There aren’t enough days in the month of October to do justice to women’s contributions to politics, culture, and the economy. Here are few ideas to help you celebrate women’s history year round.
Wheel of Women Plaza
Let’s face it. There aren’t enough commemorations of women in Canada. So when you stumble on public art about influential women, you notice it. The next time you’re strolling through the East Village River Walk, look down. The Wheel of Women is a ground level installation that commemorates thirty women who helped build Calgary. You can read their bios here: http://www.evexperience.com/wheel-of-women-blog/
Rise Up! A Digital Archive of Feminist Activism
The best way to learn about women’s history is to read documents. (Yeah – a history prof wrote this blog post!) It’s fun to leaf through old feminist newspapers, pamphlets, and even meeting minutes to see how women in the early years of the women’s movement debated and thought about issues that we’re still working on today. Rise Up! is a new digital archive committed to Canadian feminist activism from the 1970s to the 1990s. They’re still collecting documents. If you have boxes of documents from your activism that are not already on the site, consider contributing to this project.
http://riseupfeministarchive.ca/
Women’s Suffrage and Beyond
Women suffragists in Canada achieved their first partial victories one hundred years ago. Many of the first women who were elected to public office were confident that it would only take a few years to achieve gender parity. Unfortunately, we’ve still got a long way to go. Woman Suffrage and Beyond is a blog about international campaigns for women’s suffrage in the past and the democratic deficit today. There’s lots of information on this site to inspire our discussions about why we need to elect more women to City Council in 2017.
Telling the Women’s Centre Story
We’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Women’s Centre of Calgary in 2017. It’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve achieved to help us look forward. As part of the celebrations, we’ll be writing articles and blog posts about our own history. The Women’s Centre archives went missing a few years ago, so if you have files, photos, and memorabilia in your personal papers, please let us know. It’s important to leave an archival record. We’ve had a meaningful impact in the lives of countless women and have made significant contributions to politics in Calgary. That’s something future historians will want to write about.