Seven Oaks Magazine.

1) What motivated you to write Ten Thousand Roses, this history of the women's movement in Canada?

I guess I started to think about it when I read Susan Brownmiller's book, In Our Time. It's a history of the American women's movement. What I liked about her book was that she talked about the grassroots women's movement, which you very rarely read about, and how they did things, how they organized.

But I also realized that the Canadian women's movement was way more interesting than the American women's movement, and way broader and more successful. And yet all of our popular references about feminism are American. So that's when I started to think about it.

2) What are some of the long-term gains that have been won by the women's movement in Canada, I guess as a reflection of that relative success as compared to the United States?

There's two things I'd say. First of all, just in terms of legal gains, we have legal abortion. You know, they have legal abortion -- Roe v. Wade gives legal abortion in the first trimester -- but it has been constantly encroached upon. It's been a battle ever since Roe v. Wade, whereas in Canada we've really won the battle. The battle has been won. And even though there's still little 'right to life' groups around, it hasn't re-emerged as an issue. It may re-emerge. We've really fundamentally won the right to abortion in a way that they weren't able to in the United States.

Secondly, we have legal equality in our Charter. In the U.S., they fought for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and they lost. Whereas we won language that's very similar to that in the Charter.

But where I see the movement in Canada as more successful is in the breadth of the movement. The American women's movement is very much a white middle class movement. And the black feminist movement is separate. In Canada, we managed to create a multi-racial women's movement which they never created in the United States. I'll never forget, the first year I was president of NAC (National Action Committee on the Status of Women) I went to a meeting of NOW (National Organization of Women), and there were fewer women of colour in NOW than there were in NAC. And with the history of Black activism in the States, I was quite shocked by that.

We, in Canada, have had much more working class women and socialist feminist leadership, which I think has helped to make these things happen.

3) And you said at the book launch the other night that the women's movement in Canada has been largely sustained by women of colour, and that it has been mostly white middle class women who have walked away from the movement?

Well, basically, if you read the book carefully what you notice is that in the 70s the feminist movement was growing at a grassroots level. Women were organizing everywhere. And what started to happen in the 80s is that the movement gained power and so it started to have an influence at the state level, and started to win things. The constitutional gains, the abortion gains -- all the gains I just talked about were in the 80s. And more and more white middle class women started to get positions of power and, you know, walk away from the movement.

But at the same time, in the 80s, women of colour started organizing, in their own communities first. The fascinating thing about Canada is that they organized in their own communities, but very soon they started to talk to each other. So Chinese women, South Asian women, talked to each other and started to work together. In Ontario anyway they worked together in the Coalition of Visible Minority Women. And so they brought a new grassroots energy to the women's movement just as the women's movement was becoming more and more kind of focused on lobbying, and therefore coopted, in my view.

4) How much of the women's movement in Canada in the late 60s and 70s was fuelled by the other activism that had emerged in those years, such as the anti-war and socialist movements?

There were two currents, well, three really. There was Voice of Women, who were left-wing women. They were Quakers, I think some of them were communists, although of course they were hidden because of the anti-communism. And they were left-wing women who were older. They would have been in their thirties, married with children.

Then you had the emergence of the radical part of the movement, not radical feminist but radical. They were young women who were part of the Left in the anti-war movement. Those were, in Canada, mostly socialist feminists. In 1969, in Toronto, you had a split with a group called the New Feminists, who were radical feminists. The difference was that radical feminists saw patriarchy as the main problem, and tended to see an exclusively female women's movement. The debate described in the book is around International Women's Day in 1973. The big debate was whether men could march with women, and the radical feminists argued against men marching with women.

So socialist feminists played a huge role in the Canadian women's movement. And so when you had the decline of the far Left in the late 70s, a lot of leaders of the far Left, including myself, Judy Darcy is another example, went into the women's movement.

But then you also had the current of Liberal feminism, and they had a huge influence too. But in terms of the radical part of the movement socialist feminists were much more prominent than radical feminists, which wasn't true in the States.

5) How much do you think that sexism remains a problem within Left and progressive movements?

I think what's interesting on the Left is that I don't think there's as much active sexism as there was in the 60s. I hope not anyways. But there's not a feminist politic; there's not an anti-racist politic in the global justice movement. And that really concerns me...

What troubled me, and one of the reasons that I wrote the book was that the young activists, while they are sensitive on issues of representation, there's not a feminist and anti-racist analysis that has been integrated. So suddenly we get back to this anti-capitalist politic, which is great, but it's not a feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist politic.

6) Do you see any positive developments starting to challenge this short-coming?

I think it's starting to happen. I think that a lot of the young women who didn't really see a need for feminism in the global justice movement are starting to see it. You see it in Naomi Klein's book (No Logo). She talks about her evolution, sort of rejecting the identity politics that she practised in university. I think that a lot of those young women who thought that they didn't need feminism are realizing that they do.

The key issues to me are violence against women, in terms of marginalized women in particular, and figuring out how to stop violence against women, which I think requires a big, big discussion about masculinization. You know, what in the socialization of men creates this rage toward women in our culture. I think we need a big debate and discussion about that with men, because while we've made big improvements, violence against women has not been abated at all.