Ana Stevenson reflects on the recent A Workshop in Transnational Feminism/Atelier sur le féminisme transnational at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Between May 10 and 12, 2018 I attended A Workshop in Transnational Feminism/Atelier sur le féminisme transnational held in Hamilton, Ontario at McMaster University’s L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History.

Miglena S. Todorova, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Title: Race and Socialist/Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe

 

Shahina Parvin, Department of Sociology, the University of Lethbridge.

Title: The Significance of Inclusion of Women’s Standpoints within Transnational Feminist Epistemology and Methodology 

 

Ana Stevenson, International Studies Group, University of the Free State.

Title: Transnational Feminism in North American and Australian Settler Societies: The “Slave Class” and the “Colonising Sexual Urge”

1. 12:30 PM: Panel 2 – Sources and self-representation in postcolonial, settler colonial, and imperial contexts

Lynne Marks, Department of History, University of Victoria and Margaret Little, Departments of Political Studies and Gender Studies, Queens University

Title: Family Matters: Divisions Between Immigrant Women Activists and Mainstream Feminists in Ontario and BC,1960s-1980s

The 1960s to 1980s were a major period of immigration to Canada

• Mainly from Asia, Caribbean, South America, Africa, Middle East and others
• Toronto was the centre of immigrant women’s activism in Canada
• Analysing the activism of mainstream feminists, who saw gender as central to women’s oppression, versus immigrant women feminists
  • These groups saw family and motherhood quite differently: central to women’s oppression versus family as a buttress against racism etc. in Canada
  • They often held different perspective to the issues discussed, as they had different imperatives based on the different experiences of their lives, but also sometimes had common interests and strategies
• This paper focuses on:
  • Paid work
    • Skills training
    • ESL
    • Healthcare
    • Domestic workers
    • Equal pay
    • Childcare
    • Unions
  • Violence against women
    • Mainstream feminists
      • Take Back the Night marches
      • Shelters with mono-cultural models
      • Victims of male violence
      • Saw men as the problem
    • Immigrant women activists
      • Violence against women was more complicated
      • Survival in a hostile new land
      • Culturally sensitive shelters focusing on abused immigrant and racialised women
      • Demanded men’s groups for education on violence against women
      • Developed an expanded, transnational definition of violence
        • Police violence against young black males
        • Issues of migration and border crossing
        • Harassment in the workplace
        • Political violence in Latin America
      • Transform how domestic violence was understood to include a broader transnational and political context that focused on notions of family
    • Reproduction and reproductive rights
      • Mainstream feminists
        • Abortion rights movement
      • Immigrant women activists
        • Women’s right to control her body but in the context of family and community
        • Go-betweens for the mainstream abortion rights movement and immigrant feminists’ perspectives towards reproductive rights
        • Realised that there is not one clear position on reproductive rights
      • Issues related to family and motherhood could create major differences between mainstream feminists and immigrant women activists
        • Perspectives towards these issues were based around family and community, rather than individual independence, and on their own terms
        • Aim to challenge the racism they often experienced from mainstream feminist organisations
        • Families offered cultural support and continuity in a racist society

 

Safaneh Mohaghegh-Neyshabouri, Comparative Literature, University of Alberta.

Title: Reading Life Writing as Everyday Resistance in Two Travel Narratives by Qajar Women

There is largely ignorance about the everyday lives of Qajar women’s lives (Qajar Dynasty: 1789-1925)

• The helpless Muslim woman in need of saving is the dominant discourse in Europe
  • But this is also the result of later dynasties, the Pahlavi Dynasti (1925-1979) and the Islamic Republic (1979–), have presented themselves as the savior of women from the earlier era
  • Also Orientalism
• The travel narratives offer the opportunity to understand the lives of two women from their own words and perspectives
  • Neither woman is concerned with a revolutionary agenda, although one offers concern regarding the impoverished condition of peasants encountered along her journey and even a critique of autocracy and the overconsumption of the elite
  • The everyday is where these women use their agency to resist, actions which they then narrate or allude to through the act of writing in their journals
  • These women come from relatively privileged backgrounds and have quite a high social status – meaning not only are they educated, but they therefore can write and have access to pen and paper
  • Humour, trades and skills, and writing are classic examples of everyday forms of resistance that these women sometimes describe or exhibit through their journals

2:15 PM: Panel 3 – Creating transnational feminist networks

Chair: Joëlle Papillon, Department of French, McMaster University

Daria Dyakonova, Department of History, Université de Montréal.

John Riddell, Department of Social Justice education, OISE.

Title: Transnational Networking among Communist Women in the Early 1920s

Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern)

• Historians largely dismiss Soviet gender policies as “largely inconsequential lip service”
• The persistence of “manels” on communist history is a contemporary reality which itself reflects the historical dominance of male actors in communist parties and societies
• But the historiography can’t be transformed by edict; it needs to be actively rethought and considered from the margins
• Writing a women’s history of communist gender policies is one way that this can be addressed
• Three of the main currents of communism during the 1930s were led by women

 

Audrey Lasserre, Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut des Civilisations, Arts et Lettres. Title: Écrire une histoire transnationale de la littérature francophone (en contexte) féministe : l’exemple de la Rencontre québécoise internationale des écrivains (1975)

 

Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué, Department of History, Baylor University, Texas.

Title: Cameroon’s Catholic Women’s Association: Gender, Political Power, and Transnational Feminism in 20^th Century West Africa

 

The Catholic Women’s Association of women from Cameroon performs the religious ceremony in the United States, Cameroon and elsewhere

• The Catholic Women’s Association (CWA) requires membership of women who are 50 years and older, ie. women who have reached menopause
  • Religious and maternal authority has bound these women across the Atlantic since 1964
  • The CWA now operates with an international lens and advocates a “global sisterhood,” networking with both secular and religious organisations – and also having branches – across Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France
    • It seeks to take into account the essential differences that define women’s lives at the same time as advocating a “global sisterhood,” specifically in an African way, by focusing on women’s maternal roles in the home
    • “Mothering the nation” and “mothering society” just as women mother in the home
      • Women use maternalist language – “mothers of the church,” “aunts” – to describe themselves within the power structure of the organization
      • In the rural areas of Cameroon, the CWA women have a lot of power and “hold court” to make a judgement
    • While the organisation doesn’t define itself as feminist, some of its individual leaders describe themselves as feminists privately
    • There is a Pan-Africanist aspect to these connections as key CWA leaders engage with African American women’s groups in the United States
  • In 1966, the Francophone president of the Federal Republic of Cameroon dissolves all the women’s organisations into one wing
    • The CWA is one of the few organisations to escape this control because the Anglophone organisation starts to work alongside Francophone women and has international links that also protect the organisation to a certain extent
    • One of the ways the CWA grasps power is to include Francophone women, who are from the dominant political language group, into the organisation
  • The CWA describes itself as a non-political organisation and this has also contributed to its long-term survival
    • Leaders nonetheless engage in politicised “feminist actions,” some of which include organising the CWA’s (ostensibly non-political) actions
    • The CWA challenged patriarchal ideas by teaching seminars on the equality of women and men under God

4: 00PM. Panel 4 –Thinking through the periodization of women’s movements

Chair: Karen Balcom, Department of History, McMaster University

Lara Campbell, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University.  

Title: Modernity, Progress and Militancy: The Transnational Politics of Suffrage in British Columbia

This project is part of an 8-part book series focusing on suffrage in Canada’s different provinces

• Suffrage in British Columbia
  • Political Equality League (PEL) formed in Victoria in 1910; soon joins with another Vancouver suffrage organization to call itself the BC PEL
  • Publishes Canada’s only suffrage journal, The Champion, for about 3 years in the 1910s
  • Suffragists embraced ideas of modernity and progress, and this was mapped directly onto ideas of race
    • However, ideas of progress were not always linear
    • The march of progress could be “delayed” by the backwards ideas of male politicians
    • In the past, they discovered, British women held more political rights than they did in the present
  • Progress was understood to be connected to the “force” of the universe – a “spirit force,” where the universe is always being propelled forward by God (or theosophist deities?) towards justice and equality
    • First use of the wave metaphor, where the ocean is a powerful and revolutionary force with the movement of the tides
    • This joins together women who are Evangelical Christians, theosophists, and other Christian denominations
  • Links with suffragists on the western coast and use of western myths of exceptionalism
    • Shaming of Canada through discourses of “if even women in uncivilised nations have rights…” in a very racialised and racist manner
    • The rhetoric of progress has much power in British Columbia, where politicians celebrated western economic opportunity and growth, discourses which made possible the dispossession of First Nations
    • Suffragists also imagine British Columbia as a progressive space with a unique gender order that has “new women” who are inherently more progressive than their eastern (read: Ontario) sisters
      • However, this includes almost no discussion of Indigenous women
    • This Pacific region included California, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia
      • So when these American states gain suffrage in the early 1910s, the British Columbia suffragists believe that their Canadian province is falling behind
      • Suffragists use the rhetoric of “prehistoric” and “fossilized” to discuss anti-suffrage politicians
    • Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)
      • British Columbia suffragists are perhaps the most sympathetic to the WSPU of suffragists in Canada
      • These suffragists did not completely disregard militancy and adopted the WSPU’s colour scheme of purple, white, and green, whereas other Canadian suffragists adopted the American colour scheme of yellow
      • British Columbia suffragists really appreciated Emmeline Pankhurst and her speeches, as well as WSPU organiser, prisoner, and hunger striker Barbara Wylie and her well-attended British Columbia tour in the early 1910s
      • British Columbia suffragists didn’t embrace women’s militancy for in Canada, but they appreciated the violence of the WSPU suffragettes and understood why they (reluctantly) moved towards militancy
      • World War I also quashes the discussion of the possibility of suffrage militancy for women in Canada
    • Transpacific world
      • Suffragists in British Columbia came to see Asian women as representative of modernity
      • The Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association was formed by Kang Tongbi in Victoria in 1903, for the wives and daughters of elite Chinese merchants
      • British Columbia newspapers were very interested in these Chinese women lecturers, but habitually described them in highly orientalist terms

 

Patricia Harms, Department of History and Gender &Women’s Studies, Brandon University.

Title: “It is Cold on Higher Moral Ground: The First and Second Inter-American Congresses of Women, 1947 and 1951”

The First and Second Inter-American Congresses of Women, 1947 and 1951 in Guatemala City

• These congresses have received barely any scholarly attention, with only one previous study from 20 years ago
• Associated with Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) ??
• The First and Second Inter-American Congresses of Women were organised to focus on basic human rights
  • Part of this was to create a counter-discourse to the increase of discussions of armament and the prioritisation of concerns over national security
  • In the Cold War era, however, nations were suspicious of organisations developed across national boundaries
• The First Inter-American Congresses of Women was cancelled at the last minute, to the surprise of some of its U.S. organisers, a point which was made clear in the media
  • There were four reasons for this, including the fact that the Guatemalan women organisers were accused of being communist
    • WILPF had a long history of taking strong positions against U.S. policy
    • Eva Peron, while travelling through Europe, causes a political stir when she is received by the Spanish dictator; groups which had lobbied for Peron not to be allowed to enter Spain were labelled communist
    • The U.S. was suspicious of the new leader of Guatemala following its revolution
    • The impending Intern-American Conference in Rio de Janiero, which was focusing on militarisation and national security
  • These congresses imagined an ideal of sisterhood which transcended national boundaries

Whitney Wood, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London.

Title: ‘Why not a choice in obstetrics too?’: Feminism and Birth Reform in Canada and the World, 1950-1990

A transnational analysis of birth reform complicates notions of reproductive justice and notions of choice among different groups of feminists

• The medicalisation of childbirth was neither available to nor embraced by all Canadian women
• By the 1940s, a growing group of Canadian women began to articulate a desire for a less medicalized form of childbirth, as expressed by Dr Grantly Dick-Read as the “natural childbirth” movement from his book Natural Childbirth (UK, 1933) / Childbirth Without Fear (US and Canada, 1944)
  • Negative birth experiences prompted women’s interest in birth reform
  • This was a global movement, as Childbirth Without Fear had been published into multiple languages by the 1950s
  • It therefore was something of a predecessor to the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s seminal 1970s text, Our Bodies, Ourselves

 

9:00 AM: Panel #5: Gender in the international political economy

Chair: Julien Mauduit, Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University

Nancy Forestell, Department of History, and Women’s and Gender Studies Program, St. Francis Xavier University.

Title: “Reaffirming White Privilege/Supremacy: Commonwealth Feminism(s) During the Era of Decolonization, 1947-1967”

British Commonwealth League, later renamed the Commonwealth Countries League

• Its leader during the post-World War II period, Alice Hemming, was Canadian
  • Canadian engagement in the League had remained more limited during the earlier interwar period
  • Much of the scholarship focuses on the Australian and New Zealand women who contributed to this organisation, but this overlooked the contributions of Canadian women
• The League brought together British women from the imperial centre and the settler dominions (former colonies) to discuss women’s issues
  • The hegemony of British and other white women was ultimately confirmed during this period, speaking to the limits of liberal internationalism during this period
  • Motto: “Equal citizenship within countries under the British flag”
  • Premised on the notion that enfranchised white women in British and other dominions with the vote were responsible for the welfare of their less fortunate sisters
  • Colonised women were only infrequently given the opportunity to speak for themselves
• The beginnings of decolonisation shifted the dynamics of the League
  • India and Pakistan gain independence in 1947
  • Ghana is the first former colony in Africa to gain independence in 1957
  • South Africa leaves the Commonwealth in 1961
• Attempts were made during this period (beginning in 1947) to revive the League, after about a decade of inaction
  • One of the focuses of reform was for women not to lose their British citizenship upon marriage, but this continued to depend on the persistence of the husbands being classified as “aliens”
  • South African women delegates bemoaned various forms of racial discrimination they were observing in their country, but not necessarily by denouncing apartheid outright
• Many of these examples offer both continuity and a break from pre-war patterns of organising
  • Most importantly, the majority of the women discussing and organising around these issues were white women
  • There was little explicit discussion or debate about decolonisation itself, as the white women leaders continued to promote the Commonwealth as a “family”
• Post-1957 the discourse shifts to anticipate the decolonisation of Africa
  • Decolonisation is positioned as OK if it is done gradually and non-violently
  • White women thus reposition themselves during this decades as the “experts” who can go to Africa, the Caribbean etc. with the knowledge to facilitate the process of decolonisaion
  • But in the process the white women maintain their own hegemony

 

Aliénor Béjannin, Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal.

Title: Le féminisme altermondialiste au Canada, quel potentiel de dé-marginalisation ?

New title: Altermondialist Feminism in Canada and its Capacity to Demarginalise

Altermondialist: anti-globalisation

Experiences shaped by personal activism as part of a Palestinien rights group

• Whiteness and subjectification
• The altermondialist movement (anti-globalisation movement) emerged in the 1990s
  • World Social Forums (WSF)
    • These meetings began in Brazil in 2001, both annually and bi-annually, and have mainly taken place in the Global South
    • In 2016, the WSF took place in Canada but was a bit of a disaster and so returned to Brazil in 2018
      • The argument to hold the event in Canada was that the North/South divide is not relevant anymore, as there are North in the South and South in the North
      • However, it kind of ended up being a bunch of white people telling each other that it is important to have more racialised people participate!
      • Due to the conservative Canadian government at the time, about 70% of the entry visas to Canada were denied, most of which related to participants from across Africa
    • What can be the contribution of white altermondialist feminists to demarginalise the movement?
      • Many of the women participants of WSF 2016 Feminisms Committee were white
        • The committee was aware of the risks of holding the WSF in the Global North
        • So they developed initiatives of demarginalisation
          • For example, day-long events were dedicated to racialised women and Indigenous women
        • Interviewees expressed awareness of their own privileges at the same time as aiming to promote the participation of racialised women
          • Described themselves as allies and tried to act as allies
            • Many were less interested in abolishing their priviledge than to use it in a positive way
            • This does not transform structural privileges
          • While awareness of the dominance of white people was acknowledged, there was no effort to leave the spaces of priviledge and leadership and more discussion of including people of colour
          • This nonetheless demonstrated the ability of dissident feminism to travel
        • In spite of these efforts, no First Nations representative ever came to these meetings
          • Fear of tokenism?
        • Altermondialist did not manage to abolish the priviledges of whiteness in this context

 

10:45 AM: Panel #6: Transformative spaces and pedagogies

Chair: Jennifer Tunnicliffe, Wilson Institute for Canadian History, McMaster University

Alison Norman, Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, Trent University

Title: Six Nations Soldiers and British Women’s Transatlantic Activism during and after the First World War

Canadian women were not interested in Six Nations women, but some British and Scottish women were interested in the Six Nations soldiers who fought in World War I

• British Foreign and Antislavery Aborigines Protection Society?
• International Women’s Suffrage Alliance

Funké Aladejebi, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Trent University.

Title: Let’s Talk About It: Black Women, Diasporic Feminisms and the Limitations of Women’s Liberation, 1960s – 1980s

How did black women educators respond to predominantly white women’s organisations of teachers?

• Teachers unions: communities created in the context of the nation state
  • Emotional labours of black women in this context
  • Black women were othered within such organisations
• Black women’s stories do not claim universal stories of transnationalism, as did many white women and their organisations
  • Instead, black women acknowledge the global experiences of black peoples across the world
  • Who gets to articulate anger and who gets to stand in for the idea of the universal woman?
• Anger and mobilisation
  • Gloria Steinem and Margaret Sloan were invited to address the teachers union at a dinner event
    • Anger was used to Steinem to move women towards feminist action
    • Sloan was not well received by women attendees and was perceived to polarise the audience
  • Anger is often read and dismissed as an emotion on intersectional black bodies
  • How did white women feel and how were their emotions used in the movement?
    • This is underpinned by the fear of messing up
  • The “let’s talk” approach
    • Allowed for social movement activists to talk about racism in women’s movements without making institutional or material change within social movements for black women
    • Never moves beyond the conversational and storytelling aspect

Devaleena Das, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Northern Arizona University

Title: Transnational Feminism Beyond Westoxification: Theory and Praxis

Westoxification: examines how the politics of feminist knowledge production reflects the western dominance in knowledge production, or the “feminist master narrative”

• Feminist Westoxification downplays how feminisms have emerged differently across time and space, often through collaborative rather than individualistic knowledge production
• Term: “intellectual sovereignty” aiming towards transformative knowledge
• Suggesting a new terminology: “quilted epistemology”
  • Common threads of feminist revolt where non-Western women have made their own narratives of resistance
  • Interdisciplinarity
  • Resistance to a priori feminist knowledge production
  • Feminist solidarity which interweaves multiple feminist voices
  • Transformative and healing