Tag: Feminism

In Newmarket, Asian massage workers have been engaged in a battle with the town council, which is intent on shutting down their businesses by claiming that the workers are both disreputable criminals and sex trafficking victims.

Envisioning a liberated Palestine means imagining liberated Palestinian women. What is a Palestinian feminist future, and how do we get there?

At the beginning of the pandemic, the Pacific Gateway and Hilton Metrotown hotels laid off their workers – then refused to hire them back. Hotel workers are fighting for their jobs, and for the future of the hotel industry after the pandemic.

More strategies for challenging patriarchal white supremacy in labour

Mainstream feminism’s wildest dreams involve women being represented at the top of their fields. It’s a depressingly bland and narrow dream. This issue of Briarpatch thinks bigger, asking: how can we ensure all women are safe, healthy, cared for, and free?

If we could reimagine our world in order to put trans women’s well-being at its centre, maybe we could make the system more equitable and safe for all parents and children. 

Union members and staff say that sexism, anti-Black racism, and other oppressive attitudes are deeply entrenched in many unions. Drawing on a history of women, trans, and racialized workers fighting for their place in the labour movement, trade unionists share ideas to transform unions today.

Women have struggled to get what little we have in prison – but the COVID pandemic has stripped even that away.

A note from Briarpatch’s editor, clarifying four factual inaccuracies that existed in the baby book, and how they came to be published. 

In a new report, people inside women’s prisons explain how incarceration has impacted their reproductive health – from limiting health care access, to verbal and physical abuse, to destroying family connections.

New Brunswick’s refusal to fund clinic-based abortions is discriminatory, partisan, and simply harmful to health. A new lawsuit by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a last-ditch effort to lift the restriction and save a Fredericton abortion clinic.

When humans degrade the land, Indigenous women, girls, and trans and Two-Spirit people are the most severely affected. This isn’t an accident; it’s an integral part of settler-colonialism.

In her new book, Nora Loreto tracks the rise and fall of Canada’s organized feminist movement, and observes how formal organizations were replaced with a mix of online personalities, bloggers, and service organizations. How do we once again build a feminist movement that can pose a serious challenge to neoliberal austerity and misogyny?

Amid COVID-19 and a global uprising against police brutality, the already intense demands and pressures that Black women face at work have become crushing. Hawa Mire convened a roundtable on Black women’s labour during these times

By remaining silent during the invasion of Wet’suwet’en land, settler feminists in Canada have risked both complicity in this violence and irrelevance in a women’s movement that is global in scope.

“you bear their names like heavy robes. say it. / bind your waist in white ribbon. history’s seams / are tearing. you learned violence as the sweetest love / but you learned from the wrong people.“ Poetry winner of the Writing in the Margins contest.

In Honduras, women maquila workers are fighting back against the multinational garment companies that they say are endangering their health and safety.

As we stare down a climate crisis and a hard-right political wave, women activists are setting out to transform electoral politics in Canada. But are the parties ready for them?

“She doesn’t understand that she was born into a white supremacist society that devalues and underestimates Black women. Instead, she only knows that she doesn’t have ‘good hair.‘” Photography runner-up of the Writing in the Margins contest.

The federal government is ending the Caregiver Program, which gave migrant caregivers a pathway to permanent residency. But caregivers are fighting back by demanding permanent residency upon arrival.