Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism by Joan Sangster (review)

Reviewed by: Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism by Joan Sangster Sarah Glassford Sangster, Joan – Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021. 470 p. In Demanding Equality, Joan Sangster demonstrates the confidence and virtuosity of a well-seasoned scholar at the top of her game. Her topic is sprawling and unwieldy: the origins, activities, ideologies, successes, failures, controversies, long-term impact, and leading figures of an ever-evolving, amorphous, and often internally divided feminist movement, across Canada, over the course of a century, with attention to social, cultural, economic, political, racial, and intellectual factors. Just the sort of topic, in fact, that undergraduates propose for end-of-term essays before their instructors insist they scale back to something manageable. Sangster gamely plunged in where others rightly fear to tread, and the result is a gift to all of us. The book is organized into 10 chapters that are organized thematically around different versions of feminism (socialist, labour, reform, agrarian) or feminism's engagement with particular issues (suffrage, work, political parties, war and peace). Along the way, it carries readers from the mid-1800s to the end of the 1980s in roughly chronological order. Sangster's commitment to understanding intersectionalism is clear, with BIPOC, francophone, and other minority-inflected experiences (or the lack of attention paid to them by White, anglophone feminists at various points) addressed throughout the book. Labour and socialist feminisms get far more attention from Sangster than they have received in most previous studies, and when this book is read in concert with the recent women's suffrage centennial series from UBC Press, the result is Canadian feminist history that looks rather different—and certainly more diverse and radical—than readers might previously have been led to believe. The book's central chapters are buttressed by an introduction and afterword that add substantial value to the whole. In the introduction, Sangster sets out her definition of feminism (after exploring other options), takes issue with the traditional "waves" interpretation of feminist history, and candidly addresses her role as one of the "feminist activists and creators of history" (p. 11) implicated in the story she is about to tell. The afterword peers ahead into the 1990s and beyond, offering End Page 222 a brief description of self-described "Third Wave" feminism and reflecting on its strengths, weaknesses, and relationship to what went before or might come after. Time will tell whether Sangster's assessments of these more recent developments (still practically current events) hold up, but either way they will stand as just the sort of primary source she has used elsewhere in the book, in which one feminist generation observes and comments (often critically) on another's differing priorities and approaches. A casual reader could be forgiven for assuming Demanding Equality is a celebratory romp through a succession of "firsts" and a cheerful narrative of progress, since the lives of girls and women looked very different by the 1990s than they did in the 1890s, generally for the better. But this is neither a celebratory nor even a particularly cheerful narrative, and it often makes for downright depressing reading. Because at every step, Sangster argues, the revolution has gone unfinished, as it has been rolled back or undercut by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Or maybe, she often suggests, whatever change feminists of a certain period were seeking was not quite radical enough. Earning the vote did not "clean up" politics; electing women to positions of political power did not dramatically alter the patriarchal systems already in place; opening the doors of male-dominated workplaces and professions, winning the right to work after marriage, and passing pay equity legislation did not necessarily close gender pay gaps or mean equal status and treatment on the job. Even today, essential components of true gender equality such as affordable childcare and reproductive justice remain unevenly accessible, if not outright inaccessible, for many women across the country. Sangster also takes great pains to highlight the innumerable ways in which class, race, ethnicity, and religion have limited, and continue to limit, many Canadian women's enjoyment of even the imperfect...