Amanda Ricci, Countercurrents: Women’s Movements in Postwar Montreal (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Amanda Ricci, Countercurrents: Women’s Movements in Postwar Montreal (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023)

Despite its subtitle, Countercurrents focuses on the 1970s through the early 1990s rather than the entire period after World War II. Based mainly on French language sources, this book provides insights into women’s activism within an enlarged definition of feminism, one that includes the work of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant women who confronted not only sexism but also, in many instances, racism and colonialism. In addition to the introduction and conclusion there are five chapters that deal with Kahnawàke women’s activism, diasporic feminism in English-speaking Black Montreal, feminist nationalist activism, transnational feminism among Haitian women, and Italian women’s organizations. Ricci wants us to understand the limits of defining feminism as a mainly white women’s movement based in the two dominant language groups. Her book also underlines the understandable hesitancy of some groups to adopt the label “feminist” because of this link.

One of Ricci’s overarching themes is the importance of understanding the links between women’s groups and other social movements. Feminists in the Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities had different political priorities. For example, among Indigenous activists questions of land and belonging loomed large especially for those women who were excluded from reserves and band councils because of state legislation. Anti-colonial politics, while challenging land loss, could also divide as Indigenous women demanded more equitable relations with men. Fighting settler colonialism through organizations such as the Quebec Native Women’s Association (1974) meant challenging sections of the Indian Act (1951) that deprived women who married non-Indigenous men of their rights and their children’s rights. Leaders such as Mary Two-Axe Earley from Kahnawàke took on national roles and formed women’s organizations to fight for changes such as full citizenship rights beginning in the 1960s. In 1981, New Brunswick’s Sandra Lovelace went to the United Nations to argue that section 12(1)(b) of the Act violated minority rights and won forcing the federal government to amend it. While a victory, it was still more difficult for women who married out to pass on status to their children and grandchildren.

While English-speaking Black women founded the Coloured Women’s Club of Montreal in the early 20th century, women also joined mixed gender groups fighting discrimination. Early organizing included a chapter of the United Negro Improvement Association which was established by Black porters on the railway but amply supported by its women members. By the 1970s, Ricci argues that Black power, Black internationalism, and pan-African movements provided the major inspiration for groups such as the Congress of Black Women formed in 1973-74. Black liberation was tied to women’s struggles; they were two sides of the same coin. In that spirit, the Congress worked with other women’s groups including Indigenous and Haitian groups.

The roots of Haitian transnational feminism go back to Haiti and the Ligue féminine d’action sociale (lfas), formed in 1950 by mostly middle and upper class women. The Duvalier dictatorship spawned resistance groups and those fleeing Haiti for Quebec were often educated and French-speaking unlike later Creole-speaking, working-class migrants. Thus it is not surprising that diaspora feminists tended to be middle-class professionals who founded Strong Vibrant Women (1973), later Rassemblement des femmes haïtiennes (rafa) and Point de Ralliement des femmes d’origine haïtienne (1971); the latter was associated with the Maison d’Haïti which provided services to immigrants. International Women’s Year (1975) galvanized women’s groups including those in the diaspora. Though the meeting in Mexico City attracted the most attention, some women’s organizations such as rafa attended a more left-leaning gathering in East Berlin where the focus was on racism, imperialism, and poverty. While Ricci acknowledges the existence of several strands of Haitian feminism, her choice of these organizations is not explained. Although some groups had ties to Marxism and/or the communist movement, this is left undeveloped. Although there are many examples of links to other multi-racial grassroots organizations, there were limits to cooperation among Quebec’s women’s groups. For example, while the Congress of Black Women took up the cause of Haitian political prisoners, relations with other feminist groups were not always smooth as in the case of the Fédération des femmes du Québec (ffq), some of whose members were accused of racism. Even though Haitian feminists shared the Black internationalist goals and agenda of the Congress of Black Women, they chose to found their own, French-speaking chapter thus underlining the importance of language.

Haitian women’s groups developed links to the Collectif des femmes immigrantes du Québec (1983) which in turn had ties to the Centro Donne Italiane di Montreal (1978); the latter provided services to immigrant Italian women as well as connections to other feminist groups in the city. The Centro played an important role in the allophone communities where neither French nor English was dominant and Ricci argues for more use of sources from these communities in researching the city’s feminist histories. Unlike other immigrant groups, the Centro’s political orientation tended to be local rather than transnational and heavily intergenerational as younger generations aimed to improve their circumstances sometimes leading to clashes over values. The Centro worked as a collective under worker management principles, aiming to increase immigrant women’s engagement in Quebec’s social and political life. It also supported the wages for housework campaign, free birth control, and abortion. In addition, it participated in garment worker outreach and in the creation of a women’s committee in the Italian international labour federation. Increasingly, in the 1980s, Francophone women’s groups recognized the need to pay attention to immigrant and racialized women’s issues. With the ascension of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and beyond, as civil society groups found themselves providing social and other services, women’s groups organized to fight back and, according to Ricci, a new phase of feminist activism emerged.

The context for these various feminist organizations was defence of the French language and separatism but growing nationalist sentiment in Quebec in the 1960s excluded women’s concerns, an absence that the Front de Libération des femmes du Québec (flf) was formed to change. Inspired by Black nationalism, Indigenous politics, and left-wing currents, the flf’s Marxist influence is underexplored, though Ricci notes the important work done by Madeleine Parent and Lea Roback, both important union leaders and figures on the left as well as bridge builders with women from various cultures. Language was tied to the nationalist agenda. While the early manifestations of feminism in Montreal appeared among English-speaking university students and were nourished by English-language texts such as the 1968 McGill Birth Control Handbook, by the 1970s, French texts appeared and groups such as the flf moved to exclude Anglophones from membership—not only for nationalist reasons but also because of class differences; women from Anglophone Montreal tended to be from more comfortable backgrounds while Francophone women came from more working-class families. The flf saw women’s exploitation and unequal status as part of the wider context of economic exploitation and national liberation. Eventually the group dissolved as members joined Marxist groups. A few ex-flf members went on to form the Centre des femmes, a small group of revolutionary feminists that defended abortion, took anti-capitalist positions, and worked to increase women’s presence within the nationalist movement including the Parti Québéçois.

Ricci’s probe into the tangled world of Quebec feminism underlines the challenges and barriers within the movement. As she notes, we have been fighting a serious backlash since the 1980s yet the women’s movement has succeeded in “mainstreaming feminist analysis.” (196) There remain dangers as well: while more visible, racialized and Indigenous women’s needs and contributions challenge us to re-envision a politics of multiple sovereignties and political solidarity. In addition, Ricci urges that much more research needs to be done to uncover missing aspects of feminism’s history, a challenge that future scholars and activists need to embrace. Countercurrents has provided readers with a rich and thoughtful analysis.

Linda Kealey

University of New Brunswick

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.016.