Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney Nancy Janovicek Campbell, Lara, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney, eds.–Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. 324 p. Feeling Feminism is a fascinating collection of essays about second-wave feminist activism in Canada because it centres the very thing that has been used to justify women’s exclusion from politics for centuries: emotion. Drawing on feminist political theory that rejects the dichotomy of emotional feminine reaction and rational masculine reason, the editors explain that the essays are not about ‘emotional’ women but, rather how women “used emotion for control” (p. 18). Informed by affect theory and the history of emotion, the essays examine diverse organizations and actions to demonstrate how women mobilized their emotions to challenge gendered inequalities. Following critical race theorists (in particular bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patrician Hill Collins, and Gloria Anduzula), the essays demonstrate that emotions can be productive because they create activist communities based on shared experiences. But emotional bonds among activists can also be exclusionary; to be a useful lens for analysis, historians must be aware of how emotions are shaped by hierarchies of power. The essays are attentive to how bonds of connectedness forged in passionate activism often shame those who do not meet—or may reject—activists’ ideals and imaginations of equality. [End Page 200] A central theme of the book is that emotions are both individual and public. Contributions by Whitney Wood and Cheryl Krasnick Warsh use letters to examine women’s emotional responses to maternal health and potential threats to their children’s health. Drawing from her research on pain in childbirth, Wood examines letters mothers wrote to Grantly Dick-Read, who promoted “natural childbirth” to counter the medicalization of childbirth in the postwar era. Women expressed pride that they had endured the pain of childbirth, shame if they did not, and anger if they believed that unwanted medical intervention had robbed them of the experience. Krasnick Warsh uses mothers’ “fan mail” to Frances Oldham Kelsey thanking her for preventing thalidomide from being approved in the United States. She argues letters to well-known people is a unique epistolary form because the intent is to direct action. Individual letters produced collective anger about male control over childbirth and the threat to children’s health fuelled the women’s health movement. Activism entails a range of emotions, often simultaneously, because of the various gendered and racialized life experiences of organizers. Essays by Kevin Brushett and Josette Brun et al. examine women working in male-dominated spaces. Using the Company of Young Canadians (CYC) to reassess the origins of the second wave in the New Left, Brushett argues that the burnout and isolation that CYC women experienced informed their feminist practice of understanding the connections between the personal and the political. Disempowerment in a male-dominated environment helped them envision a different way of doing politics based in developing a nurturing community. Using the 1981 Women’s Journalists’ Conference in Quebec, Josette Brun, Laurie Leplanche, and Sophie Doucet examine the emotional tension in the discussions about succeeding in a male-dominated profession based on competitiveness while trying to adapt the profession to accommodate women’s familial responsibilities. While proud of their accomplishments, women at the conference also talked about the shame, guilt, and embarrassment caused by time away from children. Alienation and isolation were common experiences in women-only groups, too. Funké Aladejebi examines black teachers’ anger and frustration in the Federation of Women Teachers’ Association of Ontario. Her analysis of white women’s inability to hear black women’s discussions of racism within the profession demonstrates how hierarchies of emotions could exist within a group and also for the need to centre race in affect theory. Sarah Nickel draws on Dian Million’s theorization of “felt knowledge” to examine a range of emotional responses in British Columbia Indigenous women’s activism and argues that “political work is emotional in nature, just as emotions are, in fact, labour” (p. 74). Activists mobilized mourning, exhaustion, and loss to make critical interventions into the colonial legal...