Feminist Waves and Ableist Undercurrents: Narrating the Emotional Landscape of the Canadian Women’s Movement

Canada has a rich and storied history of feminist activism, which began with the efforts of the “Famous Five” suffragists in the 19th century. Recently, however, the trail-blazing efforts of these women have been challenged by realization that their feminist activism included steadfast support for eugenics policies, including the sterilization of “feeble-minded” women and Indigenous women. Reviewing feminist archives, including key documents and literature produced by feminist organizations as they relate to ideas of vitality and health, this paper seeks to narrate a history of feminist contention that accounts for the complex relationship between feminism, race, and disability. I am concerned with bridging the study of social movements with the idea of ableism itself as laden with emotions, “a felt politics” that dots the emotional landscape of feminist contestation across multiple waves of action. Critical features of sense-making, emotions shape ideas about who counts as a citizen and what constitutes personhood. Social movements provide access to a panoply of feelings that communicate the boundaries of appropriate emotional expression, including what it means to be a political subject with certain capacities. While dominant accounts of feminist waves highlight issues that characterize the movement, from the right to vote to abortion to the fight against gender-based violence, few of these accounts pay attention to how feminists have dealt internally with ableist practices in their midst, choosing instead to highlight the need for the movement to “include” disabled women in the representative sense. In asking how the Canadian feminist movement reckons with the politics of ableism, I seek to complement the study of disability politics in movement by revealing how histories of progressive movements are enmeshed with racist constructions of pathologized bodies and minds.