Sabine at the fabulous blog, http://www.confabulous.ca (check it out – it is my new obsession!) has started up a discussion on the future of the women’s movement, that I think everyone should check out!
I think this is a difficult discussion that we need to have and which I’ve been having offline with a number of feminist friends across Canada over the last month. How can we mobilize feminists across Canada to collaborate, and how can we do so without marginalizing or oppressing groups or individuals? This is a question that my generation needs to tackle and which I think we have often tried to do so.
In response to Sabine’s request for her readers’ dreams for the women’s movement, I added the comment below? Go check out Sabine’s blog and join in the conversation by adding your own dream!
I would like a stronger women’s movement and a more connected women’s movement. With Web 2.0 technologies, we should be able to create something where women from across Canada and women within our provinces and cities can connect, share, help each other, and collaborate. What are each of our organization’s goals and how can we help each other reach them – how can we include other organizations within the very structure of our events, instead of just having an ‘information table’ for other organizations to promote their events and causes. How can we interest those who might not be already within the struggle to join us? How do we market feminism?
I’ve worked with a number of different organizations and I find that what they all could improve on is working with each other. There is a real need for some sort of collaboration and easy communication between organizations as I think the organizations’ goals are often quite similar. How can we work together and support each other and plan together?
We talk so much about organizational strategic plans these days but I think we need a strategic plan that works across organizations and that unites organizations. We also need to be able to know who is out there and who is working on what issues and how to contact them.
How can we figure out what we all want and what we would like to see and how we can ensure that we do not oppress or marginalize certain groups in our movement? There has been talk that there is no one women’s movement anymore, but that their are various separate movements (and that that is important because it allows certain groups to prioritize their issues) but how can we work together and support each other if that is the case?
And then comes the question of how can we fund feminist work and support feminist work and get people interested in feminist work? And how can we have our work listened to by the media and by politicians? What was it about the National Action Committee that previously gave it such prominence and why has that prominence faded?
And how can we acknowledge different political positions within the feminist movement without alienating people from the movement? How can we keep it from becoming a question of who is feminist enough?
These are all questions that I think we need to think about and talk about. I would LOVE to have a monthly or bimonthly ‘Future of (Canadian) Feminism’ Blogging carnival! I am a little busy at the moment finishing my thesis but I volunteer to create one for July when I will be done… unless someone wants to take my idea and start it before then… in which case, Antigone will host the second one!
This to me is an absolutely crucial discussion to have – what is our future, where do we go from here, how can we continue getting stronger? But we also need to figure out how we can guard against the discriminatory and marginalizing tendencies of past organizations. We must do better than we have before.
