“You Appear Silent to People Who Are Deaf to What You Say”: Solidarity, Schisms, and Alterity in Immigrant Women’s Political Organizing in Toronto, 1970s-1990s
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Authors
Aguiar, Julia
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
immigrant women , history of feminism , social movements , race , gender , class , reproductive justice , labour history , Toronto , postwar Canadian history , women of colour
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Abstract
This thesis considers the connections between the increased migration of racialized women to Canada and the ascendancy of social movements in Toronto from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the mid-1970s, there was a surge of grassroots organizations founded by and for immigrant women in Toronto. They were established to address the distinct needs and experiences of immigrant women where government and preexisting, decidedly hypermasculine, ethnocultural organizations did not. This thesis argues that these organizations, and the individuals associated with them, were fundamentally political. In situating these organizations within the broader progressive political landscape of Toronto, this thesis elucidates the ways in which immigrant women’s political organizing challenged and transformed dominant social movements. In particular, immigrant women’s fraught relationship to the mainstream women’s movement in Toronto is closely examined. I argue that immigrant women organized both within and without the Toronto women’s movement. In their relationship to the women’s movement, immigrant women contested the limited perspective of white feminism by drawing closer attention to class and race. This was most evident within immigrant women’s organizing for reproductive freedom. Additionally, immigrant women organizer’s relationship to the Canadian state is analyzed as a site of struggle which dialectically constrained and sustained their activism. Because immigrant women worked in higher numbers than their Canadian counterparts and often in exploitative sectors, labour became a central issue within their activism. Through their labour organizing, immigrant women forged important alliances with the labour movement. This thesis also attends to the uneven racialization of immigrant women which informed their activism. Immigrant women’s activism offered alternative perspectives and methods of organizing which did not conform to dominant ones. By taking a relational rather than assimilationist or pluralistic approach to the relationship between immigrant women’s organizing and broader social movements, a fuller, more nuanced portrait of the intersections between immigration, gender, race, and social movements can emerge.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.