Equality for women
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The suffragists chained themselves to railings; women today struggle to unchain our voices and our feelings. And feminism has become a loaded word -- a proud banner to one generation, an uncomfortable stereotype to the next.
“Have we come to a collaborative kind of relationship with the status quo?” asks Akua Benjamin, director of the School of Social Work at Ryerson University in Toronto. “Young women tell us we have the right to go around with our navels hanging out. What a kind of feminism!” The struggle for women's status and equality has changed. But is the message really that different?
In October 2006, Homemakers and YWCA Canada invited leading women's activists and commentators to celebrate Women's History Month and Homemakers' 40th anniversary. Benjamin, Paulette Senior (chief executive officer of YWCA Canada), Annie Smith St-Georges (an Algonquin elder and teacher), Heather Maclean (vice-president of research and interprofessional education at Women's College Hospital in Toronto) and Pamela Cross (transitional executive director of the National Association of Women and the Law) reflected on how far we've come since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was first convened in February 1967 -- 40 years ago -- and how many dreams and wishes they still have for our future.
A women's wish list
Our value recognized, at last:
• We know that we're only making 71 cents for every dollar men make, and that's not enough. I would like our government to commit to moving forward with enforcing the federal pay-equity legislation that was cancelled at the 11th hour.
– Paulette Senior
• More federal dollars for legal aid because women, far more than men, are affected by the lack of adequate legal aid at the provincial level.
– Pamela Cross
• Up until 1985, if an Aboriginal woman married a non-Aboriginal person, she totally lost her status. Not only her status, but her identity. I was removed from the reserve, my community, my family – I could not even inherit land. This rejection creates drinking problems, social issues and extreme poverty. Women pushed out of the reserve have been out on the street, homeless. In 1985, with Bill C-31, I regained my status. But my children now have only half-status, and if their children don't marry an Aboriginal, that's it. What I'd like is compensation. In 1988 the Japanese nation was compensated for injustice, but we were never even looked at. After all, we are the first people of this land, and we are the women of this land. I hope it creates momentum that the government should look at this.
– Annie Smith St-Georges
• Our hormones are different from men's, and that has an impact on the way diseases manifest themselves. There are also structural differences between men and women, and there are physiological differences; our metabolism can be different. We are going to inculcate the next generation into the importance of these sex and gender differences; we hope that women will receive health care that's tailored to their unique needs based on being female.
– Heather Maclean
• As feminists, how have we become really secure about our kindness or caring? I love those things in women, even though they say that's part of our stereotyping. I think there's something intrinsic in that, and I don't want to lose that.
– Akua Benjamin
Quality child care for everyone
• We need to have a quality early-child-care learning system that will be there when we need it so we can equally participate in the economy and in society. No matter what your income level is, or where you live in the country, you should be able to access child care.
– Paulette Senior
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