During the abolitionist and anti-slavery movement, images of white women were used to represent all women, even though the fight for women’s rights was not a single, unified struggle. Angela Davis, an American political activist and scholar, argued that racialized and working-class women were excluded from the rights movements led by white women.
She noted that the evolving ideology of femininity in the 19e century portrayed white women as saviors fighting for all women’s issues, while racialized women were erased. Ultimately, white feminists were perpetuating the exact same oppression on racialized women that she experienced from men.
The Canadian women’s movement and the representation of femininity in Canada are no exception. She is defined by the social class of white, able-bodied, educated, Christian and Anglo-Saxon women. The result is a distorted portrayal of women’s diverse lived experiences, which helps lead them to focus on issues that reflect their own shared experience as privileged white women.
In Canada, as in many other colonial nations, feminists have always wanted to have a share in the political and economic power of men. They wanted a place within the existing system, whereas the struggle of women of other intersectional identities was to fight the oppressor, not sit at his table.
The predominance of white women in the Canadian women’s movement is evident when one examines the issues it prioritizes. The movement has been largely silent, for example, on Canadian issues such as the forced sterilization of black and Indigenous women. There have been no mass protests from the mainstream feminist movement to speak out against violence against Indigenous women and girls, or to support all those parents of children at unmarked graves found near residential schools.
There has been no national advocacy to end the growing violence against all women, a scourge that has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were no massive protests across Canada in support of the BIPOC communities (for Black, Indigenous and people of color, translated into French by BIPOC, for Indigenous, Black and People of Color) in their fight against systematic barriers or against gendered cultures within our national sports. What does this tell us about Canadian feminism?
Canadians are used to denouncing the mistreatment of women in other countries, but they rarely change their tune to attack the oppression of Canadian women. Canadian feminists obviously need to support their sisters around the world. But they still have a long way to go before they can begin to prescribe solutions, especially if they do so through a “white saviour” mentality and a rejection of racialized women’s priorities.
The ” white saviorism (the white savior phenomenon) has its roots in Canada’s colonial past — after all, the residential school system was seen as a way to “save” Indigenous children.
But this “saviour” mentality is also part of the white male supremacy culture. She has hindered women’s equality by erasing and silencing the voices of marginalized people and isolating those who do not fit the image of the ideal woman: liberal, white, Christian, straight, able-bodied and educated. Just as colonialism created different racial categories among citizens and whiteness is a symbol of achievement and a desirable identity with respect to economic and cultural practices, saviorship is a status to be achieved.
By focusing on issues that meet the needs of privileged white people, for example, how do we pursue professional careers like men, since more complex and structural issues are erased or downplayed? This includes various debates on empowerment (“ empowerment ” in English) who blame women themselves for not succeeding, or who victimize veiled women without admitting that white culture is also problematic, because it is fixed on the male gaze, sexualization and objectification of the body feminine, which fuel the culture of rape.
A feminist agenda seems to be solely the goal of Canadian government departments like Global Affairs, the first to pursue an openly feminist foreign policy. We do not see the same approach at Canadian Heritage or in social or agricultural departments and agencies. However, sexism, racism and all other forms of discrimination operate in all spheres of society, hence the term “systemic discrimination”.
Think, for example, of the Canadian mining camps which are full of stories of pimps, or of the agricultural immigrants, who come, far from their families and alone, to help with the Canadian harvests, but who need support, and what about health women, understudied and undertreated? All ministries need an inclusive feminist vision.
Here and abroad, Canada could work to recognize systemic and intersectional discrimination, while encouraging and supporting other women in foreign countries. On the other hand, a transnational feminist perspective would fight for women’s rights across national borders and work in collaboration with women from other countries. Transnational feminism would consider issues of gender, language, imperialism, colonialism, economics, human and women’s rights, race and nationalism. It requires an analysis of experiences within and across multiple regions, as well as their interdependencies.
If we don’t take a transnational feminist approach, we risk perpetuating a colonial culture that demands white savior practices. This means that we would be actively, albeit unwittingly, participating in the reproduction of systemic barriers for women in Canada and around the world.