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Broadside, the feminist magazine unfraid to take shots

You don’t realize you’re making history until it’s almost too late. And you don’t realize how easy it is to lose that history – forever – until it almost disappears.

I figured this out recently while working on a project to digitize one of Canada’s most influential feminist magazines of the 80s.

Broadside published monthly from 1978 to 1988, featuring famous Canadian authors like Margaret Atwood and June Callwood and emerging writers. It was Broadside that gave me my voice, and it was in its pages that NOW publishers Alice Klein and Michael Hollett found my byline.

Broadsiders tackled issues and covered artists the mainstream media tended to ignore, and we did it in ways conventional journalism mocked. We used the first person, wrote about our own experience, shamelessly touted our activism (each issue contained a calendar of meetings and events where women could get involved) and celebrated our bias.

For various reasons – political and personal changes – we ceased publishing in 1988, and complete sets of the newspapers began languishing in collective members’ basements or in various archives. At a memorial for one of our original members, we realized that we couldn’t let the magazine yellow and crumble away, especially in the digital age.

We’ve now made every page of the mag available – and searchable – online at broadsidefeminist.com, keeping alive an important part of Canada’s social movement history.

Broadside documents the activism that changed Canada’s political landscape. Want to know why our prime minister won’t dare reopen the abortion issue? Go to the site, search for “abortion” and recall the movement that would not be stopped, even as authorities busted Henry Morgentaler not once but three times.

Some things don’t change fast enough. In the last federal election, not that many more women ran for office than in 1979. We know that because back then Broadside listed every single female candidate – and this was pre-Google, remember.

Canada’s Charter Of Rights And Freedoms turns 30 this year. The original draft left women out, and legal activists were furious, rallying to make sure equality rights were enshrined in Section 28. Read all about it in Broadside – from the pens of the activists themselves.

Every issue of Broadside contained a full page of women’s events and meetings. You wouldn’t see that today. That doesn’t mean feminists aren’t out there. They’re running the shelters, rape crisis centres and other institutions we founded during the period Broadside flourished. We’re also influencing trade unions and, yes, the Occupy movement has an energetic anti-patriarchy caucus.

And we’re still living feminism every day of our lives.

The Broadside Digital Project launches Friday (June 22) at the NOW Lounge.

susanc@nowtoronto.com

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