Key Issues
Once we started questioning the roles that had been assigned to use and found other women to confirm our suspicion that it was totally unfair, we got angry. About everything: the lower pay we got at work; the way women’s bodies were used to sell everything; husbands’ and boyfriends expectations that we’d do the housework, take care of the kids, and take a secretarial job while they go to graduate school; not going out at night for fear of sexual assault; the way newspapers listed jobs in separate columns for men and for women – and that was OK. Then, we tried to figure out why women — around the world and throughout history as far back as we knew it — were oppressed. Why did men have more power? Biologically inevitable, as we were told in churches, in the schools, in the movies? Males were bigger, and they had inherited aggressive genes going back to apes and wolves, as anyone could plainly see. Or, could we be brought up differently, could society be organized differently, so everyone could share equally? Was cooperation a more important concept to explain mechanisms of evolution than competition? Maybe capitalism was the problem. Many hoped the emerging socialist societies of China, USSR, Vietnam and Cuba would be a model for us.
Increasingly, women started seeking radical alternatives. Some women were coming out of the closet and figuring out how their sexuality determined – or not – their politics. Some joined democratic centralist parties like the League for Socialist Action that provided a model for building a broad-based movement that would eventually over-throw capitalism. Others were in a much bigger hurry and insisted we had to advocate to “Smash Capitalism” as a way of organizing women. Some women simply wanted to make changes in an issue dear to their heart, such as pay equity or the right to an abortion and didn’t really know what to make of these fiercely fought, heated debates at every meeting.
Though the abortion battles and organizing working women were always front and centre of Caucus activities, other fronts proliferated with groups formed to support Quebec labour leaders jailed under the War Measures Act, organized the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference to help build the anti-Vietnam War movement, produced articles and books about women’s work, sing songs on the picket line, created women’s cooperative housing and coop women’s bookstores, and fought for women’s studies programs at the universities.