Feminism in Canada
[6] It was organized in Toronto in 1906 by Ida Siegel to provide girls in their community training in sewing skills and as a response to the conversion attempts of Jewish youth by Protestant Evangelicals.
[1] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women in Canada were also making inroads into various professions including teaching, journalism, social work, and public health.
Grace Annie Lockhart became the first woman in the British Empire to receive a bachelor's degree, providing clear evidence of the justice of women's claim to full rights in the field of higher education.
[8] Advances included the establishment of a Women's Medical College in Toronto (and in Kingston, Ontario) in 1883, attributed in part to the persistence of Emily Stowe, the first female doctor to practice in Canada.
[9] When they endorsed suffrage, in 1910, the NCWC did so on the basis that women had an indispensable role in society which should give them the right to participate in public life by electing their government, in keeping with the maternal feminism prevalent in the period.
The tactics adopted by the movement in order to bring about reform included collecting petitions, staging mock parliaments and selling postcards.
The Supreme Court, interpreting the Act in light of the times in which it was written, ruled in 1928 that women were not "persons" for the purposes of section 24 and could not be appointed to the Senate.
[24] In September 1936, Dorothea Palmer was arrested in Eastview (now Vanier, Ontario), and charged with possessing materials and pamphlets related to birth control, then highly illegal under Canadian law.
[25] Ultimately, the case was dismissed by the presiding magistrate Lester Clayon, who ruled that, as Palmer's actions were "in the public good", no charges could be held against her.
[26] In his final ruling, he explained that: The mothers are in poor health, pregnant nine months of the year... What chance do these children have to be properly fed, clothed and educated?
[32] The inclusion of women with children into the workforce led the federal government to develop a program known as the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement in order to assist working mothers with childcare during the duration of the war.
Women in these organizations engaged in a range of activities including: sewing clothes for the Red Cross, cultivating "victory" gardens, and collecting materials like rubber and metal scraps for wartime production.
[39] The subcommittee produced a report with a number of recommendations including that women should be trained or retrained for jobs on the same basis as men and that household workers should receive labour benefits like unemployment insurance.
[46] The National Action Committee (NAC) was formed as a result of the frustration of women at the inaction of the federal government in regards to the recommendations of the Royal Commission.
Partly funded by government grants, the NAC was widely regarded as the official expression of women's interests in Canada, and received a lot of attention from the media.
"[48] With so much division in Canada on what should be included in a bill of rights, the federal government decided to hold a Special Joint Committee of the House of Commons and the Senate, which allowed the public to submit amendments to the constitution.
[2] Canada recognized female genital mutilation as a form of persecution in July 1994, when it granted refugee status to Khadra Hassan Farah, who had fled Somalia to avoid her daughter being cut.
[64] In 1997 section 268 of its Criminal Code was amended to ban FGM, except where "the person is at least eighteen years of age and there is no resulting bodily harm".
[68] Fourth-wave feminism is "defined by technology", according to Kira Cochrane, and is characterized particularly by the use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and blogs to challenge misogyny[69] and further gender equality.
[73] Also during the time of fourth-wave feminism, in May 2016, in an attempt to make the Canadian national anthem gender-neutral by changing "thy sons" to "of us", Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger introduced a private member's Bill C-210.
After Confederation, the provincial government of Quebec continued to be closely associated with the Catholic Church, resulting in the preservation of traditional gender roles.
The conservatism of the then-provincial government, and the privileging of Catholic values contributed to Quebec being the last province in which women received the provincial franchise.
Belleau applies a feminist methodology and research framework to the inter-woven issues of national and cultural identity (what she terms "nat-cult"), both within Quebec and between the province and the rest of Canada (ROC).
Belleau employs "tactical thinking" to negotiate among Québécois and ROC feminisms, engaging with identity politics and processes of subordination and dissolution in how Quebec feminists are represented in the legal world.
This is manifest in the approach of intersectionality as embracing cultural distinctions, ensuring no fights for social justice are subordinate to each other, and the understanding of emancipatory confrontations as independent but still interrelated.
Conquest has led to hierarchy, exemplified through the past relationship of the Quebec matriarch and her male consort, l'homme rose, or the "pink man".
For women, many embrace their "Latin" heritage through an allegiance to their French past in order to assert their distinctiveness in a continent with competing cultural identities.
Younger Québécois feminists wish to disassociate themselves from both Anglo-feminism and Latin-femininity to construct their own intersectional identity, and to remove themselves from the sexism inherent in some Latin cultures.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a prominent member of Canada’s Black community who advocated in Ontario for a woman’s right to vote in the 1850s.
[87] Though the "double burden" of work and household labour that would be an important element of feminism in its second wave had long been present for black women, they were also less likely to be paid fairly.
