Some women want to understand the similarities between us all. Some want to make sure we recognize the differences. Others would simply like to be treated as a person.

• I don't like the emphasis being put on me being a woman. I don't like that. I want to be seen as a person with skills, knowledge, that can be used to help somebody else. Not necessarily because I am a woman. Sometimes that helps. But if I have a greatest I wish in my life that can be given to me, I would say: Let people see me as a person. Just a person. Not a Native, not a woman, not from this family, not from this community but as a person.

***********************

• It just made me realize how much we're all the same, even though certainly my back- ground, my culture-I have a different culture and a different background than the other women in the program-how much we were the same. How they voiced my concerns and my perceptions.
  
  It was scary sometimes. But very energizing-empowering-for me to know that I wasn't alone. It wasn't anything that I had done that made things in my life happen to me. Because they had experienced the same things and we were as different as night and day in our situations. Knowing that I wasn't alone. That they expressed the same things as I thought and felt. The connecting between us changed me. Helped me grow.

************************

• I work with one student particularly and she, she's a very timid person anyway. So looking at her from her point of view, maybe she has all of the extra disadvantages that come with being a woman. But there are also some very timid men here...
  
  I think they're just individuals. I just never seem to separate in my mind men and women. I know it's fashionable to do that, but I don't do that...

**************************

• Women are not always the same "woman." Some are coming into our programs from a long history of disadvantage, some are housewives from middle class or working class homes who have relatively few constraints. Some women are young, straight out of high school and getting ready for trades training or further education and some are women who have one career already. These are not all the same woman.

**************************

• It just doesn't work well to use a southern feminist analysis in the north. The context, the history, is different enough that men's and women's relations cannot be interpreted the same-particularly in relation to the social structure.

**************************

• A literacy worker recognizes her similarity with students- "I needed to come here just as much as they did. And for the same reasons. The only difference was I was here for work. I was here because I was being paid. That's the only thing I had different from them. All the other things were very similar. I needed to be with other women. I needed to talk about things. I needed the time out-even though it was so difficult to get out-I needed that experience."

• While, in another community, a literacy student expresses her experience of difference- “Because she didn't get the money she needed or wanted, she just got up and left. Said to hell with it. The thing is, we can't. And I think that's where it hurts. And that's when it really hit me, then, that it's a job to them. That's it, that's the bottom line. It's a job to them. That's as far as it goes. And I find in that respect, what do we do?”

*************************