In many parts of the world, being female is seen as a burden, a curse, or a reason for abuse. It is hard to relate to the lives led by millions of women the world over. I have access to education, health-care, and a say in my future….
Whether in India, Nigeria, the Middle East, or Canada it seems women of colour have been obsessed with fair skin. However, such obsessions are not without their critics, and as people have begun to critically analyse the reasons behind and implications of this obsession, so have people started to rethink their attitudes.
I have always been career minded. Since I can remember, I have vowed to put school, then university, then work, first. When I finished school, my parents had to practically force me to take a “gap” year before university. I was so worried that if I took a year off my peers would get ahead [...]
The latest exhibition at the Women’s Library, “Prostitution: What’s Going on?” marks the centenary of the death of Josephine Butler (1828–1906), the Victorian social reformer who fought for the rights of prostitutes. The question “What’s going on?” aims to prompt debates on the complex issues surrounding prostitution today.
Prostitution is probably one of the oldest “professions” [...]
The early part of the 20th century marked major advances in the position of women in Canada. Perhaps most famously, women fought for and won the right to vote in federal and most provincial elections by the early 1920s but there were many other important changes such as minimum wages for women and property [...]
In the past year, the Equal Opportunities Commission in the UK has celebrated 30 years of the Sex Discrimination Act. The state of women’s employment has changed dramatically in this time. A couple of years before the Act was passed, only one in four mothers with pre-school children was working, but by 2004, this figure [...]
The Superwoman: a professional woman, a friend, a lover, a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an athlete, an artist, who desires to be feminine and while doing so, she ends up “the superwoman.”
Feminist Media Scholar Susan Douglas suggests that women currently receive profoundly contradictory messages about what constitutes “ideal femininity,” and how “ideal [...]
When the news broke about the Vancouver police sealing off Robert Pickton’s Coquitlum, B.C. pig farm searching for bodies of more then 50 missing women from the Vancouver area, I was immediately glued to the news. In the weeks and months that followed, the number of murder charges against Pickton grew to 27. [...]
I was only a young child when Marc Lepine strode into l’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989. I have no real memory of what happened that day. As a young woman now, I have only just begun to realize the huge impact that day had on my world.
When I began to review some [...]
“What Women Want” is an exhibition at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University, which explores and celebrates what women have fought and longed for from the Victorian period to the 21st century. The exhibition has been created in collaboration with staff and students at London Metropolitan University and community groups from the East End of [...]
