Women's Legal Strategies in Canada

Two leading essays by Jhappan and Sheila McIntyre form the introduction. They provide the contextual and analytical backbone for the rest of the chapters. Jhappan's and McIntyre's discussions reveal an intimate knowledge of the Canadian feminist legal movement during the last two-and-a-half decades -- Jhappan's is more academic, while McIntyre's has a basis in legal activism, as she was a long-time member of LEAF (Women's Legal Education and Action Fund). Their pieces lay out the details of the various social movements and organizations as well as the legal cases that form the substance of feminist jurisprudence over the past 25 years. As with many of the essays in the book, they reveal the weaknesses of much feminist theorizing and legal advocacy about equality that has gone on in Canada since the inception of the Charter. The most glaring of these has been essentialism, in which a white middleclass woman came to represent the category of "woman" for all Canadian women, thereby obscuring women of different ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds. Consequently, this essentialist error has created forms of advocacy that reinforce legal and political systems that insist on splintering the disadvantages and identities of race and gender when dealing with women of aboriginal or ethnic backgrounds. Despite these pitfalls, both authors argue that women should continue to seek social and political redress through legal channels. McIntyre encourages broadening the processes of consultation that lead to feminist litigations by seeking advice from national public interest groups that are accountable to their constituents and are representative of the diverse demographics of Canadian society. In referring to the difficulties inherent in this type of social activism, she states "it is not whether to use the law for social change, but how to do so accountably." (74) Jhappan, in a later chapter entitled "The Equality Pit," also contends that women would be wise to broaden the normative basis of their legal petitions and to replace a highly disputed and often narrowly defined claim of equality with a more universalized rhetoric of "justice."