(interviewee)

Interviewees were in agreement that this choice needed to extend through all areas of economic life -- both formal and informal. Not only should women have access to the whole range of occupations in the paid economy, but also they should be able to move in and out of the formal economy without penalty. Women who stay at home with small children, or who take time away from paid work to care for elderly or disabled family members would not find themselves accused of 'minimal attachment to the labour force' despite 16 hour working days. In order to make it possible to develop and maintain a satisfactory division between labour in wage economy and labour outside it, changes would have to take place in both spheres. Within the informal economy, work would be recognized and valued. Men would feel free to take a larger role in the care of children and other dependents. Social recognition of the value of this type of work would be given concrete form by governments through changes in taxation and pension systems. Within the formal economy, the goal would be to have good jobs available to all willing workers. Not only would there be equal compensation for part-time work and extensive use of provisions like flexible working hours and job-sharing, but also there would be changes in the structure of occupations. For example, today it is the exception rather than the rule for construction firms to encourage employees to take weekends off and work regular hours during the short Canadian summer. Within many firms, 'corporate culture' demands that aspiring middle managers work 60 hour weeks. In each case, these working conditions preclude a decent family life for anyone, male or female. When the role and importance of family life in Canadian society are adequately recognized, working conditions such as those in the examples above will no longer be acceptable to anyone.

Equally important to the idea of choice among our interviewee was the context within which choices would be made. Interviewee actively struggled to find the words to describe a world in which the prevailing values were placed on nurturance, mutuality and peaceful co-existence, rather than competition, 'otherness', and dominance. For women, this would mean increased opportunities to work within non-hierarchical structures, the reshaping of technology in order to make it responsive to needs in both formal and informal economic life, and a virtual ending to violence at all levels, so that women could live free from the fear of sexual harassment at work, wife abuse and child abuse at home, and nuclear annihilation everywhere.

The central theme in talking about how these changes would be visible was empowerment. Women would be visible in decision-making positions at all levels of society. Income would be more evenly distributed across society so that those women who were old, or single parents, or immigrants, or natives would no longer risk living in poverty simply because of who they are. Women involved in reproduction would have their choices widened, rather than narrowed, because all members of society would feel responsibility for the nurturance of those entrusted to the care of the community.

The central themes of this vision -- choice, a qualitatively different world based on values emphasizing non-violence, nurturance, and mutual respect, and the empowerment of women are not new to the feminist movement. The visible signs of true equality that our interviewee's mentioned: women visible and represented in positions throughout society; the equal valuing of work done in the formal and informal sectors; greater control over the amount and type of paid and unpaid work that women do; greater control generally over the conditions that - determine the quality of women's lives; and freedom from the threat of violence in all its forms, are not new either. In our view, this is cause for celebration. There is a vision, it appears, which is commonly held. This vision is neither controversial nor unfamiliar. There appears to be more than sufficient consensus concerning the basic themes and characteristics of that vision for an organization like CCLOW to be able to be explicit and public in identifying that vision as the organizing tool for its goal-setting and priority-planning processes.