Anglophone Women Research Articles

Access to perinatal healthcare in minority Anglophones: Hospital type and birth outcomes.

We assessed the relationship between hospital characteristics and risk of adverse birth outcomes among minority Anglophones in Montreal, Canada. The study included 124,670 births among Anglophones in metropolitan Montreal between 1998 and 2019. We estimated risk ratios (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association between hospital characteristics, including residential proximity to hospitals and language in which medical services are provided, and risks of preterm birth and stillbirth. Models were adjusted for maternal socioeconomic status and other characteristics. In this study, 8% of Anglophones had a preterm birth and 0.4% a stillbirth. Anglophone women who delivered at a farther French hospital had a greater risk of stillbirth (RR 1.67, 95% CI 1.28-2.18) than preterm birth (RR 1.21, 95% CI 1.14-1.30), compared with delivery at hospitals closer to home. In contrast, delivery at a farther English hospital was associated with similar risks of stillbirth (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.08-1.71) and preterm birth (RR 1.36, 95% CI 1.29-1.44). The greater risk of stillbirth with delivery at a farther French hospital, versus greater risk of preterm birth at a farther English hospital, remained present in analyses stratified by maternal age, education, material deprivation, and region of origin. Minority Anglophones in Montreal who travel to a farther French hospital for delivery have a greater risk of stillbirth than Anglophones who travel to a farther English hospital. This novel observation suggests the need to determine if access to perinatal healthcare in a woman's language may help reduce the risk of stillbirth.

Intersection of Language, Gender, Race, and Its Impact on Psychological Safety for Black Anglophone Women in the Québec Workplace

Aim/Purpose: This research aims to assess the extent to which discourse around representation in the Quebec workplace aligns with the experiences of Black Anglophone women. Background: There is a persistent lack of quantitative and qualitative data on Quebec’s English-speaking Black Community (ESBC). With the increase in implementation of diverse, equitable, and inclusive policies in the workplace, and recent French-language laws, it is crucial to collect current and meaningful data on the community’s experiences. Methodology: Data collection methods included interviews, surveys, and content analysis. Interviews were conducted with a small, diverse group of eight (8) Black Anglophone women aged 18-65. Findings: Québec’s language politics creates additional barriers for Black Anglophone women in the workplace, even in a working French proficiency environment. The language social stratification hinders their work quality even after Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion policies have secured them a position. Impact on Society: The volatile language politics in Québec intersect uniquely with gender and race, further shifting the goalpost for Black Anglophone women's full inclusion in the workplace. By fostering and encouraging discourse they can identify aspects of psychological safety, empowering themselves and their communities to navigate work environments more effectively.

Of Beginnings and Convergences: Contemporary Women’s Poetry in Manipur

Anglophone women’s poetry in Manipur in the last decade critiques the norms prevalent in patriarchal societies. This article focuses on six contemporary women poets whose works highlight the woman, her subjectivity, and her truths. Collectively, their works constitute an emerging feminist poetic tradition in Manipur. Despite the multiplicities of location and creative idiom of each poet, their poetry converges upon seminal issues and amplify one another’s voices, giving us an intimate glimpse of women’s trysts with everyday structures of patriarchy. The respective poets attempt to rewrite previously inscribed taboos and cultural practices—some by reimagining tropes that have weighed against fair representation of women such as the body, female desire, and myths; and others by breaking the cycle of abuse and shame through testimonial poetry.

‘We have much identity’: contesting the claimed hybrid identity in Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun

ABSTRACT Since the second half of the 20th century, the notions of hybrid, hyphenated and transcultural identity have found urgent currency for scholars interested in the Arab Anglophone literary movement. Several books and anthologies have situated Arab Anglophone writers within diaspora and multicultural studies (e.g.). In particular, the fascination of Western academia has augmented comfortable diffusion and propagation of writers and critics endorsing these concepts. Whilst representing trans-cultural and hybrid identities is of immense importance when assiduously addressing issues of diaspora, migration, exilic consciousness, and dislocation, it has also become a ‘survival’ strategy for some ‘minority’ writers. The article challenges the claim that Arab Anglophone women writers’ depiction of hybrid identity is an expression of their lamentable state of affairs. It rather argues that those writers espouse strategic construction of hybridized identity to serve extrinsic aims related to recognition, canonization, and readership. This depiction is thus closer to an ‘essentialist practice’ than to a trans-cultural hybrid identity construction.

Guardian Hosts and Custodial Witnesses: In loco parentis in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1852–1920

ABSTRACT In the mid nineteenthcentury, a subgenre of ghost stories emerged that had roots in a hybrid tradition of institutional religious doctrine and oral folkloric expressions of anxiety over the fate of the child’s soul in the afterlife. Given the persistently high infant mortality rates and increased public awareness of child abuse across the classes, the growing presence of stranded child ghosts in literary fictions of the period represents, I suggest, doubts or fears over the newly dominant liberal insistence that all children would attain peace in heaven and would be reunited and cared for by their family, as well as looked after by God. The child in this period represents the completion of the domestic and gendered ideal and various non-fiction and fiction literatures urged a sense of community care and guardianship over the living child that was extended to its dead spirit. In a great number of ghost stories by well-known and obscure Anglophone women writers, childless female and male protagonists and narrators act as witnesses for, or saviours of, the orphaned ghost child in ways that reframe or interrogate prescribed ideals regarding motherhood, fatherhood, the spinster, and the bachelor, but which simultaneously project concerns over childlessness and childhood more widely.

Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden’s controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act’s limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city’s largest Anglophone women’s organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council’s long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women’s disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists” political unity.

National Identity and Social Integration in International Marriages between Anglophone Women and Korean Men

This article investigates the capacity and willingness of women from English-speaking countries, married to Korean men, to integrate into South Korean society, via examination of the expression of national identity in everyday life and the negotiation of relationships across socio-cultural boundaries.

Negotiating Meanings of Borderlands in relation to Arabness, Americanness and Muslimness: Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

Anglophone Arab writings have come of age after years of ethnic, religious and gender-based invisibility. This literature has carved out a niche for itself as a literature of minority, of womanhood and of borderlands. Recent theorizations on borderland zone(s) have endeavored to understand journeys of displacement and dislocation that immigrants may experience. The present paper offers an investigation of how the border zone, be it geographical or psychological, is fictionalized in Arab Anglophone women narratives. The novel of the Arab American Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), highlights the borderland zone occupied by Arabs in the diaspora and represented by Khadra, the novel’s protagonist. Kahf’s novel serves here as a case study that shows how women characters have to negotiate their Arabness, Americanness and Islamness. The question is how.

“I kind of feel like sometimes I am shoving it under the carpet”: Documenting women’s experiences with post-abortion support in Ontario

Background: Abortion has been available without criminal restriction in Canada since 1988, and approximately 33 000 terminations take place in Ontario each year. Objectives: This study aimed to explore women’s expressed desire for post-abortion support services, document the priorities expressed by women in seeking post-abortion support, and identify actionable strategies to improve post-abortion support services in Ontario. Methods: Between 2012 and 2014 we conducted in-depth, open-ended interviews with 60 Anglophone women from across Ontario who had recently had an abortion. We aimed to rigorously explore the compounding issues of age and geography on women’s abortion experiences. We analyzed our data for content and themes and reported on the findings related to post-abortion support. Results: One third of our participants expressed a desire for post-abortion support, yet few were able to access a timely, affordable, non-directive service. Women were uncertain about how to find services; most contacted a provider recommended by the clinic or searched online. Women were enthusiastic about a talkline format citing anonymity and convenience as the main advantages. Conclusion: Our results suggest that exploring ways to expand post-abortion support services in Ontario is warranted. A talkline format could provide an anonymous, convenient, non-judgmental, and non-directive way to address this unmet need.

At the Intersection of Gender and Language: Why do Francophone Women have Lower Levels of Political Participation?

ABSTRACTIn Canada, research has found few differences in levels of political participation between Francophones and Anglophones despite traditional differences in resources leading to participation. This study argues that it is when gender is considered alongside language that differences emerge. Differences in conditions between Francophone and Anglophone women may mean that the explanations for the gender gaps differ. Findings show that Francophone women in Québec have lower levels of political participation than Anglophone women and men across Canada. These gender gaps are small but significant. Differences in resources and involvement in voluntary associations help account for Québec Francophone women’s lower participation. Additionally, these results indicate that the different political context and the different political influence of the women’s movement in Québec matter in determining explanations for gender gaps in political participation.

Constructing Gender Roles in Literature and Criticism: Elaine Showalter and Anglophone Women’s Literary History

Gynocriticism constructs a new perspective of women’s literary history and explores the creativity of women against the male-oriented literary canon. As the main representative of this critical practice, Elaine Showalter advocates the intention to study the production of women’s writing in relation to female experience, and the new perspectives of gender roles in literature. Th is paper focuses on literary representations of gender in the 1990s, the decade that, according to Showalter, is a watershed of women’s struggle to be accepted in the literary canon, but also the period of the flowering of postfeminism. Sarah Waters, Ann Beattie and Gloria Cigman are those contemporary women writers whose work is outlined in order to parallel Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper , an insightful narrative of female confinement which needed decades for a breakthrough but has persisted as a unique metaphor of the women’s literary tradition in the making.

Narratives of Arab Anglophone Women and the Articulation of a Major Discourse in a Minor Literature

“It is important to stress that a variety of positions with respect to feminism, nation, religion and identity are to be found in Anglophone Arab women’s writings. This being the case, it is doubtful whether, in discussing this literary production, much mileage is to be extracted from over emphasis of the notion of its being a conduit of ‘Third World subaltern women.’” (Nash 35) Building on Geoffrey Nash’s statement and reflecting on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of minor literature and Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderland(s), we will discuss in this paper how the writings of Arab Anglophone women are specific minor and borderland narratives within minor literature(s) through a tentative (re)localization of Arab women’s English literature into distinct and various categories. By referring to various bestselling English works produced by Arab British and Arab American women authors, our aim is to establish a New taxonomy that may fit the specificity of these works.

Translation on Edge: The Wager of Multilingual Poetics in Tessera’s Last Volumes (2002-2005)

As a feminist bilingual journal dedicated to experimental writing, Tessera’s fostering of a concerted dialogue between Francophone and Anglophone women writers played a pioneer role between the 1980s and 1990s in inscribing the question of translation at the heart of feminist discourse. Critical attention has been steadily directed at the work of the journal’s mostly Anglophone first collective (1984-1993), which promoted a hopeful erotics of translation, driven by ‘sextual’ pleasure in the polysemic variances of languages and a deep seated trust in translation’s capacity to modify different languages’ topographies of sexual difference in profound ways. Tessera, however, published regularly for over twenty years and had three different collectives working at its helm. This paper seeks to address the critical imbalance by focusing on the poetics of translation promoted in the last years of Tessera’s life (2002-2005), when operations shifted from Toronto to Montreal and a mostly Francophone Editorial and Advisory Board took over. Indeed, against the optimism of the early bilingual experiments that emphasized common cross-cultural understandings of writing in the feminine, the texts published in the early 2000s consistently draw attention to the constitutively exilic relation to linguistic diversity held by diasporic queer bodies that live in the interstices of overlapping cross-cultural norms. Nathalie Stephens (now Nathanaël), a poet featured prominently in Tessera’s last volumes, is possibly the most significant writer to perform the un-decidable dimensions of such interstitial dwelling. In particular, I analyze a multilingual text by Stephens published in Tessera in 2002, whose overt intertextual allusions to Nicole Brossard and Suzanne de Lotbinière-Harwood’s bilingual text Sous la langue/Under Tongue provide an interesting terrain of comparison with previous translation poetics. Contrary to the utopic ‘dream of a common language’ of Sous la langue/Under Tongue bilingual cross-contaminations, Stephens’ jagged multilingualism weaves lesbian desire with questions of bodily and cultural/linguistic exile, which provoke a radical queering (and querying) of such dream. At the crossroads of erotic and genealogic affinities Stephens gestures towards a space of collapsed translation, where the ideal “fusion” of tongues evoked by Brossard and de Lotbinière morphs into a painful and yet necessary con-fusion of languages marked by transversal alliances that anchor the text’s ‘je’ to the provisional rootedness of a diasporic memory. Despite the marked shift in tone, at the end of the essay I argue that both Stephens and her predecessors participate in Tessera’s consistent commitment to inscribing translation as a creative practice of heterotopic displacement and semiotic proliferation. A commitment, I would argue, which remains to date singularly feminist and singularly productive.

Documenting women’s abortion experiences in Ontario

Although Canada decriminalized abortion more than 20 years ago, there continue to be significant disparities in access to services, and the geographic distribution of providers is uneven. Through in-depth, open-ended interviews with 60 Anglophone women in five areas of Ontario, this study aimed to (1) document women's experiences obtaining abortion care; (2) identify the financial and personal costs associated with obtaining abortion services; and (3) explore women's perceptions as to how access to services could be improved.

Colonial modernism's thwarted maternity: Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark

Anglophone women experienced modernism as a negotiation of an interrelated set of ideologies, including that of the imperial mother. A comparative reading of Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark demonstrates ways that Bowen's and Rhys's formal experimentations reveal the impact of colonialism on maternal ideology in the interwar period. Critical assessments of Bowen and Rhys have tended to treat the women's writings separately, but a comparative reading helps to illuminate shared reproductive concerns that characterize women's writings from the margins of the British Empire. Furthermore, this interrogation of gender as it intersects with modernism opens up critical inquiry into a neglected subcategory of sexuality and maternity. This reading argues that Karen and Anna (the respective characters) represent a thwarted maternal identity because colonial strictures have deemed them incapable of fulfilling imperial maternal imperatives.

Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden's controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act's limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city's largest Anglophone women's organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council's long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women's disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists’ political unity.

Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Abstract Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden's controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act's limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city's largest Anglophone women's organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council's long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the re...

Culture and Ritual in the Montreal Women's Movement

This paper focuses on how culture and ritual in social movements can be forms of protest or conduits to contentious politics. Based on the Montreal cases of the anglophone women's performance scene in the 1990s and the 2000 World March of Women campaign, we argue that the context in which culture is produced and consumed affects its political character and potential. Networks among activists and organizations in social movement communities affect the extent to which participants interpret and use cultural productions and rituals to support political change. Movement campaigns play an important role in giving political meaning to cultural rituals and providing opportunities for participants in cultural activities to become involved in contentious political action.

Women Pioneers in Canadian Sociology: The Effects of a Politics of Gender and a Politics of Knowledge

Abstract: This article examines the life histories of ten anglophone Canadian pioneer women sociologists: Helen Abell, Grace Anderson, Jean Burnet, Eleanor Cebotarev, Kathleen Herman, Helen McGill Hughes, Thelma McCormack, Helen Ralston, Aileen Ross and Dorothy Smith. All were born before 1930, encountered significant sexism, and found jobs very easily. This pattern is placed into the context of a of gender and a of knowledge. Politics of gender in the institutional context and in family roles resulted in disadvantages, while the effect of the women's movement led to solidarity among women sociologists and eventual improvements in their situation. The simultaneous emergence of the women's movement and the Canadianization movement led to a of knowledge which proved advantageous for both. Nevertheless, the sociological canon so far has not included women pioneers -- the author needed to conduct interviews since almost no published information existed about most of these important soci ologists prior to this paper. Resume: Le present article se penche surl'histoire vecue de dix pionnieres canadiennes anglophones dans le domaine de la sociologie: Helen Abell, Grace Anderson, Jean Burnet Eleanor Cebotarev, Kathleen Herman, Helen McGill Hughes, Thelma McCormack, Helen Ralston, Aileen Ross et Dorothy Smith. Nees avant 1930, elles se sont toutes heurtees un sexisme marque ce qui ne les a pas empechees de trouver tres facilement du travail. Le phenomene est mis en perspective au vu d'une politique du genre et d'une politique de la connaissance. La politique du genre dans le cadre des institutions et des responsabilites familiales s'est traduite par des handicaps, tandis que le mouvement feministe a engendre une solidarite des femmes sociologues et, finalement, une amelioration de leur situation. L'emergence simultanee du mouvement feministe et de celui de canadianisation a engendre une politique de la connaissance quis'est revelee avantageuse pour les Canadiennes. Neanmoins, jusqu'a present, les pionnieres brillent par leur e xclusion du pantheon sociologique. L'absence quasi totale de donnees prealablement publiees sur ces importantes sociologues a d'ailleurs amene l'auteure du present article devoir effectuer des entrevues. Introduction [1] In reviewing the status of the women founders of sociology and social theory, Lengerman and Niebrugge-Brantley argue that the women have been of our history, rather than having been invisible. Being written out suggests that they were once seen as a presence in the community and that they were subsequently erased from its record (1998:2-3). This politics of erasure is premised on two interrelated processes: a of gender and a of knowledge. While their account deals with the issue at a time before sociology was established as a professional discipline in Canada, their questions are relevant to understanding the position of women pioneers within Canadian sociology. This paper asks how a of gender and knowledge affected some of the early anglophone women sociologists in Canada. When approaching histories of Canadian sociology we find little about women. I therefore decided to use a life history approach. Goetting (1995:9-12) identifies several advantages of this approach: it fills knowledge gaps (sorely needed in this instance); it provides a window on organizational structures by making informal power relations visible; it is a tool for interpreting the intersection of micro- and macro-levels of social order; and, when dealing with women's biography, it can contribute to the correction of the social production of obscurity. Life history is thus a critically helpful way of understanding our gendered world. I wanted to focus on the earliest group of anglophone women sociologists and thus chose birthdate and position as my selection criteria. The subjects of my study had to have been born prior to 1930 and formally trained in sociology. …

The social significance of gender-linked linguistic features in French

The social significance of gender-linked linguisitic freatures in French. During the '70s and '80s, it was argued that the tentative speech styles adopted by Anglophone women did them a disservice in the workplace. This paper suggests that French women also adopt tentative speech styles and questions the "deficit" label attached to such forms. Tentative or hedged speech, in either sex, is to be encouraged, creating and atmosphere of open-mindedness, flexibility, and respect for others.