Editors: Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson and Catherine Gidney
Deadline: 30 September 2016
In 1967 female members of SUPA denounced their male
comrades’ sexism, arguing that it made the organization “like a civil
rights organization with a leadership of southern racists.” In 1970
members of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus led an Abortion
Caravan across Canada to demand the de-criminalization of abortion,
employing powerful props such as coat hangers and coffins to symbolize
the danger and death associated with illegal abortion. As part of the
postwar women’s peace movement, women campaigned
against war toys and went on hunger strikes. And at the Indochinese
Conference to End the War, held in Vancouver in spring 1971, feminists
engaged in intense disagreements over the degree to which patriarchy,
imperialism, race, and sexuality should be assessed
in relation to war.
All of these activities involved emotions. Sometimes women acted out of
pain and anger while at other times, they were driven by hope or the
possibility of liberation and freedom. They experienced excitement,
exhilaration, desire, rage, and deep personal connections
with other women. This collection aims to explore the intersection of
the history of emotions and second-wave feminism.
Proposed chapters might pursue, but are not limited to, the following
questions: How do emotional bonds politicize feminist activists? How do
these bonds shape activist politics and priorities? How have individual
emotions shaped feminist activities? How have
women resisted and broken down older emotional patterns and frameworks
and created new ones? While the height of the movement runs from
approximately the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, the collection will
embrace the perspective of a ‘long second wave,’ with
interest in articles that reach back to the immediate post-suffrage era
and examine legacies that extend to the present day. Chapters might
offer new histories of second-wave feminism, or re-examine previous work
through the lens of the history of emotions.
The collection aims to capture and convey a sense of the deep passion
that runs through the movement and how thinking about this period
through the lens of emotional history might tell us new stories about
the history of Canadian second-wave feminism.
Please send a one-page single-spaced proposal and short c.v. to cgidney@stu.ca by 30
September 2016. Full papers would be due by 1 Sept. 2017.
We will be looking for short, readable pieces aimed at an undergraduate
audience (approximate length, 7000 words). Our aim is to submit the
collection to a press by January 2018.
