February 2006

Briarpatch
March/April 2006

AN OLD BUTTON HAS reappeared recently among young feminists at the University of Saskatchewan. “This is what a feminist looks like,” it reads. This button illustrates at least two concepts that are key to understanding the current state of feminism in Canada. First, feminists are diverse. Feminists don’t all look the same and don’t all agree about everything. Second, it demonstrates that feminism is alive and well, and is still being proudly worn on the sleeves of people of all ages, races, classes, orientations, and abilities.

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by Jenn Ruddy
Briarpatch Magazine
March 2006

To what extent is it appropriate or possible for men who resist patriarchy to participate in the feminist movement?

“You can see in the very movements of their bodies, forced painfully into the narrow space of permitted masculinity, moving inside an invisible cage, how the supposed winners of the gender game suffer just as much as the others from their hollow victory. Constantly terrified of each other and everyone else, themselves most of all, they take their fear out on the rest of us, perpetuating the climate of fear and violence—but when the terrain of affection itself has been occupied, when every gesture has been appropriated by the language of coercion, how will we approach each other for support, for sanctuary and for healing?”

(CrimethInc., Days and Nights of Love and War)

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by Bonnie Morton
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2006

“The lack of a gender-based analysis of welfare reform is having a devastating effect on the health and well-being of women.”

THE PRAIRIE WOMEN’S Health Centre of Excellence recently released a report entitled “Women and Social Assistance Policy in Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” which looks at the impact that changes in Canadian social assistance policies over the last forty years. The report found that social policy reforms in both provinces are causing hardship for women and their families.

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by Lisa Comeau
Briarpatch Magazine
March 2006

A university education is widely accepted as the “great equalizer,” the means by which class mobility can be achieved. But un-partnered mothers in academia—including undergraduate and graduate students, contract academic staff, and, to a lesser extent, tenure-track and tenured faculty—face structural barriers that put these women at a great disadvantage relative to their childless and partnered peers. Their long-term ability to provide for their children depends on their success in academia. Yet success in academia is made much harder for them because of the chronic lack of time and money and the continual stress and insecurity of life—much of which is worsened by the restrictions imposed by systems of child care, housing and employment.

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by Simon Helweg-Larsen
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2006

RAPED, TORTURED, AND BEATEN, her hands and feet tied with barbed wire and her skin covered in puncture holes, Maria Isabel Veliz Franco was found dead in Guatemala City in December of 2001. Yet while the murder of this fifteen-year-old girl sparked some local media attention, she was already just one more case among the hundreds of women killed in Guatemala that year.

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a review of Ten Thousand Roses
by Judy Rebick
Penguin Canada, 2005

Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution is Judy Rebick’s chronicle of the second wave of the mainstream feminist movement in Canada. Rebick herself was an active participant in the latter part of this movement and remains a well-known feminist today. As such, she is well placed to take on a project to document a history that is in danger of being lost or that might be assumed to be no different from the US feminist movement. In fact, as is revealed throughout the book, the Canadian feminist movement was unique in terms of the issues that mobilized women, the struggles and challenges faced, and the victories won.

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a review of The Wimp Factor
by Stephen J. Ducat
Beacon Press, 2005

OVER THE LAST DECADE the emerging field of study known as “masculinity studies” has begun to generate a great deal of debate and attention. It is not, however, a new area of study; the current theoretical underpinnings of masculinity were developed through the appropriation of a variety of issues raised by feminists from the late ’70s and ’80s that are only now receiving due attention outside of feminist circles.

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by Ariel Troster
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2006

I COULDN’T HELP BUT CRINGE when Jack Layton suggested during one of the election debates that electing more NDP women to Parliament would somehow civilize the raucous atmosphere of Question Period. There is no doubt that having more women in Parliament is a good and important thing. But the expectation that it’s women’s role to be a quieting, nurturing force, bringing manners into the male world of cursing and posturing, is a throwback to essentialist feminism—the notion that by pure virtue of biology, men and women “naturally” exhibit different characteristics. You know the drill: women are peace-loving Earth Mothers. Men are vicious brutes who like to eat large chunks of meat and play with guns. It’s women’s role to temper the male beast—especially in public life.

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power / hungry

navigating the looming energy crunch

Without Agency: My first food bank experience
by Annonymous
-plus- Dumping and Donating: How food banks contribute to an
unsustainable food system
by Tracey Mitchell

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[What's it going to take for the NDP to take a clear stand on Canada's participation in the US war on terror? Here are a few excerpts from NDP defence critic Dawn Black's comments in the on-line debate:

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