“You Appear Silent to People Who Are Deaf to What You Say”: Solidarity, Schisms, and Alterity in Immigrant Women’s Political Organizing in Toronto, 1970s-1990s

This thesis considers the connections between the increased migration of racialized women to Canada and the ascendancy of social movements in Toronto from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the mid-1970s, there was a surge of grassroots organizations founded by and for immigrant women in Toronto. They were established to address the distinct needs and experiences of immigrant women where government and preexisting, decidedly hypermasculine, ethnocultural organizations did not. This thesis argues that these organizations, and the individuals associated with them, were fundamentally political. In situating these organizations within the broader progressive political landscape of Toronto, this thesis elucidates the ways in which immigrant women’s political organizing challenged and transformed dominant social movements. In particular, immigrant women’s fraught relationship to the mainstream women’s movement in Toronto is closely examined. I argue that immigrant women organized both within and without the Toronto women’s movement. In their relationship to the women’s movement, immigrant women contested the limited perspective of white feminism by drawing closer attention to class and race. This was most evident within immigrant women’s organizing for reproductive freedom. Additionally, immigrant women organizer’s relationship to the Canadian state is analyzed as a site of struggle which dialectically constrained and sustained their activism. Because immigrant women worked in higher numbers than their Canadian counterparts and often in exploitative sectors, labour became a central issue within their activism. Through their labour organizing, immigrant women forged important alliances with the labour movement. This thesis also attends to the uneven racialization of immigrant women which informed their activism. Immigrant women’s activism offered alternative perspectives and methods of organizing which did not conform to dominant ones. By taking a relational rather than assimilationist or pluralistic approach to the relationship between immigrant women’s organizing and broader social movements, a fuller, more nuanced portrait of the intersections between immigration, gender, race, and social movements can emerge.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.