In The Feminine: Women And Words/Les Femmes Et Les Mots

Year Published:  1987
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX3263

Abstract: 
"How do the diverse and often opposing views of women, even in a single field such as 'literature', how do theenergetic and contradictory opinions of women with vastly different experiences and backgrounds come together? Do the variousvoices...together make one resounding statement, and if so what is the message?

This was the central theme of the Women and Words/Les Femmes et les Mot Conference of 1983, held in Vancouver. Over 1,0000 anglophone and francophone women participated. IN THE FEMININE is the volume of conference proceedings trying to come to grips with the status of women's writing in Canada, alternatives and future directions.

The first section, The Social Context of Women's Writing, discusses whether art subverts politics or polictics art; women's culture and "official culture"; class; and violence.

Other chapters examine Writing and Motherhood, Feminist Critical Theory, Writing in the Feminine; Language and Form, and Against Double Colonizaiton, in which Native Indian and Black women assert their identity against both gender and ethnic bias in the mainstream culture.

Despite vast differences in their culture backgrounds, the quality of experience they recounted as women involved in literature were remarkably similar. "Women are tired of being left out of the cultural mainstream....to say of women's concerns that they are not universal is to say that women are not fully human..."