Approaching 40: The Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada

Abstract

Gender analysis is settling into comfortable middle age in the forty years since the creation of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The Royal Commission produced a case study in democratization and social inclusion in spite of the fact that more recent scholarship tends to diminish its achievement as having been limited, and even fatally flawed in terms of its outreach to the full range of women’s diversity. Sources from the archives provide a somewhat different account to the one made familiar by liberal feminists.