Feminism

McGill Students for Literacy (MSL) is an independent literacy organization founded and operated by McGill University students. Its mandate is to train McGill students to tutor adults and youth in basic literacy skills and to promote awareness of illiteracy issues. MSL's tutoring services are free and all of the students involved work as volunteers.

Joan McFarland participated in both the 1985 Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women to the Year 2000 conference in Nairobi, Kenya and the 1995 Platform for Action conference in Beijing. In this article, she is interested in trying to compare what was happening in 1985 and in 1995 in the International Women's Movement.

CCLOW is a national feminist organization which promotes the empowerment of women through education. What kind of education leads to empowerment?

In this article, the author "re-visits" the origins and principles of consciousness raising groups, considered to be the foundation of the women's movement and of feminist pedagogy.

The author's premise in this article is that education in general, and literacy in particular, are gender issues. What, exactly, is the difference between the West African practice of not paying girls' school fees, and the Canadian message to female students to limit their educational horizons? Isn't the Canadian man who refuses to parent in the evening while his wife attends classes helping to deny her access to education?

In this article, the author, in her role as a tutor for an adult literacy student, relates her experience dealing with inappropriate primary adult reading material. She discusses the sexist views and gender stereotyping found throughout the four books she was asked to use to teach a retired tradesman to read.

In this article, the author discusses two aspects of what she calls the feminist revolution in legal education: the law school curriculum and women's actual experiences in "getting through the day" in law school. The promise (if not yet reality) of feminism is the transformation of legal education - and with it, of law itself.

In the late afternoon of December 6, 1989 in a classroom at the École polytechnique of the University of Montreal, a young man entered the room, armed with a gun. He separated the women from the men and shot at the women, accusing them of being feminists. Fourteen women died, and ten women and three men were wounded. In this article, the author discusses her personal feelings after the massacre.

Some female students at the University of Victoria formed the CCC [Chilly Climate Committee], to investigate the climate of the Political Science department and give its faculty some recommendations on how to improve women's experiences in the department. This resulted in backlash and name calling both on campus and off.

In this article, the author tells about a workshop she attended at the Fifth Congress of Feminists From Latin America and the Caribbean. The workshop was organized by Sistren, a women's popular education theatre group and dealt with the topic of difference and culture/race/gender/class barriers.

In the spring of 1989, Canadian Jobs Strategies (CJS), funded a project called TechPrep for Women, offering women preparatory training for advanced technical-based occupations. This article discusses the problems, objectives, methods and outcomes related to planning and implementing programs of this nature through the private sector.