On Intergenerational Feminisms
This week I attended a lovely event hosted by soon-to-be-retired Senator Marilou McPhedran. It was billed as a symposium on the “Virus of Inequality”, and the evening event and reception was part of a series of events and dialogues that the senator was hosting. Part of the motivation was to mark the anniversary of section 15 of the Charter (something the senator had a hand in establishing).
It was a complex and ambitious event, featuring three MCs, an excellent keynote address by the CEO of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, reflections from former WAGE minister Maryam Monsef about the work she has been doing with young Afghan women and the recognition of four special “Femtors” for their contributions to Canadian feminism and women's equality.
Let me make this clear before I go further. I’m not begrudging the event or the recognition of these particular women. All of them had a substantial impact on Canada’s feminist history - an impact that lives on in the legislative protections we enjoy, in the organizations we rely on, the shifts in gender stereotypes and expectations that so many of us take for granted. But the way the event played out really got me thinking about the very complex relationships between different generations of Canadian feminists as well as different parts of our feminist movements.
As an early 1968 baby, I guess I fall squarely into the category of “Elder Gen X”. Too young to be part of the second wave, too old to be considered third wave. Just there, doing the work and left to our own devices. I came of age at the time of massive progress - the Morgentaler decision, the Chantal Daigle case, the struggle to include equality rights in the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, reform to sexual assault legislation, pay equity legislation in some provinces, the Employment Equity Act, and much more. At the campus level, my generation of feminists worked to raise awareness of date rape and established the "no means no" campaign, pushed for access to contraception and abortion referrals, set up women's resource centres and peer support networks, pushed for sexual harassment policies and codes of conduct.
I started to get more active in the provincial and national women's movement when I was a student leader in Ontario, during the time of the Paul Martin/Chretien cuts to funding for women's organizations and their overhaul of transfers for education, health care and social programs. Let's call it Liberal Austerity part 1, since we're now in part 2. The loss of core/operational funding support left many feminist organizations and coalitions scrambling to determine a path to a sustainable future. And this was complicated by another existential crisis, marked by challenging internal discussions around representation and inclusion of diverse voices, particularly coming from racialized and immigrant women, lesbians and women with disabilities.
In the early 2000s I was part of a discussion about the future of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, one of a few "youth" voices (I use quotes because I was in my early 30s) as the structure of the organization and the way that young feminists were organizing at the time meant that young feminists had no way to get involved in NAC or in formal feminist organizations. The women at the centre of trying to keep the movement alive were women who had known each other and worked together for decades. So there was a real source of tension arising from a perception that the established women's movement was inaccessible to younger women, and the perception that many younger feminists at the time were focused less on issues of law and institutional reform and economic equality and more on sexuality, bodily autonomy, intersectionality, anti-racism, trans inclusion, sex work advocacy, and so on.
Now I say this because I always felt that the conflict was a false one, amplified by a culture of scarcity and fear because of the threat of funding cuts and a recognition of the precarity of women's gains. Sometimes it felt like we could be in the same room but different perspectives were having different conversations and not really taking the time to listen and hear each other.
Now, why I am telling this back story while reflecting on a celebratory event in 2026? Because of who was there, and who was not, and because of what was said.
The women receiving awards, all connected with Marilou and having somewhat of a shared or interconnected history, all in their 80s but still active in many ways, diverse in some ways but not in others, were all women who had broken incredible barriers, faced extremely challenging environments, discrimination and backlash for their work, and had made significant contributions through politics, philanthropy, legal fights, and journalism. Attending were senators, representatives from some national feminist organizations, friends and family of the recipients, students academics and folks from the human rights legal community, and a lot of of young Afghan women eager to raise awareness of the extreme challenges facing women at home and to thrive despite everything. It was definitely an intergenerational gathering of not every facet of Canadian feminisms but certainly a smattering of a few different perspectives.
Most of the evening was wonderful. Incredible, rich reflections about the virus of inequality and its many potential antidotes. Heartwarming tributes for each of the Femtors and inspiring reflections by the women recognized.
Unfortunately my mood changed with former Senator Nancy Ruth spoke. Now, she is a very controversial figure. Brash and outspoken, her style makes a lot of sense given her background, experience, the struggles she faced and the time that she was doing some foundational work. But her relationship with feminists of generations younger than hers is fraught. During the Harper years, when she was a conservative senator, she controversially told a group of representatives from national women's organizations to "shut the fuck up" about whether abortion or contraception would be covered under Harper's global maternal and child health initiative. This happened about a week before I started at my current job and so while I wasn't at that event I certainly was part of the discussions that ensued, especially after many groups' funding was subsequently cut.
During her remarks she focused on some of the things she was proudest of in ter time as a Senator, and when started to brag about her attempt to co-opt Randall Garrison's bill on hate crimes based on gender identity, her remarks began to veer into the problematically transphobic. That was too much for me to take, and given the current global attack on trans rights that we have worked so hard to win - an attack that will inevitably harm all women, cis and trans. I'm not saying that Nancy Ruth is a TERF - I honestly am not sure - but the remarks were certainly problematic, and her approach to that bill (which was in its third attempt at getting through the House, held up because of her desire to use this bill to advance a long-held concern about the lack of clear references to misogyny as hate speech rather than championing it as a victory for an extremely vulnerable population) led to it dying on the order papers when the government prorogued.
And this is where the intergenerational differences between feminisms come in. Second wave feminists were intent on not just advancing the interests of individual women but in putting in place mechanisms to address systemic barriers to discrimination against women. And they made incredible progress in a hugely hostile environment. The progress they made, however, is often framed as a victory for middle class white women - the women who had the education and means to lead the way at the time. Feminism has never been monolithic though, and certainly there were other movements, connected and not quite connected, that also did some foundational work during the same time - Black feminists, domestic workers, immigrant and migrant movements, Indigenous women, lesbians, queer women and trans women - and a lot of this work inspired the adoption of intersectionality (a concept that arose out of Black feminist scholarship and approach) that many feminist of my generation and younger feminists see as fundamental to the way we work.
Many women's rights and equality seeking organizations have worked hard for the last two decades to lift up and centre voices of marginalized women, to advance gender inclusion, to see the connections, complexities and nuances of the way that power and oppression work in our society. And we have had to learn that in order to do that work properly, we need to understand our own place within these structures. We need to understand where we may unconsciously be perpetuating the very systems we are trying to dismantle. It's a humbling exercise, especially for those of us who are white, middle class women - even us Gen Xers who came of age during a brutal recession with few opportunities for jobs and stable incomes. We stumble, we make mistakes, we react in all kinds of crappy ways.
Unlearning is a messy, complicated process - for individuals, organizations and movements.
Some younger feminists do not always know the history or understand the struggles that our second wave sisters went through to get us here. Some women take the victories for granted and don't understand that the struggle for human rights is never over. Rights need to be realized. They need to be protected. They need to be defended.
The concepts of rights is ever-changing as our world changes. It doesn't make the rights any less universal - it means that we need to constantly amend and advance these rights because they are always already under attack from the forces that wish to keep power in the hands of a few - the forces of patriarchy, oligarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and so on.
I think younger generations of women are starting to realize this, and it's being helped along by the huge rise of blatant misogyny and sexism perpetuated not only by the manosphere but also by authoritarian governments that are actively seeking to roll back rights. The attack we are seeing against trans folk and the concerted attempts at erasure. The rise of hateful, racist, anti-immigrant and discriminatory attitudes. In many ways, we are back in the kind of everyday discriminatory environment that trailblazing feminists had to navigate (not that it went anywhere; we just had better ways to defend it) and we need to understand where we came from, understand how law and rights work, and keep pushing. But we don't need to push in the same way - we don't need a return to the feminist structures of the past, but rather to determine what we need to meet the challenges of today and ensure no one gets left behind.
As much as the event this week left me with many mixed feelings, I have come to the conclusion that we can thank and honour our second wave sisters without tolerating or platforming some of the notions and attitudes that were a part of that kind of feminism and that diminished and marginalized the voices of diverse women. The righteousness and determination were necessary to accomplish the things they did and they did it in an environment that was extremely hostile. And they laid the foundations that many of us are trying to preserve and build on today. But the movement has grown and changed and we need to celebrate and amplify that as well.
To defend our gains and keep advancing we need well-funded and vibrant women's and equality-seeking organizations and they need the capacity to work together in all the spaces where decisions are made. Certainly it is time to reach back to the determined and passionate energies that led our sisters to establish the organizations and institutions that we are trying to hold on to, and to double down on our efforts to make sure they are able to continue to do this important work, or new structures and ways of working are established to keep the movement strong, inclusive and effective.
