Women in Higher Education in Québec

Abstract

Using her personal testimony and memories, the author revisits her own path to becoming a feminist activist and a specialist of gender and women’s history. Immigrating from Morocco to France, where she studied in Paris 8, then the center of leftist activism, she was acutely aware of the difficulties to integrate into French Society, as a young woman. Educated in the French culture, as a colonized subject of the French Empire, but still a stranger with a Moroccan passport and papers, she found in Trotskyism a new family and milieu. But she felt quickly the burden of the patriarchal structure, within this new family as well, with male comrades at the top, and female ones behind. Not able to secure a job in France, because she was not a French citizen, she migrated a second time to Canada where she found a job as a professor at the history department. She tells with many vivid details the many discriminations she endured, as a woman and as an immigrant, in the political science department where she first landed. With a group of colleagues in social sciences, she co-founded the first feminist regrouping at UQAM, which has celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2021. She faced many difficulties organizing classes and research agenda, on a wide feminist program, since the majority of the group was defending a feminist materialist perspective as well as a nationalist stance, that she did not share. This is a story often heard but rarely told at the first person, with a twist concerning the many avenues feminism encompasses, then and now.