In the late 1960s, my friends and I decided to wear pants to our public high school. We were promptly sent home and ordered not to return unless we were wearing a skirt or a dress.
My friends and I believed we were gutsy girls in the vanguard, and a year later, the school reversed its policy. Growing up on the cusp of a women’s movement that opened many doors, I had no idea that women had been far more daring long before I was born.
The impulse to discover (and recover) our feminist foremothers has been driven by the realization—surprise, surprise—that women my age were not the trailblazers we supposed. We were not the leaders of the pack when it came to pursuing an unusual path, undertaking an unconventional career or daring to be different in the name of equality and women’s rights.
Women of courage have been so thoroughly erased from Canadian history that a movement has arisen in the past few decades to recognize the women who set the table...
Linda Kay is a journalism professor at Concordia University. She is the author of The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).
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