Women and Political Representation in Canada

Chapter 7: The Canadian Women's Movement and Political Parties, 1970-1993

7 The Canadian Women's Movement and Political Parties, 1970-1993 LISA YOUNG, University of Calgary Introduction In popular discourse, the political representation of women is synonymous with the election of women to the representative institutions of formal politics—parliaments, legislatures, and councils—and the integration of women into political party elites. This is due in no small part to the efforts of the Canadian women's movement to gain entry for women into these elite positions. Within the women's movement, however, there has never been consensus regarding the strategic importance of this objective. Moreover, at the same time that women are gaining entry to these political elites, there has developed a significant gulf within the Canadian movement over questions of strategy. This chapter traces the evolution of the Canadian women's movement's strategic orientation toward political parties and electoral politics between 1970 and 1993.1 "Strategic orientation" refers to the related issues of the election of women and relations with established political parties, the vehicles through which women could be elected and the movement's policy agenda furthered. This captures only one aspect of the movement's broader strategy for social and political change, but it is an element that warrants consideration because of the crucial role the movement plays in constructing the social meaning of "the political representation of women." It is, of course, impossible to categorize the women's movement's strategy definitively.The Canadian women's movement is an extremely diverse, amorphous aggregation of groups and individuals with widely diverging views of the appropriate political strategy for the movement. Moreover, as Vickers (1989) and Bashevkin (1993) have both noted, the Canadian movement has been characterized by a persistent tension between separation and integration, or autonomy and partisanship. The task for research, then, is to identify the different strategic tendencies 196 WOMEN AND POLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN CANADA within the movement and to examine the changing relative strengthof these tendencies over time. The primary focus will be on the umbrella organization ofwomen's groups, the National Action Committee on the Status ofWomen (NAC). As the largest feminist organization in Canada, the NAC plays a crucial role.in defining the partisan meaning of the movement, and provides cues to movement adherents (Dalton 1994). A secondary focus is on the organizations that concentrate primarily on electoral/partisan politics, such as Women for Political Action and the Committee for '94.2 This study of the women's movement's changing orientation toward partisan and electoral politics is situated in the context of a debate within social movement theory regarding the determinants of movements' orientation toward partisan and electoral politics. In movement-centred accounts, movements' orientations toward parties are endogenously determined; that is, the movement's characteristics determine its partisan orientation. New socialmovement theorists argue that the new movements' ideological character, which entails a rejection of old-style politics, causes them to eschew engagement with established parties (Melucci 1989; Offe 1990). In contrast to movement-centred approaches, other accounts emphasize the importance of exogenous, or external, variables in shaping the pattern ofmovement-party interaction. These variables comprise the "opportunity structure"—the set of constraints and opportunities that discourage or encourage movement behaviours and lead movements toward certain forms of collective action over others (Tarrow 1989, 32). Movement leaders, as rational actors, will seek to maximize strategic advantage when responding to these structures (Zald 1992). Relating these two approaches to the experience of the Canadian women's movement between 1970 and 1993, it becomes clear that neither provides a compelling explanation (fora critique of this notion of opportunity structure, see the text by Rankin and Vickers also in this work). Rather, it is the dynamic interaction between internal and external factors that provides the most helpful explanation for the movement's changing orientation. Multipartisanship (1970-1984) When the contemporary Canadian women's movement first mobilized, pursuit of power for women through the electoralroute was prominent among the strategies adopted by liberal feminist organizations. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of THE CANADIAN WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND POLITICAL PARTIESS 197 Women (RCSW 1970, 355-356) identified the absence of women from public life as a significant obstacle to the achievement of equality for Canadian women and called on political parties to nominate more women (in her text, Jane Arscott explains how the RCSW could have recommended that more women gain access to power, without questioning the Canadian...