Second-Wave Feminism and the History of Emotions
Editors: Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson and Catherine Gidney
In 1967 female member of SUPA denounced their comrades‘ sexism, arguing that it made the organization „like a civil rights organization with a leadership of southern racists.“ In 1970 members of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus led an Abortion Caravan across Canada to protest the criminalitaion of abortion, drawing on powerful props such as coat hangers and coffins to symbolize the danger and death associated with illegal abortion. As part of the postwar women’s peace movement, women campaigned against war toys and went on hunger strikes. And at the Indochineser Conference to End the War, held in Vancouver in spring 1971, feminists engaged in fist-fights over the deree to which partiarchy, imperialism, race, and sexuality should be assessed in relation to war.
All of these activities involved emotions. Sometimes women acted out of pain and anger while other times, they were driven by hope or the possibility of liberation and freedom. They experienced excitement, exhilaration, desire, rage, and deep ersonal connection with other women. The editor’s collection aims to explore the intersection of the history of emotions and second-wave feminism.
Articles might include, but are not limited to, asking the following questions:
- How do emotuonal bonds politicize feminist activists?
- How do these bonds shape activist politics and priorities?
- How have individual emotions shaped feminist activities?
- How have women resisted and broken down older emotional patterns and frameworks and created new ones?
While the height of the movement runs from approximately the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, the collection will embrace the perspective of a ‚long second wave‘, with interest in articles that reach back to the post-suffrage era and a legacy that extends to the present day. Articles might cover new histories of second-wave feminism, or re-examine previous work through the lens of emotional histories.
The collection aims to capture and convey a sense of the deep passion that runs through the movement and how thinking about this period through the lens of emiotional history might tell us new stories about the history of Canadian second-wave feminism.
Please send a one-page proposal and c.v. to this email address. Deadline: 15 August, 2016. Full papers would be due by 15 May 2017. The aim is to submit the collection to a press by winter 2018.