State of Struggle: Feminism and Politics in Alberta (review)

Alberta occupies a peculiar place in the Canadian political landscape. Its politicians cultivate myths of rugged individualism, fiscal austerity, and small government while simultaneously engaging in substantial, even profligate, public spending in order to ensure that their political hegemony continues uninterrupted. The result is a one-party political system that uses the province's oil-derived wealth to co-opt potential dissenters and ensure that the citizenry remains complacent.

It is against this backdrop that Lois Harder traces the history of second-wave feminism in Alberta. As she wryly observes in her preface, the common assumption is that a book about feminism in Alberta would necessarily be brief. But, as Harder shows in her thorough account of feminist activism in the province from the 1970s through the 'Klein Revolution' of the 1990s, feminist organizing has not been absent from the province's political landscape. It has, however, been faced with a better-organized and more vociferous anti-feminist movement than found elsewhere in Canada. Perhaps even more significant, Alberta feminists have focused their attention on a government not well disposed towards equality-seeking groups.

That said, Harder makes the essentially important point that even in a province where the party forming the government does not change from election to election, there have been very different provincial administrations in Alberta over the past three decades. Animated both by the individuals in government and underlying economic conditions, the Alberta government has taken several different state forms over the three decades included in Harder's study.

The Alberta government was most receptive to feminist claims in the 1980s, as Don Getty's government struggled to cope with the breakdown of social consensus resulting from low oil prices. In an effort to maintain its electoral support, Getty's government simultaneously tried to respond to feminist claims and cast itself as a supporter of the traditional family form.

This ambiguous stance broke down, according to Harder, in the face of Ralph Klein's neo-liberal revolution. Constructing the province's financial situation as one of crisis, Klein launched an attack on the public sector in the province. Given that women disproportionately staff the largest aspects of the provincial public sector - health care and education - and are left to pick up the slack when the government pulls out of early childhood education, health care, and social services, this neo-liberal state form had a disproportionate impact on women. But, because resistance to Klein was not constructed in gendered terms, the eventual outcome of the Klein revolution was to reduce the presence and voice of feminist activism in the province.

Like many works in the Canadian political economy tradition, State of Struggle is long on critical political analysis and short on economic fact. The reader is left wondering whether the particular difficulties of feminist advocacy in the province result in greater gendered economic inequalities, lower female labour force participation, or greater rates of violence against women.

That said, State of Struggle makes an important contribution both to our understanding of Alberta politics and to knowledge of feminist organizing in Canada. In terms of the former, Harder's conceptualization of state forms is an important corrective to the notion of the Alberta provincial government as Conservative hegemon. Like any other state, its permeability changes with changing social, economic, and political conditions. In terms of the latter, Harder's careful history of feminist organizing in the province is a model for the kinds of provincial-level studies that are necessary to understanding the diversity of feminism in our highly decentralized federation. It is required reading for anyone with an interest in political economy or provincial politics.