Bringing It Home: Women Talk about Feminism in Their Lives ed. by Brenda Lea Brown (review)

HUMANITIES 159 women's oppression under patriarchy - it only gestures to the way . oppressive social practices might be transformed without, in fact, transforming them. At best, as here, it points the way. (ELIZABETH LANGLAND) , Brenda Lea Brown, editor, with a foreword by Rosemary Brown. Bringing It Home: Women Talk about Feminism in Their Lives Arsenal Pulp Press. 348. $21.95 ' When Brenda Lea Brown attempted to write a personal. essay called J A Feminist Education,' she realized she had no real political analysis despite the fact that she had identified herself as a feminist for twenty years. Her path to feminism had been via Ms., not through activism or serious study. She lacked the credentials, she felt, to write about feminism. Jolted by journalist Susan Crean's question, 'What is it about women like you who think there's some big feminist judge out there?/ Brown got to work. She asked other women to write about their 'feminist educations.' She wanted to find out how women became feminists and how they integrated their feminism with their personal lives. While Brown wanted to solicit thereflections of 'ordinary',women, many ofthe twenty-four contributors to BringingIt Home are well known. Readers will recognize names such as Ursula Franklin and Mary Meigs. And while Brown did not want a focus on activists, the fact is that the essays by activists are the most interesting in the book. Raminder Dosanjh, for example, talks about the difficulties of organizing to stop violence against women within the Vancouver South Asian community when the media constantly constructs the issue as a 'cultural' problem of immigrants. Larissa Lai reflects on questions of identity in contemporary Canadian feminism. Brown has made some effort to include material from a diversity of women. Ofthe twenty-fourwriters, one quarter are FirstNations orwomen of colour. A handful are lesbian, and/or living with disabilities. The regional distribution reflects Brown's West Coast -base, but there are contributors from across Canada. There is some representation ofthe young feminists who arecreating feminism's third wave- what Toronto's Fireweed magazine calls the 'girl revolution.' But the majority of the essayists are from middle-classbackgroundsand theyhave remained in thatsocial class. Indeed, the absence of working-class women's contributions represents a huge gap in the collection. While some writers (including Mary Meigs and Denise Nadeau) reflect on how class has shaped their lives and their feminism, others appear to be quite oblivious to such questions. Lyndsay Green, for example, talks about her 'partnership' with her nanny, thereby obscuring the real employer-employee power differences. Class and race distinctions are also evidentin the pathways to feminism. For example, white, middle-class women speak about the influence of Ms. 160 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 magazine or Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Women of colour, by contrast~ point to work such as This Bridge Called My Back and Making Face, Making Soul, landmark American anthologies of political writing by Black, Latina, Asian, and Native feminists. No single definition of feminism emerges from these accounts. Some women see feminism in conventional individual terms, as permission to have a career and experience the world, while others such as Pamela Dos Ramos insist that feminism must be about working together for the freedom of all women, not just the most privileged . Along the way, women talk about how their experience of motherhood , thebody,housework, work, racism, violence, friendship/spirituality, family, and sexuality has forged their feminism. Bringing It Home is geared to a popular audience, and this is one of its strengths. It will appeal to readers new to feminism or those interested in the shaping of popular feminism. Those searching for more critical analytical essays they can use in the classroom or for popular education will be disappointed. The book's epigraph is from a recent essay by the American radical feminist Mary Daly, in which she speaks of the need for women to 'share our experiences' in order to chart future directions. However, as many activists and theorists in the women's movement have discovered, 'sharing our experiences/ while a central component of feministpractice, is simplynot enough. The diversity ofthatexperienceand the material differences among womenmean that such sharingprovides no...