Women Unite! An Anthology of the Canadian Women’s Movement

Written by Lynn Kaye

NOTE: The complete book has been digitally reproduced and can be downloaded. Given the size of the file, this may take a few minutes.

In 1972, Women’s Press published its first book, Women Unite: Up from the Kitchen, Up from the Bedroom, Up from Under. It contributes to the historical record of the struggles that were central to the burgeoning Canadian women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This context included the active involvement of Canadians and Americans in the peace movement and civil rights movement, the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970 in response to events in Quebec, and the emerging consciousness of the global environmental crisis influenced by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962).

In the late 1960s, a significant number of radical women’s groups formed across Canada, especially on university campuses, actively working on issues such as birth control, daycare, abortion, violence against women, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. However, most of the English-language theoretical writings about the growing international women’s liberation movement were coming from the United States and England. To grapple with the lack of English-language Canadian materials on these issues, Discussion Group No. 6 (of the Toronto Women’s Liberation movement) decided to develop a book of essays on the Canadian movement. A widespread call for manuscripts was sent to a diverse range of women’s groups and communities across Canada.

Discussion Group No. 6 approached numerous publishers with their book, but the manuscript was repeatedly rejected. Determined to publish the book, Ruth McEwen, Judy Skinner, and Lynn (Lang) Kaye formed a collective, and then became a women’s publishing company formally incorporated as the Canadian Women’s Educational Press, but commonly known as the Women’s Press. They applied for and won a federal government Opportunities-for-Youth (OFY) grant and then called for volunteers to join a working collective to proceed with the commitment to publishing works by, for, and about Canadian women.

Women Unite! was produced at Dumont Press, a collective print shop in Kitchener that provided training and off-hours access to their typesetting system. The actual typesetting and layout was done by Women’s Press collective members (who commuted to Kitchener and worked overnight). This was done on a Compugraphic typesetting system that used a punch code machine into which the essays were typed, producing long paper tapes. These tapes were then fed into a computer, which produced sheets of photo-based text that were then trimmed, waxed, and physically laid out, ready for printing.

The first edition of Women Unite! was released in July 1972. It sold out immediately and was reprinted in December 1972. It has been out-of-print since the mid 1970s.

For further details on the historical context of the book Women Unite! and the early development of the Canadian women’s movement, please see the Preface, page 7, and the Introduction, page 9, in the digital reproduction.
(© 2023 Lynn Kaye)