Minds of Our Own: Inventing Feminist Scholarship and Women's Studies in Canada and Quebec, 1966-76 (review)

The aptly named Minds of Our Own is a page-turner. An opening chapter sketches the social, political, economic, and academic conditions under which the first Canadian Women's Studies projects were launched. The conclusion outlines a series of themes that emerge across the core of the volume, comprised of more than forty brief but telling first-person narratives, some co-authored, all about "inventing feminist scholarship" at various sites throughout the country between 1966 and 1976. The chosen time-frame is strategic, embracing the establishment of the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC) and the final days of International Women's Year, one way to situate and account for the first decade of formal Women's Studies in Canadian academe.

The gathered narratives are as compelling as the tale of editorial collaboration behind the work is emblematic of growing networks among scholars in the field. Three parallel efforts to document Women's Studies' early years are brought together in this text, which offers an archive of personal reflections on a process of academic inquiry that continues to unearth the complexities of knowledge politics. The project is indebted to similar collections by American feminists but emphasizes the Canadian situation as unique. It acknowledges that anglophone and francophone environments for Women's Studies in Canada have remained distinctive, that finding and generating locally relevant materials for study was both daunting and an on-going revelation from the start, and that there were and still are gaps in shared awareness about how diversely felt and situated the experiences of different communities of women remain in Canadian and international contexts.

Graced by a cover that presents in textile art a bitten pomegranate with at least one seed airborne off the page, the book invokes a time when a sufficient critical mass had formed to defy western cultural interdictions against women's power to know in public and counterpublic ways. The assembled accounts chronicle experiences of emergence from a host of situated solitudes and advance a vision of a more-or-less coherent, multi-staged movement for social transformation, fostered through an alliance of academic and community-centered initiatives focused on improving the quality of women's lives. Amidst stories of outrageous behaviours and claims by hostile and patronizing "colleagues," apparently threatened by the prospect of Women's Studies in the academy, a spirit of generosity and mutual support often invests the ways contributors voice their appreciation for the comrades who gravitated to one another during these critical early moments.

The term "sisterhood" surfaces throughout as a name for such experiences of shared discovery and effort, as does a common feeling of "pioneering" spirit. Reflecting the historical moment, these descriptors express how invigorating and sustaining such affective and intellectual bonds became. By exposing the transformative potentials of subordinated forms of knowledge, obscured by received disciplinary approaches, scholars and students in the field understood themselves to be introducing an important new academic rigour. There was a unifying sense of creating together a more engaged and therefore "real" university, as Dorothy Smith terms it, a depiction that Jacqui Alexander has also used in Pedagogies of Crossing when she narrates how she and her students chose to study the intersectional operations of racism at the New School in the late twentieth century.

Since the period under review in Minds of Our Own, sisterly and colonial metaphors have been "troubled" by the very principles of inclusivity and justice that characterize the commitments of the earlier period, revealing the inevitable fissures and instabilities that inform constructed social roles and categories, and efforts to organize around them. While restrictive gender norms are still lived and negotiated everywhere in everyday life, feminist theorists have grown more inclined to imagine organizing around Spivak's "strategic essentialisms," and more often hesitate to frame feminist projects in terms that invoke the assimilation processes which...