This essay analyzes the discourses on woman suffrage articulated at the annual meetings of the National Council of Women of Canada from 1894 to 1918. The essay argues that the women active in the National Council articulated a vision of transcendent citizenship for Canadian women. This “transcendent” citizenship was exercised through personal influence and moral suasion, through the election of men with strong moral character, and through raising public-spirited sons. This understanding of women’s citizenship valorized women’s personal, moral influence over and above their political equality. Literally and figuratively concerned with enfranchising White women, the woman suffrage debate in the National Council was influenced by a nation-building project that sought to establish Canada as a White settler nation. While the woman suffrage movement was important for extending the political rights of White women, it was also authorized through race-based arguments that linked White women’s enfranchisement to the need to protect the nation from “racial degeneration.”
For some time now I have been intrigued by the discourses on post-feminism consistently articulated within popular media. In an attempt to interrogate and understand the rise of this post-feminist movement, this article discusses three of the most popular treatments of the topic: René Denfeld’s The New Victorians (1995), Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After (1993), and Christina Hoff Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (1994). Specifically concerned with how these works define feminism, how they articulate the “crisis” of the movement, and what solutions they propose, I am interested in uncovering what is at stake in these debates. The similarities between these books (all published in the early 1990s, all discussing campus feminism, all written by feminist-identified, university-educated women) allow for an assessment of how these young, white, well-educated women position themselves against a movement once thought to be theirs alone. While each author claims to offer insight into the current crisis facing feminism, it is my contention that, collectively, these works signal a fear of the perceived radicalism of feminism on university campuses, a radicalism which these authors attribute to the increasing influence of queer theory, “radical” lesbians, and feminists of colour. These fears over the potential radicalization of young women belie a concern over the loss of literary and canonical traditions, as well as an attendant concern over the legacy of the university as a cultural, intellectual, and social institution.
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