Beyond Purity: A Response to Sangster

Readers of [this journal] may well have experienced a number of disorienting sensations: watching media coverage of a political event or demonstration one attended which completely distorts what one observed, or reading reviews of one's own book and finding it unrecognizable. Reading Joan Sangster's "Beyond Dichotomies" had a bit ofthe same effect. Canadian women's history, and its relationship to the emerging field of gender history, as we have studied it, taught it, and written it is - from Sangster's presentation - barely recognizable. We suppose we are among the members of the "younger, more hip generation" (counterposed, presumably, to the sober socialist feminist), whose "consumer choice" Sangster decries. And so we welcome the opportunity to tell our version of the story. --Author's introduction