The Political Is Personal

Judy Rebick’s Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution explains how “radical uppity women” made the Canadian women’s movement “the broadest, most interesting and most successful in the world.” Rebick claims that enough has been written about the achievements of “liberal, middle-class women who already had a certain amount of privilege.” But “radical uppity women make people in power nervous,” and she says that is why “they are disappeared from history whenever possible.” Most histories are written from “a single perspective” but Ten Thousand Roses is not, because Rebick’s radical uppity women are “everywhere in this book.” In reflecting “the mosaic of the women’s movement,” it offers readers “a rich, if not complete, picture of the many facets of women’s liberation in Canada.”

A radical uppity woman in her own right, Rebick is well placed to record the history of second-wave feminism in Canada. Far from being an observer, she has a...