Content area
Full Text
THE PAST DECADE witnessed a sea change in scholarship on the early Canadian women's movement as feminist scholars came to recognize (or were forced to see(1)) the racism of white feminist "foremothers" and wrestled with its implications for critical practice. Whereas scholars in the 1970s and 1980s tended to celebrate the achievements of early suffrage and reform activists, often "white-washing" (Smith 93) their ideological impurities so that they might stand as icons of resistance, more recent scholarship by Carol Lee Bacchi, Angus McLaren, Mariana Valverde, and others has emphasized the imperialist and racist foundations of early Canadian feminism.(2) Such work has been crucial in redressing the errors and omissions of white feminist scholarship. Critical reassessment, however, has often shaded into outright dismissal, and in the process some of the complexities of early feminist discourse have been lost in the reductive conclusion that all first-wave feminist writing promoted a monolithic racism. Investigation of Canada's past is, as Veronica Strong-Boag has suggested, an ongoing and open-ended process of reexamination guided by current concerns and theoretical perspectives, and it is perhaps time to take another look at early feminist engagements with race. As I hope to demonstrate, the differences between and within early white feminist writers are worth exploring for a number of reasons.
Recent developments in postcolonial and critical race theory, especially Homi Bhabha's emphasis on "the ambivalence of colonial discourse," point the way to a nuanced reading of this complex archive. Particularly important for my purpose is the recognition that ideological formations such as white supremacy are rarely stable or coherent (Hall 15). John Comaroff has stressed that scholars studying colonialism's history do well to pay attention to its "moments of incoherence and inchoateness, its internal contortions and complexities" (165), because they often provided the points where resistance came to be focused.(3) Race was always a contested subject in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canada,(4) and competing understandings of race within Social Darwinism and evangelical Christianity made the term itself highly unstable.(5) Scientific debate raised unanswered questions about how profound racial differences were and whether they were primarily biological or cultural (Anderson 40-44). Furthermore, early white feminism also contained competing claims. Although Darwinian beliefs about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and evangelical emphasis on the civilizing mission...