In the spring of 1970, seventeen women set out from Vancouver in a big yellow convertible, a Volkswagen bus, and a pickup truck. They called it the Abortion Caravan. Three thousand miles later, they “occupied” the prime minister’s front lawn in Ottawa, led a rally of 500 women on Parliament Hill, chained themselves to their chairs in the visitors’ galleries, and shut down the House of Commons, the first and only time this had ever happened. The seventeen were a motley crew. They argued, they were loud, and they wouldn't take no for an answer. They pulled off a national campaign in an era when there was no social media, and with a budget that didn't stretch to long-distance phone calls. It changed their lives. And at a time when thousands of women in Canada were dying from back street abortions, it pulled women together across the country.

Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive, reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral landscape for evaluating classic questions about population control.

As author Karin Wells (2020) shows in her new book, The Abortion Caravan: When Women Shut Down Government in the Battle for the Right to Choose, even the women of the Caravan did not realize the depth of their impact for many years. [...] Everywhere, young people questioned and critiqued the status quo and the prevailing culture, and women stood in the front ranks. [...] In 1970, those of us in the Vancouver Women's Caucus put forward a proposal to women's liberation groups across the country: "Join together in a Caravan from the West coast to Ottawa demanding abortion as a right for all women and its removal from the Criminal Code!" (Wells 2020: Appendix 2). [...] Ultimately, we forced the closure of Parliament for the first time in Canadian history! Our work had only begun, but the right to abortion was now squarely on the agenda of the country from coast to coast. [...] While the Vancouver Women's Caucus (VWC) - from which the Caravan emerged - published writing that recognized the "double oppression" of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirited people and organized with the Native Alliance for Red Power in British Columbia, none of the women who set out on the Caravan were Indigenous.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, in the midst of the Cold War and second-wave feminism, the RCMP security service – prompted by fears of left-wing and communist subversion – monitored and infiltrated the women’s liberation movement in Canada and Quebec. Just Watch Us investigates why and how this movement was targeted, weighing carefully the presumed threat its left-wing ties presented to the Canadian government against the defiant challenge its campaign for gender equality posed to Canadian society. Based on a close reading of thousands of pages of RCMP documents declassified under Canada’s Access to Information Act and the corresponding Privacy Act, Just Watch Us demonstrates that the security service’s longstanding anti-Communist focus distorted its threat assessment of feminist organizing. Combining gender analysis and critical approaches to state surveillance, Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt consider the machinations of the RCMP, including its bureaucratic evolution, intelligence-gathering operations, and impact, as well as the evolution of the women’s liberation movement from its broad transnational influences to its elusive quest for unity among women across lines of ideology and identity. Significantly, the authors also grapple with the historiographical, methodological, and ethical difficulties of working with declassified security documents and sensitive information. A sharp-eyed inquiry into spy policies and tactics in Cold War Canada, Just Watch Us speaks to the serious political implications of state surveillance for social justice activism in liberal democracies.

Ten Thousand Roses is a rich tapestry of stories told by over a hundred feminists from across Canada who organized, discussed, protested and struggled for change. Legalized abortion, resistance to male violence, pay equity and employment equity, legal equality through the Charter, pornography, anti-racism, action against poverty, rights for Aboriginal women and child care: these are the issues that rallied Canadian women to activism from the 1960s through the 1990s, the second wave of feminism. Judy Rebick, feminist activist, weaves together an insightful and stirring oral history full of four decades of struggle, defeat and triumph. The book also offers honest and insightful discussions of the differences that simultaneously divided and strengthened the women's movement in its efforts to remake a male-dominated culture. These stories define the Canadian women's movement as one of the most successful on the planet and open a treasure chest of knowledge for anyone wanting to make a better world.

Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel is a gritty portrait of a turbulent home life and harrowing adventures on the road, from the mud flats of North Vancouver to the farm fields of California and the fringes of the hippie subculture in Toronto. Renowned author Lee Maracle’s groundbreaking biographical novel captures the spirit of Indigenous resistance during the Red Power movement of the 60s and 70s, chronicling a journey towards political consciousness in the movement for self-determination. A fearless portrayal of one woman’s struggle to make sense of the world as she fights to change it, Bobbi Lee is a powerful, unforgettable story that marks a significant beginning in the modern history of Indigenous people.