Approaching 40: The Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada

I was the lead-off speaker, setting the historical context for more recent developments. I have not presented on this topic in some time, and had a host of new information to offer. Graduate students indicated they were familiar with my co-authored book, Still Counting. Professor Maureen O’Neil (Public Administration) added some remembrances of local women who were involved in the Commission’s work in the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Former Senator Sheila Finestone spoke to me afterward about the role played by women in Quebec, telling me that she had been at the public hearings held at the YWCA in Montreal in 1968 as President of the Federation of Quebec Women (FFQ). Based on the feedback I received I agreed to participate in a panel at the Canadian Political Science Association meetings to be held in Vancouver June 2008 on the topic “Before NAC (the National Action Committee on the Status of Women). This panel has been accepted. An abstact of that paper follows: Before NAC: Strategies for Interacting with the State During the RCSW Years Lobbying within, outside and alongside the federal state resulted in the creation of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in February 1967. In addition to the Brief and Lobby strategy used by the Committee for the Equality of Women of Canada the previous year, several other models for interacting with the state emerged. Among them were the coordination of women’s groups sponsored by a sympathetic provincial Cabinet Minister in Manitoba, leadership on the part of governmental agencies funded by governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan, extra-parliamentary coordination among lead organizations in the Maritimes, amplification of key messages by state-owned media in the North, and a concerted initiative undertaken by the emerging women’s movement in Quebec. Taken together, these strategies worked effectively to provide comprehensive national coverage of matters of concern to women. The success of this mobilization prepared the way for further development of the women’s movement in English Canada, not the least of which involved preparing the ground for the creation of a peak-level women’s organization that reflected different relations of attachment to the state locally. I wrote an e-mail to one of my colleagues with this conclusion about the conference. “Yes, it was a wonderful event. Linda and I were comparing it to the first Women and Politics panel we cobbled together back in the early 1990s. It's exhilarating hearing so many smart people talking knowledgeably and passionately about new areas of inquiry.” (13 Nov 2007) I conclude the conference was very worthwhile and am pleased that it has spawned another conference paper. A copy of the paper is attached. Presenters have been asked to submit a copy for uploading to the conference website. I have decided not to add endnotes but to add a half dozen of the most important references to the main sources used in the preparation of the paper. These references were not included in the paper as delivered. The completed paper is to be uploaded to the conference website.Gender analysis is settling into comfortable middle age in the forty years since the creation of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The Royal Commission produced a case study in democratization and social inclusion in spite of the fact that more recent scholarship tends to diminish its achievement as having been limited, and even fatally flawed in terms of its outreach to the full range of women’s diversity. Sources from the archives provide a somewhat different account to the one made familiar by liberal feminists.Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF