An Editor Reflects ...

by Christina Starr

The one thing that stands out about my employment interview with CCLOW in the fall of 1987 is that the chair that then-Executive Director Aisla Thomson was sitting on fell apart. As a new recruit to feminism and the women's movement, I didn't recognize the significance of this incident: that hard-working, over-taxed organizations compensate for insufficient funding with (among other things) second hand equipment and hand-me-down furniture. It didn't matter. leaving CCLOW'S offices that day, in an out-of-the-way semi-renovated Victorian house, sandwiched between doctors' offices on the first floor and a private apartment on the third, I hoped as much as I dared that I'd be offered the job.

That rickety chair could also have told me that a major responsibility of the work, de- scribed as Communications Coordinator and Editor of Women's Education des femmes, would also become fund-raising, and that there'd be far too much to do and too little time in which to do it.

Nevertheless, I grew to love that work and, for nine and a half years, dedicated myself to producing and sustaining what I hoped was an informative, challenging and inclusive publication. I also grew to respect and admire the women in CCLOW'S office and on the Board of Directors, and to feel extremely grateful to those who responded to my requests for material and who trusted their words, research and stories to my editorial eye. Together, we put out a fine publication.

Christina Starr and her nine-year-old daughter, Geneva. Photo: Szu Burgess

No other magazine in Canada, perhaps not even in North America, exclusively addressed the issues we did. We asked older women what they wanted to learn. We asked how violence affected a woman's ability to learn. We asked women with disabilities about obstacles to learning. We asked women and girls interested in science and technology whether they felt welcome there. We asked how racism interfered with education and how education might be used to unlearn racist conditioning. And so on. In each case women responded with stories, poems, opinions, and analysis that painted a diverse picture of women's unequal access to an education that is safe, empowering, relevant, and useful.