I’ve heard people claim that in looking at the big picture, women’s specific, everyday issues and struggles will get lost. I have always argued that looking at the big picture is the only way to find ourselves, to know how we fit in it. To say that feminism speaks to a broad range of issues is not to dilute feminism but to acknowledge how multifaceted it is, or ought to be.
JR: I actually think liberal feminism, the idea that you can just change some rules and achieve equality, is dead in the women’s movement . . . . When I was at the UN NGO Forum on Women in Huairou, none of the plenary speeches focussed on what we would call women’s issues. They all addressed the global economic agenda and the rise of the Right, the rise of fundamentalism and the need for the women’s movement to present an alternative for humanity.
KR: But knowing that achieving equality is more complex makes it harder to organize. I was talking to a woman the other day who first got involved in the abortion rights movement. As she pointed out, the urgency of the issue was clear, and the enemies to abortion rights were known. But when you understand the enemy is the way the whole system works, where do you start?
JR: A very interesting question. In the sixties, we also believed the enemy was the system. At first there were the clear demands of the civil rights struggle and the anti-war struggle, but then it became obvious that the “establishment,” as we called it then, did not want to change. So we got more radical. “Smash the State” and “Burn Baby Burn” were the kinds of slogans American radicals used. In Canada we were more polite, of course, but we really believed that we, the youth, would make the revolution in a couple of years. It took me until practically 1980 to give up on the idea that revolutionary change was just around the corner . . . .
KR: I think there are a number of factors that affect how young women feel about feminism. One obvious thing is the negative media portrayal of feminism. But it’s more than that. The success of the feminist movement means that a lot of the most obvious forms of sexism have been eliminated. At one time, for example, women were actually barred from entering law school. Today, women make up 50 per cent of law students. But after graduation, women are still hired less often by law firms and they have a harder time sustaining a practice. The gains we’ve made make some people feel that we don’t need feminism any more. But the fact is that while some women are doing quite well, many more still face barriers. Often less obvious barriers, which makes the struggle trickier. At the same time, for women who do understand the need for feminism, it’s hard to find a way to get actively involved. We’ve been bombarded with messages of materialism and individualism and there’s a disconnection from any tradition of struggle . . . .
There’s a mutual mistrust and lack of respect that happens sometimes between older and younger women. In the women’s movement, older women have said, “Listen, young thing, I’ve been doing this for years,” in a dismissive way. And in the popular culture, and the book world, young feminists who diss our elders are promoted and touted as cutting edge, even though their critiques do not advance feminist thought. Both kinds of behaviour are a waste of time and pull us away from the source of our power.
Young women have to develop and run our own organizations. It’s one of the few ways we can gain leadership skills and talk together. But I think it’s crucial that once leadership emerges from younger women, older women encourage and mentor them.
Another thing is that a lot of young women’s activism is in the realm of culture. If you produce a magazine or a video or host a show on community radio, there’s something tangible and immediate about it. One of the challenges we face is to create new organizations where young women will feel that they can have an effect on changing society.
JR: One of the things we understood in the sixties and seventies was the importance of organizing. Everyone who was active was involved in movement building, meaning building organizations, organizing campaigns, reaching out to new people, organizing meetings, teach-ins, demonstrations, and so on. What that did was give individuals a way to get involved. Now, I think partly because of the sophistication of our existing organizations, most of which had their roots in those days, young people don’t see a place where they can make a difference.
KR: The success of the women’s movement has led it away from that kind of grassroots organizing. There are very few “entry points” to feminism if you’re isolated and don’t have friends who are interested in women’s issues. A lot of psychological barriers still need to be broken through about being smart and independent, liking your body; thinking critically and speaking up. I think we need to get back to consciousness-raising groups, to meeting together on a regular basis to discuss where we go from here . . . .
JR: . . . We’ve stopped talking to each other about our life experiences. And at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, it was those discussions that empowered us. Consciousness-raising groups may be part of the answer, but I do think we have to start organizing again.
KR: How do we redefine feminist struggle in this new climate? Many of our issues have gotten professionalized along the way. And while we have been grappling more in the women’s movement with questions around race, there is a whole class component that I think we still only pay lip service to. We talk about the “feminization of poverty,” but we haven’t really strategized around combatting it.
JR: There is also the problem of movements getting co-opted . . . . [A]s soon as you get to the point where the government starts to recognize that they have to deal with the issue, a process of co-option begins. The result is, as you say, the professionalization of our issues, dressing them up in language and demands that government bureaucrats, politicians and the media can accept. So our slogans change from “Free abortion on demand” to “Freedom of choice.” Our demands change from affirmative action to employment equity and our tactics change from using the streets to relying on committee rooms.
I think what has kept us from getting too co-opted as a movement is the struggle of various women for inclusion. Lesbians have really led the way. Lesbians have always been a significant group within the women’s movement. They were involved in fights on every issue from abortion to equal pay, even when the issue didn’t directly affect them. But for a long time mainstream women’s groups didn’t want to recognize the contributions of lesbians for fear of being labelled as a bunch of male-hating dykes. I remember being shocked to hear from lesbians on the NAC executive that right into the 1980s they felt they had to remain closeted to retain their credibility. But lesbians fought for visibility, and I think they succeeded in forcing groups like NAC to openly acknowledge their contributions to the movement and to strongly support their issues.
KR: NAC still has a way to go on lesbian issues. Some women do not feel it is vocal enough in supporting gay and lesbian struggles. And other women’s groups are grappling with these issues too. At the Congress of Black Women’s national meeting in 1994, one of the delegates, who is an open lesbian, was approached by her chapter to run for president. She decided to accept the nomination and put her name on the ballot. She had a lot of support and thought she would win, until another delegate announced her candidacy just before the vote. An emergency meeting was called, and the lesbian candidate was directly told by a few of the delegates that they could not support a lesbian as national president. It was a difficult experience, but this incident led to some open and honest discussion about how to address and overcome homophobia. I think there is greater awareness and more willingness among many members now to look at how homophobia divides us, and to put an end to that.
JR: . . . The Liberal welfare state that works to co-opt our movements is disappearing, and we don’t know what is going to take its place. I think we are being pushed back to the days before we had attention paid to our issues. Back to the days of grassroots organizing. We need more ways to involve women in action . . . .
KR: Another issue we have to look at is how we are going to sustain and support women’s organizations. Already we’ve lost Studio D, the National Film Board unit that produced films by and about women, and the DisAbled Women’s Network, and other centres have had to close their doors. And we need to reexamine the whole issue of government funding. Getting money from government has implications. In some ways I think we haven’t really understood that organizations like NAC, the National Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women and other groups were formed in response to federal government initiatives. So the government “helped” to organize women and to contain women’s agenda. We need to be more aware of constraints or of compromises that were made.
JR: I agree with you that government funding, especially at the national level, was designed to structure the women’s movement in a way that government could relate to or control, depending on your point of view. That’s why national women’s groups tend to be more conservative than grassroots women’s groups. But overall, I think government funding is one of the reasons why the women’s movement in Canada is so strong. NAC, for example, was formed in opposition to what the government wanted. But it got government funding, and without it, I don’t see how it could have survived as a cross-country, representative women’s organization . . . .
KR: I disagree that NAC was created in opposition to the state. At the beginning, it was formed as a watchdog organization to monitor government activity on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. For most of its life, NAC has been at least 80 per cent funded by government. But today, only about 20 per cent of NAC’s budget comes from the feds. I think that is a good thing, because the less feminists rely on government, the more self-determining—and critical of government—we can be . . . .
I think these hard times mean that women’s groups are going to have to do more sharing, more co-operative work, to strengthen our bonds. We need to expand the definition of what feminist work is, too. The mainstream press and some women’s studies texts have presented NAC as the voice of the feminist movement. Of course it is the largest feminist organization, but the movement has always occurred on different levels. For example, the Congress of Black Women hasn’t fought only against racism. Congress women recently linked up with another group to establish a co-op housing complex. Sister Vision Press is celebrating ten successful years of publishing ground-breaking works by women of colour in Canada. The women of Camp Sisters in the Struggle are clearing land in the Ontario countryside and constructing buildings that will be permanent spaces for women’s meetings and retreats. The Coalition of Visible Minority Women are teaching newcomers English, and Women Working with Immigrant Women are helping other organizations to assess women’s needs, helping them to gain skills and to fight workplace sexism and discrimination. Low-income women are working on community economic development. You start to have a movement when women increasingly do things spontaneously to build community . . . .
JR: The issue of economic independence is a crucial one . . . . I think women’s groups here should do more of what they do in the U.S., selling certain goods and services as a way of fund-raising. NOW, the National Organization of Women in the U.S., does that, and some American gay and lesbian groups are doing it too. I personally have to buy lots of things. Why shouldn’t I buy them from someone who is going to give 5 or 10 per cent of the money I spend to a women’s group? There are many women like me, working-class women, middle-class women, who spend a lot of money and would like to spend it in a way that supports women’s groups or other social change groups . . . .
KR: We’ve been pretty successful on a lot of different levels, and yet we still feel frustration at not having some of our major demands met. We haven’t made enough progress on things like child care or violence against women. Real understanding and change haven’t seemed to root themselves deeply enough.
JR: Well, we’ve won major and fundamental reform: the legalization of abortion and equality rights in the charter . . . . In terms of why we have not had more success on child care, I think partly this comes out of the political culture. In Europe, where there is a culture that values social rights, women have had the most success on issues like child care and social programs to promote equality. In many places in Europe, there is a national child-care program. In North America, there is much more the notion of political rights and equality, so we have had the most success in the legal arena . . . .
. . . We have attacked the sexual division of labour in the workplace. We have focussed a lot on economic equality in the workplace, reproductive freedom. We have focussed a lot on violence against women. These are all very important issues, but on the issue of the role of women inside the family, we have not done enough work. This is one reason why the social conservatives have had some success in appealing to women who work in the home. We haven’t challenged men enough to take up parenting. The reality is that the high number of single-parent families is a problem. And it is a problem from a feminist point of view, because it is women who are carrying the burden of these families. Dead-beat dads are getting off scot-free, not only financially, which we have made an issue of, but emotionally and physically, right? I think it is bad for kids, too, not to have more than one adult role model. The third factor is money: A national child-care program would cost a lot of money. Free choice on abortion doesn’t cost a bloody thing financially. Many of our gains have been in areas that don’t cost the government a lot of money. And the Right has had some success in distorting our position on child care to make it seem that we are in favour of state-run creches, a kind of gulag for preschoolers.
But the most important impact of the women’s movement, in my view, is not the winning of specific legal rights, but the change in attitude. It is a change in the social structure of society . . . .
KR: I remember hearing you say a few years ago that things were going to be different now because we have a whole new generation of young women who’ve grown up believing they are equal. But society doesn’t treat us equally yet. And women, who more often live in poverty, are being forced to bear the brunt of restructuring while we remain outside the centres of power. We need to prioritize our demands and develop some dynamic campaigns to see them through, to involve large numbers of women and revitalize feminist movement.
JR: True. And if we don’t move forward, there is a good chance we will move backwards.
Women’s (In)Equality before and after the Charter
Diana Majury
Diana Majury is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law at Carleton University. Her research interests include criminal law, feminist legal theory, human rights, lesbian issues, sex equality theory, violence against women, women’s health, law and literature, and family law.
. . . Equality has been, and continues to be, a cornerstone and watchword of feminist struggles, particularly in the context of the law. But, all the while, there has been ongoing disagreement among feminists about the appropriateness and effectiveness of the focus on equality. Even among feminists who have adopted equality as either a means or an end (or both), there is disagreement on what equality means and how we might attain it.
As women, we live with and have internalized inequality on many levels and in many different forms, and we experience these inequalities differently. Many, perhaps most, women experience inequalities that are rooted in multiple sites of oppression—sex, race, class, sexual identity, disability and/or age among them—and that are mediated by multiple sites of domination. While the inequalities are interactive and complex, feminist legal equality strategies have been, and often still are, simplistic and one-dimensional, focusing on gender at the expense of other categories, as if gender is the only, or at least an isolatable, discrete, source of inequality for women. This restrictive focus is in part a function of how our law and legal system work and in part a function of equality as a concept. The tension between the complexity of gender inequality as experienced by women and the oversimplification involved in legal approaches to equality raises fundamental questions about our continuing commitment to working in and with law and to working with equality as a primary principle . . . .
While I think we need to approach both law and equality with a great deal of scepticism, I also think that we need to engage fully and actively with both of them. It would be foolish to ignore law or boycott law or concede the legal terrain; law simply provides a powerful forum for struggle . . . .
I am more interested in raising questions and concerns about the meaning(s) of equality under the Charter so that we can think strategically and critically about our engagement with law in this context . . . .
One of the problems of equality is that, despite its mythic promise of universal application, our individual and collective understandings of equality are only ever partial and circumscribed. The critiques of universality as invoking false and oppressive generalizations that perpetuate dominance apply to equality in very similar ways. However, to me the promise of equality lies not in its universality, but rather in its potential for particularity and in its uncertainty, openness, and fluidity. It is a promise that can be furthered when these qualities are directed to the elimination of dominance and subordination, and when they are informed by an understanding of underlying, intersecting inequalities and the power dynamics that maintain those inequalities. This to me is the possibility of equality.
(In)Equality before the Charter:
The Historical Backdrop
Equality has been, and remains, a key component of liberal political theory. Individual equality, defined in terms of equality of access, equal opportunity, and the right to equal treatment, is a cornerstone of the liberal concept of democracy. The unstated norm underlying this notion of equality is that of the prototypical person, the person who is from the dominant groups in all aspects of himself, that is the oft-referred to white, heterosexual, non-disabled, Christian, middle-class, male (hereinafter referred to as the prototype). It is he who represents the goal (members of non-dominant groups are assumed, or expected, to aspire to be him) and the standard by which the right to equality is measured (to qualify for equality, members of non-dominant groups have been required to prove they are just like him). Under this liberal model, equality action is directed towards the removal of overt barriers and the elimination of differential treatment; the rest is left up to the individual—to prove herself equal.
. . . In this context, members of oppressed groups (women, racialized people, people with disabilities, Aboriginal peoples, poor and working-class people, lesbians and gays, transgendered people) have been expected to direct their equality-seeking activities towards proving that they are the same as members of the dominant group. To qualify for equal treatment, one had to demonstrate that there were no substantive differences between oneself and the prototype, and thereby one had the right to be treated the same. This model of equality is clearly and unapologetically one of assimilation.
Oppressed groups have participated, to varying degrees, in this assimilationist model. White women have a long history of trying to fit within the liberal equality paradigm, of trying to prove ourselves just like, that is equal to, the prototype. There have always been some members of each oppressed group who have resisted the assimilationist model and demanded equality on their own terms and in their own image; some groups have been more sceptical than others about the potential for liberation under the rubric of equality; and some have rejected the language and concept of equality altogether. For those who are members of more than one oppressed group, it has been harder and more complex to try to prove they are equal. The less one is like the prototype, and the more ways in which one’s ‘differences’ are apparent, the more difficult it is to prove that those differences do not matter, and probably, as well, the less one is likely to be willing to deny or disown one’s ‘differences.’ It may be for this reason that those who are oppressed on compounded grounds have often had the most clear and radical insights into the limitations of the liberal model of equality . . . .
Over the past century, the impediments and double standards imposed by law on women, in both the so-called public and private spheres, have largely been eliminated. Up to, and even shortly after, the advent of the Charter, white women’s fight for legal equality in Canada focused primarily on the attainment of full legal ‘personhood,’ that is, on obtaining the rights and privileges accorded to men under law. In law reform efforts and litigation, women’s fight for equality was, for a long time, largely a fight for inclusion. It was premised on the notion that if women were just allowed in, we could prove that we are just as good as men. This model of equality, now referred to as formal equality, reflected the liberal notion of a level playing field. The formal equality model was advocated, sometimes successfully, but often unsuccessfully, in the early equality cases at the beginning of this century,1 as well as in the more recent cases under the Canadian Bill of Rights (discussed below). These fights for inclusion were largely waged by women who, with the exception of their gender, were from the dominant groups.2 The feminist prototype became that of the white, Christian, non-disabled, middle-class, heterosexual woman. Many of the same assumptions and expectations that underlay the male prototype were unthinkingly transposed by white feminists to create the feminist prototype. Women of colour, Aboriginal women, non-Christian women, women with disabilities, lesbians, low income and poor women have been disregarded, not just by prototypical males, but by prototypical feminists as well. Multiple oppressions were ignored, as were the women from these communities who often were resisting and fighting for change at more fundamental levels than is possible under a formal [equality] model.
The Canadian Bill of Rights
. . . The first Bill of Rights sex equality decision by the Supreme Court of Canada also involved a challenge to the Indian Act.3 Two First Nations women, Jeannette Lavell and Yvonne Bedard, in two separate actions, argued that section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act conflicted with section 1(b) of the Bill of Rights, and accordingly, was inoperative. Their cases were heard together at the Supreme Court of Canada, and a single decision was rendered which upheld section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act. Under this provision of the Indian Act, a First Nations woman who married a non-Indian man lost her Indian status and was struck from the Band list; conversely the non-Indian wife of a First Nations man gained Indian status as a result of the marriage. The children and further descendants of First Nations women who were denied their Indian ‘status’ on this basis were, by extension, also denied their status.4 In a five-to-four decision, the Court held that the distinction between the treatment of First Nations women and First Nations men did not constitute inequality under the Bill of Rights.
Writing for the majority, Justice Ritchie looked to old rule of law principles and defined equality before the law in the narrowest terms as meaning ‘equality in the administration or application of the law by the law enforcement authorities and the ordinary Courts of the land.’5 According to Ritchie, the Indian Act was ‘a structure created by Parliament for the internal administration of the life of Indians on reserves and their entitlement to the use and benefit of Crown [sic] lands.’6 According to Justice Ritchie, section 12(1)(b) was an essential component of this paternalistic structure. One could not, therefore, tinker with a piece of the Act for fear that the whole structure would come tumbling down, that the whole Act would be recognized as discriminatory. Justice Ritchie then distinguished his earlier decision in the Drybones case on the basis that it dealt with the ‘behaviour of Indians off a reserve,’ as opposed to ‘the internal regulation of the lives of Indians on reserves.’7
The second and only other Bill of Rights sex equality case decided by the Supreme Court of Canada was Bliss v. Attorney-General of Canada,8 decided in 1978, five years after Lavell and Bedard. The decision was again written by Justice Ritchie, but this time it was a unanimous decision of the seven-man Court. Stella Bliss, who had just had a baby, challenged the section of the Unemployment Insurance Act that disentitled a pregnant woman and new mother from regular unemployment insurance benefits for the period during which maternity benefits were available. However, to qualify for maternity benefits, the woman needed to have at least ten weeks of insured earnings whereas regular unemployment insurance benefits required only eight weeks of insured earnings. Bliss met the eight-week but not the ten-week requirement. In fact, she met all of the requirements for regular unemployment insurance benefits except that she fell within the period of pregnancy-based disentitlement. She argued that this disentitlement constituted sex discrimination resulting in denial of equality before the law. And she lost.
Applying the same narrow, rule-of-law definition of equality before the law as was applied in Lavell and Bedard, the Court held that ‘the enforcement of the limitation . . . does not involve denial of equality of treatment in the administration and enforcement of the law before the ordinary Courts of the land.’9 The Court distinguished between qualifications for entitlement to benefits (Bliss) and differential harsh treatment (Drybones), as if denial of a benefit solely because a woman is pregnant does not constitute differential harsh treatment. However, the Court did not rely exclusively on the benefit/disadvantage distinction, their fallback position was to blame nature. In one of those supremely quotable displays of judicial sexism, Justice Ritchie stated: ‘Any inequality between the sexes in this area is not created by legislation but by nature’10 . . . .
The Advent of the Charter
This was the legacy of the equality decisions under the Bill of Rights—racism, sexism, and a lack of even the most basic understanding of discrimination and inequality that, even in its time, seemed incomprehensible. With this dismal history, it may be hard to imagine how and why feminists pursued the inclusion of equality rights provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Certainly, the focus on the Charter and the hope placed in the entrenchment of equality rights were not shared by all, or even most, feminists in Canada. Many perceived the Charter project as hopeless or useless; some saw it as counterproductive; some saw it as co-optation. But others, unwilling to concede the territory to inequality, were determined to ensure that the Charter wording made it impossible to repeat the atrocities that had been inflicted under the Bill of Rights.
. . . Equality can be used to promote inequality, as easily as to address inequality. The challenge for feminist advocates and lawyers is to try to make the Charter more than a guarantee of the equal opportunity to participate in a prototype-defined world. And it is a challenge. The liberal roots of equality that tie it to an individualistic theory of rights and an assimilationist model of formal equality make this a difficult task. But the language of equality has the advantage of allowing us to focus on group-based inequality, on the specific, concrete, and often intersectional manifestations of women’s oppression and on the systemic and intractable nature of that oppression. Equality to me is not a goal; I have no equality formula to offer; I do not know what equality would look like if we had it. Equality to me is a strategy and a process that we can use to try to address existing inequalities; the Charter equality provisions provide one vehicle through which we can make those arguments.
(In) Equality after the Charter
The Andrews Case
The first Supreme Court of Canada decision applying section 15 of the Charter was Law Society of British Columbia v. Andrews,11 decided in 1989, seven years after the advent of the Charter, four years after section 15 came into effect. This case marked a clear turn away from the formal model of equality and a significant move towards the recognition of inequality as the starting point for analysis of the meaning(s) of equality.
Prior to this decision, most Canadian courts, in applying section 15 of the Charter, had tended to follow the equality jurisprudence of the United States in which equality was interpreted in the Aristotelian sense to require only that ‘likes be treated alike’ and ‘unalikes be treated unalike.’ The test for determining ‘likeness’ became known as the similarly situated test—persons who were similarly situated should be similarly treated . . . . In gender terms, this required women to try to prove that they were just like men in order to qualify for the same treatment as men. This was largely the substance of equality litigation under the similarly situated test; this was assimilation writ large.
In the Andrews case, Mark Andrews and his co-claimant, Elizabeth Kinersly, were successful in their claim that the requirement of Canadian citizenship for admission to the bar of British Columbia contravened the equality guarantee of section 15 of the Charter. Mark Andrews, a British citizen, and Elizabeth Kinersly, a U.S. citizen, were both permanent residents in Canada and met all of the requirements for admission to the practice of law except that of Canadian citizenship. Although citizenship is not expressly included in section 15 as a prohibited ground of discrimination, the Court held that it is included as a ground analogous to the express grounds. Non-citizens were found to fall within the type of ‘discrete and insular minority’ that section 15 was designed to protect, that is, ‘those groups who suffer social, political and legal disadvantage in our society,’12 a determination to be made by looking at the social context, not just the law being challenged.13 These have become key words and concepts in section 15 jurisprudence, providing an important focus for the meaning of equality under the Charter, a focus on inequality, oppressed groups, and social context.
However, the wording of the test enunciated in Andrews is not without problems. ‘Disadvantage’ has become the primary word used to denote inequality. But, as First Nations scholar and activist Patricia Monture has explained, it is a word that is itself exceedingly problematic. Monture rejects the description of oppressed groups as disadvantaged:
Generically I am speaking about racism and sexism and classism and all of the other isms of how individuals who fit those stereotypical classifications get qualified as disadvantaged. We are only disadvantaged if you are using a White middle class yardstick . . . . Disadvantage is a nice, soft comfortable word to describe dispossession, to describe a situation of force whereby our very existence, our histories are erased continuously right before our eyes. Words like disadvantage conceal racism.14
The characterization of the inequality as ‘disadvantage’ is from the perspective of the dominant group; from the perspective of the subordinated group it is oppression. The elision from oppression to disadvantage masks the harm, the animus, the systemic nature of the inequality. Hester Lessard, in her article on the decisions of Madam Justice Wilson, makes a similar critique of the term ‘disadvantage’ when she argues that ‘we need to examine the cultural norms embedded in the concept of disadvantage which is increasingly presented as the benchmark of a social equality approach.’15 Lessard goes on to raise the concern that what she calls the social equality model may rely on a single and dominant notion of social prosperity that is similarly, if less overtly, assimilationist as the formal equality model. These critiques of the language enshrined in the Charter and in Charter equality jurisprudence give rise to fundamental concerns about the potential of the Charter to facilitate social change—are the apparent shifts in the understanding of equality reflected in Andrews really shifts only on an abstract or linguistic level? Is equality forever trapped in a comparative assimilationist model, or is it capable of breaking free of dominant constructs, bringing oppressed people with it? The Andrews decision offers the hope of liberation and, at the same time, raises the fear that we will be unable or unwilling to move beyond assimilation.
Justice McIntyre, in a lengthy discussion of the meaning of equality, endorsed by the majority of the court in Andrews, firmly and unequivocally rejected the treating likes alike approach to equality . . . .
This was a much celebrated move by the Supreme Court of Canada and signalled the potential for section 15 to move beyond the assimilationist model of formal equality. However, even at the time of the Andrews decision, I feared that all may not be as positive as these words might indicate;16 now as the section 15 jurisprudence develops, my fears increase. While the Court did reject the similarly situated test as a section 15 formula for determining the application of ‘equality,’ the actual result in the case seemed very much one of treating likes alike. From the limited information available in the Andrews decision, Mark Andrews and Elizabeth Kinersly seem very much ‘like’ the dominant image of both ‘lawyer’ and ‘Canadian citizen.’ It may be because of this ‘likeness’ that the Court was able to recognize that it was unfair to deny them the right to practise law accorded to Canadian citizens . . . .
While the Andrews decision was definitely a major step forward for equality in Canada, at the same time the seeds of possible future problems were sown. The characterization of the issue, by Justice McIntyre, as one pertaining to ‘irrelevant personal difference’17 and ‘personal characteristics’ has become a defining feature of the section 15 test of discrimination:
. . . [D]iscrimination maybe described as a distinction, whether intentional or not but based on grounds relating to personal characteristics of the individual or group, which has the effect of imposing burdens, obligations or disadvantages on such individual or group not imposed on others, or which withholds or limits access to opportunities, benefits and advantages available to other members of society. Distinctions based on personal characteristics attributed to an individual solely on the basis of association with a group will rarely escape the charge of discrimination, while those based on an individual’s merits and capacities will rarely be so classed.18
The recurring references to ‘personal characteristics’ and ‘irrelevant personal differences’ seem to me extremely unfortunate. When I try to apply them to myself as a white, non-disabled, middle-class, Christian, lesbian, I would say that in our highly gendered, lesbian-hating society, neither my gender nor my sexuality are irrelevant, either to me or to society. The point is that these characteristics are seen as relevant; they have been used as criteria for imposing burdens and denying benefits; they have been socially constructed as relevant, and that means they are relevant. The oppression comes from the characterization my being a woman and my being a lesbian as ‘differences’ from a perspective of dominance; and both of these ‘differences’ are considered as a relevant basis for differential treatment. And, while both my gender and my sexuality are at one level deeply personal, in the larger social context neither is personal, that is, they are not really, or necessarily, about me. This is one of the ways discrimination works; it is, at the same time, all about the person being discriminated against and not really about that person at all . . . .
To move from personal characteristics to group-based claims, one has to read in the stereotypes that attach to members of that group.19 Thus, the test itself perpetuates the stereotypes being challenged. Without apparently being aware of this problem of invoking the stereotype to challenge the stereotype, Justice McIntyre in Andrews seems to have been concerned with stereotyping as the primary issue of discrimination. Discrimination, according to Justice McIntyre, is about the attribution of personal characteristics based solely on group membership. But this notion of stereotyping as inaccurate attribution is only one of the problems of discrimination. Stereotyping involves much more than the question of its accuracy on either an individual or group basis. The larger and more systemic problem is the devaluation of those ‘characteristics’ traditionally assumed to belong to an oppressed group. Thus, consistent with the treating likes alike and unalikes unalike approach, the inequalities experienced by those who do fulfil the group-based stereotype are less likely to be recognized as such. Again, this is more about assimilation than it is about equality. Similarly, in asserting that distinctions based on an individual’s merits and capacities would rarely be classed as discrimination, Justice McIntyre fails to recognize the systemically discriminatory nature of these concepts. ‘Merit’ and ‘capacity,’ defined in terms of the prototype model, have consistently been used to exclude those who do not fit that model—women, members of racialized groups, people with disabilities.20 The less one fits the model, the less likely one is to be considered to have the required ‘merit’ or ‘capacity.’
After Andrews
. . . In the early days of the Charter, the majority of the sex discrimination arguments under the Charter were put forward by men, as was the case with the equal protection clause under the U.S. Constitution.21 Recently, the sex equality arguments are more frequently being made by women. However, something that makes an assessment of the effectiveness of section 15 for women even more difficult is that many of the Charter cases that most affect women and raise the most serious equality issues do not come forward as section 15 equality claims. Abortion,22 pornography,23 the relevance of the past sexual history of the woman who was raped in a sexual assault trial,24 access to women’s therapy and counselling records,25 the incarceration of a pregnant woman in a ‘treatment program’ in order to protect her fetus26 are all issues that have been decided in cases in which section 15 was not the central Charter provision, and the primary focus was not necessarily on women. It may be that equality arguments are not always presented in these types of cases and section 15 may or may not provide a basis for the decision; nonetheless, these cases are among the most significant sex equality decisions to date. Women and women’s organizations need to be constantly vigilant about the cases that are being brought forward in which women have an interest that is not being represented. Section 15 does provide an important base from which women can demand to be heard by the court; and so far the courts have generally allowed women’s groups to intervene to make their section 15 arguments.27
Section 15 provides the entry point through which a women-centred, intersectional analysis and argument can be made. It is, however, clear that the courts have not always, or not even usually, understood the arguments being put forward by women’s organizations. In saying this, I am not equating understanding with agreeing with or supporting the section 15 sex equality analysis being presented to them (that would be the next step, hopefully). I am saying that, at a much more basic level, often the courts just do not seem to get it. Women’s inequalities and the discrimination that is so interwoven into women’s daily lives are largely unrecognizable and incomprehensible to those in dominant positions. It is the privilege of not knowing and the, often unconscious, resistance to finding out that are at stake here. Section 15 offers a place from which that privilege can be challenged and for this reason alone, it is an important tool. But whether the section 15 promise of equality will mean anything more than an opportunity to voice one’s oppression very much remains to be seen . . . .
In terms of concerns, I want to come back to the issue of stereotyping that was central in McIntyre’s discussion of discrimination in Andrews. The irony of the focus on stereotyping as the evil of discrimination is that frequently equality decisions explicitly, if unconsciously, reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes. Justice Linden, in his dissent at the Federal Court of Appeal in Egan and Nesbitt, one of a number of gay ‘spousal’ benefit cases, alluded to this problem when he said: ‘It would be paradoxical indeed if a decision under s. 15 were itself to be based on prejudice and stereotyping.’28 The reliance on stereotypes in the name of equality is a central paradox of equality and one of the serious risks involved in raising or responding to a s. 15 argument. Stereotypes are inevitably a part of the analysis of discrimination, but unless the stereotypes are being critically unpacked, they are being perpetuated.
. . . For example, Justice McLachlin rejected out of hand the equality claim of Sue Rodriguez, saying: ‘I am of the view that this is not at base a case about discrimination under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that to treat it as such may deflect the equality jurisprudence from the true focus of s. 15—“to remedy or prevent discrimination against groups subject to stereotyping, historical disadvantage and political and social prejudice in Canadian society.”’29 Sue Rodriguez, a woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis who was seeking the right to terminate her own life under conditions of her own choosing, met all of these criteria. The issues presented by this case are complex, and I do not think that there is a simple disability-positive conclusion, as is reflected in the fact that there were disability rights groups presenting arguments on both sides of the case. However, even though there may not be a clear-cut equality-based answer, the case is clearly about discrimination and equality rights. Whatever the results of the analysis, Sue Rodriguez’s situation could only be fully understood in the context of an analysis of discrimination and equality. Yet this is what Justice McLachlin failed to recognize when she refused to apply an equality analysis to the complex issues before her. While there have been disability cases where the Supreme Court of Canada accepted that section 15 should be considered,30 Rodriguez stands as an important reminder that disability is frequently not recognized as an issue of (in)equality . . . .
The Rodriguez decision also raises the problem that, despite the fact that the Bliss decision has been overruled by the Supreme Court of Canada, the logic of Bliss is still with us. In asking the question ‘whether a claim by the terminally ill who cannot commit suicide without assistance can be supported on the ground that s. 241(b) [of the Criminal Code] discriminates against all disabled persons who are unable to commit suicide without assistance,’ Justice Sopinka is asking a question akin to that which derailed Bliss—whether a claim by a pregnant woman can be supported as sex discrimination because the claim does not pertain to all women. The fact that the discrimination does not, or may not, apply, or apply in the same way, to all members of the oppressed group does not negate its discriminatory impact on a subset of that oppressed group.
Other Bliss-type arguments are similarly resurfacing. The argument that only members of the oppressed group can be subject to disadvantageous treatment in order for the treatment to constitute discrimination is related to the Bliss argument that the discrimination has to affect all members of the oppressed group. The recurrence of this ‘only the oppressed group’ argument is truly surprising given that, even long before Andrews, the disparate impact on an oppressed group of an apparently neutral rule was clearly recognized in Canada as discrimination. Yet, the Federal Court of Appeal in 1994 in Thibaudeau v. R.31 rejected the plaintiff’s claim of sex discrimination based on the fact that the Income Tax Act provisions, requiring the inclusion of child support payments in taxable income, have an adverse impact on a small number of custodial fathers, as well as on custodial mothers who are the bulk of the people affected by this requirement . . . .
The Bliss logic was employed in reverse to defeat the claim in the Egan case. Because an oppressed group (lesbians and gays) was a subset of a larger group (non-spouses) that experienced the same disadvantageous treatment (denial of access to the Old Age Security spousal allowance), the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada held that the oppressed group was not discriminated against by that denial. The Court held that lesbians and gays were simply treated the same as other non-spouses, that is the same as ‘all sorts of other couples [sic] living together such as brothers and sisters or other relatives, regardless of sex, and others who are not related’32. . . .
Attempts to preserve reproduction (notwithstanding the copious evidence to the contrary) and marriage as exclusively heterosexual domains are at the root of the powerful and emphatic resistance to many of the equality claims that have been brought by lesbians and gays. Even when, as in M. v. H.,33 the Court applied section 15 favourably to a lesbian claim, they were very careful to limit and circumscribe the decision to protect the illusion of heterosexual exclusivity with respect to reproduction and marriage. So in M. v. H., while the court was willing to impose ‘spousal’ support obligations pursuant to the breakup of a lesbian relationship,34 they were at great pains to repeat, at length, that this decision did not have any impact on marriage or even have any necessary consequences for the meaning of ‘spouse’ in any other context. Provincial and federal government responses to this case have certainly borne this out, with most governments going through incredible contortions to preserve the territory of marriage exclusively for heterosexuals . . . .
To some extent the reluctance of the courts to fully endorse and apply equality rights seems to be related to the overtness of the discrimination being challenged, coupled with the Court’s discomfort, and unwillingness, to provide a remedy. It is also about the problems of compound discrimination and of multiple grounds of discrimination. In this regard, claimants are required, under section 15, to fit their experience(s) into the appropriate ground, that is pick the right shell or shells in the shell game; they have to present their experience(s) in terms of the shells in a way that does not allow their experience(s) to fall through the spaces between the shells; at the same time, they want to present their experience(s) under the different equality headings so that they are seen as integrally related, as a compound whole, not separate (un)grounded parts. It is a difficult, if not impossible task, for the claimants and a task that carries with it the risk of shattering their sense of self. And, even if claimants are able to present themselves and their claims in an integrated and interconnected way, the Court may simply pull them back apart, dissect them, and leave them in pieces.
Madam Justice L’Heureux-Dubé has for some time, although without success, been trying to get the Court to put an end to the shell game by adopting a more flexible and contextualized approach to equality that focuses less on the categories of discrimination and more on the discrimination experienced. Her approach moves away from the notion of grounds as discrete and severable boxes into which the claimant must contort her claim to an analysis in which social context is of prime importance and intersectionality is recognized and understood as creating potentially endless combinations and permutations of discrimination.
The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision in the Sparks35 case offers some limited hope on the issue of intersectionality. In this case, an African-Canadian single mother on social assistance successfully challenged the reduced eviction notice requirements for public housing tenants on the basis of race, sex, and income. The court did not seem to have been overwhelmed by the different grounds, or to have felt obliged to pick a single ground as the ‘real’ ground, or, in confusion, to reject them all. However, the decision did not discuss the compound and interrelated nature of these oppressions. I am left wondering whether the judges were able to see Irma Sparks as a whole person or whether she was, for them, simply her discriminated-against parts.
Conclusion
Having broken free from the confines of the formal equality mode according to which likes are to be treated alike, equality under the Charter has become an even more amorphous and uncertain concept. Andrews, the first and most significant section 15 equality decision from the Supreme Court of Canada to date, offered a great deal of promise with respect to the direction and meaning(s) of equality, and the potential for improvements in the lives of oppressed people. At the same time, the Andrews formulation of equality contained the seeds of its own limitations and inadequacies. It is impossible to summarize where we are with ‘equality,’ in this country, at this time; we are everywhere and we are nowhere. The equality analysis is shifting and changing, such that both between and within decisions there are contradictions and inconsistencies . . . .
In its 1999 decision in Law v. Canada,36 the Supreme Court of Canada went back to equality basics in an apparent attempt to extricate itself from the jurisprudential equality morass it had spawned and to reunite the Court under a single approach to section 15. In this case, a thirty-year-old, non-disabled woman without dependent children challenged the denial of survivor’s benefits under the Canadian Pension Plan, arguing that this denial constituted age discrimination. Her claim was rejected by a unanimous Court, and most of the decision is devoted to setting down guidelines for the application of section 15. The focus is on a contextual and purposive analysis of section 15 and the concept of human dignity figures heavily and problematically in the Court’s understanding of equality. The Court in Law draws extensively from Andrews and rearticulates much of what was said in that first Supreme Court equality decision. With some refinements and revisions, Law is largely a restatement of Andrews, with the same promise and the same limitations.
It would appear that the Court considered Law to be clear-cut, an easy case, and seized the opportunity of a non-contentious outcome to come to agreement on the basic principles that underlie section 15. But, of course, therein lies the problem—it is easy to agree on principles in the abstract or in the context of what is perceived to be a clear-cut case. It is in the hard cases, the ones that challenge dominant values or that raise the spectre of significant public expenditure or that demand fundamental realignment or rethinking of existing structures that the disagreements will arise . . . . We may have a shared commitment to equality, but we do not have a shared understanding of what equality means, and we do not have a shared commitment to the elimination of inequality.
The equality issues being presented to the courts are complex and full of contradictions and arise in the context of deeply entrenched, widespread, and diverse inequalities. This raises the inevitable question of whether the legal forum, which is a place where issues tend to be simplified and where ‘answers’ are required, is an appropriate place to ‘resolve’ equality issues. My response to this question is that there is no place that is inappropriate for addressing equality issues; what happens to and with equality in the courts affects how equality issues are raised and fought in other forums; and vice versa—what happens on the streets, in the classroom, in the legislature, in the workplace, in the home, affects what happens in the court room. There is no right or best place to advocate or adjudicate equality. Equality is being negotiated, contested, defined, adjudicated—everywhere, all of the time.
Notes
1. See, e.g., the famous persons case, Edwards et al. v. Attorney General for Canada, [1930] A.C. 124, in which five women challenged the exclusion of white women from sitting in the Senate; and Re Mabel French (1912), 1 D.L.R. 80 (N.B.S.C.); and Dame Langstaff v. the Bar of the Province of Quebec (1915), 46 Que. S.C. 131, in which white women challenged their exclusion from the practise of law.
2. The cases of Attorney General of Canada v. Lavell; Isaac v. Bedard (1973), 38 D.L.R. (3rd) 481 (S.C.C.) brought by First Nations women are a notable exception to the dominance of white women as sex equality litigators in the pre-Charter cases.
3. See Lavell and Bedard . . . . The interactive compound mix of race and sex was ignored and, in the face of the glaring significance of race, the case was decided exclusively on the basis of sex discrimination.
4. After a successful complaint against the Canadian government brought to the U.N. Human Rights Committee by Sandra Lovelace, as well as extensive and persistent activism by First Nations women across Canada, this situation has to some extent been rectified. However, reverberations from this egregious act continue to disrupt and divide First Nations communities. See Janet Silman, ed., Enough Is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1987).
5. Lavell and Bedard, 495.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 498–9.
8. (1978), 92 D.L.R. (3d) 417(S.C.C.). Bliss was eventually overruled in 1989 in a human rights decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, Brooks v. Canada Safeway Ltd., [1989] 1 S.C.R. 1219.
9. Bliss, 423.
10. Ibid., 422.
11. [1989] 1 S.C.R. 143.
12. Ibid., 34.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Patricia Monture, ‘Ka-Nin-Geh-Heh-Cah-E-Sa-Nonh-Yah-Gah’ (1986) 2 CJWL 161. Monture is a member of the Mohawk Nation and the ‘we’ and ‘our’ to whom she refers in this quotation are First Nations people.
15. Hester Lessard, ‘Equality and Access to Justice in the Work of Bertha Wilson’ (1992) 15 Dalhousie Law Journal 59.
16. See [Majury] ‘Equality and Discrimination According to the Supreme Court of Canada,’ (1991) 2 Canadian Journal of Women and Law (CJWL) 407 at 425.
17. Andrews, 11 . . . .
18. Ibid., 18.
19. This concept of reading in the stereotype comes from Patricia Williams, ‘The Death of the Profane,’ in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) in which she tells the story of an editor who had, in the name of racial neutrality, eliminated all references to her race such that the reader would have to read in racist stereotyping in order to understand her story.
20. See Margaret Thornton, ‘Affirmative Action, Merit and the Liberal State’ (1982) 2 Australian Journal of Law and Society 28; see also Anne Donnellon and Deborah Kolb, ‘Constructive for Whom? The Fate of Diversity Disputes in Organizations’ (1994) 50 Journal of Social Issues 139; and Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 192–225.
21. See Gwen Brodsky and Shelagh Day, Canadian Charter Equality Rights for Women: One Step Forward or Two Steps Back? (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1989).
22. R. v. Morgentaler, [1993] 3 S.C.R. 463.
23. R. v. Butler (1992), 89 D.L.R (4th) 449 (S.C.C.).
24. R. v. Seaboyer and Gayme, [1991] 2 S.C.R. 577.
25. R. v. O’Connor (1995), 130 D.L.R, (4th) 235 (S.C.C).
26. Winnipeg Child and Family Services (Northwest Area) v. G.(D.F.) (1997), 152 D.L.R. 4th 193 (S.C.C.).
27. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), often in coalition with other groups, has probably been the organization that has intervened most consistently to raise women’s equality issues. This is because this is what LEAF was established to do. See Sherene Razack, Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Education and Action Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991); see also LEAF, Equality and the Charter: Ten Years of Feminist Advocacy before the Supreme Court of Canada (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 1996). Other groups intervene when the issues they work with—e.g., immigration, violence against women, reproductive rights—are before the court.
28. [Egan v. Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. at 359.] I cannot help but think that Justice Linden made this statement in recognition of the prejudice and stereotyping underlying the majority decision in this case. This case dealt with the availability of the spousal allowance under the Old Age Security Act to a gay male partner. Having been denied the benefit at trial and by the Federal Court of Appeal, the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada where the spousal allowance was again denied to them, Egan v. Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 513.
29. Rodriguez v. Attorney General of Canada, [1993] 3 S.C.R. 616.
30. In Eaton v. Brant County Board of Education (1997), 142 D.L.R. 4th 385 (S.C.C.), the Court held that s. 15 did not mandate a presumption of integrated schooling for children with disabilities and refused to overturn the tribunal decision that segregated schooling was in the best interests of this particular child. In Eldridge v. British Columbia (Attorney-General) (1997), 151 D.L.R. 4th (S.C.C.), the Court held that the failure to provide people who are deaf with sign language interpreters when they receive medical services was an unjustifiable breach of s. 15 of the Charter. I would describe these cases (simplistically) as a loss and a win respectively. Eldridge is a particularly important victory in that it is a decision that will cost the B.C. government money, something the courts tend to be reluctant to do.
31. [1994] 2 F.C. 189 (C.A.). The challenge was successful in the Federal Court of Appeal under the analogous ground of being a separated custodial parent. See Ellen Zweibel, ‘Thibaudeau v. R.: Constitutional Challenge to the Taxation of Child Support Payments’ (1994) 4 NJCL 305. The Federal Court of Appeal decision was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, [1995] 2 S.C.R. 627, on the basis that there was no s. 15 violation, on any ground, including sex.
32. Razack, Canadian Feminism, 535.
33. (1999), 171 D.L.R, 4th 577 (S.C.C.).
34. The courts appear more willing to recognize and remedy inequality when the economic costs of doing so fall on the shoulders of an individual rather than the state. This would offer some explanation for why M. and H. were recognized as spouses while Egan and Nesbitt were not.
35. Dartmouth-Halifax County Regional Housing Authority v. Sparks (1992), 12 N.S.R. (2d) 389 (C.A.).
36. [1999] 1 S.C.R. 497.
The Aboriginal Women’s Movement
Grace Ouellette
Grace Ouellette was raised on the Red Pheasant Reserve by her grandmother, Mrs. Bella Wuttunee, and she includes Metis, Cree and Assiniboine when describing her ancestry. She is primarily interested in Native Studies and the status of indigenous women. Along with a B.Ed, she has received B.A. and M.A. in Native Studies.
Background
Aboriginal women in Canada have had their own women’s movement for almost as long as the broader feminist movement in Canada has existed. However, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), a national organization, did not form until 1974. The Aboriginal women’s movement came to life when Aboriginal women became aware that they were discriminated against by Canada’s Indian Act on the basis of race, gender and marital status.
Two Aboriginal women’s groups, Indian Rights for Indian Women (IRIW) and the Tobique women’s group, wanted their fight against the discriminatory legislation commonly known as Section 12(1)(b) of the revised 1951 Indian Act documented. The membership of the IRIW and their president, Jenny Margetts, asked the Advisory Council on the Status of Women for help in documenting the impact of this discriminatory federal law on Indian women. In response, Kathleen Jamieson produced a book, Indian Women and the Law in Canada: Citizens Minus (1978), which reviewed the various Indian acts from 1830 to 1951. A group of thirteen women from the Tobique reserve in New Brunswick, who were also actively involved in bringing about changes to the pre-1985 Indian Act, asked Janet Silman to record their experiences and activism (Silman 1987). The group’s activism was also documented by Shirley Bear (1991). The Tobique women’s group began as a movement for better housing and living conditions on their reserve, but “status” became the main issue, and Section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act came under attack. The offending section of the Indian Art (Section 12(1)(b) in the 1951 revision), which discriminated against Indian women for over a century, dates back to 1869. Section 12(1)(b) stated:
The following persons are not entitled to be registered, namely . . . (b) a woman who married a person who is not an Indian, unless that woman is subsequently the wife or widow of a person described in section 11. (cited in Jamieson 1978: 8)
Indian men, however, could marry whom they pleased without penalty and could confer their Indian status on their non-Indian spouses and subsequent offspring. This law has been a continuing source of contention and divisiveness amongst Indian women and Indian men. The rise of Native nationalism and activism coincided with the Canadian women’s movement. Both were fighting oppression and striving for liberation . . . .
Turpel (1990) provides a good background on the emergence of Aboriginal women’s groups:
The Indian Act dilemma gave rise to the formation of many other Indigenous women’s organizations in Canada. Indian Rights for Indian Women (IRIW) was formed in the 1970s and has been active in lobbying and at other political efforts to eliminate discrimination from the Indian Act. IRIW at one time had regional representation. However, much of this has since joined with the NWAC. (98)
Other Native women’s organizations came into existence in the 1970s: the Professional Native Women’s Association and the Indian Homemaker’s Association of British Columbia, and the Indian and Inuit Nurses Association. Turpel also informs us that Inuit women have now formed their own national organization, the Inuit Women’s Association (IWA), which was incorporated in 1985 . . . .
The result of networking culminated in 1974 in the formation of a national Indigenous women’s organization, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), which represented Indian, Inuit and Metis women. Ottawa became the headquarters for NWAC in 1980.
Turpel outlines the difference between mainstream feminism and the Aboriginal women’s movement:
The NWAC, along with the Inuit Women’s Association . . . embodies an organized movement in Canada which differs fundamentally from the mainstream Canadian women’s movement. The objectives of the NWAC and TWA are not feminist in nature, and they do not strive for complete “equality of men and women” in all areas. NWAC, at least, appears to accept genuine cultural role distinctions. TWA has not yet fully developed its organizational personality. (95)
Indian women who had lost their Indian status upon marriage to non-treaty persons challenged the Canadian government’s legislation on women.
Various feminist writers (Etienne and Leacock 1980; Leacock 1981; Brown 1980; Van Kirk 1980; Bourgeault 1989; Green 1985; Krosenbrink-Gelissen 1991; Silman 1987) analyzing the oppression of Indian women have focused on male domination including control of modes of production. The Indian Act as an instrument of colonization in the subjugation of Indian people has often been overlooked. Despite many revisions, the Indian Act continues to define and regulate the lives of Indian people in every respect. It is a special legislation exclusively for Canada’s Aboriginals. Not only do Aboriginal people have to live within the confines of the Indian Act, they are also subject to provincial and federal laws. The process of colonialism is still very much alive in Canada.
How appropriate and applicable is feminist theory in the analysis of Indigenous women’s oppression? The following pages examine scholarly works which have attempted to apply feminist frameworks in their analyses of Indigenous women’s oppression . . . .
The Contemporary Period
Some contemporary scholars’ works are based on the perspectives of Canada’s Aboriginal women themselves (Poelzer and Poelzer 1986; Cruikshank 1990; Perreault and Vance 1990; Ahenakew and Wolfart 1992). These studies show that the roles of Indigenous women vary according to their culture, but that some roles have indeed changed and declined following contact with Europeans. It is apparent that the imposition of European-based laws and institutions over Indigenous peoples has contributed to these changes. Little theoretical orientation is evident in these works, and in some, feminist theory is more implicit than explicit . . . .
Colonialism
The process of colonialism at the hands of Europeans has dispossessed Canada’s First Nations of their rights as the original inhabitants of this country and has undermined their diverse cultures and customs. The dislocation and dispossession are well documented by Boldt and Long (1985), Manuel and Posluns (1974), Richardson (1990), York (1990) and Mercredi and Turpel (1994), as well as in various published articles by the Aboriginal Women’s Council of Saskatchewan (AWCS newsletters 1992, 1995). The colonization of Canada’s Aboriginal people is grounded in the Indian Act. It is the colonial instrument for regulating and controlling the lives of Canada’s Aboriginal people in every aspect. Gail Kellough’s (1980) article describes the process of colonization in Canada:
The colonizing of a people is a social process; in the case of the Canadian Indians, this process had its roots in the earliest days of contact. While they enjoyed a high level of autonomy during the earlier period, a mutual interdependence also existed between the two groups. Ultimately, what distinguishes colonizers from colonized is a question of power. When the balance of power shifted in favor of the Europeans, the actual colonial period began. (343)
According to Kellough, analysis should involve the external and internal mechanisms of colonialism and their structures, as well as the experiences of the Native peoples. The external and internal factors are referred to by Kellough as the “two levels of power.”
The external forces of colonialism set up this power structure in the form of institutions: the government and the church. The church then also becomes part of the internal process through what Kellough terms “normative control.” The state administers the people by various policies and programs and establishes control and power through legislation. The church and the missionaries act as agents of the state to establish normative control through psychological and cultural conditioning to prevent revolt. The state has a political structure in place to exercise control and to pursue economic interests, while the church converts the minds of the colonized. Kellough terms the state’s role “structural colonialism” and refers to “cultural colonialism” for the church’s function.
Kellough also suggests a strategy for social change for the colonized through decolonization. Kellough says that Indian people must develop consciousness:
It is absolutely essential that Indian people know their history. They have become alienated, not from the white society, but from their own world. Assimilationist policies have only perpetuated and enlarged their problem. A sense of common experience and identity is a first step towards the ending of this alienation. (369)
Patricia Monture-Angus (1999: 116–34) also writes about colonialism and is very critical of the Canadian justice system, which she views as a colonial instrument. She cites several cases of colonial oppression in the justice system, as well as her own experiences as a colonized person.
The Indian Act legislation has been one of the most oppressive colonial instruments of the Canadian government, and it has kept Aboriginal peoples in an encapsulated world—in a Fourth World. Aboriginal peoples are bound by federal and provincial laws, as well as by the Indian Act, and by their own band governments.
Aboriginal women have their own strategy for social change. Their source of wisdom and knowledge can be found in their own experiences and in their grandmother’s teachings, which have been passed on for generations through oral tradition. Decolonization and co-existence can be achieved through the recovery of these sources.
Theories of Aboriginal Women’s Oppression
Scholars have suggested several appropriate frameworks for analyzing Aboriginal women’s oppression (Van Kirk 1987; Emberley 1993; Monture-Okanee 1992) . . . .
Van Kirk (1987) does not consider whether or not feminist sexual politics are appropriate for a revision of Native women’s history and does not discuss what oppression means to Native women. As suggested before, the oppression of Native women must be seen within a broader context, not simply on sex specific terms. The whole process of colonization must be taken into consideration, with the Indian Act recognized as Canada’s main legal instrument of colonialism.
. . . Emberley proposes a feminism of decolonization based on Native women’s writings, which she suggests show ideological differences and resistance. She believes this will provide a critique and point of departure for the deconstruction of relationships between Native women and Anglo-American feminism. Emberley also maintains that Native women were powerful influences in their Native societies, and that the breakdown of egalitarian relationships was essential to colonization. Emberley’s proposed theory in the area of humanities has considerable merit with regard to the opposition between oral tradition and printed text, considering the struggle Aboriginal people have in validating the reliability and credibility of oral tradition and oral history as sources of knowledge.
Patricia Monture-Okanee (1992) believes that feminism is one way of seeing things, but that it has its limitations. She advises caution, because feminism can be a barrier to the type of social change Aboriginal women want: “caution must be exercised before any complete embracing of feminist thought or feminist analysis occurs. The consequences of the feminist analytical structure contain serious barriers for the scope of social change that is defined as desirable from the Aboriginal perspective” (253). Monture-Okanee uses the concept of justice to articulate the differences between Aboriginal thought and Euro-based justice systems. She utilizes feminist terminology but does not critique feminist theory in general. At the time of this writing, no definite position has been taken by Monture-Okanee as to the appropriateness and applicability of feminist theory, but she does question the universality of experiences.
Winona Stevenson insists that feminists and Aboriginal women are involved in parallel but separate movements:
I do not call myself a feminist. I believe in the power of Indigenous women and the power of all women. I believe that while feminists and Indigenous women have a lot in common, they are in separate movements. Feminism defines sexual oppression as the Big Ugly. The Indigenous women’s movement sees colonization and racial oppression as the Big Uglies. Issues of sexual oppression are seldom articulated separately because they are part of the Bigger Uglies. Sexual oppression was, and is, one part of the colonization of Indigenous peoples. (Stevenson, Johnson and Greschner 1992: 159)
According to Stevenson, racism is more devastating than sexism. Her experience with feminists has not been positive, and she does not see conversion by either side as being necessary. In the final analysis, Stevenson does not endorse or reject feminism.
There are also scholars who have analyzed the relationship between the Aboriginal male-dominated organizations and NWAC, including the impacts of the 1985 Amendment to the Indian Act and the exclusion of NWAC from constitutional talks during 1982–1987 (Krosenbrink-Gelissen 1991). As well, the conflict between Aboriginal women’s conceptions of motherhood and those of the broader feminist movement is discussed by Krosenbrink-Gelissen (1991). Both Green (1985) and Krosenbrink-Gelissen (1991) use sexual equality as their criterion for evaluating existing relationships between the men’s and women’s organizations and also within Indian governments . . . .
According to Priscilla Buffalohead (1993), the contributions of women from different cultures have not been part of feminist scholarship:
Unfortunately, all too many feminist scholars wear the same ethnocentric blinders as their male counterparts, viewing the study of the history of tribal women valuable only insofar as it illuminates the origins of sexism in human society. (236)
Buffalohead shares the same concerns as Albers and Medicine (1983) regarding the portrayal of Aboriginal women in American movies and history as either whores, drudges or princesses, portrayals that emphasize their secondary roles in relation to Aboriginal men. The important economic, political and spiritual roles Aboriginal women played in their societies have been overlooked in these portrayals. Buffalohead believes a culture clash may be responsible for this oversight:
Whether they realize it or not, feminist scholars dealing with the history of Euro-American women become caught up in issues of sex equality precisely because they belong to what has always been a class-stratified society characterized by unequal access to power, prestige, and privilege. Many tribal societies, on the other hand, stem from egalitarian cultural traditions. These traditions are concerned less with equality of the sexes and more with the dignity of individuals and with their inherent right—whether they be women, men or children—to make their own choices and decisions. (236)
Buffalohead outlines the various positions—“farmers, warriors, traders”— which at times crossed gender lines that Ojibway women held in their societies. Albers and Medicine (1983) point out that the Plains Indian women also played multi-faceted roles, and although there was a division of labour, at times roles crossed over, depending on the circumstances and needs of their group. The division of labour does not necessarily mean inequality; tasks were done by either gender as needed at the time. Albers and Medicine are of the opinion that colonialism and the changing relations in production have contributed to the changes in the relationships between Indigenous men and women.
Buffalohead also discusses the autonomy at Ojibway women with regard to their sexuality: “In the flow of family life, the ideal of mutual respect dominated the relationship between the sexes” (241). The women were indeed responsible for child-rearing until weaning, at which time men became more involved. Divorce was not uncommon and was less traumatic than present-day divorces, because children and property were not divided according to parental and property rights. Children were often looked after by an extended family, and therefore custody was not an issue. Also, the concept of private property was uncommon in Aboriginal societies at the time.
There is definitely a conflict between the relationship of the Aboriginal women’s movement and the broader feminist movement with regard to the concept of “motherhood” and the role of women. As well, there are other situations that feminists do not share with Aboriginal women, such as national oppression, of which racism and classism are parts.
Indigenous Women’s Concerns
Globally, Indigenous women appear to be more concerned with racism, classism and national oppression in its various forms than with the issue of sexism. Several articles to this effect can be found in publications by the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) in Copenhagen. One publication, Document 66—Indigenous Women on the Move (IWGIA 1990), contains insightful information on Indigenous women’s movements for liberation. On the whole, the contributors were more concerned with their home environments, land dispossession and displacement, loss of traditional economies and customs, the rights to self-determination and self-government, and other societal problems affecting their communities as a whole than with male domination. Several of them indicated that racism and national oppression were the greatest barriers to their “liberation,” a term which implied self-determination for their people and not simply liberation for themselves as women . . . .
Within the Canadian context, Aboriginal women organized collectively to challenge the discriminatory section of the Indian Act. This challenge was aimed at the Canadian government’s policy of discriminating against Indian women on the basis of sex, race and marital status. It was not a challenge against the domination by Indian men, because Indian women knew that Indian men did not take part in the formation of the Indian Act. It was Canada’s Indian Act that provided the impetus for an Aboriginal women’s movement.
Aboriginal women belonging to the Native Women’s Association of Canada have become part of this organization to challenge Canada’s colonial policy. Aboriginal women are aware of the divisiveness caused by the state’s legislation on Indians. Unfortunately, NWAC has not always been included as part of the Aboriginal delegation to national conferences held by the federal government, and this has caused conflict between the sexes. Consequently, the male Aboriginal organizations came under attack for not including women from NWAC as delegates, and sexism became an issue with the former leading spokespersons for NWAC.
The 1985 amendment to the Indian Act, Bill C-31, which provided a process for the reinstatement of persons who had lost their Indian status through voluntary or involuntary disenfranchisement, has made this conflict worse, not improved it (Krosenbrink-Gelissen 1991; Green 1985; Purich 1986). The adverse reaction of some Aboriginal leaders to the reinstatement of Aboriginal women has been well documented. The issues arising from this amendment are complex, and sexism within Aboriginal communities has become an issue. However, sexism is not the only concern that Aboriginal women have to worry about. As colonized persons and as women, they face a multitude of problems. The impact of the state’s legislation on Indians in Canada not only oppresses members of First Nations but causes divisiveness within these societies as well . . . .
Unfortunately, the 1985 amendment to the Indian Act, which repealed the discriminatory provisions, has not improved the unhappy lot of persons affected by the pre-1985 legislation. Two-Axe Early (1992) states:
I was happy that women who had lost their status could at last go home. I was wrong, once again we were betrayed by the promise of politicians. The government gave us back our Indian Status with one hand, and with the other hand they gave the legal power to the Band Councils to choose those who could return. They did not choose women who had opposed them. (23)
It is clear that this struggle has not been shared by the predominately male Aboriginal leaders, whose silence in addressing Aboriginal women’s concerns leads to the assumption that they have adopted European values and the patriarchal system. This is one reason why Aboriginal women in various organizations are concerned with the direction Aboriginal leadership has taken . . . .
The Four Directions Model
NWAC was approached by a feminist journal, Canadian Woman Studies, to prepare a volume on Aboriginal women (10(2–3) 1989). All the different regions in Canada under NWAC, as well as various Aboriginal women’s achievement organizations, contributed to this issue, and therefore it provides a good account of Canada’s Aboriginal women’s activism and is truly representative of Aboriginal women’s diversity.
The structure of NWAC and the Circle of Life philosophy can also be found in this edition (NWAC 1989). NWAC’s structure is based on the Four Directions and under each direction is a region of Canada responsible for addressing certain issues and concerns. Each of these regions has a portfolio for a certain period of time, and then passes it on. This system of rotating the portfolios ensures that each region shares the responsibilities of all portfolios. For example, at the time the volume was prepared, the East was responsible for Education and Culture, the South for the Family, the West for Justice and Rights, and the North for the Community (NWAC 1989: 134–35). In each region these portfolios are subdivided, some examples under Education being curriculum development, language instruction and Native history. Part of the Western region’s portfolio was to address abuse in its various forms—sexism, sexual inequality, sexual abuse, violence and so on. This approach is holistic in nature so there tends to be an overlap of issues.
NWAC also operates in the form of a “grandmother’s lodge”:
[O]ur self-identification as an association is that of a “Grandmother’s Lodge.” In this “Grandmother’s Lodge,” we, as Aunties, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers and Relatives, collectively recognize, respect, promote, defend and enhance our Native ancestral laws. We acknowledge the Creator as one being—one who gave us our spiritual beliefs, language and traditions, and we fully acknowledge and empower ourselves by accepting our responsibilities as Aboriginal women. (1989: 133)
Aboriginal women belonging to NWAC acknowledge their responsibilities and roles as women and wish to retain these roles. They believe that, as in traditional ways, their organization should be included in any decision-making process Aboriginal male leaders are involved in. They do not necessarily see themselves as part of a separate feminist movement but rather one that will complement the Aboriginal organizations, which tend to be male-dominated. It should be noted, though, that leadership of the Aboriginal organizations is open to women as well as men and that there are no restrictions as to who can run for office.
Issues of sexism are not the only concerns Aboriginal women have, as is evident in the following NWAC (1989) statement:
Our efforts concentrated on effecting amendments to the Indian Act, attaining guaranteed equality rights in the Canadian constitution, and increasing our participation in the movement towards re-establishment of Aboriginal governments. (135)
As a strategy for liberation, Aboriginal self-determination and self-government are also goals of the Aboriginal women’s movement, as they are with other Aboriginal organizations. However, the members under NWAC want to ensure that their rights as Aboriginal women will not be abrogated by federal legislation, as they were in the past, and that their rightful participation in negotiations will be upheld by future Aboriginal governments. Nevertheless, concern for Aboriginal people as a whole makes up the agenda for the Aboriginal women’s movement. Theirs is not a struggle solely against male domination but rather one of liberation from the colonial policies and national oppression of the more dominant Euro-Canadian immigrant society and its governments. NWAC is particularly concerned about the type of self-government that will be implemented by Aboriginal leaders. The present Indian bands and governing institutions have not followed traditional Indigenous forms of governing and have adopted European models of government.
Monture-Angus (1999) claims:
The oppression, colonizing and labelling as inferior has left a large imprint on Aboriginal lives. The call for the “right” of self-governing powers by Aboriginal people is equally a call for the opportunity to remedy the consequences of colonialism and the corresponding oppression we carry as individuals and collectively. This in fact makes discussions difficult, because part of what Aboriginals seek, the right to heal, is not considered by all a self-governing function. (27)
It is interesting to note that despite disagreements and different approaches, the underlying remedy for the liberation of Aboriginal people remains in Aboriginal values and beliefs, namely in co-existence.
Hot Potato: Imperial Wars or Benevolent Interventions? Reflections on “Global Feminism” Post September 11th
Sedef Arat-Koc
Sedef Arat-Koc is an Associate Professor at Trent University in Women’s Studies and Sociology.
This essay aims to provide some reflections on feminist theory and practice in a post September 11th environment. Specifically, it aims to address whether some dominant and popular strands of “global feminism” are able to analyze and offer alternatives to an understanding of global relations between women specifically, and First World/Third World relations in general, in the aftermath of September 11th. Feminist reflections on this question are needed not only because of the enormity of events and developments that beg a feminist perspective, among others, to respond thoughtfully and sensibly to what is going on. Feminist reflections are also needed, specifically, as the war waged in Afghanistan is being presented as a humanitarian war which is about saving women. While there is some diversity among feminist responses to the US political response to September 11th there is as yet little challenge to this image of the war1 . . . .
While some feminists who have expressed ambiguity on US responses to September 11th still take an anti-war position, others are cautiously optimistic about the potential for change in the post-war period asking for Afghan women’s participation in the “peace process.”
What is common to these responses among feminists, whether they support the war or are against it, is the sense of solidarity they express with the women of Afghanistan. In this sense, some may characterize the general nature of the North American feminist response as one representing “global sisterhood.” What I would like to do in this paper is to argue that in the absence of critical questions being asked about the nature of existing and new global power structures, and First World/Third World women’s and feminists’ relationships, as well as the ways in which the war is affecting the nature of social and political relationships in Western countries, there is no innocence to a position of “global sisterhood.” Rather than supporting a feminist cause globally or locally, I suggest that an unproblematized and uncritical position of “global sisterhood” on the part of First World women would, on the one hand, provide legitimacy and support to existing and newly redefined relations of imperialism, and on the other hand, fail to focus on many regressive political developments taking place in their home countries.
Images of Afghan Women and Expressions of “Global Sisterhood”
In the days and weeks that followed September 11th, Western media became flooded with images, testimonies and commentaries of Afghan women’s treatment by the Taliban regime . . . . Since the Northern Alliance captured the cities of Afghanistan, images and dominant interpretation of images have been painting a story of a happy ending, or at least the beginning of a happy ending in which the women of Afghanistan are saved from their oppressors and on the road to liberation. In presenting these “happy” images of liberation, the Western media turned the gaze on Afghan women to a stare, whereby daily photographs of unveiled or partially veiled women came to symbolize what was good about this war. In the days following the fall of [the] Taliban, the media summarized the mood of the Afghani people with references to children flying kites, music in the streets and women with the veils of the burqas lifted . . . . These images, irresistibly seductive to a Western audience, reduce complex realities and a very messy and uncertain political situation to sugar-coated clichés about the meaning of liberation. While some feminists have expressed caution about these images, this caution leans in the direction of cautious optimism,2 rather than a challenge to the ways in which these images are used to manipulate public, including feminist, opinion and justify new relations of ultra-imperialism.
There are several serious problems with these images of victimization and subsequent liberation. One obvious problem has to do with hypocrisy. It has been military hawks, right-wing politicians and columnists, with very different approaches to women and feminism in their own countries, who have been most outspoken in the discourse of saving Afghan women . . . .
A second major problem has to do with which realities these images omit and replace. Missing or marginalized in the media are images, discussion or even serious questions about the human costs of the war: Numbers of civilian casualties of bombing, people dislocated and forced into refugee camps with the war, those who face starvation, sickness and death due to challenges the war presents for provision and delivery of food or medical aid . . . .
Western feminists have been demanding that their governments participate in efforts to improve Afghan women’s conditions after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Some feminists identify the hypocrisy in Western leaders’ messages about the “humanitarian” nature of the war and keep a cynical and vigilant eye as to whether there are in fact any improvements in women’s conditions in Afghanistan3 . . . . However, there are questions that are not asked in these critical perspectives, questions about the mode of intervention, who is intervening and why, and power relations are created with what potential implications for women and people of Afghanistan.
A third serious problem with images of women victimized and emancipated has to do with the seductiveness of the images . . . . I will argue that the seductiveness is rather caused by the definitions of and power relations entailed in “us” and “them” that they perpetuate and re-establish: “them” as victims of a “barbaric” culture, and “us” not just as liberated subjects of a civilized world but also as “saviors” of victims of culture. I will further argue that it is the participation of some feminist theory and practice in these discourses of “us” and “them” which may cause the relative acquiescence and absence of critical challenges by feminists to government and mainstream media interpretation of events.
Eurocentric “Global Feminism”: Solution or Problem?
If feminism is to be different, it must acknowledge the ideological and problematic significance of its own past.
(KumKum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, cited in Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 18)
One of the questions to be asked is whether “global feminism” can provide the tools of analysis and the principles of feminist action and solidarity in the post-September 11th environment. Despite the contributions made to feminist theory and practice for at least the last two decades by anti-racist, multicultural and postcolonial feminists, and despite many attempts to base global feminist politics of solidarity on ant-racist and anti-imperialist principles4. . . .
Especially in relation to Third World women, there is an obsessive focus on the treatment of Third World women’s bodies. Specifically, it is an obsession with some aspect of women’s bodily experience, sexual and reproductive, often ignoring other bodily experiences of production, exploitation or of hunger, which may not seem as culturally exotic and interesting. These approaches to “global sisterhood” create an abstract sense of solidarity with Third World women . . . . Thus, rather than being interested in different dimensions of women’s conditions and developing an understanding of these conditions in the context of national and international economic and political relations, there is a tendency to isolate women and their issues . . . . What needs questioning here is not feminist sentiments and acts of real solidarity and coalitions based on actual relations and exchange with flesh and blood feminists in specific contexts. It is rather the abstract spiritual solidarity often based on scarce knowledge of the actual conditions of and absence of real relationships with the “other.”
Whereas gender essentialism and gender reductionism characterize some approaches, cultural essentialism and reductionism characterize others. A second problematic approach in “global feminism” has to do with the assumptions commonly held about “Third World women.” There is often a simplistic dualism in the ways First World women are conceptualized as the “self” and Third World women as the “other.” As “other,” Third World women, unlike their western sisters, are defined by their “Third World difference.”
In these conceptions, differences between “self” and “other” are exaggerated and absolutized, while the “other” is essentialized, exoticized and mystified. Abstract, static and monolithic conceptions of culture and religion dominate understanding of how Third World difference is constituted. Often, what is defined as a sensational practice is chosen to stand for the “culture” and women’s status and experience in others’ cultures. Thus, infibulation comes to represent “African culture,” the veil or the burqa represent “Muslim culture.” These representations are so powerful that they stand on their own, replacing any need to learn the reality and diversity of women’s lives . . . .
Despite interventions from women and feminists from the Third World to encourage more inclusive approaches to violence against women and gendered conceptions of human rights, Eurocentric conceptions of “self” and “other” still continue to dominate such discourses. In recent discussions on women’s rights as human rights, for example, there is almost an exclusive focus on Third World women as subjects of human rights violations.5 What is rarely discussed in “global” discussions of human rights is the treatment of groups of women in policies and legislation by Western countries . . . .
Whether their differences are eradicated or suppressed under universal womanhood, or exaggerated and essentialized in dualisms of “self” and “other,” representations of Third World women remain problematic in the dominant Eurocentric approaches to “global feminism.” Sorely lacking in most studies of “Third World women,” and especially of Middle Eastern and Muslim women, has been historical specificity. Orientalism leads not just to cultural reductionism, but also to static notions of certain cultures and religions. So, “Islam”—depicted as an unchanging monolith, hardly different from its fundamentalist interpretations—becomes the cause of women’s oppression in “Muslim societies,” always and everywhere. Most find this approach rather unproblematic even though they would find references to equally reductionist monolithic conceptions of “Christianity” and “Christian societies” totally absurd . . . .
So, part of the problem in knowledge about Third World women has had to do with production of this knowledge. This is only part of the problem, though. A greater problem has to do with the reading and interpretation of knowledge that inevitably goes through the lenses and perspectives that already dominate. Recent feminist literature has been enriched by accounts of geographically and historically specific analyses often written by feminist scholars from specific Third World countries. Even when sophisticated and historically specific analyses are available, however, the ways they are being framed, read and understood may still reflect the already mentioned dominant paradigms of “global feminism.” So, “reception” may continue to be problematic even when some production problems are solved . . . . Reception is a central question having implications for a number of different topics: who gets published or invited for talks to Western, white, middle-class audiences; on which topics; what people want to hear; what they do hear; etc. Reception theorists suggest that what gets to earn central focus and attention in detailed accounts of the conditions of women in historical or ethnographic studies, what causality gets attributed to women’s oppression in “other” cultures, and whether Third World women are seen as resisting and fighting agents or pitiful total victims, all depend on the context of reception . . . .
“Global feminism” is a project that aims to bring First and Third World women together in feminism. It is about forming alliances and creating relations of mutuality. Necessarily central to the forming of such relations would be questions of: whose agenda, whose issues, whose definitions, whose perspective, whose leadership and whose interests. In theory and in practice, “global feminism” requires cultural exchange. Meaningful exchange is a challenge given the existing power differences globally. It is also very difficult when certain paradigms have tended to dominate the relationship between First and Third World women, historically as well as in the present: the “saving brown women from brown men” model; the “victims of culture” model, and the “feminist by exposure to the West” model (Amireh and Majaj 2000, 7). The discourses that depict Third World women in a particular way are “predicated upon assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives” (Mohanty 1988, 81). The same discourses of “self” and “other” do something more important, however. When conceptions of the “other” define “brown women” as helpless victims and “brown men” as their barbaric predators exercising the authority given them by traditional culture, the discourse of the “self” inevitably becomes one who has a moral and political duty to intervene to save. When it works with these paradigms, the project of “global feminism” has to involve “benevolent rescues” and “principled interventions” and become part of a larger civilizing project which has historically involved missionary projects and modernizing efforts (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 7). Interventions “on behalf” of women have a long history in colonialism, from non- or anti-feminist religious missionary activities to feminist campaigns during the first wave. After the end of formal colonization, they continue, albeit in more subtle forms which bell hooks calls “neocolonial paternalism” (hooks 2000, 45) . . . .
In the discussion on dominant paradigms on “global feminism,” I suggested that some of these paradigms create several serious obstacles to communication and collaboration among feminists. Unfortunately, wars may not provide the best environment for transnational communication. Rather, wars thrive on and further perpetuate ignorance about “self” and “other.” It has to be acknowledged that the images of Muslim women as total victims of religion and culture, and images of Muslim men as hyper-masculine (but, unlike “our” men, of an irrational, uncivilized barbaric kind), were already a very central part of Western common-sense, long before anybody knew anything about the Taliban. These images tremendously increased the moral and common-sensical appeal of the war as a right and legitimate response to attacks on September 11th . . . .
A Feminist Peace Movement: Necessary, but Sufficient?
A feminist anti-war position is immeasurably valuable at a time of thoughtless patriotism and unhindered militarism. Such a position is also useful to help question how being at war changes priorities of spending; how it helps push issues of health, education, and social security down in the government agenda. However, an anti-war position on its own, a position which does not simultaneously ask critical political questions, has some shortcomings. One of the dominant positions in feminist peace activism in different contexts has been one that considers women to be naturally nurturing and peace loving and men to be violent and war-mongering . . . . In this particular historical context, to claim that women, as women, are against war is inaccurate. Not only do many women support this war, but women also participate in discourses that are sometimes used to reproduce power relations internationally. Many wars historically have been fought to defend a “motherland,” or the women and children of a country. This war is specifically sold to part of the Western public as a benevolent, humanitarian war, not just protecting “our” women and children against terrorism, but also saving “their” women. Feminists need to address these claims explicitly. Secondly, an essentialist womanist peace position could marginalize women and feminists. It may help feminists to stand pure and clean in an otherwise ugly men’s world gone crazy. However, remaining pure and clean may also mean an inability to engage with issues and developments and to challenge them. What we need instead is an explicitly political and engaged activism . . . .
What we are experiencing since September 11th constitutes no less than a serious weakening, if not a major collapse, of many institutions and practices which were supposed to be central to the self-definitions of western countries as “democratic” and “tolerant.” In the name of security, a lot has been justified from violation of international law, to racist attacks on minorities, from general threats to civil liberties and trampling of due legal process under the new “anti-terrorist” security legislation, to specific attacks on specific oppositional movements such as the anti-globalization movement. The irony, of course, is that it is precisely in the aftermath of September 11th, when discourses such as “the clash of civilizations” are widely employed to exaggerate the assumed differences between “us” and “them,” that the institutional and practical basis for “us” is becoming undone.
Turning the gaze to “ourselves” may be psychologically difficult and painful. At a time when democrats in general and feminists in particular have every reason to feel powerless, it may indeed to be gratifying to think there are others around the world who have it worse than “us.” While it may be psychologically reassuring, however, such a position represents a complete retreat from feminism as a project of change. It is absolutely essential that there is a discussion and exposure of who and what internally the “new war” has really been against.
A New World Order, “International Justice” and Issues of Sovereignty
. . . There are, however, perhaps two developments that can be identified as new in the recent period. One important development has been the articulation of the demand by feminists that the human rights discourse be extended to address the specific forms of violence women experience on the basis of gender. Brought forward and supported by Third World as well as First World women, backed by a petition signed by over half a million women from 124 countries, this demand led to the adoption of the Vienna Declaration in 1993 which recognized the human rights of women and girls as part of universal human rights.
A second, very different development, has to do with the emergence, in the post Cold War period, of the US as the biggest and unchallenged military, political and economic global power, going far beyond its previous status as one of the superpowers. The latter development means that internationally the power of the United Nations has been diminished and subordinated to US interests and priorities. In this particular context, there is a challenge for feminists. On the other hand, there is clearly a demand for establishing international standards for women’s rights and finding ways to make states accountable for their human rights practices. On the other hand, there is no clarity as to how, by whom and under which relations of power such standards could be enforced . . . .
Conclusion
The critique to popular versions of “global feminism” I urge in this paper might be interpreted as a position of isolationism which would keep First World feminists away from a feminist internationalism. It is important to clarify that such a direction is not the intended message of this critique. Rather than isolationism, what we need is perhaps a more engaged feminism both nationally and internationally. “More engaged” means that feminism needs to go beyond a narrow focus on “women’s issues” as if these can be isolated from issues and relationships of class, race and imperialism. An engaged feminism would be interested in issues of equality and justice whether women may appear to be implicated in the issues or not. This means feminism engaging with an array of issues from foreign policy, to immigration, to civil liberties, to sovereignty. “Engaged” also means that we have a better and a critical understanding of power relations of intervention and their complex implications.
What we are facing today, in the aftermath of September 11th, is an increased urgency to rethink the meaning, the mode and relationships of “global feminism.” The critiques offered by anti-racist, postcolonial and multicultural feminists and reception theory are valuable in warning us against the neo-colonial or imperial directions in which “global feminism” has gone and may continue to go. The nature and magnitude of changes since September 11th, however, suggest two important points: first, that there is an increased urgency to this rethinking; and second, that we cannot make sense of or offer any alternatives to the existing responses if we continue to think within the confines of what is typically conceived as feminism, namely a concern and activism about women. If feminism is a political project which is not merely about changing women’s place in the world, but about questioning and trying to change the world as we know it, we may need to rethink a whole number of issues in new ways: Civil liberties, human rights, “terrorism,” imperialism, internationalism and national sovereignty, among others. If critical rethinking about these issues is ignored, we face the possibilities of remaining complacent, or at least indifferent or acquiescent to changes towards a totalitarian world (and national) order being created not just in front of our very eyes, but also (partly) in our name.
Endnotes
1. Although the theme is much more obvious during the war against Afghanistan, it is not completely new. “Women at risk” is becoming a central theme in the military interventions in the newly developing global regime. The theme prevailed previously in the intervention in Yugoslavia.
2. See, for example, the beginning of the article in Ms. Magazine, which lists Afghan women among women of the year. After references to the conditions Afghan women suffered under the Taliban, the article continues thankfully stating that “as a result of the United States’ war on terrorism, the story of their oppression is finally being widely aired” (Anaga Dallal 2001, 52). The article fails to ask questions about, and therefore takes for granted the dominant discourses on, the meaning of the term “war on terrorism” or the impact of this war on women.
3. For example, feminists are asking questions about how the withholding by the US administration of funds from the United Nations Population Fund will affect Afghan women who face high numbers of pregnancies and life-threatening conditions of birth-giving (Landsberg 2002).
4. See, for example, Chs. 7 and 8 in Miles, 1996.
5. See, for example, the special issue of Canadian Woman Studies on Women’s Rights Are Human Rights (1995) where all the articles are either on women living in Third World countries or on Third World immigrants in the First World.
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War Frenzy
Sunera Thobani
Sunera Thobani teaches Women’s Studies at the Centre for Research in Women’s Studies and Gender Relations at the University of British Columbia. She is a past President of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
October 15, 2001.
My recent speech at a women’s conference on violence against women has generated much controversy. In the aftermath of the terrible attacks of September 11, I argued that the U.S. response of launching “America’s new war” would increase violence against women. I situated the current crisis within the continuity of North/South relations, rooted in colonialism and imperialism. I criticized American foreign policy, as well as President Bush’s racialized construction of the American Nation. Finally, I spoke of the need for solidarity with Afghan women’s organizations as well as the urgent necessity for the women’s movement in Canada to oppose the war.
Decontextualized and distorted media reports of my address have led to accusations of me being an academic impostor, morally bankrupt and engaging in hate-mongering. It has been fascinating to observe how my comments regarding American foreign policy, a record well documented by numerous sources whose accuracy or credentials cannot be faulted, have been dubbed “hate-speech.” To speak about the indisputable record of U.S. backed coups, death squads, bombings and killings ironically makes me a “hate-monger.” I was even made the subject of a “hate-crime” complaint to the RCMP, alleging that my speech was a “hate-crime.”
Despite the virulence of these responses, I welcome the public discussion my speech has generated as an opportunity to further the public debate about Canada’s support of America’s new war. When I made the speech, I believed it was imperative to have this debate before any attacks were launched on any country. Events have overtaken us with the bombing of Afghanistan underway and military rule having been declared in Pakistan. The need for this discussion has now assumed greater urgency as reports of casualties are making their way into the news. My speech at the women’s conference was aimed at mobilizing the women’s movement against this war. I am now glad for this opportunity to address wider constituencies and in different fora.
First, however, a few words about my location: I place my work within the tradition of radical, politically engaged scholarship. I have always rejected the politics of academic elitism which insist that academics should remain above the fray of political activism and use only disembodied, objectified language and a “properly” dispassionate professorial demeanor to establish our intellectual credentials. My work is grounded in the politics, practices and languages of the various communities I come from, and the social justice movements to which I am committed.
On American Foreign Policy
In the aftermath of the terrible September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration launched “America’s War on Terrorism.” Eschewing any role for the United Nations and the need to abide by international law, the U.S. administration initiated an international alliance to justify its unilateral military action against Afghanistan. One of its early coalition partners was the Canadian government, which committed its unequivocal support for whatever forms of assistance the United States might request. In this circumstance, it is entirely reasonable that people in Canada examine carefully the record of American foreign policy.
As I observed in my speech, this record is alarming and does not inspire confidence. In Chile, the CIA-backed coup against the democratically elected Allende government led to the deaths of over 30,000 people. In El Salvador, the U.S. backed regime used death squads to kill about 75,000 people. In Nicaragua, the U.S. sponsored terrorist contra war led to the deaths of over 30,000 people. The initial bombing of Iraq left over 200,000 dead, and the bombings have continued for the last ten years. UNICEF estimates that over one million Iraqis have died, and that 5,000 more die every month as a result of the U.N. imposed sanctions, enforced in their harshest form by U.S. power. The list does not stop here. 150,000 were killed and 50,000 disappeared in Guatemala after the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup; over 2 million were killed in Vietnam; and 200,000 before that in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. Numerous authoritarian regimes have been backed by the United States including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Suharto’s dictatorship in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and Israel’s various occupations of Lebanon, the Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories. The U.S. pattern of foreign intervention has been to overthrow leftist governments and to impose right wing regimes which in turn support U.S. interests, even if this means training and using death squads and assassinating leftist politicians and activists. To this end, it has a record of treating civilians as entirely expendable.
It is in this context that I made my comment that the United States is the largest and most dangerous global force, unleashing horrific levels of violence around the world, and that the path of U.S. foreign policy is soaked in blood. The controversy generated by this comment has surprisingly not addressed the veracity of this assessment of the U.S. record. Instead, it has focused on my tone and choice of words (inflammatory, excessive, inelegant, un-academic, angry, etc.).
Now I have to admit that my use of the words “horrific violence” and “soaked in blood” is very deliberate and carefully considered. I do not use these words lightly. To successive United States administrations the deaths resulting from its policies have been just so many statistics, just so much “collateral damage.” Rendering invisible the humanity of the peoples targeted for attack is a strategy well used to hide the impact of colonialist and imperialist interventions. Perhaps there is no more potent a strategy of dehumanization than to proudly proclaim the accuracy and efficiency of “smart” weapons systems, and of surgical and technological precision, while rendering invisible the suffering bodies of these peoples as disembodied statistics and mere “collateral damage.” The use of embodied language, grounded in the recognition of the actual blood running through these bodies, is an attempt to humanize these peoples in profoundly graphic terms. It compels us to recognize the sheer corporeality of the terrain upon which bombs rain and mass terror is waged. This language calls on “us” to recognize that “they” bleed just like “we” do, that “they” hurt and suffer just like “us.” We are complicit in this bloodletting when we support American wars. Witness the power of this embodiment in the shocked and horrified responses to my voice and my words, rather than to the actual horror of these events. I will be the first to admit that it is extremely unnerving to “see” blood in the place of abstract, general categories and statistics. Yet this is what we need to be able to see if we are to understand the terrible human costs of empire-building. We have all felt the shock and pain of repeatedly witnessing the searing images of violence unleashed upon those who died in New York and Washington. The stories we have heard from their loved ones have made us feel their terrible human loss. Yet where do we witness the pain of the victims of U.S. aggression? How do we begin to grasp the extent of their loss? Whose humanity do we choose to recognize and empathize with, and who becomes just so much “collateral damage” to us? Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and theorists have long insisted on placing the bodies and experiences of marginalized others at the centre of our analysis of the social world. To fail to do so at this moment in history would be unconscionable. In the aftermath of the responses to my speech, I am more convinced than ever of the need to engage in the language and politics of embodied thinking and speaking. After all, it is the lives, and deaths, of millions of human beings we are discussing. This is neither a controversial nor a recent demand. Feminists (such as of Mahasweta Devi, Toni Morrison, Gayatri Spivak and Patricia Williams) have forcefully drawn our attention to what is actually done to women’s bodies in the course of mapping out racist colonial relations. Frantz Fanon, one of the foremost theorists of decolonization, studied and wrote about the role of violence in colonial social organization and about the psychology of oppression; but he described just as readily the bloodied, violated black bodies and the “searing bullets” and “blood-stained knives” which were the order of the day in the colonial world. Eduardo Galeano entitled one of his books The Open Veins of Latin America and the post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe talks of the “mortification of the flesh,” of the “mutilation” and “decapitation” of oppressed bodies. Aime Cesaire’s poetry pulses with the physicality of blood, pain, fury and rage in his outcry against the domination of African bodies. Even Karl Marx, recognized as one of the founding fathers of the modern social sciences, wrote trenchant critiques of capital, exploitation, and classical political economy; and did not flinch from naming the economic system he was studying “vampire capitalism.” In attempting to draw attention to the violent effects of abstract and impersonal policies, I claim a proud intellectual pedigree.
Invoking the American Nation
In my speech I argued that in order to legitimize the imperialist aggression which the Bush administration is undertaking, the President is invoking an American nation and people as being vengeful and bloodthirsty. It is de rigueur in the social sciences to acknowledge that the notion of a “nation” or a “people” is socially constructed. The American nation is no exception. If we consider the language used by Bush and his administration to mobilize this nation for the war, we encounter the following: launching a crusade; operation infinite justice; fighting the forces of evil and darkness; fighting the barbarians; hunting down the evil-doers; draining the swamps of the Middle East, etc., etc. This language is very familiar to peoples who have been colonized by Europe. Its use at this moment in time reveals that it is a fundamentalist and racialized western ideology which is being mobilized to rally the troops and to build a national and international consensus in defence of “civilization.” It suggests that anyone who hesitates to join in is also “evil” and “uncivilized.” In this vein, I have repeatedly been accused of supporting extremist Islamist regimes merely for criticizing U.S. foreign policy and western colonialism.
Another tactic to mobilize support for the war has been the manipulation of public opinion. Polls conducted in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks were used to repeatedly inform us that the overwhelming majority of Americans allegedly supported a strong military retaliation. They did not know against whom, but they purportedly supported this strategy anyway. In both the use of language and these polls, we are witnessing what Noam Chomsky has called the “manufacture of consent.” Richard Lowry, editor of the National Review opined, “If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, this is part of the solution.” President Bush stated, “We will bear no distinction between those who commit the terrorist attacks and those who harbour them.” Even as the bombing began last weekend, he declared that the war is “broader” than against just Afghanistan, that other nations have to decide if they side with his administration or if they are “murderers and outlaws themselves.” We have been asked by most public commentators to accept the calls for military aggression against “evil-doers” as natural, understandable and even reasonable, given the attacks on the United States. I reject this position. It would be just as understandable a response to re-examine American foreign policy, to address the root causes of the violent attacks on the United States, and to make a commitment to abide by international law. In my speech, I urged women to break through this discourse of “naturalizing” the military aggression, and recognize it for what it is, vengeful retribution and an opportunity for a crude display of American military might. We are entitled to ask: Who will make the decision regarding which “nations” are to be labeled as “murderers” and “outlaws”? Which notions of “justice” are to be upheld? Will the Bush administration set the standard, even as it is overtly institutionalizing racial profiling across the United States?
I make very clear distinctions between people in America and their government’s call for war. Many people in America are seeking to contest the “national” consensus being manufactured by speaking out and by organizing rallies and peace marches in major cities, about which there has been very little coverage in Canada. Irresponsible media reporting of my comments which referred to Bush’s invocation of the American nation as a vengeful one deliberately took my words out of this context, repeating them in one television broadcast after another in a grossly distorted fashion.
My choice of language was, again, deliberate. I wanted to bring attention to Bush’s right wing, fundamentalist leanings and to the neo-colonialist/imperialist practices of his administration. The words “bloodthirsty” and “vengeful” are designations most people are quite comfortable attributing to “savages” and to the “uncivilized,” while the United States is represented as the beacon of democracy and civilization. The words “bloodthirsty” and “vengeful” make us confront the nature of the ideological justification for this war, as well as its historical roots, unsettling and discomforting as that might be.
The Politics of Liberating Women
I have been taken to task for stating that there will be no emancipation for women anywhere until western domination of the planet is ended. In my speech I pointed to the importance of Afghanistan for its strategic location near Central Asia’s vast resources of oil and natural gas. I think there is very little argument that the West continues to dominate and consume a vast share of the world’s resources. This is not a controversial statement. Many prominent intellectuals, journalists and activists alike, have pointed out that this domination is rooted in the history of colonialism and rests on the ongoing maintenance of the North/South divide, and that it will continue to provoke violence and resistance across the planet. I argued that in the current climate of escalating militarism, there will be precious little emancipation for women, either in the countries of the North or the South.
In the specific case of Afghanistan, it was the American administration’s economic and political interests which led to its initial support for, and arming of, Hekmatyar’s Hezb i Islami and its support for Pakistan’s collaboration in, and organization of, the Taliban regime in the mid-1990s. According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, the United States and Unocal conducted negotiations with the Taliban for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan for years in the mid-1990s. We have seen the horrendous consequences this has had for women in Afghanistan. When Afghan women’s groups were calling attention to this U.S. support as a major factor in the Taliban regime’s coming to power, we did not heed them. We did not recognize that Afghan women’s groups were in the front line resisting the Taliban and its Islamist predecessors, including the present militias of the Northern Alliance. Instead, we chose to see them only as “victims” of “Islamic culture,” to be pitied and “saved” by the West. Time and time again, third world feminists have pointed out to us the pitfalls of rendering invisible the agency and resistance of women of the South, and of reducing women’s oppression to various third world “cultures.” Many continue to ignore these insights. Now, the U.S. administration has thrown its support behind the Northern Alliance, even as Afghan women’s groups oppose the U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan, and raise serious concerns about the record of the Northern Alliance in perpetuating human rights abuses and violence against women in the country. If we listen to the voices of these women, we will very quickly be disabused of the notion that U.S. military intervention is going to lead to the emancipation of women in Afghanistan. Even before the bombings began, hundreds of thousands of Afghan women were compelled to flee their homes and communities, and to become refugees. The bombings of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and other cities in the country will result in further loss of life, including the lives of women and children. Over three million Afghan refugees are now on the move in the wake of the U.S. attacks. How on earth can we justify these bombings in the name of furthering women’s emancipation?
My second point was that imperialism and militarism do not further women’s liberation in western countries either. Women have to be brought into line to support racist imperialist goals and practices, and they have to live with the men who have been brutalized in the waging of war when these men come back. Men who kill women and children abroad are hardly likely to come back cured of the effects of this brutalization. Again, this is not a very controversial point of view. Women are taught to support military aggressions, which is then presented as being in their “national” interest. These are hardly the conditions in which women’s freedoms can be furthered. As a very small illustration, just witness the very public vilification I have been subjected to for speaking out in opposition to this war.
I have been asked by my detractors that if I, as a woman, I am so critical of western domination, why do I live here? It could just as readily be asked of them that if they are so contemptuous of the non-western world, why do they so fervently desire the oil, trade, cheap labour and other resources of that world? Challenges to our presence in the West have long been answered by people of colour who say, We are here because you were (are?) there! Migrants find ourselves in multiple locations for a myriad of reasons, personal, historical and political. Wherever we reside, however, we claim the right to speak and participate in public life.
Closing Words. . .
My speech was made to rally the women’s movement in Canada to oppose the war. Journalists and editors across the country have called me idiotic, foolish, stupid and just plain nutty. While a few journalists and columnists have attempted balanced coverage of my speech, too many sectors of the media have resorted to vicious personal attacks. Like others, I must express a concern that this passes for intelligent commentary in the mainstream media. The manner in which I have been vilified is difficult to understand, unless one sees it as a visceral response to an “ungrateful immigrant” or an uppity woman of colour who dares to speak out. Vituperation and ridicule are two of the most common forms of silencing dissent. The subsequent harassment and intimidation which I have experienced, as have some of my colleagues, confirms that the suppression of debate is more important to many supporters of the current frenzied war rhetoric than is the open discussion of policy and its effects. Fortunately, I have also received strong messages of support. Day by day the opposition to this unconscionable war is growing in Canada and all over the world.
I would like to thank all of my family, friends, colleagues and allies who have supported and encouraged me.
***
Americans have political problems which they don’t even recognize as political. The impoverishment of the country by the arms race is a good example.”
American author Donald Barthelme (interviewed by Barbara Roe, 1988)
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