violence

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.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's second novel, The Way the Crow Flies (Random House of Canada, 2003), follows her award-winning Fall On Your Knees, a first novel that sold more than 300,000 copies in Canada and was selected for the Oprah Book-of-the-Month Club.

MacDonald is also a playwright and actor, and the current host of CBC-TV's Life and Times. She spoke with Sara Cassidy in September, over the phone from her "roundy Edwardian" home in Toronto, which she shares with her spouse, Alisa Palmer, and their infant daughter.

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.

Sunera Thobani's speech at the "Women's Resistance: From Victimization to Criminalization" conference in Ottawa on October 1 2001, provoked a storm of controversy after her remarks were interpreted as blaming the September 11th terrorist attacks on U.S. foreign policy. Canada's Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, described it as a "terrible speech that we are 100 percent against."

In July, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Justice announced several revisions to the now infamous Shia Personal Status Law. The law, signed by President Hamid Karzai in April, contains 249 articles regulating marriage and family life for the country’s Shia minority, who account for an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the population.