It’s more difficult for me to characterize this period, since I’m still in it.
Obviously some of my earlier concerns stayed with me, and though I was still asked to review women writers, it stopped being exclusive, partly at my insistence. Knee-jerk responses have always bothered me, partly of course when directed at me, but having had so many knees jerked in my direction I think I know one when I see one and the attitude, coming from certain sectors, that no man has a valid “subject” or can produce anything of value is certainly a knee and a half. Female critics have to be willing to give writing by men the same kind of serious attention they themselves want from men for women’s writing. And why leave all the reviewing of men’s books to men? I’m still amazed though at the amount of male paranoia that’s running around out there, and the forms it takes. When men express surprise that you’re wearing a dress you know they must have a strangely distorted idea of what constitutes a feminist. The Movement is no longer small and concentrated, but diffuse and grassroots; in fact, it’s the editorials in Homemakers’ Magazine, which may account for certain frightened attempts by certain frightened men to pigeonhole and stigmatize “feminists” as the female equivalent of rapists. My awareness of these attitudes engendered speeches such as “Writing The Male Character.”
I have always seen Canadian nationalism and the concern for women’s rights as part of a larger, nonexclusive picture. We sometimes forget, in our obsession with colonialism and imperialism, that Canada itself has been guilty of these stances towards others, both inside the country and outside it; and our concern about sexism, men’s mistreatment of women, can blind us to the fact that men can be just as disgusting, and statistically more so, towards other men, and that women as members of certain national groups, although relatively powerless members, are not exempt from the temptation to profit at the expense of others. Looking back over this period, I see that I was writing and talking a little less about the Canadian scene and a little more about the global one.