Du silence à l’affirmation : Women Making History in Point St. Charles

The author notes that women made, and continue to make history in Point St. Charles, and in doing so, transform selves, groups and community. Building on the literature on class and gender in community organising, the author tells a story of the journeys of a group of ten women activists – Francophone and Anglophone – through four decades of neighbourhood organising. She shows that although all the women were first involved in citizens’ committees around practical needs such as housing, welfare, urban renewal and education, most of them, stimulated by feminist agitators in their midst, came to new awareness about gender inequalities, to new and deepening analyses, and to individual and collective actions around strategic gender needs. Part and parcel of this spiral of change were the tensions that emerged with their families, friends and neighbours, and even with the agitators themselves. The author contends that out of these tensions came transformations at the macro level – community, public opinion and government, at the meso level – organisational structures and cultures, and at the micro level – family and selves. Next the author does a metanarrative on the methodology that underlies the project upon which her thesis is based, one that borrows from feminist community organising practice to deal with the many ethical dilemmas inherent to feminist life history methodology. In line with the notion of “translocational imaginings in dialogue”, the author’s project was conceptualised to pre-figure power in order to construct narratives of belonging that break with processes of differentiation and stratification. Her project is about doing community history with the people who make that history. Because of this, when tensions emerged around power relations, instead of paralysis, individual, interpersonal and collective transformations emerged.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

2004

520p.

en