Possibilities of Life: My Women's Movement

this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged in us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

Adrienne Rich

So, it's June of 2005. A dozen blocks from me stands an abortion clinic. Every drugstore in town will soon distribute a morning-after pill. Another woman was murdered by her male lover, husband, ex. Yesterday's Sunshine girl's breasts are bigger and higher and harder than imaginable. My friends are losing their breasts to cancer and their uteruses to chemotherapy. Almost a thousand Calgary women could dig up sixty bucks or so to hear Gloria Steinem speak for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser last month. Then the Herald printed a fierce critique of Steinem for praising Margaret Sanger's work on reproductive rights since Sanger was classist and anti-Semitic. Kuwaiti women fight for the vote and get it. How's feminism doing? Just fine, thanks. It's not yet run out of things to do. How are feminists? Depends on the generation, I suspect. And the particular trajectory of the speaking feminist. 

We used to call it "Women's Liberation"; the media called it "Women's Lib"; and others "Women's Lip." At the time that one annoyed me, but now I think it's funny. The elemental cry, "It's not fair," informed our initial stirrings. We read The Second Sex. We wanted birth control. When a group of us tried to get the University of Alberta's Student Health Centre to provide the Pill, we were told, "Keep your legs closed." The Double Standard in allowable sexual behaviour was a big deal; unfair wages (still a big deal) and the respectful attention of men were issues. When I approached the Stanford University's Free Speech Movement, the boys asked me if I could type. I had been careful not to learn, figuring that typing was not going to bring ME freedom of speech. Much influenced by the U.S. women's movement—I was in Chicago in 1969—consciousness-raising meant that every aspect of one's life and thinking was under scrutiny. We were so relieved to discover that women weren't silly, weak, or pathetic but, rather, OPPRESSED, the realization fell upon us like sunshine. We could see the oppression, feel it, smell it, and, gift that consciousness was, resist it. That knowledge made us move. That knowledge made us move, often right into each others' arms (remember Lesbian Nation?). We were the Women's Movement, and we believed we could go as far as our imaginations could take us.

It took some of us right up against ideological imperatives: monogamy was a patriarchal plot; racism was something all good white women understood and abhorred; all women and no men were allies. We were merciless, believing then that nothing was free of masculinist poison and, if our hearts would not adhere to our values, then the hearts had been corrupted. We struggled ourselves into exhaustion. Meanwhile, women's houses and co-ops formed a network that meant we could drive from Edmonton to Maine, staying with women all along our route. We carried scissors and left long swaths of women's hair piled around in the kitchens. Short hair was liberation.

Women were changing laws, raising public awareness about pornography, violence against women, and female poverty. We began to name and claim our own experiences: date rape, sexual harassment, abuse. But things changed fast. Free Abortion on Demand became Freedom of Choice or Reproductive Rights. Women of Colour, who had been central in early activism and writing, challenged white women's comprehension of racism. White women began to learn much more about their own racist assumptions, exposed thoroughly when Cherrìe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldùa produced This Bridge Called Our Backs. White women's focus necessarily turned inward while they grappled with a fractured view of themselves. Women could and would betray one other. We broke one another's hearts in manifold ways. Some...