Sexual Politics in Quebec: The Structure and Dynamic of Class, National, and Sexual Oppression

Abstract

<p>This study focuses on a substantive sociological problem, namely, how to account for the particular forms and rhythms in which sexual politics have been played out during the course of capitalist development in Quebec. The social position of women is seen as oppressed and determined by the intersection of three structures of domination--of nation, class, and sex--which characterize the Quebec social formation as a whole. Ideologies of women, changes in these ideologies, and women's political self-organization in the feminist movement are analyzed as expressing the contradictions inherent in the intersection of these three structure of domination and as emerging in the context of global political dynamics. Three historical moments--the Conquest and its aftermath, the process of capitalist industrialization, and the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath--at which the status of women was called into question as a social issue and at which a modification in the sexual division of labour took place have been selected for study. The position of women in the family, in production, in the juridico-legal structures of the state, and in the ideologies which reflect and distort, define and justify that position will be examined. A central problem will be how to interpret the political practice of francophone women in the public domain.</p>