One very obvious connection that I have with my research topic of Canadian women is that I am a Canadian woman. For this reason, I definitely feel a connection to the women I have researched, and I feel that I have a strong appreciation for everything that these women went through so that I can enjoy the privileges and rights that I have today. Even though I know that I am privileged today in comparison to the women I have studied for my history classes, I know that there is still a lot to be done in regards to women’s equality. I realize that there are many current feminist issues, and the more I learn, the more I am inspired to understand women’s history. I recently watched a documentary by The National Film Board of Canada called “Status Quo? The Unfinished Business of Feminism in Canada.” This film, which you can watch by clicking here, highlights a number of the issues for women in Canada today. As women fought for change in generations past, we must still fight for change in the modern day, and for this reason it is valuable to look into the past for understanding and inspiration.
Another connection I have to this project has to do with education. I have always been passionate about academia, and as a woman I find it fascinating that I would have had a much different experience in university if I were born less than a century ago. Due to these connections, I have done similar projects in the past. I have taken a Canadian women’s history class in a previous semester, and from that class I wrote a paper about women getting a post secondary education around the turn of the century in Canada. I really enjoyed writing that paper, so I decided to present it at the Philosophy, History, and Politics Conference at TRU in January, 2016. I enjoyed presenting on a topic that I am passionate about, and I received positive feedback as a result of the presentation. This experience discussing Canadian women’s history in a broader community setting strengthened my passion for the topic and has inspired me to do similar projects in my classes, including this one.
The class discussions in relation to this project really provoked me to consider how my personal family history is related to my project. I do not have a very well documented family history, however I do know that I have multiple generations of Canadian-born family members on both my mother’s and father’s side. This connection with earlier Canada in my family makes me curious about our country’s past, and I really enjoy learning and researching more about Canadian history. This project, as it is about women, has gotten me to consider my grandmothers. Although I do not know much at all about the generations of women who came before them, I do know bits and pieces of both of my grandmothers’ lives. Both of them were working women who were also married and had families. One of them also went to university to get an education for a teaching career, and all of these aspects of their lives fit well into the feminist themes that I researched. I would like to look further into the history of my family, particularly of the women who lived earlier on in the twentieth century to see how they fit in with the historical research I have done as well.