‘Plus ça change…’: Graduates’ views of Canadian females’ opportunities after 50 years of change.
J. Paul Grayson
Refereed Article, 2019
Grayson, J. P. (2019). ‘Plus ça change…’: Graduates’ views of Canadian females’ opportunities after 50 years of change. The Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue canadienne de sociologie 56(1), 49–77.
New-Left Feminism emerged on Canadian campuses in 1967. While prior to that date some Canadian women had been concerned with their limited circumstances, by and large, university students expressed little visible support for their cause. In this article, I will show that prior to the debut of New-Left Feminism, while they may not have been vocal, the 1967 graduates of Glendon College, York University, located in Toronto, Canada, were well aware of the barriers faced by Canadian women. In the intervening half-century, although many impediments to the full social participation of Canadian women were removed, Glendon graduates of 2017 continued to recognize the existence of limits on female Canadians. Indeed, in some areas, these recent graduates saw more barriers than their counterparts 50 years earlier. This can be attributed, in part, to the attention currently given in curricula to the lives of Canadian women, large numbers of female faculty, a public discourse that includes sexuality and issues of interest to women, and the "relative deprivation" of Canadian females.