The women's liberation movement in North America was part of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and through the 1980s. Derived from the civil rights movement, student movement and anti-war movements, the Women's Liberation Movement took rhetoric from the civil rights idea of liberating victims of discrimination from oppression. They were not interested in reforming existing social structures, but instead were focused on changing the perceptions of women's place in society and the family and women's autonomy. Rejecting hierarchical structure, most groups which formed operated as collectives where all women could participate equally. Typically, groups associated with the Women's Liberation Movement held consciousness-raising meetings where women could voice their concerns and experiences, learning to politicize their issues. To members of the WLM rejecting sexism was the most important objective in eliminating women's status as second-class citizens.
In North America, the movement began in the United States and Canada almost simultaneously with the first articles articulating their aims appearing around 1965. By 1967, organizations had formed in major US and Canadian cities spreading within a year throughout both countries. In Mexico, sparked by the movement in the north, groups began to form in 1971. Characterized as man-haters and radicals, the movement in North America gave way to more liberal reformers by the mid-1970s in the United States and Canada and by the early 1980s in Mexico.
Canada The Women's Liberation Movement in Canada derived from the anti-war movement, Native Rights Movement and the New Left student movement of the 1960s. An increase in university enrollment, sparked by the post-World War II baby boom, created a student body which believed that they could be catalysts for social change. Rejecting authority and espousing participatory democracy as well as direct action, they promoted a wide agenda including civil rights, ethnic empowerment, and peace, as well as gay and women's liberation. The Canadian magazine, Chatelaine serialized Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and published articles on birth control, modifications needed for the divorce laws, and other women's issues, making them public concerns. Institutionalized feminists, (liberal feminism) focused efforts on forming a royal commission to evaluate women's status and address them through reforms, but grass-roots feminists desired more radical change.
As early as 1967, women in Toronto had formed a Women's Liberation Group and in July 1968, a group of women students at Simon Fraser University (SFU) organized the Feminine Action League (FAL). Faculty, like Margaret Benston supported Women's Lib encouraging studies to gain an understanding of women's societal roles and the perception of women's place both by themselves and by men. In that year, the U.S. organization SNCC barred whites from participating in leadership positions, influencing the founders of FAL to ban men in their organization. Though often depicted in media as a sign of "man-hating", separation was a focused attempt to eliminate defining women via their relationship to men. Since women's inequality as child-rearers, citizens, sexual objects, wives, workers, etc. were commonly experienced by women, separation meant unity of purpose to evaluate their second-class status. Politicizing personal issues was done in consciousness-raising sessions aimed at eliminating the need to rally support for abstract causes, because the issues were those impacting women's daily lives. Soon after their forming, the group changed their name to the SFU Women's Caucus and initially focused on contraception and pregnancy prevention for students. In July 1969, the group moved off-campus, to downtown Vancouver, opening offices as the Vancouver Women's Caucus (VWC). They began publishing a newspaper, Pedestal, focused on women's liberation and protesting sexist hierarchy and male-domination in the student movement. Women's Caucuses also formed at the University of Alberta and the University of Regina, as offshoots of the Students for a Democratic Union (SDU) and at the University of Toronto aligned with the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA). As in the U.S. a network of women's centers, which included spaces like the Ste-Famille Women's Centre in Montreal and the Prince George Women's Centre in northern British Columbia developed to facilitate meetings of women and provide them with services.
WLM groups sprang up throughout Canada, though in Quebec there was a struggle over whether women's liberation or Québécois liberation should be the focus for women radicals. Advocating public self-expression, such as participating in protests and sit-ins, organizations affiliated with the movement tended to operate on a consensus-based structure and participated in consciousness-raising, like their U.S. counterparts. However, Canadian Women's Lib groups typically incorporated a class-based component into their theory of oppression which was mostly missing from U.S. liberation theory. For example, Frances Wasserlein, a prominent LGBT and feminist activist who chronicled the history of the Abortion Caravan, argued that to be involved in the WLM in Vancouver equated to being a socialist. Some of the first actions of the VWC were to protest discriminatory hiring and wage practices of the Civil Service Commission against women. Other direct actions included the occupation of a building on the University of Toronto campus by the Toronto Women Liberation Movement. Having tried to negotiate with the university to establish day care centers and failing in their efforts, they took over a university-owned house, cleared out the squatters, and renovated it for their children.
In response to the passage of a reform to the civil code on abortions in 1969, the VWC began a series of protests focused on abortion. Marge Hollibaugh and other liberationists organized the Western Regional Conference on Women's Liberation, which was held during the Thanksgiving weekend at the University of British Columbia campus to spread the word about the upcoming caravan. Betsy Wood organized a guerrilla theatre performance on Valentine's Day 1970 at the Vancouver Courthouse to illustrate the inequalities which could emerge from allowing Therapeutic Abortion Committees to make decisions for women and the consequences of denying procedures which could be suicide or back-alley abortions. It was also Wood's idea to organize the caravan, which she had proposed at the October conference. Members of the VWC left Vancouver on 27 April performing guerrilla theatre along the way. They reached Ottawa on 9 May and assembled with other WLM groups from throughout Canada at Parliament Hill. Over the next three days, they managed to stage a protest at the home of the Prime Minister and disrupt the House of Commons, shutting it down for the first time in history.
In Quebec, 1969 was also pivotal, with the establishment of the Women's Liberation Front (). Their slogan was "Pas de libération des femmes sans libération du Québec! Pas de libération du Québec sans libération des femmes!" (No liberation of women without liberation of Quebec! No liberation of Quebec without women's liberation!) and they supported changes to gain socio-economic and political equality, but also pressed for Quebec's autonomy and a recognition of the unpaid labor of women working in the home and in family businesses. One of their first demonstrations was against the prohibition of public protests put forth by the administration of Montreal's mayor, Jean Drapeau. In 1970, Nicole Thérien and Louise Toupin set forth a manifesto proclaiming that in a society defined by exploiters and the exploited, woman and Québécois citizens were slaves of the exploited. That same year the FLF founded a newspaper called Québécoise deboytte! (Quebec women standing up!) in protest to mainstream media's curtailment of women's voices.
In November 1970 the first national conference of the WLM was held in Saskatoon. Marlene Dixon, a sociology professor teaching at McGill University debunked the idea of an autonomous women's movement, encouraging women to join extant movements fighting racism and classism. The radical movement in Canada was shaped by these opposing views of whether women could gain equality within the existing socio-economic/political system or whether capitalism had to be overturned to create human equality. In 1973, Rosemary Brown, the first Black Canadian woman elected to a provincial legislature in the country, spoke at the national congress of the Canadian Negro Women's Association. She embraced the ideas of the WLM and rejected the idea that black women were needed in the struggle for black men to achieve equality. Rather than being an anti-male position, she believed that black men were not weak and in need of women propping them up. She saw the movement as one which validated the human import of males and females.
In 1971, Lisa Balcer, called as a witness for the trial of Paul Rose in the kidnappings perpetrated by the Quebec Liberation Front the previous year, refused to testify because women were not allowed to serve as jurors. She was declared to be in contempt of court. Seven women from the courtroom who were members of the FLF stood and protested legal discrimination of women. All seven were arrested and served from one to two months in jail, but their action brought attention to the problems of inequality. A few months after their protest, women gained the right to serve as jurors in Quebec.
By the late 1970s, the Marxist and liberationists' alliance fractured in part because of media characterization of radicals in the grass-roots movement as "crazy", but in part because the radical grass-roots groups had difficulty mobilizing women under abstract theories. Bonnie Kreps, who wrote "Radical Feminism 1" which was published in 1973 in the anthology Radical Feminism: The Book portrayed Canadian feminists as falling into three categories: socialist feminists, who were opposed to capitalism; liberal feminists, who were concerned with equal rights and equal pay; and radical feminists who focused on "the oppression of women as women" or sexism. Activists who had been involved in the WLM turned their efforts toward violence against women, when the liberal feminists gained the dominant position and public perception that legal change to the existing systems were the legitimate concerns of the women's movement. In 2007, Marjolaine Péloquin, published a history of the movement in Quebec, En prison pour la cause des femmes: la conquête du banc des jurés (In prison for the cause of women: the conquest of the jury box), critically analyzing the short-lived but significant impact of the FLF.
United States