When Flora MacDonald passed away last year, I felt as bad as the next person. I liked and admired Flora and I appreciated everything she had accomplished.
I well remember the day of the Progressive Conservative leadership convention in 1976 when dozens of her supporters went into voting booths wearing Vote for Flora buttons and clearly voted for someone else. She was terribly betrayed and the expression on her face is burned into my memory all these years later.
At some point after her death, an article in The Walrus included this quote:
“I’ve always been a feminist, long before the word was ever used. I grew up in a background that made me a feminist without having to go out and proclaim it.”
It's not a bad quote. It's the kind of thing we often say — and hear — about our mothers. "Oh yeah. She was a feminist before there was a word for it."
I have no doubt that the mothers in question — and Flora — were strong and independent women.
But feminism is a movement. It's women organizing and working together to make life better for all women. It's not about independent/individual women.
I think it's an important distinction and I think maybe you do have to go out and proclaim it.
In the days when I first became a feminist — a feminist of the second wave — women came together in consciousness-raising groups to begin to identify what we were up against. The discussions were painful and intimate. We talked about things we had faced in our families and with our partners, with co-workers and with strangers in the street.
Many of us lived our lives in fear. We had women who came to our group once and then disappeared back where they came from. One member of our group ran into one of the women who had been to one meeting and spoke to her. It was in a grocery store. The woman went pale and literally turned and ran. We found out later that her husband had discovered she'd gone to a women's meeting and he threatened her. Another woman came to a few meetings but she was too nervous to stay. She kept looking out the window, convinced that her boyfriend had followed her.
Most of the women lied about where they were on meeting nights.
After months of intense conversation, we began to read. We were a book club whose members were restricted to reading radical feminist authors. From talking, then reading, we moved to doing — we worked at setting up safe houses for women who were fleeing domestic abuse and we organized women's centres where women could drop in and socialize, drink coffee, read, chat, and exchange helpful neighbourhood information.
Even then, there were divisions in the ranks of feminists. There were women who believed men should be part of the movement; some women believed all efforts should be concentrated on getting more women into the political and social systems while others believed the only way to fight oppression was from outside the system. They were the women who believed that it was irrelevant if a woman was president of General Motors and another woman was Prime Minister. Those women would simply be tools of the patriarchy unless the systems were overthrown.
There were women whose struggle was multi-layered and who resented some of the definitions that were imposed.
These divisions didn't have a name then and there were many irreparable misunderstandings among women who lived with varying degrees of privilege and with enough power to move comfortably among those in charge.
Today, there is a name: intersectionality is a concept often used to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. It's a concept that must be considered and taken seriously and it adds layer upon layer of complexity to the struggle for women's rights.
When I started writing this, I simply wanted to point out that feminism is not something we do alone. It's a collective struggle and the old slogan still holds true:
No woman is free until all women are free.
The story is ongoing as the struggle is ongoing — and I'll be back with another chapter soon enough.
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