The Waffle and the Women’s Movement

Abstract

Without any question, the Waffle was the culmination of the politicization of the 1960s, Canadian style. The events and movements that formed the international context for our radicalization were indeed extraordinary: the Cuban revolution, the Algerian war of Independence, Ban the Bomb marches, the American Black civil rights movement - Freedom Summer, SNCC, Malcom, Martin, the Black Panthers - both Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, the war and the anti-war movement, dodging the draft, SDS, the Yippies, the urban ghetto riots, May/June in Paris, the Prague spring, the Prague repression, the Chicago police riots at the time of the Democratic convention, where I personally saw for the first time what the armed might of the state really looked like. In Canada we participated directly and indirectly in many of these movements. But we confronted and were touched particularly by the independantiste movement in Quebec and by the crisis of national identity in English Canada, overshadowed culturally and stunted economically by the American giant to the south.