Demanding Equality

One hundred years of feminist activism, from the 1880s to the 1980s, presented multiple paths for women’s search for equality, autonomy, and dignity. Women fashioned different dreams of freedom and social transformation, yet what is Canadian feminism?

Demanding Equality illustrates feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s, with its focus on feminism as a collective project of resistance. Instead of equating feminism solely with women’s search for individual independence and equality with men, Joan Sangster argues that the pursuit of different pathways to equality often created a hybrid politics in which emancipation was intertwined with, and propelled by, struggles against related injustices such as racism, war, colonialism, economic disparity, or homophobia. She also challenges the popular “wave” theory that identifies successive surges of equality seeking, 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.