From Women's Room to Women's Movement

It's always bugged us in Canada to admit it, but the truth is that many of the most important feminist books have been written by Americans. And none are more crucial than Marilyn French's The Women's Room. It's not diat this novel was any better than anything written by Canadian writers, only diat Canada always had a strong and highly appreciated female literary contingent - Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munroe - women who were writing about women's lives long before the word feminism made its way into the mainstream.

They didn't feel the need to resist a male-dominated literary tradition for long, for by die time French wrote her groundbreaking novel they had become our literary tradition. They were best-sellers who didn't necessarily diink of themselves as writers in opposition to the Richlers and the Findleys and the Robertson Davies of the CanLit landscape,...