sexism

Take a look around your bathroom. The average North American woman uses 10 or more personal care products every day.

From toothpaste and soap to antiperspirant and moisturizer, personal care products are made from 10,500 chemical ingredients that are as much a part of our daily routine as sitting down to breakfast.

And like most things that happen before a mug of morning coffee, it’s easy not to think about them too much. But researchers and women’s health activists are sounding the alarm bell about the makeup of makeup.

Over the past 25 years, Catharine MacKinnon has changed the face of feminist legal theory. A law professor at the University of Michigan, she is, as one reviewer notes, “a famously polarizing figure.”

She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination, and her belief that pornography violates women’s civil rights influenced Canada’s redefinition of obscenity law from sexual explicitness to a harm-based approach a decade ago.

Fair-skinned girls who want mainstream acceptance aren’t singing about gender politics or First Nations’ issues, either, but that’s exactly what makes Kinnie Starr stand out.

Favourably compared in the music press to Lauryn Hill, PJ Harvey and Ani Difranco, Starr has spent her 10-year career on the edge of mainstream success. Her first album came out in 1996 and she has worked steadily—albeit often independently—since then.

Herizons: Historian Shane O’Dea said of you that: “Ms. Walsh has an agenda of speaking for the marginalia, those people consigned by power elites to burial in the footnotes of history. To these, Marg Delahunty gives voice.” What do you make of that?

Herizons: I’m so delighted to be able to chat with you about A Complicated Kindness. I imagine this book took a lot of courage to write. Can you talk about that a bit?

In this article, Afua Cooper blows the whistle on Canada's history of slavery and gives a voice to unsung heroes of the past.

Afua Cooper is a poet and writer whose work includes Memories Have Tongue, Utterances and Incantations: Women, Poetry and Dub, and (with co-editors Peggy Bristow and Dionne Brand) We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History.

"Third-wave feminism" is a catchy yet contested term for the ideas and activism of young North American women. Lara Karaian, Allyson Mitchell and Lisa Rundle created an anthology that reflects the issues and experiences of these women. Their book, Turbo Chicks, (Sumach Press, 2001) challenges the image of young women as apathetic, apolitical dupes of an anti-feminist backlash. Instead, the contributors to Turbo Chicks present a lively, intriguing series of opinions and perspectives which are by turns thoughtful, provocative, funny, angry and poignant.

The federal government wants you to mark April 17, 2002 on your calendar. On that day, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms will turn 20. There will be ceremonies on Parliament Hill, academic conferences and media retrospectives commemorating this milestone in Canada's constitutional history.