Home
Demanding Equality

Demanding Equality

One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism

by Joan Sangster

Published by: University of British Columbia Press

Imprint: UBC Press

484 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 60 b&w photos, graphics, and cartoons

Paperback
9780774866071
Published: February 2022

£28.99

Buy

Hardcover
9780774866064
Published: June 2021

£36.00

Buy

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

For one hundred years women fashioned different dreams of social transformation in their search for equality, autonomy, and dignity; yet what is Canadian feminism?

Demanding Equality offers illustrations of feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s. Broadening our definition of feminism – and recognizing that its political, cultural, and social dimensions are entangled – Joan Sangster explores the different pathways pursued to gain equality. She challenges the popular "wave" theory, concluding that feminist activism was continuous, despite changing significantly across decades.

Demanding Equality presents a picture of a heterogeneous movement characterized by both alliances and fierce internal debates. This comprehensive rear-view look at feminism in all its political guises encourages a wider public conversation about what Canadian feminism has been, is, and should be.

Introduction

1 Spreading the Word of Women's Emancipation

2 The Origins of Socialist and Labour Feminism

3 Feminism, Democracy, and Suffrage

4 Reform Feminism and Women's Right to Work

5 Agrarian, Labour, and Socialist Feminism after the First World War

6 Feminism and the Party Question

7 Feminism, War, and Peace

8 Feminism in a Cold War Climate

9 Liberating Feminisms

10 Feminist Organizing in the 1970s and 1980s

11 Afterword: Feminist Challenges of the 1990s and Beyond

Notes; Index

Joan Sangster is Vanier Professor Emeritus at Trent University and a past president of the Canadian Historical Association/Société historique du Canada. She is the author of One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada; Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada; and The Iconic North: Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada.

"There are few, if any, historians better placed than Joan Sangster to write a history of a century of feminism in Canada... Demanding Equality is a book that is at once capacious in its scope and accessibly written." - Magda Fahrni, Universite du Quebec a Montreal (Labour / Le Travail)
Sangster's precisely written yet wideranging book is a tour de force that chronicles the struggles for 'equality, autonomy, and dignity' in all of their rich complexity.
- Elaine Coburn, York University (Literary Review of Canada)
"Demanding Equality is a formidable book, wide in scope, commendably readable, expansive in content, and convincing in analysis."
- Rebecca Priegert Coulter, Professor Emerita, University of Western Ontario. (University of Toronto Quarterly)
"In Demanding Equality, Joan Sangster demonstrates the confidence and virtuosity of a well-seasoned scholar at the top of her game."
- Sarah Glassford, University of Windsor (Social History) [Demanding Equality] is an impressively balanced account that will undoubtedly become required reading for gender and women's history classes across the country. - Catherine Carstairs, University of Guelph (JACANZ, Vol. 1, Issue 2)