Women and the State

Travelling in England and the United States, Canadian socialist feminists have often been very surprised to discover the strongly academic and weakly activist formation of socialist feminism in these countries. The element of surprise arises from an assumption that the large quantities of English and American socialist feminist literature which we in Canada consume emanate (somehow) from vast systems of socialist feminist political mobilizing. Within Canada, socialist feminists have an ongoing history of participation in popular movements, particularly the women's movement, while comparatively few socialist feminists hold academic positions. Given the sparse number of accounts documenting socialist feminism as an organized political practice, there is an inclination to suppose a rough international uniformity in the political location(s) of socialist feminism although not, after the UN Decade for Women, of feminism. National variations in socialist feminism are constituted organizationally as well as textually, despite our international appearance to each other chiefly as texts. Minimally, anticipation of significant differences in where and how socialist feminism is practised might help us become more astute travellers. Women and the State: A Conference for Feminist Activists, held from 6-8 February 1987 in Toronto, reflected the strengths of a Canadian socialist feminist activist tradition, the chief concern of the event being strategic analysis from the perspective of women's organizing. Focusing on the interaction between feminist organizing and state processes, the conference emphasized a very different range of issues than has appeared in the English socialist feminist literature, which has for the most part described the internal practices of gender regulation in social policy and welfare, together with the effects of these regulatory practices on women's lives. While English socialist feminists have made distinguished contributions to the analysis of official

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• Femocratic Feminisms

  Open Access•Sophie Watson•The Sociological Review•1991

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