To Solidarity and Liberation! Please go and support feminist organizations that are carrying on the struggle for female rights and safety. Also, why women are joining the Canadian Women for Sex Based Rights group:
Continue readingTag: International Women’s Day
THE CAREGIVERS' LIVING ROOM A Blog by Donna Thomson: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY – A DAY TO CELEBRATE CARING!
March 8 is International Women’s Day and this year, I would like to celebrate the women in our families who nurture us, love us, feed us, drive us, shop for us, and rescue us from mishaps every day of our lives. What if 3 Wise Men were Women? What would
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: International Women’s Day: yes, we still need to protest this shit
On International Women’s Day 2017, we still need to “protest this shit” because, for example, Donald Trump got elected president of the US and he “endorses positions of feminine passivity and masculine power that underpin sexual harassment.” The post International Women’s Day: yes, we still need to protest this shit
Continue readingAlberta Politics: International Women’s Day turns into a major embarrassment for Alberta’s tone-deaf opposition
PHOTOS: Wildrose Opposition Leader Brian Jean – nothing to do with us, really. Below: Health Minister Sarah Hoffman, Environment Minister Shannon Phillips and former PC leadership contender Sandra Jansen, all New Democrats. It’s International Women’s Day and, whatever Alberta’s two right-wing Opposition parties would rather be doing, one doubts it’s
Continue readingdaveberta.ca – Alberta Politics: Bozo-Eruption Alert: Wildrose campus club email declares “Feminism is Cancer”
“Feminism is Cancer” was the subject line of an email sent out by the Wildrose Party campus club at the University of Calgary promoting the showing of the film “Red Pill.” The Wildrose club planned to screen the film, which online reviews describe as exploring Men’s Rights issues, on the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Throne Speech suggests Alberta NDP won’t let oil price crisis go completely to waste
PHOTOS: Status of Women Minister Stephanie McLean with her new son, Patrick, in the rotunda of the Alberta Legislature Building after yesterday’s Throne Speech. Below: Royal Canadian Artillery Band conductor Capt. Patrice Arsenault starts the proceed…
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: In Canada and around the world, “women are unpaid, undervalued and unequal”: Report
A new report says women now play defining roles in the the global economy but still receive “unequal benefits.” The report was co-published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Oxfam Canada.
The post In Canada and around the world, “…
Montreal Simon: Celebrating International Women’s Day in the New Canada
I will never forget as long as I live, that the very first thing Stephen Harper did when he came to power was attack the rights of women.By ordering his minions to remove the words "women's rights" from every document of the Status of Wo…
Continue readingdaveberta.ca – Alberta Politics: For the first time, Women are running the show in Alberta politics
Today is International Women’s Day. Almost one hundred years ago, on April 19, 1916, women in Alberta were granted the legal right to vote through the passage of the Act to provide for Equal Suffrage (Short title: The Equal Suffrage… Continue Readi…
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Study highlighting large and growing gender income gap makes grim reading on International Women’s Day
PHOTOS: Status of Women Minister Stephanie McLean, at left, announced the NDP Government’s plan to improve gender equality yesterday. (Government of Alberta photo.) Below: Queen’s University Law Professor Kathleen Lahey, the cover design of the Par…
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: International Women’s Day 2015: Ontario’s bold anti-sexual violence plan
This powerful anti-sexual violence ad, released just in time for the 2015 International Woman’s Day, is part of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s ambitious $41-million plan to combat sexual violence. The post International Women’s Day 2015: Ontario’s bold anti-sexual violence plan appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that they did not want blog posts that are “used as, or be perceived as, a platform for political positions or partisan statements”. Strong-Boag replies that she considers this approach to be both “naive and pedagogically unsound for a museum supposedly dedicated to (the promotion of) Human Rights”. It’s worth reading both statements in their entirety.
In the public response to the CMHR’s statement, the museum has been called out by a wide array of historians for what they perceive as its desire to try to produce a museum which is not political at all. As Franca Iacovetta and many others point out, “human rights are, by definition, political.” I fully agree, and at least on the face of that letter, it seems that I might have given the museum too much credit if I thought they might have accepted a balanced political post that was not overtly partisan. A museum of human rights cannot hope to be taken seriously if it pretends that the issues it discusses are not political. There must be political content in their exhibits if they are to be able to educate their audiences. On that issue, I’m fully onside with the critics of the museum – assuming that they are correct in taking the CMHR’s statement that they do not want the blogs to be “a platform for political positions or partisan statements” as a complete disavowal of all things political.
And now for my qualifier. “Political” can mean a number of different things. It can mean discussing issues that are politicized, and it can mean presenting a variety of political stances on a given issue. It can mean taking one specific political stance or viewpoint. Or it could mean taking one political stance or viewpoint and explicitly tying that to why a person should support or oppose a given political party. “Political” is not the exact same thing as “partisan”, although there is overlap. One can take a political stand on an issue – favouring government-funded childcare, for example – without explicitly endorsing or attacking a particular political party. So while I fully endorse my colleagues in calling for a Canadian Human Rights Museum which engages with political and politicized issues, I do ask the genuine question of whether they also think or expect that the Museum should also be partisan in its communications. Do they expect the Museum to engage in direct criticism of the current governing Conservative Party of Canada, calling the party out by name? Would they expect the same if the governing party were Liberal or NDP? Would they have considered it acceptable if the Canadian War Museum had explicitly criticized the Trudeau or Chrétien Liberal governments for cutbacks to the military? Would it be acceptable for Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation to take an explicitly separatist approach to Quebec’s history and overtly celebrate the accomplishments of the PQ and criticize the PLQ for being federalist? How will they feel if the Canadian Museum of History, in its new incarnation, explicitly celebrates past Conservative governments for their contributions to Canada’s development, and is critical of Liberal governments for supposed missteps or failures? The parallels are not exact, but hopefully they illustrate my point.
My worry is that the debate over the issue of partisanship has got a bit lost in our haste to insist on the need for political content at this museum, and I think it would be useful to have a sense of where the line can or should be drawn. Because if we call for a free-for-all on explicitly partisan material, then it becomes that much easier for a museum to be manipulated to serve the government of the day and to use them as a mouthpiece to trumpet the policies of the current administration. In other words, how far do we expect museums to go, when we ask them to be “political”?
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that
Continue readingPample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan
The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend. The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag. On their side, the museum indicated that
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and commentary about the story, she had been commissioned by the Museum to write a post about IWD for their collective blog. When she submitted the blogpost, it was initially approved, and then withdrawn when the communications department expressed concern over her comment on the current Conservative government. As a result, historians from coast to coast have been decrying the “censorship” and “silencing” of Strong-Boag by the museum (and speculating that the current federal government might have had a hand in this).
Shortly after the ActiveHistory piece was published, Franca Iacovetta, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, and the current president of the International Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, published a condemnation of “the effort to silence Canada’s leading women’s historian” on the Berks website. Since that time, PressProgress has added their voice into the mix, commenting on the irony of a human rights museum censoring a commissioned blog. Both of these pieces have also received extensive coverage on Facebook and Twitter.
I have a somewhat different take on these events from many of my historian colleagues, and would posit a working theory. I suspect that Prof. Strong-Boag might have known full well (or at least strongly suspected) that her blogpost for International Women’s Day, which only includes one reference to Canadian governments past or present and does so to highlight the “anti-woman record” of “Canada’s Conservative government”, was never going to be approved by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum has been mired in controversies and funding crises for years – even before it has opened to the public. The people who commissioned the post probably were hoping for a broad overview of the history of International Women’s Day, or perhaps a post that included some discussion of how Canada’s governments (past and present) have dealt with women’s issues. This is not what they received, and someone probably balked at the fact that the sole reference in the post to Canada’s governments was a partisan attack on the current Conservative administration. An offer to add more detail to support the assessment of the current government as “anti-woman” was probably even less welcomed.
Here’s where I think the story gets interesting. By being “censored”, Strong-Boag has ensured that her message gets diffused to a much wider readership than the original blogpost itself likely would have been. It is a fairly standard social movement tactic to try to create a situation (a “grievance” to use the social movement scholarly jargon) that will lend itself to media exposure, with the movement able to cast itself as the aggrieved party. This helps to generate broader-based support for the movement, which is crucial to resource mobilization. I very strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who have commented and re-posted this story have never before read the blog of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and would not have seen the post had it simply been posted there. I had to scroll back to August 2013 to find a post on the CMHR blog that had a comment on it. It also isn’t a blog with a rich history of guest postings – only six names of guest bloggers appear on their contributors roll. The ActiveHistory.ca website, on the other hand, has a widespread readership among Canadian historians and engenders a lot of commentary. The Berks is the main conference on women’s history in North America. Far from being silenced, the decision by the CMHR to remove the post as written from their site has meant that Strong-Boag got a series of major platforms to attack the Harper government’s record on women’s rights, and along the way to damage the CMHR’s reputation and cast suspicion (possibly warranted, although this is unproven) of a sinister federal hand behind the removal of the blogpost. Meanwhile, there is no post for International Women’s Day on the CMHR blog.
To be perfectly clear, I don’t disagree with Strong-Boag’s stance on the Harper government’s policy record. But nor am I surprised that the museum would have shied away from her post. Strong-Boag engaged in a direct partisan attack. A paragraph discussing past-and-present Canadian governments’ decidedly mixed record on women’s issues (perhaps including Trudeau-era restrictions on the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s lobbying efforts that were linked to their government funding, or the successive failures of a series of federal governments to make any meaningful progress on the childcare agenda) might possibly have made it past the communications officers at the CMHR. At the very least, it would have been harder for a communications officer to defend the removal of a blogpost that presented a more balanced critique of the less-than-stellar record of Canada’s federal governments (Liberal and Conservative) on women’s issues that placed the current claw-backs in their historical context. But to me, the section on the current government in the post as currently written reads as an isolated (if deserved) swipe at the government of the day and explicitly partisan.
If this was a deliberate strategic move on Strong-Boag’s part, it has worked beautifully, so kudos to her for getting her message disseminated. Far more people have read her account of IWD than likely would have ever seen it on the CMHR blog. I just find it a little bit disingenuous to speak of silencing and censorship in what appears to me to be a case of a museum trying not to appear to be overtly partisan in its public communications. Even if it could have been claimed that this was a “guest post”, the museum would have been held accountable in the media, and with their various funders, for the content that appeared.
UPDATE (March 9, 3:10 PM): The story is now on the CBC website, with additional commentary from Strong-Boag, and a reply from the museum’s blog editor.
Continue readingPample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights
For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum of Human Rights. According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: International Women’s Day – Still Far to Go
Filed under: Feminism Tagged: Feminism, International Women’s Day
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Lupita Nyong’o On Validation, For International Women’s Day
A sublime meditation on validation. Bravo! …in which a young woman shares her adolescent anxieties and blossoms into a role model for us all. Happy International Women’s Day! Enjoy the whole clip here: July 15, 2013 Fearing Kate MacEachern: The Latest Canadian Military Blunder (40) November 22, 2010 A
Continue readingWalking Turcot Yards: International Women’s Day 2013
International Women’s Day: What’s the way forward? By Judy Rebick | March 8, 2013 As an aging feminist I am often asked to speak about the progress we have made as feminists and how much is left to do. It gets depressing sometimes because of the persistence of violence against
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