About This Project

The Vancouver Women’s Caucus History Project started back in 1997 when some of the Caucus’s original members met two times to reconstruct and record their own history. Participating in the project were Jean Rands, Marcy Toms, Pat Davitt, Andrea Lebowitz, Anne Roberts and Ellen Woodsworth.

Because of the difficulty transcribing the tapes (bad recording equipment, several people talking at once), the tapes got put aside and were eventually misplaced.  When they turned up 15 years later, Pat Davitt and Anne Roberts decided it would be a good retirement project to get the work done.  They met on many Sunday mornings for nearly a year in 2013 to complete the work (transcript of tape 1; transcript of tape 2).

After the tapes were transcribed, the original group (minus Andrea, who died in 2011, and Ellen, who decided she was too busy to continue working on the project) began to meet monthly in 2014 to talk about what, if anything, to do with the material.  Joined by Liz Briemberg, the group decided the following priorities, depending on what energies and interest they have to follow through:

  1. The transcripts and tapes would be donated to the Women’s Caucus collection in the SFU archives;
  2. The transcripts would be circulated to other women who had been Caucus members with requests for feedback (reactions, corrections, arguments) and for additional material to fill in the gaps (in written form or in an interview format);
  3. Oral histories would be collected as much as possible from the women involved in the various workshops or subcommittees, such as the working women’s group, The Pedestal, the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference and the education committee.  (We decided that the abortion campaign was already well-documented.)
  4. To make all this material widely available to the public, a website would be created where we could also post pictures, leaflets, posters, articles, podcasts, songs and links to other historical documents, books, such as Ann Thompson’s book on the abortion battle in Canada, etc.

In 2015, Jackie Ainsworth, a formidable force in working women’s movement that grew out of Women’s Caucus, joined the history project.  The group has been asking anyone connected to the Caucus to write down their own memories and analyses – when and how they got involved, what happened and why, and what they did after Women’s Caucus.  The idea is to make a wide variety of material without exercising heavy editorial control   (except in the unlikely event of libel, racism, sexism, etc.). Email us any suggestions, reactions, corrections and submissions for posting on the site.

Get out those old boxes stored in attics and see if there are any leaflets, articles, posters, pictures, etc. to help us compile a complete record as possible.

The VWC History Project hopes that the material on this website (created 2017) will be useful to future researchers and to other women, particularly young women who are unaware of the battles women fought in the past for the gains enjoyed today. Without that knowledge and historical perspective, the group believes that those hard-won rights could be too easily taken away.