Education

Wow! On looking back most of the work and inspiration of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus was to educate, and in every way possible. Our overall goal was to raise the consciousness of all women to the overwhelming number of ways in which women and girls were led to believe they were inferior beings and then to organize to achieve radical change of this situation.

On reviewing issues of The Pedestal between 1969 and 1975, the educational aspects of our work are evident on nearly every page – information and discussion about work conditions, childcare, women in history, women’s sexual agency, women’s bodies, the denial to women of political and any other leadership roles, women’s cultural designation in art and literature, and on and on. It was as much an education of ourselves as well as others. Few of us had spoken in public before. We knew in our guts or by experience many of the issues but we had not had to articulate our thoughts on these issues and certainly we had not been involved in a newspaper production. The learning curve for us all was very steep.

The publication of our newspaper ‘The Pedestal’; the annual IWD demonstrations; the numerous workshops on any number of topics and our outreach to women in other communities, all were educational for us as well as for the readers and listeners. Its very first issue contained an article entitled “Women Against Myth in the Education system” including sections on ‘Women as Teachers’ and as ‘High School students’.

Our annual IWD demonstrations took our ideas to the general public and were educational for those involved in the organizing, public speaking and, at times, street theatre.

Our workshops addressed many issues – women’s rights in the workplace; the organizing of a union; obtaining union certification; first contracts; child daycare issues; women’s legal rights; high school organizing; abortion rights and sexuality issues; and the Quebec separatist issues. There was also a theatre group and a video workshop that met at various times.

We held courses in libraries, schools, community centres as well as at the two universities and colleges – one example, was entitled ‘Feminine Mystique or Real Oppression’ and another was ‘The Education of Women – how we learn to be inferior.’

In May 1969 a discussion paper was written by two members of the Caucus entitled ‘Education as a Priority’. The writers proposed the necessity of organizing within the BC Teacher’s Federation to encourage teachers within school classrooms to foster a critical attitude towards the traditional view of women’s role and press for curriculum changes. By 1971 such an organization came into existence called ‘Women in Teaching’, in which one of our members was active for many years.

In Spring 1971, as part of increasing our awareness of women’s situation internationally, we helped the ‘Voice of Women’s organization hold a conference at which four Indo-Chinese women guests spoke to us and our US guests about the impact of the ongoing Vietnam war upon their people and their countries to inform us about the war situation and encourage women in North America to press for a Peace agreement and end of the war.

In Fall 1971 a group of women at UBC organized a non-credit course entitled “The Canadian Woman: Our Story” held at the Student Union Building every Tuesday evening for ten weeks in each of the two semesters. Registration cost $2.00 and was open to the public. Several of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus more active members were involved in giving presentations and in facilitating the small group discussions which followed each presentation. The following year, 1972, an interdisciplinary non-credit course was held at UBC called Women’s Studies and followed much of the same format. UBC introduced its first interdisciplinary ‘for credit’ Women’s Studies course in 1973 after much wrangling with the UBC Administration. Similarly SFU introduced such a Course in 1976 after similar resistance from some Faculty and the Administration.

From this short account it is clearly apparent that much learning and education of ourselves and others was needed. So many of the topics had been dismissed or hidden behind a shroud of patriarchal condescension – such ideas, concerns and humiliations were not worthy to be given attention. As it turned out the more we educated ourselves and others, the more we acted on what we had learned, the more we realized how important these issues were and the importance of both studying them and implementing the changes to which they directed us.

Elizabeth Briemberg, October 2016

Related materials

How did women’s rights evolve at SFU?

As part of SFU’s 40th anniversary celebration, this question was posed in order to prepare a commemorative, interactive display poster. Visit the SFU online archives to explore the interactive poster.