Gendering the Vertical Mosaic: Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gendering the Vertical Mosaic: Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society Amber Gazso Roberta Hamilton , Gendering the Vertical Mosaic: Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society. 2nd edition. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005, 248 pp. Many scholars often experience some confusion upon being first introduced to feminist theorizing on the hierarchies that characterize women's and men's structural positions and agency in historical and contemporary Canadian society. This confusion tends to centre on the absence of one specific feminist lens to view the social world. Instead, the uninitiated is immediately exposed to a multitude of perspectives, centred on understanding gender inequality through different key assumptions. In this second edition, Roberta Hamilton revisits the intent of her first edition of Gendering the Vertical Mosaic published in 1996, [End Page 376] to introduce readers to these different feminist viewpoints and understandings of Canadian society. Continuing in the same vein in this edition, Hamilton effortlessly unravels and differentiates among several feminist theoretical understandings, thereby smoothing out confusion and revealing for readers how Canadian society is a "vertical mosaic" that is not just class-stratified but racialized and gendered too. Many readers will find her revisions culminate in an updated text containing recent events and scholarly work and appreciate the new chapter on feminist understandings of globalization and the restructuring of the Canadian state as a welcome and necessary addition. What makes the text immediately refreshing and appealing as an introductory text or a text for the more sophisticated reader is Hamilton's willingness to state her feminist assumptions and definitional standpoints that guided her writing of the text in the introductory chapter. Hamilton briefly reviews John Porter's ungendered Vertical Mosaic as a main impetus to her own exploration of class-based, racialized and gendered hierarchies in Canadian society. Her gendering of the vertical mosaic is influenced by a process-based understanding of gender; the fluidity and ongoing construction of gender means its manifestation in multiple forms subjected to multiple understandings. Readers are encouraged to be an 'active' audience, to make their own connections amongst each of the feminist approaches and substantive areas covered within the chapters despite her dividing up "the indivisible so that we may proceed in some sort of systematic fashion" (7). Hamilton begins Chapter 1 by first stressing the importance of theory to any understanding of the social world before delineating how its use as tool to is taken up differently by feminist theorists. Using the classic argument posed by Karl Marx to frame the discussion, that individuals are born into particular experiences that shape their lives, she shows how particular feminist thinkers have differently theorized women's agency and their making of history as shaped by the conditions they have been situated within, thus giving rise to the multitude of feminist theoretical perspectives. It is through this more in-depth discussion of these perspectives (socialist feminism, radical feminism, anti-racism feminism and feminist psychoanalysis and poststructural theory) that readers meet important first wave feminist thinkers (i.e. Mary Wollstonecraft as a key figure of liberal feminism) and the assumptions of each perspective. Feminist theoretical perspectives are shown to be potential mechanisms of social change — they challenge the gendered order — but, in turn, are challenged by taken-for-granted assumptions about physical differences between women and men that are upheld by structural and ideological forces. The 'women's movement' and its containment of the specific challenges second wave feminists made to these structural and ideological forces in Canadian society is the subject matter of Chapter 2. Hamilton traces the gradual rise of the women's movement, noting the increasing participation of women [End Page 377] in the labour force and its affinity with other social movements in the 1960s as its main catalysts. She reviews how particular feminist perspectives gave rise to feminist agendas that have been and are forwarded by specific action (the 1970 Royal Commission, lobbying, conscious raising, the development of women's centres and caucuses, business and cultural initiatives and efforts within the academy) to bring about change and also points to the diversified and multifaceted character of the women's movements in Canada. Special attention is given to feminist identification of the family as a sight...