Polyphonic Symphony

In her acclaimed book from 2006, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, the feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick wrote that the “well-known history in the Americas, of white masculine European mappings, explorations, conquests, is interlaced with a different sense of place.” It’s this different sense of place that the historian Joan Sangster vividly describes in Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism, which covers the feminist movements in this country from the 1880s to the 1980s. Illustrated with period photographs, satirical cartoons, and candid shots of protesters, Sangster’s precisely written yet wide-ranging book is a tour de force that chronicles the struggles for “equality, autonomy, and dignity” in all of their rich complexity.

Throughout, Sangster describes a century of “polyphonic” activity: “It was a chorus of diverse political voices (not necessarily singing in harmony) rather than solos sung...