WOMEN OF INFLUENCE: CANADIAN
WOMEN AND POLITICS
by Penney Kome. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1985. $19.95.

Reviewed by Sylvia Bashevkin

Penney Kome's contributions to research on Canadian women are numerous and varied, beginning with her books on housework (Somebody Has to do It) and the constitution (The Taking of Twenty-Eight), and continuing through her most recent study of the political process. Women of Influence offers a valuable introduction to women's history from the suffragist period through the present; it is full of useful information as well as lively anecdotes, and is easily accessible to general readers.

The main theme which Kome develops in her study can be summarized as follows: Canadian women have pursued greater political rights and visibility since the period of World War I, but only during the 1980s have they become "a politically significant block" (p.7). Early feminists in Canada argued for the rights to vote and to hold public office primarily on the basis of broader social reforms which enfranchisement could bring; in other words, "social" or "maternal" feminists promised that women voters would clean up the political process and inject a unique element of purity and morality within the public sphere. Indeed, Kome shows that during the decades between federal enfranchisement in 1919 and the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1967, important social feminist reforms in such areas as employment legislation, public education, and family law were effected. The basic belief that women's rights remained unequal to those of men even after enfranchisement, however, was held by many Canadian women throughout these decades; Kome points to Emily Murphy, Madeleine Parent, and Laura Sabia as prominent activists whose commitment to equality transcended the various "waves" of the feminist movement.

Kome's argument is notable for a number of reasons. First, in very basic terms, her approach synthesizes a relatively specialized academic literature on the origins and historical continuity of Canadian feminism, and brings this work to the attention of a wide public audience. If only for this single reason, the book is well worth reading. Second, and here we arrive at the less fortunate dimension of syntheses of scholarly work, significant distortions do result from Kome's celebration of social feminism and the presumed political breakthroughs of the 1980s. Since these problems are important and have not been addressed in previous evaluations of the book, we shall consider them here in some detail.

In terms of its treatment of the development of early feminism, Women of Influence presents a selective interpretation of women's political history. It quickly dismisses the work of historian Carol Bacchi (see p. 16), for example, by concluding that Canadian feminists who sought suffrage on the basis of equal rights rather than social reform (the "hard-core" or "political" approach, not identified as such by Kome) were few in number and limited in impact. True, but these con collusions beg the larger question of implications; namely, how did the dominant position of social feminism shape women's relationship to the political process? Might one reason for so few "women of influence" in this country be the very fact that the vote was demanded by women in the name of reform, rather than in the name of equality or women qua women? As a long-term political strategy in a parliamentary system, how useful was or is the anti-party approach of the social feminists? To be fair, Kome is a journalist, not an historian, yet greater balance and a willingness to question what she heard and read would have helped to explain the lingering problem of why political mobilization around women's rights by Canadian women active in politics has been so long in coming.

Clearly, the main focus of Women of Influence is the 1984 federal elections which Kome, like American writers Bella Abzug (Gender Gap, published by Houghton-Mifflin, 1984) and Ethel Klein (Gender Politics, Harvard University Press, 1984), anticipated as the coming of age of women in politics. A gender gap in public opinion was expected to evidence at last the pacifist, pro-welfare state, and generally anti-right attitudes of the majority of the population as a key determinant of the outcome of national elections. Rather than producing governing mandates for either Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro or the NDP, however, the 1984 elections in North America led two conservative chums, Ronald Reagan , and Brian Mulroney, to massive " victories.