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The Palgrave Handbook
of Gender, Sexuality,
and Canadian Politics
Edited by
Manon Tremblay · Joanna Everitt
 The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Sexuality,
and Canadian Politics

“Tremblay and Everitt’s collection offers an innovative take on Canadian politics. By

employing gender, sexual orientation and intersectional lenses, the volume unsettles
conventional understandings of a stable federal state in the Westminster parliamentary
mould. Finally, here’s the handbook that critical students and teachers have long
awaited.”
—Sylvia Bashevkin, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto, Canada,
and editor of Doing Politics Differently? Women Premiers in Canada’s Provinces
and Territories

“This handbook is a tremendous resource for students, faculty, elected representatives,

policy-makers and activists. Including the main input and output components of
Canadian politics, it is comprehensive and timely. This work includes chapters by many
of the Canadian academy’s leading lights on the multiple ways and sites of intersection
among identity, structures and agency in Canada. Its comprehensiveness is indicated by
its attention to the roles of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and language in confront-
ing political institutions. Importantly, it examines both domestic and foreign policy.”
—Melissa Haussman, Professor of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada

“This important handbook sheds new and powerful light on the fact that the Canadian
political system has been, and continues to be, dominated by heterosexual and cisgen-
der men. It eloquently illustrates how the Feminist Revolution of the 1970s is far from
over. This handbook will quickly become an essential reference in Canadian politics.
Gender issues are analysed from all angles by confirmed experts in their field. There is
no more comprehensive set of studies than the one put together by Manon Tremblay
and Joanna Everitt.”
—François Rocher, Professor of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada

“In my 2015 CPSA presidential address I asserted that, while decades of gendered
research expanded knowledge in the field, little transformation occurred in how con-
ventional political science thinks. This handbook shows that transformation has begun
in studies of Canadian politics. Within the field’s conventional framework for texts, the
handbook’s 26 chapters employ a gendered and intersectional approach to show how to
research, theorize and teach politics in various ways relevant to Canada’s increasingly
diverse population. Using broadened concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘politics,’ the authors
expand the field’s subject matter by exploring diverse communities’ struggles. This
starts to turn a previously static field into one that is much more dynamic – a dynamism
that will change the study of Canadian politics in the 21st century more than anything
else. A ‘must read’ contribution!”
—Jill Vickers, Distinguished Professor of Politics Science and Emeritus Professor,
Carleton University, Canada
 Manon Tremblay • Joanna Everitt
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Gender,
Sexuality, and Canadian
Politics
Editors
Manon Tremblay Joanna Everitt
School of Political Studies Department of History & Politics
University of Ottawa University of New Brunswick
Ottawa, ON, Canada Saint John, NB, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-49239-7    ISBN 978-3-030-49240-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49240-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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 Contents

1 Introduction: Approaching Canadian Politics Through a

Gender Lens  1
Manon Tremblay and Joanna Everitt

Part I Ideologies  13

2 Canadian Liberalism and Gender Equality:

Between Oppression and Emancipation 15
Éléna Choquette

3 Conservatism, Gender, and LGBTQ+ Equity Debates:

An Ideological Clash? 35
Frédéric Boily and Brent Epperson

4 Socialism/Social Democracy: Ideologies of Equality in the

Canadian Context 57
Roberta Lexier

5 Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in Canada:

A Critical Reading 79
Sevan Beukian

6 Gender and Sexuality: Indigenous Feminist Perspectives101

Elaine Coburn and Emma LaRocque

v
vi Contents

Part II Institutions 121

7 Mobilising Equality Through Canada’s Constitution and

Charter: Milestones, or Missed and Even Mistaken
Opportunities?123
Alexandra Dobrowolsky

8 Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations:

Prospects for a More Gender Equal Canada147
Linda A. White

9 Canada’s Legislature: A (Gendered) Parliament for the People167

Tracey Raney

10 Executives in Canada: Adding Gender and Sexuality

to Their Representational Mandate187
Joanna Everitt and J. P. Lewis

11 Public Administration and Government Services:

Gendering Policymaking in Canada207
Tammy Findlay

12 The Judiciary: Representation in Law and Justice

Public Policy231
Erin Crandall

13 Municipal/Local Politics: The False Pretenses of the

Municipal Level in Canada249
Anne Mévellec, Veika Donatien, and Guy Chiasson

14 The Electoral System: The Gendered Politics of

Institutions273
Dennis Pilon

15 Canada’s Political Parties: Gatekeepers to Parliament297

Jeanette Ashe

Part III The Civil Society 317

16 Public Opinion, Political Behaviour, and Voting: Exploring

Diversity319
Amanda Bittner and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant
 Contents  vii

17 Watching the Watchdogs: The News Media’s

Role in Canadian Politics341
Angelia Wagner

18 Social Movements: Full-Fledged Actors in Canadian Politics359

Manon Tremblay

19 The Gender Dynamics of Interest Group Politics:

The Case of the Canadian Menstruators and the
Campaign to Eliminate the “Tampon Tax”379
Francesca Scala

Part IV Public Policy 399

20 Beyond the Binary: Sexual Orientation and Gender

Identity in Canadian Foreign Policy401
Taryn Husband-Ceperkovic and Rebecca Tiessen

21 A Feminist Account of Canadian Defence Policy421

Meaghan Shoemaker and Stéfanie von Hlatky

22 Inflicting the White Man’s Burden: Colonial Intrusion into

First Nation Women’s Lives439
Cora Voyageur

23 Canadian Economic and Fiscal Policy: Questioning

Markets’ Neutrality459
Geneviève Tellier

24 The Shifting Politics of Health in Canada:

Papanicolaou (Pap) Screening, Human
Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccination, and Cervical Cancer
Prevention485
Jessica Polzer, Laura Cayen, and Monica Molinaro

25 Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and Immigration:

Mapping the Complexities of Inclusion and Exclusion
Through Intersectionality507
Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Nisha Nath

26 Conclusions: Re-envisioning the Research and Teaching of

Canadian Politics and Gender, Sexuality and Politics529
Jocelyne Praud
 Notes on Contributors

Yasmeen Abu-Laban is a professor of Political Science and Canada Research

Chair in the Politics of Citizenship and Human Rights at the University of
Alberta. She is also a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Her published research addresses themes relating to ethnic and gender politics;
nationalism, globalization and processes of racialization; immigration policies
and politics; surveillance and border control; and multiculturalism and
anti-racism.
Jeanette Ashe is the Chair of the Political Science Department at Douglas
College in New Westminster, British Columbia. Her research interests include
political recruitment, political parties, representation, and gender and politics.
She is the author of Political Candidate Selection: Who Wins, Who Loses and
Under-representation in the UK (2020) and her articles have appeared in the
Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, British Politics, and the
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy. She has advised MPs in drafting legisla-
tion on electronic petitioning and gender equity and has appeared before
Parliament as an expert witness on gender and political representation.
Sevan Beukian completed a PhD in Political Science from the University of
Alberta and an MA in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut.
Her research is inspired by trauma and memory studies, gender, sexuality and
queer studies, decolonial and post-colonial theories, critical race theory, and
nationalism. Her current research examines LGBTQ activism in post-Soviet
Armenia and the diaspora, constructions of femininity and non-Western femi-
nisms, and the impact of traumatic memories and intergenerational transmis-
sion. Her publications have appeared in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism,
Armenian Review, Routledge and others. After a decade of teaching, Sevan
moved to policy work with a focus on intersectionality and EDI.
Amanda Bittner is professor of Political Science at Memorial University,
where she is the Director of the Gender and Politics Lab. She studies elections,

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

voting, and public opinion in Canadian and comparative contexts. She is the
author of Platform or Personality: The Role of Party Leaders in Elections as well
as the co-editor of three additional volumes, and her articles have appeared
in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science; Electoral Studies;
the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties; and Political Behavior.
Frédéric Boily is a professor at Campus Saint-Jean (University of Alberta).
He specializes in Canadian political ideologies, specifically conservatism and
populism in Alberta and Quebec. He is a member of the Alberta Political
Culture Project, and his research is supported by SSHRC. He is the
author of several books, most notably Le conservatisme au Québec. Retour
sur une tradition oubliée (PUL, 2010). This book received the Donald
Smiley award (2011), from the Canadian Political Science Association.
His most recent books include Stephen Harper. La fracture idéologique d’une
vision du Canada (PUL, 2016) and La Coalition Avenir Québec. Une idéolo-
gie à la recherche du pouvoir (PUL, 2018).
Laura Cayen, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Western
Ontario in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her
research interests include women’s health, sexuality, and postfeminism.
Guy Chiasson teaches Political Science and Regional Studies at the Université
du Québec en Outaouais. His main research interests are municipal politics and
urban governance in mid-sized Canadian cities as well as politics related
to natural resources. His most recent research projects relate to municipal
participation in forest governance and its implication for regional devel-
opment. He published Minorités francophones et Gouvernance urbaine
(Francophone Minorities and Urban Governance) with Greg Allain in
2017 and co-authored L’économie politique des ressources naturelles au Québec
(The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Quebec). His most recent
articles on municipal politics reflect on municipal political parties, urban
planning as well as local policy-making and collaborative planning as
markers of an ongoing renewal of the Canadian municipal model.
Éléna Choquette is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge
and holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of British
Columbia. She is a scholar of Canadian political development. Her main
research programme considers intersections of Indigeneity, race and gender in
the building of the Canadian state and identity.
Elaine Coburn is an associate professor of International Studies at York
University’s bilingual Glendon College. Prior to coming to Glendon, she was
a researcher with the Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques (CADIS)
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and assis-
tant professor at the American University of Paris. Coburn is on the edi-
torial board of the Canadian Review of Sociology. Her research interests
include neoliberal forms of globalization, struggles for social justice and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

social theory, especially socialist feminist, Indigenous and anti-racist per-

spectives. She is the author of more than sixty publications, including the
edited collection, More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom: Indigenous Resistance
and Resurgence.
Erin Crandall is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at Acadia
University. Her research is centred around Canadian judicial politics, with a
particular focus on how judicial selection processes affect representation on the
bench. Her articles have appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political
Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, Public Policy and Administration,
and the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, among other
publications.
Alexandra Dobrowolsky is a professor of Political Science at Saint Mary’s
University and teaches in the areas of Canadian, Comparative, and Women,
Gender and Politics. Her articles have appeared in a range of national and
international journals, and she has written, edited, and co-edited six books on
issues related to social policy, representation and citizenship broadly conceived,
including Women and Public Policy in Canada: Neoliberalism and After?
(2009). She is a contributor to, and the co-editor of, the Canadian Journal of
Political Science’s first special issue on feminisms (2017), and her most recent
volume, co-edited with Fiona MacDonald, is entitled Turbulent Times, and
Transformational Possibilities? Gender and Politics Today and Tomorrow (2020).
Veika Donatien is a PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa’s School of
Political Studies. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Ottawa’s
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Her research inter-
ests include municipal politics, territorial governance, local development
in developing countries, and issues relating to gender and public policies.
She collaborated as a research assistant in various research projects focused
on municipal auditors general and local elections in Canada. Prior to her
graduate studies, Donatien was the head of the gender unit of a Haitian
human rights organization. She also worked as a Project Officer in the
field of gender-based violence and gender-mainstreaming at the United
Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
Brent Epperson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) in France, working in comparative health policy. Much of
his research is undertaken as a visiting researcher at Campus Saint-Jean
(University of Alberta). He simultaneously serves as Graduate
Ombudsman at the University of Alberta (on partial research leave),
where he combines his research in macro-level issue framing with training
in mediation and restorative practices to mitigate conflicts. Epperson
holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Public Administration from the
University of Montana, a PhD from the University of Alberta, and certifi-
cates in mediation and best practices for ombudsman offices. His research
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

interests include health care policy, issue framing and media representation,
public sector governance, and conflict resolution.
Joanna Everitt is a professor of Political Science at the University of New
Brunswick in Saint John specializing in Canadian politics, with a focus on gen-
der and identity in political engagement, public opinion, and political commu-
nication. She has also been involved in federal and provincial election studies.
Her recent books include The Mediation of Gender and Identity in Canadian
Politics (2019), and The Blueprint: Conservative Parties and Their Impact on
Canadian Politics (2017).
Tammy Findlay is an associate professor and chair in the Department of
Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. Her research
focuses on feminist intersectionality and public policy, social policy, child care
policy, women’s representation and democratic governance. She is the
author of Femocratic Administration: Gender, Governance and Democracy in
Ontario (2015), and co-author of Women, Politics and Public Policy: The
Political Struggles of Canadian Women, 3rd ed. (2019). She is also a research
associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Nova Scotia
and a Board member of the Canadian Research Institute for the
Advancement of Women.
Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant is an associate professor in the Department of
Political Studies at Queen’s University, as well as Director of the Canadian
Opinion Research Archive (CORA). Her research focuses on political behav-
iour, elections, and political representation, especially how gender structures all
three. She is the author of Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral
Politics in Canada, which won the 2016 Pierre Savard award from International
Council for Canadian Studies. Her work has also appeared in such journals as
Political Behavior, Electoral Studies, Politics & Gender, Commonwealth &
Comparative Politics, and Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Stéfanie von Hlatky is an associate professor of Political Studies at Queen’s
University and Director of the Centre for International and Defence Policy
(CIDP). Prior to joining Queen’s, she held positions at Georgetown University,
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Dartmouth College,
ETH Zurich, and was a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of
Southern California’s Centre for Public Diplomacy. She has published four
books, including a monograph with Oxford University Press titled American
Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry (2013) and The Future of US
Extended Deterrence (co-edited with Andreas Wenger) with Georgetown
University Press (2015).
Taryn Husband-Ceperkovic is a PhD Candidate in the School of
International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa.
His research takes a critical perspective on new institutionalist frameworks,
focusing on the role of legal institutions in gender equality efforts and how
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

they can be leveraged by social movements to include a broader definition of

gender. In addition to this work, he is interested in the question of disability in
international development theory, policy and practice.
Emma LaRocque is a scholar, author, poet and professor in the Department
of Native Studies, University of Manitoba. Her prolific career includes numer-
ous publications in areas of colonization/decolonization, Canadian historiog-
raphy, racism, violence against women, and First Nation and Metis literatures
and identities. Her poems are widely anthologized in prestigious collections
and journals. In 2005, LaRocque received the National Aboriginal Achievement
Award. She is author of Defeathering the Indian (1975), which is about stereo-
types in the school system; and more recently, author of When the Other Is Me:
Native Resistance Discourse 1850–1990 (2010), which won the Alexander
Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-­Fiction. LaRocque is originally from a Cree-
speaking and land-based Metis family and community from northeastern
Alberta.
J. P. Lewis is an associate professor in the Department of History and Politics
at the University of New Brunswick (Saint John). His major research interests
are in Cabinet government and citizenship education, with a focus on Canada.
His work has appeared in Governance, the Canadian Journal of Political Science,
Canadian Public Administration, the Journal of Political Science Education, the
British Journal of Canadian Studies, and the Canadian Parliamentary Review.
Roberta Lexier is an associate professor in the Department of General
Education at Mount Royal University. Her research interests include social
movements and social change and left politics in Canada. She is trained as a
historian, and her articles have appeared on Sixties student movements in
English Canada and the intersections between social movements and political
parties, especially the New Democratic Party (NDP).
Anne Mévellec is an associate professor in the School of Political Studies at
the University of Ottawa. Her research falls into two related fields. The first
field is political sociology, in which she studies the sociology of elected munici-
pal officials in urban and rural contexts. In particular, she has published on the
dynamics of professionalization (with M. Tremblay, Genre et professionnalisa-
tion de la politique municipale, 2008, Presses de l’Université du Québec),
municipal political parties and the effects of gender at the municipal level, as
well as on governance in the forest context. The second concerns public policy.
She has worked on territorial reforms (municipal amalgamations, regionaliza-
tion, de-regionalization) and urban planning. She is co-editor of the bilingual
Revue Gouvernance.
Monica Molinaro is a PhD Candidate in the Health and Rehabilitation
Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Western Ontario. Her doctoral
research on paediatric oncology nurses’ narratives of caregiving is supported by
an SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS).
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nisha Nath (she/her) is a settler woman of colour living in Amiskwacîwâskahikan

(Edmonton) and Assistant Professor of Equity Studies for the Master of Arts
in Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Athabasca University. She is working
on two major projects implicating race, security, gender and citizenship—one
on relational securitization in Canada and a second interdisciplinary project
with Willow Allen on the settler colonial socialization of public sector workers.
Dennis Pilon is an associate professor in the Politics Department at York
University. His research interests include Canadian and comparative
­democratization, voting systems, diverse representation, and class analysis. His
articles have appeared in the Canadian Political Science Review, the Journal of
Canadian Studies, Labour/Le Travail, Studies in Political Economy, the Journal
of Parliamentary and Political Law, Inroads, and the Socialist Register; he has
contributed chapters to thirteen edited collections, and he has written
two books and co-edited one other. His most recent book is Wrestling with
Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the Twentieth Century West.
Jessica Polzer is an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario in
the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and in the School
of Health Studies. Her research examines the biopolitical dimensions of health
in the twenty-first century with a specific focus on the intersections and effects
of discourses on risk, gender, and responsibility in emerging health
technologies.
Jocelyne Praud teaches in the Department of Political Studies at Vancouver
Island University. She has written journal articles and book chapters and co-­
edited journal volumes on gender and politics in Canada and France. Her latest
publication is “The Public Women of Canada: Women in Elected Office,” in
Working Women in Canada: An Intersectional Approach, ed. Leslie Nichols
(2019), which she co-authored with Alexa Lewis and Jarod Sicotte.
Tracey Raney is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and
Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Her research
focuses on women/gender and politics, sexual harassment in politics and
Canadian politics, and her contributions have appeared in several leading
books and journals, including the Canadian Journal of Political Science and
Nations and Nationalism. In 2013 she won the Jill Vickers Prize for the
best paper presented on gender and politics at the Canadian Political
Science Association annual conference.
Francesca Scala is a professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political
Science at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She has written on topics
related to gender and public policy, gender mainstreaming and feminist
governance, citizen engagement, and the politics of expertise in public
policy. Her research has appeared in a number of journals, including
Politics & Gender, Gender, Work & Organization, and Policy & Society. She is
the author of Delivering Policy: The Contested Politics of Assisted Reproductive
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Technologies in Canada (2019) and the co-editor of Fertile Ground: Exploring

Reproduction in Canada (2014). She is serving as Associate Dean of
Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia
University.
Meaghan Shoemaker is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University, focusing on
the intersections of International Relations and Gender. Shoemaker’s work has
been supported by the Center for International and Defence Policy, where she
was the Project Manager for the CIDP Gender Lab, Queen’s University, and
Canada’s Department of National Defence Targeted Engagement Grants.
Shoemaker is the Women in Defence and Security (WiDS) 2018
Scholarship Recipient, R.S. McLaughlin Graduate Fellow (2019, 2018,
2016). Her research interests include international organizations, mili-
tary, defence, human rights and diversity.
Geneviève Tellier is a professor in the School of Political Studies at the
University of Ottawa, where she teaches in the Public Administration program.
Her work focuses on public budgeting, public finances and parliamentarism.
Her recent work is a book with University of Toronto Press: Canadian Public
Finances. Explaining Budgetary Institutions and the Budget Process in Canada.
Rebecca Tiessen is a professor in the School of International Development
and Global Studies and University Chair in Teaching at the University of
Ottawa. Her research and publications primarily focus on feminist foreign aid
policies, gender and development, and gender mainstreaming. One of her
most recent books is titled Obligations and Omissions: Canada’s Ambiguous
Actions on Gender Equality (co-edited with Stephen Baranyi, 2017).
Manon Tremblay is a professor in the School of Political Studies at the
University of Ottawa. She is the author of 100 Questions About Women and
Politics and the editor of Queering Representation: LGBTQ People and Electoral
Politics in Canada, among many other works on women, lesbian and gay activ-
ism, and politics.
Cora Voyageur is a professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary and
teaches a variety of Criminology and Indigenous courses. She was faculty lead
of the Indigenous Women in Leadership program at the Banff Centre for
16 years. She has published 8 books and more than 60 academics articles/book
chapters. Her academic research focuses on the Indigenous community and
their lived experience. Her research includes Indigenous Women’s Health,
Indigenous Women in Leadership, Indigenous Women and Entrepreneurship,
and Indigenous Women on Boards of Directors. Voyageur holds a Bachelor of
Arts in Sociology, Master of Education and Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
from the University of Alberta. She is a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan
First Nation and a residential school survivor.
Angelia Wagner is an instructor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Alberta. After earning a Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

University, Wagner worked as a journalist at weekly and daily newspapers across

Western Canada before pursuing graduate studies. Her research examines
how the potentially differing attitudes of women and men regarding a
career in politics influence the candidate emergence process in Canada.
She began this research while she was a Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow with the
Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University.
Wagner’s other research interests include examining the intersections of gen-
der, media, and politics in the Canadian context.
Linda A. White is the RBC Chair in Economic and Public Policy and Professor
of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at
the University of Toronto. Her areas of research include comparative welfare
states, comparative social and family policy, particularly education, early child-
hood education and care, and maternity and parental leave; gender and public
policy; ideas, norms, and public policy development; and federalism, law and
public policy. Her articles on comparative social policy have appeared in jour-
nals such as Comparative Political Studies, Governance, Journal of European
Public Policy, Publius, and Social Politics. She is the author of Constructing
Policy Change: Early Childhood Education and Care in Liberal Welfare States
(2017), among other co-authored and co-­edited books.
 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Women elected to the Canadian House of Commons (historical) 180
Fig. 12.1 Outline of Canada’s court system 236
Fig. 16.1 The funnel of causality 327
Fig. 16.2 Left-leaning partisans in Canada, by sex 328
Fig. 23.1 The Canadian welfare state 468
Fig. 23.2 Difference between the annual rate of unemployment of women
and men, 1976–2018 (in percentage points) 474
Fig. 23.3 Gender-based analysis for cultural programs—Budget 2019 480

xvii
 List of Tables

Table 9.1 Senators appointed on advice of the prime minister by sex of

appointee171
Table 9.2 LGB politicians elected to Canada’s House of
Commons (historical) 181
Table 10.1 Female lieutenant governors and territorial commissioners
in Canada 191
Table 10.2 Women in federal cabinets 194
Table 10.3 Types of portfolios held by women at the federal level 202
Table 10.4 Women holding positions as members of an inner cabinet and
chair of a cabinet committee 203
Table 11.1 Representation of disadvantaged groups in Canadian
public service 215
Table 13.1 Key competences exercised by Canadian municipalities 256
Table 13.2 2015 Municipal statistics (statistics on gender of elected officials) 262
Table 15.1 NDP candidate-selection process results (2015) 307
Table 15.2 NDP’s selection process (2015) 310
Table 15.3 NDP’s selection process filtering by sex and LGBTQ+ 311
Table 20.1 Action areas of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy 411
Table 23.1 Socio-economic indicators, selected countries, 2017 461
Table 23.2 Some key indicators on Canadian businesses 464
Table 23.3 Major sources of income, per capita, by age group
and gender, 2017 469
Table 23.4 Employment insurance benefit, by type, amount paid,
2016–2017470
Table 23.5 Federal income tax on individuals, by category of taxable
income, 2016 471

xix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Approaching Canadian Politics

Through a Gender Lens

Manon Tremblay and Joanna Everitt

Introduction
In 1929, the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council (JCPC) located
in Great Britain and the highest court of appeal in the British Commonwealth
overruled the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the landmark
Edwards v. Attorney General for Canada case (1930). More commonly known
as the “Persons Case,” this reference case sought to determine whether women
were “persons” and therefore eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada. In writing
up the court’s decision John Sankey, then Lord Chancellor of the JCPC, set
out what has become a leading principle of constitutional interpretation in
Canada: “The British North America Act planted in Canada a living tree capa-
ble of growth and expansion within its natural limits” (p. 136). Thus, despite
the intent of its original framers, the values of the day meant the word “per-
sons” used in section 24 of the British North America Act (1867) should be
considered as including women—and therefore that they could be appointed
to the Senate.

M. Tremblay (*)
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
e-mail: mtrembla@uottawa.ca
J. Everitt
Department of History & Politics, University of New Brunswick,
Saint John, NB, Canada
e-mail: jeveritt@unbsj.ca

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Tremblay, J. Everitt (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender,
Sexuality, and Canadian Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49240-3_1
2 M. TREMBLAY AND J. EVERITT

The Living Tree: Social Transformations

and Equality Considerations

While the interpretive metaphor of the living tree had been somewhat forgot-
ten in the five decades following its enunciation, it was reinvigorated with the
adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which came into
existence in 1984. Perhaps most significant has been its impact throughout the
1990s and 2000s in securing of equality rights for those whose sexual orienta-
tions, gender identities and gender expressions (SOGIE) did not fit with tradi-
tional heterosexual norms. For example, it was mentioned in Reference re
Same-Sex Marriage (2004) and Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop (2007)
cases which sought to secure survivor Canada Pension Plan benefits for same-­
sex couples. In the former the court argued that: “The ‘frozen concepts’ rea-
soning runs contrary to one of the most fundamental principles of Canadian
constitutional interpretation: that our Constitution is a living tree which, by
way of progressive interpretation, accommodates and addresses the realities of
modern life. Read expansively, the word ‘marriage’ in s. 91(26) does not
exclude same-sex marriage.” In fact, the opening of civil marriage to same-sex
couples “far from violating the Charter, flows from it.” (Reference re Same-Sex
Marriage 2004)
The idea that the Constitution is a timeless document capable of adapting
to the transformations that shape Canadian society is useful in understanding
the human rights revolution that has occurred in Canada since (and even
before) the adoption of the Charter, but it is also useful in understanding the
Canadian political system. Indeed, the principle of constitutional interpretation
of the living tree carries a tension between continuity and change. On the one
hand, the framework of the political regime established by the British North
America Act in 1867 still prevails today. For example, the ideologies that
founded Canada (liberalism and conservatism) still hold the upper hand in the
Canadian political game, as does nationalism, which has inspired the desire for
self-determination of French-speaking people. Few changes have occurred in
our political institutions over the past century and a half. Canada is still a con-
stitutional monarchy where debates about the appropriateness of becoming a
republic have little influence. Parliament maintains a bicameral structure, and
despite various debates over the years, members of the Senate are still not
elected by Canadians. The first past the post voting system introduced by the
Constitutional Act of 1791 continues to be employed despite numerous
attempts by civil society to replace it. The prime minister remains a central
actor in the Canadian parliamentary system, although her/his power has
evolved over time to make her/him a hegemonic actor (some will say an elected
queen/king). Interest groups still enjoy privileged access to policymakers and
their influence on the public policy process remains significant. Despite a public
discourse that promotes diversity, Canada’s political system remains domi-
nated—in terms of its ethos, institutions, actors, processes—by white,
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING CANADIAN POLITICS THROUGH A GENDER… 3

heterosexual and cisgender men. In addition, First Nations peoples continue to

suffer from the colonial oppression of the federal state.
Yet despite this remarkable continuity since Confederation, the Canadian
political system has also undergone a profound transformation. New political
ideologies have emerged and have even been able to access legislative represen-
tation, as evidenced by appearance of social democratic parties in the early
1900s and more recently the Green Party of Canada. The Constitution of
Canada has been enriched by a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has
served minorities rather well, including women and lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgendered and queer (LGBTQ) people. The judicial branch of state power
emancipated itself from British control when the Supreme Court became the
court of last appeal in criminal matters in 1933 and in civil matters in 1949.
While Canadians still use the first-the-post-system to designate MPs, the elec-
toral supply has diversified, electoral behaviour has become more complex and
the partisan system has shifted from a two-party to a polarised pluralist party
system. Legislative bodies are slowly becoming more diverse and political exec-
utives have broadened their representative mandates from geographic and lin-
guistic representation to incorporate religious, ethnic/racial, gender and sexual
orientation and identity. While the British North America Act of 1867 places a
very secondary importance on municipalities, they are now full-edge players in
Canadian political governance. Although civil society has always been a breed-
ing ground for citizen activism (as evidenced by the uprisings of 1837–1838 or
even resistance to conscription), social movements have grown in importance
since the 1970s, have become formalised and have gained legitimacy in the
eyes of the population but also of the state apparatus. This is reflected in the
reframing of state language on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and
expression (SOGIE).
Indeed, an examination of the Canadian political system in light of gender
reveals two observations: one is that it has always been deeply mono-gendered,
in the sense that the male principle reigns by default; the other is that the femi-
nist revolution of the 1970s and beyond forced it to undergo certain transfor-
mations. The Canadian political system has been, and continues to be,
dominated by heterosexual and cisgender men. This is true of its ideologies, its
institutional culture and its public policies. For example, liberalism, the ideo-
logical background of the Canadian political system, is based on a division
between the private (the space of the reproduction of life and family) and the
public (the world of production via the economy, society and politics), with
women being assigned to the former and men to the latter. State institutions
are dominated by men, who occupy the majority of legislative, executive and
judicial roles. As far as public policies are concerned, many are still based on the
pre-eminence of the male principle, whether in defence, healthcare or taxation.
The feminist revolution of the 1970s and beyond not only uncovered this
male pre-eminence of the Canadian political system, but also provided a trans-
formative force for it to become more inclusive of women. For example, in
1967 the Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson established the Royal
4 M. TREMBLAY AND J. EVERITT

Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, whose mandate was to

“inquire into and report upon the status of women in Canada, and to recom-
mend what steps might be taken by the Federal Government to ensure for
women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian Society”
(Canada 1970: vii). The Commission’s 1970 report captures the full scope of
second-class citizenship for Canadian women, making 167 recommendations,
many of which are still relevant today. In doing so, the Commission was not
only in tune with the mobilisations of the feminist movement that were then
taking place in Canadian political society, but it also encouraged and legiti-
mised such mobilisations within the state apparatus itself as state-based femi-
nism institutions. Thus, the position of Minister responsible for the Status of
Women was created in 1971 in response to the report, and in 1976 a depart-
ment agency (the Office of the Coordinator, Status of Women) was created,
which led to Status of Women Canada. In 1995, the federal government
adopted a plan for equality between women and men. One of the objectives
was to implement gender-based analysis in all federal departments and agen-
cies. In 2011, the gender-based analysis adopted an intersectional design to
become the gender-based analysis plus, and in 2018 the Ministry of Women
and Gender Equality, which replaced Status of Women Canada, was given a
mandate to work to “the advancement of equality, including social, economic
and political equality, with respect to sex, sexual orientation, and gender iden-
tity or expression” (Women and Gender Equality Ministry Act, L.C. 2018, c.
27, art. 661, para. 2a), thus clearly incorporating the SOGIE variable.
The feminist revolution of the 1970s and beyond also affected state person-
nel: more women are sitting in the House of Commons and provincial legisla-
tures, acting as cabinet ministers and holding judicial office. Women are also
more present among federal public service executives. Women, albeit only a
few, have served as prime minister or premier, including Kathleen Wynne, not
only the first woman to be premier of Ontario but the first openly LGBTQ
person to hold such an elite office in Canada and across the Commonwealth.
However, gender parity in politics is still a long way off.
Furthermore, these findings—that the Canadian political system is male-­
dominated, and that feminism and the mobilisation of LGBTQ interests have
created within it a certain room for women and those with diverse SOGIE
backgrounds—are absent from the textbooks on the Canadian political system.
The Palgrave Handbook on Gender, Sexualities and Canadian Politics is the
fruit of an observation: mainstream introductory Canadian politics textbooks
are embedded in a narrow vision of Canada in which white Anglo-saxon het-
erosexual cisgender men are the active citizens and political entrepreneurs, a
reading that needs to be challenged by accounts more sensitive to the diversi-
ties of Canadian society. Indeed, textbooks on Canadian politics either say
nothing about women, mention them in a paragraph or footnote or segregate
them to a “special” chapter. As for sexualities, they are conspicuous by their
very absence. These silences should not come as a surprise, since women and
sexualities have traditionally been associated with the private sphere, a field
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING CANADIAN POLITICS THROUGH A GENDER… 5

conceptualised as antinomic of the public sphere—the political space. And that

is not to mention other absences in addition to gender and sexuality, including
those related to ethnic/racial origin, social class, capacity and, above all, those
that silence Indigenous realities. In fact, the only diversity that seems to be
acceptable in Canadian politics is that of language—and, following out of that,
that of the regions. It is as if Canada is a country only made up of white, het-
erosexual and cisgender men, petit-bourgeois, fully able-bodied and so on, and
that its political system and institutions (e.g., the constitution, the executive,
social movements, public policies) do not have gendered, sexualised and inter-
sectional dimensions. It is this vision that the Handbook proposes to challenge
by promoting a gendered, sexualised and intersectional reading of Canadian
politics.

Employing a Gender Lens on Canadian Politics

The primary objective of the Handbook is to revisit the field of Canadian poli-
tics in light of gender—in other words, to examine the study of Canadian poli-
tics using “gender” as a category of analysis. First and foremost, our approach
to gender does not just involve a focus on women. We understand gender as
being inclusive of women; however, we interpret gender more broadly. As a
result, in its assessment of Canadian politics this text adopts a focus on sex,
sexualities, sexual identities and where possible other intersecting identities
constituted by class, race/ethnicity, age, capacity, religion and other categories.
The basic premise of the Handbook is that political actors have a gender, are
sexual beings and have other intersecting identities that frame how Canadian
politics is thought, told and enacted; in turn, Canadian politics, as a set of
ideas, state institutions, decision-making processes and civil society mobilisa-
tions, does and redoes gender. Ultimately, the goal of the Handbook is to shed
light on the gendered, sexualised and intersectional nature of Canadian poli-
tics. Put differently, the Handbook is driven by the objective of constituting an
introductory textbook to Canadian politics whose privileged approach is that
of intersectionality. As a result, it places gender and sexuality at the forefront of
its focus and identify how they interweave with other diversities to read the
Canadian political system. It seeks to answer questions such as: What happens
to the ideologies that form the bedrock of Canadian political society when
examined in light of gender, sexuality and other intersectional identities? What
do the voting system or municipal political institutions tell us when they are
subject to the same scrutiny? And what about interest groups—does this tradi-
tional elite bargaining device of liberal societies provide a voice for women and
sexual minorities to influence the public decision-making process? Are public
policies neutral, that is, without gendered and sexualised assumptions upstream
and without gender-specific and sexualised effects downstream?
We would note that the contributors to this volume come from a variety of
theoretical, methodological and geographic backgrounds. Contributors also
reflect different generations of ideas and streams of thought in Canadian
6 M. TREMBLAY AND J. EVERITT

politics. As a result, the volume and its approach to the study of Canadian poli-
tics reflects the diversity of scholarship in this field and the role that sexual
orientation and gender identity play in our political institutions, processes and
policy approaches.
The Handbook is designed as many other mainstream introductory
Canadian politics textbook with four parts (ideologies, institutions, civil society
and public policy), each of which contains several chapters. Each chapter
reviews the basics of a given topic from the perspective of gendered/sexualised
and other intersectional identities. For example, the chapter on the legislative
branch provides basics on the topic (the principles that govern the legislative
power, a description of the Senate and the House of Commons, their main
actors and functions, etc.), but from gendered/sexualised and intersection-
alised perspectives.
Part I, on “ideologies,” explores the principal political ideologies that have
inspired Canadian politics since confederation: liberalism, conservatism, social
democracy/socialism and nationalism. This part also discusses philosophies
that inform Indigenous governance, which have been eradicated from the
Canadian ideological landscape. This examination of the dominant ideological
approaches underpinning politics sheds light on a paradox: on the one hand,
gender, sexualities and other intersectional identities have been traditionally
excluded from mainstream understandings of Canadian politics, but on the
other hand they deeply structure political ideologies (for instance, via the
taken-for-granted division between the private and the public, the family as a
space of moral regulation and racist assumptions about citizenship).
For example, in Chap. 2 Éléna Choquette outlines how liberal ideas both
supported the domination and the emancipation of women and LGBTQ com-
munities. By drawing on contemporary critiques of the liberal understanding
of the relationship between the private and the public articulated by Black,
Franco-Québécois, Indigenous and lesbian feminists, this chapter highlights
both the potential and limits of liberal theory and practice to achieve gender
and sexual equality. In focusing on the relationship between LGBTQ groups
and the conservative movement, Chap. 3 by Frédéric Boily and Brent Epperson
highlights the tensions between conservative ideological orientations empha-
sising law and order and more traditional religious values, and current public
pressures, particularly by LGBTQ activists, for inclusion and identity recogni-
tion. They conclude that attempts to reconcile the concerns of conservatives
with the demands of LGBTQ communities are unlikely to succeed due to the
rejection by conservatives of what they see as ill-advised identity politics.
Chapter 4, by Roberta Lexier, traces the roots of socialism and social democ-
racy in Canada through the history of the Cooperative Commonwealth
Federation and the New Democratic Party. Lexier argues that despite contin-
ued struggles around the marginalisation of women and sexual minorities, the
centrality of the notion of equality to these philosophies has provided space
within them for the recognition and integration of women and LGBTQ
persons.
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING CANADIAN POLITICS THROUGH A GENDER… 7

Chapters 5 and 6 take slightly different approaches to ideologies by focusing

on nationalism and Indigenous feminist perspectives. Chapter 5 by Sevan
Beukian analyses nationalism in Canada through gendered and intersectional
lenses by focusing on English (or Anglo-) nationalism, Québécois nationalism
and Indigenous nationalism. It draws on the concepts of collective trauma and
memory to unpack constructions of the nation as a continuously traumatic
event, particularly for racialised and excluded women, LGBTQ and Two-Spirit
individuals and highlights the importance of the resistance and resilience of
those who challenge barriers to inclusion. Chapter 6 by Elaine Coburn, with
Emma LaRocque, offers an important insight into the diversity of Indigenous,
and particularly Indigenous women’s voices and political positions around
issues of gender equity and sexuality. They highlight how these positions vary
across time and communities, and are sometimes conflicting, reflecting rich
debates within contemporary Indigenous feminist scholarship.
Part II examines the institutional framework of the Canadian political
regime—that is, institutions that are responsible for implementing representa-
tive democracy: the constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
federalism and intergovernmental relations; the legislative branch; the execu-
tive; the judiciary; public administration and government services; municipal
politics, the electoral system; and finally, political parties. Attention is paid to
the descriptive and symbolic representation of women, LGBTQ people and,
other intersecting identities (e.g., based on class, race/ethnicity or religion) in
state institutions. This part also explores the mechanisms that contribute to the
underrepresentation of women, LGBTQ people and other intersecting identi-
ties within the state apparatus and suggest ways to increase their presence.
Some chapters, such as Chap. 7 on the Constitution and the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms by Alexandra Dobrowolsky, take a historical approach
and explore different pre- and post-Confederation power struggles and their
implications and challenges for various actors’ efforts (in particular those of
Indigenous women and men, feminists and lesbians and gays) to refine the
meanings and mechanisms of equality. Others such as Chap. 8 on federalism
and multilevel governance by Linda A. White focus on the ability of these insti-
tutions to constrain or facilitate public policymaking that might lead to a more
gender equal society in Canada that includes both women/men, femininities/
masculinities and differing sexualities.
Chapter 9 on legislatures by Tracey Raney and Chap. 10 on executives by
Joanna Everitt and J.P. Lewis both explore two of the critical representative
institutions in Canadian politics. Raney considers the degree to which changes
that have occurred in the Senate and the House of Commons have been suffi-
cient to keep pace with Canadians’ expectations of their governing institutions
and how the rules, norms and culture of Canada’s federal legislature are gen-
dered in ways that either diminish or enhance women’s and LGBTQ voices and
perspectives. Everitt and Lewis discuss how Canada’s history of interest repre-
sentation in cabinet, initially geographic and linguistic, then religious and eth-
nic, opened up opportunities for the representation of gender and sexual
8 M. TREMBLAY AND J. EVERITT

orientation. They also note that the appointed nature of Canada’s formal (i.e.,
the positions of governor general or lieutenant governor) and political (prime
minister/premier and cabinet) executives has made it easier to improve the
symbolic representation of traditionally excluded identities in ways that do not
necessarily further substantive policy representation. Likewise, Chap. 11 by
Tammy Findlay on public administration and government services highlights
the relationship between gender, sexuality, gender identity and public adminis-
tration. It demonstrates how a gender lens can be applied to the study of public
administration by building on feminist theories of the state, and focusing on
gender and employment and representation in the bureaucracy. She concludes
by discussing the challenges and the potential impact for gender-based analysis
(GBA) and GBA+ approach to public policy development.
Like other chapters that highlight the implications for numeric representa-
tion, Chap. 12 on the judiciary written by Erin Crandall demonstrates the
impact of judicial selection and gender diversity on the courts on justice public
policy. She argues that the use of a gendered and sexualised lens is important
for understanding the politics of Canada’s judicial branch. Chapter 13 on
municipal politics covers a topic not often included in general Canadian politics
texts, yet Anne Mévellec, Veika Donatien and Guy Chiasson’s work demon-
strates how important this topic is to the daily lives of citizens despite low levels
of citizen attention and interest during election campaigns. Furthermore, they
reveal the limited capacity of municipal councils to function as institutions of
descriptive or substantive representation of Canadian diversity.
Chapter 14 on the electoral system and Chap. 15 on political parties provide
a bridge to the next part on civil society. Dennis Pilon’s chapter focuses on the
implications of the rules and institutional arrangements of the electoral system.
He demonstrates how they are gendered and often produce gender and sexual
inequalities in political contests. Jeanette Ashe builds on these ideas by high-
lighting how political parties serve as “gatekeepers” who, through their nomi-
nation processes and the choices of the party selectors, play a key role in
determining why women and LGBTQ people are under-represented in
Canada’s House of Commons.
Part III is on the civil society. It focuses on electoral activism by women,
LGBTQ people and other intersecting identities to access descriptive, symbolic
and substantive representation within the state apparatus of democracy. In
Chap. 16, Amanda Bittner and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant demonstrate that
the public opinion and political behaviour literature has traditionally treated
cis, heterosexual white men as the “default,” despite the fact that this does not
reflect the experience of most of the population. Furthermore, they argue that
research on the role of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity provide us with
important (and more nuanced) insights into the minds of voters. Angelia
Wagner, in Chap. 17 on the media, demonstrates how key professional norms
prioritise white, heterosexual men’s perspectives. She discusses the challenges
facing the Canadian news media in general, the implications of the gendered,
sexualised and racialised dimensions of news products for the depiction of
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING CANADIAN POLITICS THROUGH A GENDER… 9

different types of politicians and the quality of political journalism in Canada.

The role of social movements in Canadian democracy is discussed in Chap. 18
by Manon Tremblay. She argues that not only do social movements participate
fully in Canadian politics through their interaction with various parts of the
Canadian political regime, but in their role as counterbalances to the power of
the state they broaden the representation of diverse interests that are tradition-
ally excluded from decision-making offices. This idea is furthered in Chap. 19
by Francesca Scala where she argues that interest groups provide an important
vehicle for organising and representing the collective interests of society to
government. In doing so, she explores how gender shapes interest groups poli-
tics and the institutional arena(s) where it takes place and highlights how and
why women’s and LGBTQ groups and their interests are often marginalised in
policymaking.
The final part (Part IV) of the book analyses some of the public policy fields
of Canadian politics with the objective of shedding light on how they contrib-
ute to framing a citizenship that is gendered, heterosexualised and otherwise
excludes intersecting identities minorities. Put differently, a gender-based-­
inspired analysis informs this part. The chapters in this part of the Handbook
focus on the following areas: international relations, defence, Indigenous
People, fiscal and economic policy, health and, finally, citizenship, multicultur-
alism and immigration.
In their discussion on Canadian foreign policy found in Chap. 20, Taryn
Husband-Ceperkovic and Rebecca Tiessen assess the extent to which the
Canadian Government’s international development and foreign policy and
practice reflect a broader definition of gender equality which includes topics
related to sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. They con-
clude that while space exists to include SOGIE issues, Canada’s current policy
and practice still does not employ a sufficiently comprehensive definition of
gender that is inclusive of transgender and otherwise gender-variant persons.
In Chap. 21, Meaghan Shoemaker and Stéfanie von Hlatky concluded that
while there has been increased attention to diversity and inclusion within
Canadian defence since the 1960s, there remain limitations to the current pol-
icy framework and a continued need for work in this field to engage with criti-
cal and feminist perspectives, and their histories.
Chapter 22 by Cora Voyageur on policies addressing the needs of Canada’s
Indigenous Peoples argues that First Nations, and First Nations women in
particular, have been placed in a precarious and subordinate position by foreign
and domestic governments. She demonstrates that in order to fully understand
the current social, political and economic position of First Nations women one
must understand the historical foundations of Canadian legislation and public
policy. Chapter 23 by Geneviève Tellier on economic policy highlights how
Canada’s mixed economy promotes both free-market mechanisms and state
intervention to allocate resources. She argues that it is necessary to adopt a
gender/sexuality lens to understand the impact of these policies on those tra-
ditionally ignored in economic analyses. In their assessment of the shifting
10 M. TREMBLAY AND J. EVERITT

politics of health policy in Canada, found in Chap. 24, Jessica Polzer, Laura
Cayen and Monica Molinaro use the example of two approaches to cervical
cancer prevention to demonstrate how policy decisions can be disproportion-
ately and negatively experienced by marginalised women and LGBTQ popula-
tions. Finally, in Chap. 25, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Nisha Nath highlight how
an intersectional approach allows debates and policies around immigration,
multiculturalism and citizenship to be more attuned to issues of settler-­
colonialism, heteropatriarchy and race/ethnicity. They argue that these areas of
public policy in Canada are distinct in that they reflect both domestic and
global forces, but like other elements of Canadian public policy carry gendered
implications.
The Handbook closes with a comprehensive conclusion that highlights
some of the major contributions of the text. Jocelyne Praud in Chap. 26 dem-
onstrates how various ideological approaches have become more receptive to
the claims of marginalised groups and how governing and electoral institutions
have been affected by the changes and innovations promoted by those tradi-
tionally excluded from them. This has resulted in these identities becoming
more numerically, symbolically and substantively representative in various
aspects of Canadian politics. Furthermore she highlights how despite their
exclusion from traditional institutions of big “P” politics, women and sexual
minorities have been able to pursue their interests though small “p” activities
in interest groups and social movements. Yet despite these improvements, she
acknowledges the sustained representational challenges still presented by
Canada’s political institutions and a civil society that may still hold sexist and
heteronormative views that continue to exclude women and non-conforming
individuals. She argues, as would we, that while the impact of the above noted
changes has resulted in improved representation in substantive terms through
public policies, attention is still needed to ensure that governments adopt more
gender-sensitive approaches to policymaking, particularly under more conser-
vative governments. She concludes by recognising that efforts need to be made
by instructors in Canadian politics to integrate a more gender inclusive and
intersectional perspective into their courses, particularly given the diverse
nature of our student populations. Only by incorporating an expansive under-
standing of gender (from just women and men) that includes gender orienta-
tion, gender identity and expression is possible to achieve real gender equality.
A word before we close. Different acronyms are used in the chapters to refer
to sexual and gender minorities: some authors simply use LGBT, while others
use the terms LGBTQ, LGBTQ+ or LGBTQ2. We ourselves tend to employ
LGBTQ, but rather than having a single acronym for all the chapters, we have
opted to let the authors choose the acronym that best suits their argument. We
should also note that different acronyms can be used in the same chapter if the
author refers to diverse realities that affect different subgroups within the
LGBTQ populations (e.g., LGB vs. transpeople) or to other work that employs
a different way of describing these individuals.
 1 INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING CANADIAN POLITICS THROUGH A GENDER… 11

References
Canada. 1970. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada.
Ottawa: Information Canada.
Canada (Attorney General) v. Hislop. 2007. 1 SCR 429.
Edwards v. Attorney General for Canada. 1930. A.C. 128.
Reference re Same-Sex Marriage. 2004. 3 S.C.R. 698.
 PART I

Ideologies
 CHAPTER 2

Canadian Liberalism and Gender Equality:

Between Oppression and Emancipation

Éléna Choquette

Introduction
For more than 150 years, liberalism has been the backdrop of Canadian poli-
tics. In this chapter, we examine liberalism through the lens of gender and,
secondarily, sexualities. By tracking the development of liberalism in Canada, it
becomes clear that it has supported both the domination and emancipation of
women and LGBTQ people. To the extent that liberalism developed the gen-
dered idea that the private and public spheres should be distinct, it has rein-
forced the privatisation and domination of women and LGBTQ citizens.
Concurrently, Canadian liberalism has supported certain forms of emancipa-
tion for gendered and sexualised communities. In this sense, liberal feminists
and the liberal trend in the LGBTQ movement have made significant gains for
women and LGBTQ people, most importantly by advancing equal rights.
The first section draws important distinctions, including between different
kinds of feminisms and trends in the LGBTQ movement. Next, we sketch the
main tenets of early liberalism and examine the emergence of the private/pub-
lic divide as constitutive of liberal theory and practice. We consider the conse-
quences for gender and sexual identity of drawing that very distinction.
The second section investigates what can be called the three “waves” of
feminism in liberal Canada. If the first wave of Canadian feminism worked with
the liberal distinction between the private and the public, the second wave
problematised it. By making the argument that the divide continued their

É. Choquette (*)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: elena.choquette@alumni.ubc.ca

© The Author(s) 2020 15

M. Tremblay, J. Everitt (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender,
Sexuality, and Canadian Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49240-3_2
16 É. CHOQUETTE

oppression, second-wave liberal feminists, especially in English Canada, partici-

pated in building programmes that assisted women, but mainly in the respon-
sibilities they assumed as mothers and wives within heterosexual families.
Feminists of the third wave have articulated the many limitations of main-
stream liberal feminism, including by challenging the very understanding of the
private/public distinction problematised by liberal feminists as inappropriate to
address the concerns of many women. Finally, we examine Black, Franco-­
Québécois, Indigenous, and lesbian feminisms as four of the most important
challenges to the legacy and perspectives of liberal feminism.
In short, this chapter brings into view the contradictions that have inhabited
liberalism in Canada since it emerged as an ideology in the nineteenth-century
Western world. A century and a half of liberal rule may have produced some
forms of formal (or legal) equality for gendered and sexualised groups, but not
substantive equality (that which is reflected in daily living conditions). Despite
that mixed legacy, most struggles and claims for equality continue to take place
on liberal terms. Because of the ubiquity of liberal thinking and practice, it is
all the more important to look closely at liberalism in relation to gender and
sexualities. Achieving equity for women and LGBTQ citizens starts with recog-
nising the kinds of oppression liberalism has promoted in order to understand
and rectify them.

Gender, Sexualities, and Liberalism

To the extent that this chapter takes up the task of analysing Canadian liberal-
ism through the lens of gender and sexualities, let us first consider the relation-
ship between these last two concepts. In many ways, gender and sexuality are
co-constituted in Canada society. For that reason, the oppression of women is
connected to the oppression of LGBTQ people (Knegt 2011: 108). Inasmuch
as feminism challenged the liberal separation between the public and the pri-
vate, it supported the LGBTQ movement in some of their claims. Very impor-
tantly, women and LGBTQ citizens have jointly fought the battle against
liberal privatisation—and, as such, the domination and confinement—of gen-
dered and sexual identities. While there are tensions between the women’s
movement and the LGBTQ movement (to say nothing of the tensions internal
to both movements),1 the two groups have jointly challenged the liberal legacy
of invisibility and subordination for women and LGBTQ citizens by politicis-
ing the private sphere.
Liberalism can be understood in multiple and contradictory ways (Bell
2014: 683). To situate the liberal tradition in the context of Canadian political
development, it is useful to use historian Ian McKay’s idea of Canada as a “lib-
eral project of rule” (2000: 623). According to this definition, a “project of

1
Most feminists and LGBTQ activists disagree on some issues, including the legislative regula-
tion of pornography and sexual exploitation (see Smith 1999: 29). Because gender—as opposed to
sexualities—is the main theoretical focus of the chapter, it leaves important questions unaddressed.
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 17

rule” is the attempted imposition of a particular social and political order that
looks to expand and consolidate across time and space. In Canada, this particu-
lar order is defined by philosophical assumptions and political practices that are
distinctively “liberal” in the classical sense. Liberal thinkers and actors, includ-
ing Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, have theorised classi-
cal liberalism as based on the ontological and epistemological priority of
individuals—and, as will become clear, by “individuals,” classical liberal think-
ers usually referred to able-bodied, white male citizens. This means that within
liberalism, the state lacks any finality of its own: it exists only to the extent that
individuals, who are assumed to be self-possessed and formally equal, consti-
tute and govern it. In turn, the most important mandate of the state is to pro-
tect and promote the rights and interests of these individuals.2
Indeed, not everyone has equally benefited from the protection of the
Canadian state as full liberal subjects. In many ways, the Canadian liberal
regime is premised on the domination, privatisation, and, at times, harassment
of women and LGBTQ people (Perry 2009: 291; Kinsman and Gentile 2010:
xvii). Despite its exclusionary legacy, liberalism has provided marginalised com-
munities with some tools to promote their emancipation as full liberal subjects,
including the advancement of civil and equality rights.
By advancing some of their claims through liberal precepts and resources,
many feminists and LGBTQ activists contributed to reinventing liberalism.
Both the women’s movement and the LGBTQ movement can be said to be
split into two main branches: the first is the liberal (or reformist) trend, and the
second, a more radical (or liberationist) trend. As many scholars of Canadian
feminism have demonstrated (O’Neil 2017: 447; Vickers 1992; Strong-Boag
1975), liberal feminism has been the most prevalent form of feminist engage-
ment in Canada throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly,
scholars of the LGBTQ movement find that if the liberationist branch of queer
activism in Canada was predominant at the end of the 1960s and the beginning
of the 1970s, it has since the 1990s been reduced to marginality within the
LGBTQ movement (Knegt 2011: 7; Tremblay 2015a; Warner 2002).
Liberal feminists and LGBTQ activists are distinct on account of their aspi-
rations—that is, obtaining liberal rights and formal equality—and the means of
their engagement—that is, formal political avenues, particularly state organisa-
tions, party politics, and the judicial system. In a word, liberal feminists and the
liberal trend of the LGBTQ movement have usually agreed with the assump-
tions and practice of liberalism as the ruling ideology in Canada, but they have
asked that established liberal institutions are more inclusive of women and of
sexual minorities. Because liberal feminists and LGBTQ activists have couched
their aspirations in liberal terms (i.e., in the terms of the prevailing ideology of

2
Even if the Liberal Party of Canada has governed the country for roughly 70 per cent of the last
century, it is important to distinguish the liberal ideology (as a set of assumptions and practices that
are foundational to liberalism as the ruling ideology) from Liberal parties (as the partisan groups
these principles have embodied in Canadian history).
18 É. CHOQUETTE

Canadian politics), they were able to gain significant rights and bring about
many concrete changes in the lives of women. Because they have critiqued
liberalism, they have also contributed to making liberalism more inclusive of
gendered and sexualised communities. What many radical feminists and libera-
tionist queer activists argue, however, is that even if these gains are important,
they fail to address patriarchal and heteronormative domination at its heart.3

Early Liberalism and Feminism

This section examines the origins of liberal theory to bring into light both its
potential and limitations for emancipating gendered and sexualised communi-
ties. Although liberalism only emerged as a coherent tradition in the nine-
teenth century, we can find in the seventeenth-century thinking of John Locke
the ideas that are antecedent to the tradition and became central in it (Arneil
1996). As many feminists have analysed (Brennan and Pateman 1979: 183;
Nash 2001), the early liberal ideas of Locke developed in opposition to patri-
archal theory. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke challenges the patriar-
chalist argument that the natural superiority of certain individuals (most
importantly, kings) justified their domination over others, for the reason that
all individuals are essentially free and formally equal. As a result, sovereigns
have no inherent or divine right to rule over their subjects and neither do men
over women.
Early liberal theory gave rise to what Michael Walzer (1984) names the lib-
eral “art of separation,” that is, the separation of the public sphere from various
spheres, including the religious and the economic spheres. Most importantly
for our purposes, early liberalism applied the “art of separation” to the domes-
tic sphere (Brodie 1997: 228). According to Lockean liberalism, individuals
should in the privacy of their own home be free to exercise their rights to life,
liberty, and property—a principle which was, of course, clearly refused to those
people we call today “LGBTQ.” Authority within the private realm was under-
stood to lie beyond the purview of the social contract, which implied that
husbands could continue to exercise their authority as heads of their hetero-
normative family. Lockean liberalism also assumed that only (male) heads of
households would enter the public sphere as “individuals.”
The liberal idea that the public and private spheres should be separate is
gendered; that is, it does not apply to women and men in the same way. Despite
Locke’s explicit rejection of the patriarchalist idea that women are naturally
subordinate to men, his liberalism implicitly allows for the subjugation of
women by excluding them from the public sphere, in which individuals are

3
In the words of DeGagne (2012: 26): “the current mainstream lesbian and gay movement is
abandoning its emphasis on being different from the ‘straight majority.’… Formal but not substan-
tive equality is granted once minorities are recognized (categorized), acknowledged (allowed to
speak) and accepted (depoliticized). Ultimately, therefore, accommodation occurs on the terms of
the majority.”
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 19

regarded as free and equal, and relegating them to the private sphere, in which
they are regarded as naturally subordinate to men. For this reason, the liberal
claim that the political must be separated from the private is not so different
from the patriarchalist (and heteronormative) claim that within the private
sphere women and girls (as wives and daughters) are subject to men (as hus-
bands, fathers, and brothers). In the words of Brennan and Pateman, Lockean
liberalism “provides a new contractual dress” for the patriarchal and heteronor-
mative assumption that women are to marry men and, as wives, be subordinate
to them (1979: 194; see also Brodie 1995: 29).
Even if it authorised the privatisation of women, early liberal theory also
provided feminists with an important tool. By stipulating that both women and
men were equal liberal individuals in the public sphere, liberalism laid the foun-
dation for the feminist project of obtaining political rights for women. In her
1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft uses liberal
resources to make the feminist argument that women should be fully included
in the public sphere. Provided they receive education, Wollstonecraft argues,
women could become full citizens. The articulation of liberalism by John
Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women), one of Wollstonecraft’s successors, rein-
forced in the nineteenth century the idea that the exclusion of women from the
public sphere, for example, by denying them the franchise, was inconsistent
with the liberal claim that all individuals are entitled to freedom and rights.
However, as Pateman (1989: 131) makes clear, Mill’s failure to question the
sexual division of labour, entrenched in the separation of domestic from public
life, undercuts his argument in favour of the suffrage of women by ensuring
they cannot be fully present in the public sphere.
In short, early liberalism has left behind a mixed legacy. While liberal theory
provides for a separation between the private and the political realm that sup-
ports the privatisation of women and of sexualities, it also provides for the
emancipation of women and LGBTQ people by insisting on their equal stand-
ing in the public sphere.

Three Waves of Feminism in Liberal Canada

Working with the Divide

Even if it drew on different influences, what could be called the first wave of
feminism was dominated in Canada by liberal forms of arguments and practice.
During the suffrage era, liberalism and feminism developed as mutually rein-
forcing ideologies that helped women achieve greater access to the public
sphere (Sangster 2018: 96).
Most feminists in the nineteenth century shared an implicit acceptance of
the doctrine of “separate spheres.” This doctrine states that the two spheres—
the public sphere of individual rights and contractual arrangements, which is
set against the private sphere of family—are equally important, but separate.
The first Canadian feminists worked with this liberal doctrine to achieve formal
20 É. CHOQUETTE

legal and political equality for women. Whether they insisted on their distinct
identity as women or on their formal equality with men,4 first-wave feminists
successfully undertook to overthrow some of the laws that prevented some of
them from participating in the government of their communities by using the
liberal tradition of rights and freedoms.
In addition to using liberal arguments, the first Canadian feminists also
achieved their objectives through liberal forms of advocacy. In contrast to more
radical ideologies, liberal feminism stipulates that civil liberty and equality can
be achieved within the present system (Adamson 1995: 225). Most liberal
feminists believed that the best way to achieve feminist objectives was for a
small number of elite women to advocate women’s rights within existing politi-
cal parties, usually the Liberal Party (Kealey and Sangster 1989). In part
because they configured their arguments within existing principles and did not
fundamentally challenge established institutions, liberal feminists were able to
make some important gains for some women.
Canadian liberal feminists and suffragists were quite numerous. Among the
most influential are Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, Thérèse Casgrain, and
Cairine Wilson. The career and ideas of Cairine Wilson, Canada’s first woman
senator, are unmistakeably those of a liberal feminist. As a girl Wilson studied
the works of liberal thinkers and politicians, including those of John Bright and
William Ewart Gladstone (Iacovetta 1985: 111). Throughout her career,
Wilson expressed her acceptance of the liberal doctrine of the separate spheres
and attempted to reconcile her political involvement with her domestic duties
as a wife and mother. When addressing the Senate, she stated: “I trust that the
future will show that while engaged in public affairs the … mother of a family
by reason of her maternal instinct will remain the guardian of the home” (cited
in Iacovetta 1985: 108). Liberal senator Wilson also believed that women, by
virtue of their inherent nurturing qualities, were particularly capable of leading
certain campaigns, for instance, the peace movement. Like most liberal femi-
nists of her time, Wilson finally believed that well-educated, upper-middle-class
women and women of European descent were the best leaders of the feminist
movement in Canada.
The first wave of Canadian feminism, which espoused liberal assumptions
and practices, secured a number of gains for some women, including the rights
to vote and to own property. By virtue of their activism, women who were
Canadian “citizens”—a designation that excluded Indigenous women and
most racialised women—became eligible to vote in federal elections in 1918.

4
To gain political rights, Canadian liberal feminists used two distinct arguments. Some demanded
to be treated as equals on the basis of their essential sameness with men. Others demanded rights
as the logical extension of women’s distinct responsibilities as mothers. In Quebec, for instance,
these two arguments emerged at different historical moments: if the latter (maternalist) argument
appeared in the 1920s, the former (egalitarian) argument was mobilised in the 1930s by the more
radical suffragists like Idola St-Jean (Baillargeon 2019: 89–166).
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 21

Problematising the Divide

Liberal feminists of the second wave succeeded to the mostly liberal assump-
tions and modes of advocacy of their foremothers by problematising the doc-
trine of the separate spheres. In different ways, they argued that if the
suffragettes addressed the inclusion of women in the public sphere, they left
the domination of women in the private sphere unchallenged. It appeared to
second-wave feminists that equality for women in the public sphere could not
be achieved without challenging the strictures of private life. One of the most
important contributions of second-wave feminism in Canada and in other lib-
eral democracies was to show that the spheres are integrally related and that the
understanding of the public realm had to be enlarged. In the words of Janine
Brodie, second-wave feminists contributed to revealing that the public-­
domestic divide is “a shifting and contested cultural construction which is satu-
rated with impositional claims and gendered codings” (1997: 230). Through
the slogan “the personal is political,” second-wave feminists in Canada revis-
ited liberal theory to argue that no strict distinction can or should be drawn
between the two spheres. The most direct implication was to redefine and
enlarge the understanding of “the political” by including as “public” a range of
issues regarded until then as strictly “personal.” Abortion, childcare, and the
allocation of welfare benefits were progressively understood as legitimate
domains of public policy.
Two trends emerged in Canadian feminism in the late 1960s and early
1970s (Lamoureux 2016: 182; Vickers 1992). On the one hand, there was a
liberal trend which engaged with the ordinary political process with the view of
better integrating women into existing social structures. On the other hand, a
more radical trend insisted that equality of women required fundamental
changes to social organisation. If the radicals hoped for a radicalisation of the
liberal feminists, it is rather the radical feminists who “liberalised.” Queer activ-
ism developed similarly during the same years. Born at the end of the 1960s, a
bold and militant movement labelled “lesbian and gay liberation” spearheaded
the fight for the liberation of all sexualities. Following the adoption in 1982 of
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, gays and lesbians were able to secure
certain civil rights. In part as a result of these successes, queer activism adopted
a more liberal orientation (Tremblay 2015a: 20; see also Smith 1999). In a
word, both the women’s movement and the LGBTQ movement evolved
towards the end of the twentieth century into mostly liberal movements and
therefore mainly focused on attaining liberal rights and equality through for-
mal political avenues.
The potential and shortcomings of liberal feminism can be illustrated
through the mandate and legacy of Canada’s Royal Commission on the Status
of Women (RCSW), which was established by the Canadian government in
22 É. CHOQUETTE

1967.5 According to Monique Bégin, who served as executive secretary to the

Commission, the RCSW “was clearly informed by a liberal feminist analysis of
gender relations.” She explains that “the commission did not have an explicit
conceptual framework or a shared philosophy, other than its commitment to
the ‘equal rights’ approach” (Bégin 1992: 29). The liberal feminist underpin-
nings of the Royal Commission led commissioners to establish the “absence of
women from the public sphere.” As Bégin admitted, that approach stopped
short of addressing “the real problems underlying [that] absence.” What is
more, the Canadian government “failed [to] set in motion the radical changes
requiring the transformation of society” that the Commission did propose
(31). Nevertheless, many of the Report’s recommendations were quite rapidly
adopted in the 1970s. Federal and provincial funding for women’s organisa-
tions like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, which
worked to institutionalise feminist claims-making, grew substantially from the
early 1970s and late 1980s (O’Neil 2017: 446). The RCSW was also instru-
mental in constituting women as a political constituency (Marshall 1999: 83).
The approach and legacy of the RCSW are illustrative of the potential and
limitations of liberal feminism during the second half of the twentieth century.
Its focus on discrete issues facilitated the implementation of some of its recom-
mendations. These recommendations appeared to be all the more “legitimate”
in that they were articulated in established conceptual frameworks, including
that of civic rights. Commissioners also contributed to problematising the doc-
trine of the separate spheres by advocating the adoption of public policies that
supported women as mothers—which, of course, is a heteronormative stance.
If liberal feminism proved to be relatively efficient in challenging some forms
of the oppression of women, it was also relatively inadequate to address others.
The Commission did take stock of the persisting inequality of women and men
in the public sphere. However, it failed to see how that inequality was directly
related to the doctrine of separate spheres—which, of course, served to repro-
duce the distinction between the two spheres. For instance, it did not theorise
that the doctrine, coupled with the increasingly common reality that women
held paid positions, had produced a “double burden” for most women who, in
heterosexual families, are both wage earners and responsible for significant
amounts of unpaid domestic labour at home. In other words, it did not fully
account for the fact that equality for women in the public sphere had to be
achieved by addressing inequality in the private sphere.

5
The Commission was mandated “to inquire into and report upon the status of women in
Canada, and to recommend what steps might be taken by the Federal Government to ensure for
women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society” (Canada 1970: 4). Both
Franco-Québécois and Anglo-Canadian liberal feminist groups participated in establishing the
Royal Commission. The Quebec government did not appoint a commission similar to the RCSW,
but a few years later it mandated the Conseil du statut de la femme to identify the various forms of
discrimination Quebec women faced and to make recommendations to end that inequality. Like
the RCSW, the Report of the Conseil, entitled “Pour les Québécoises: Égalité et indépendance,”
embodies liberal assumptions and practice (Lamoureux 2016: 115).
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 23

Alongside feminists, gays and lesbians further challenged the liberal separa-
tion of the public and the private by “[deconstructing] and [subverting] the
most private realm of all, the realm of sexuality” (Smith 1999: 142). In response
to some of their claims, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott
Trudeau partially decriminalised homosexual acts between two consenting
adults over the age of 21.6 Trudeau notoriously defended the legislative change
by explaining that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the
nation,” adding that “what’s done in private between consenting adults does
not concern the Criminal Code.” This legislative reform, together with its jus-
tification, is illustrative of the liberal approach to sexuality, that is, as a private
activity that should only be engaged in by two adults in narrowly defined pri-
vate places.
Another legislative initiative of the Trudeau Liberal Government was the
adoption in 1982 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, which since
1995 prohibits sexual orientation as ground for discrimination.7 Various rights
for lesbians and gays have been upheld through courts in the wake of the adop-
tion of the Charter, including with regard to employment, civil union and
marriage, reproduction and parenting (Tremblay 2015a: 20). In part because
they have been successful in securing these rights, an increasingly large branch
of the LGBTQ movement has since the 1990s prioritised advancing further
claims through courts as opposed to building communities and providing ser-
vices to these communities (Smith 1999: 35).
The liberal orientation of the LGBTQ movement is not without its critics.
Liberationist activists argue that the legalistic and reformist posture of main-
stream queer activism—embodied for instance by EGALE, the country’s only
national queer lobby group—has brought some positive change for LGBTQ
communities but is inadequate in a number of respects. In the words of Alexa
DeGagne, “while the liberal equal rights framework may afford people formal
protections, it does little to challenge common assumptions of acceptable sexu-
ality and the ways in which heteronormativity permeates society” (2012: 24).
Seeking formal equality for “sexual minorities” within the institutions designed
by and for the “sexual majority” can only go so far in addressing the heteronor-
mative regime that oppresses LGBTQ citizens and “straitjackets Canadian soci-
ety” (Tremblay 2015b: 291).

6
As specified by Hooper, the 1969 legislative reform mainly concerned sodomy and decriminal-
ised “acts of gross indecency,” not by removing the “gross indecency” section of the Criminal
Code but by adding an amendment that stipulated that it was not criminal to pursue same-sex sex
acts if and only if these acts are committed between two consenting adults (of age 21 or above) in
narrowly defined private places. For that reason, “gay sex was still criminal” (Hooper 2014: 59),
and same-sex sex acts amongst consensual adults have remained the object of prosecution and
policing since 1969 (see Kinsman and Gentile 2010).
7
While sexual orientation was not listed as a prohibited ground for discrimination in the Charter
at the time of its adoption, it was incorporated through a court interpretation in 1995 (see
Smith 1999).
24 É. CHOQUETTE

In a word, both, the liberal trend of the women’s movement and the
LGBTQ movement have secured important gains for gendered and sexualities
groups, including by claiming liberal rights. The more radical trend of both
movements, however, find that the resources and institutions of liberalism,
including the distinction between the private and the public, are too narrow to
challenge deep-seated inequalities between women and men, or across sexual
identities.

Challenging the Problematisation of the Divide

In its partial articulation of and challenge to the doctrine of the separate
spheres, liberal feminism of the second wave neglected to fully account for the
lived experience of many women, whether they were poor, Indigenous, dis-
abled, unmarried, lesbian, or racialised. The third wave of feminism, to which
we now turn, clarifies the limits of liberal feminism by addressing equality for
gendered and sexualised communities across differences of race, class, and sex-
ual identities.
The most important challenge to the liberal feminist assumptions and legacy
of the second wave is the argument that oppression in Western liberal democra-
cies like Canada is intersectional. The theory of intersectionalism, which
Kimberlé Crenshaw was amongst the first to introduce to feminism in 1989, is
premised on the idea that patriarchy coexists with other systems of oppression
(Crenshaw 1991). From that proposition, intersectionalism argues that oppres-
sions are experienced concurrently and that they are difficult to distinguish
from one another. As a result, systems of oppression must be fought simultane-
ously (see Pagé 2014: 203). The most significant implication of intersectional-
ism for feminism is that all oppression suffered by women, whether it originates
in patriarchy or in other systems, must be fought together. Insofar as many
third-wave feminists have adopted the intersectional model, they strive to
achieve substantive equality for gendered and sexualised communities by
accounting for the diverse situations of women.
One intersectional challenge to the liberal theory and practice of second-­
wave feminism concerns its understanding of the separation between the public
and domestic spheres. As the last section illustrated, liberal feminists have
argued that the spheres are integrally related and that the understanding of the
public realm had to be enlarged to encompass various issues until then regarded
as strictly private. Through the theory of intersectionalism, some feminists
challenged that conceptualisation of the public/private divide by arguing that
it reflects the lived experience of white middle-class women and heterosexual
women rather than those of racialised working-class women or lesbians (Arneil
1999: 60). In other words, third-wave feminism argues that the liberal feminist
analyses of women’s oppression instantiate the background and interests of
women who, despite their oppression as women, benefit from a number of
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 25

privileges, especially with regard to their race and class (Stasiulis and Yuval-­
Davis 1995: 2).8

 lack Feminist Feminism

B
It is important to examine the black feminist critique of liberal feminism, for it
first theorised the intersectionality of oppression systems. Intersectionalism
makes the very important argument that the social situation of women is not
solely determined by their gendered identity: it is also determined by their situ-
ations with regard to class and race. Black feminists, including bell hooks,
Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Hazel Vivian Carby, Malinda S. Smith, and Dionne
Brand, also showed that racism contributed to forming a black femininity that
is quite different from white femininity.
bell hooks authored a powerful critique that is directly aimed at the liberal
feminist reading of the doctrine of the separate spheres. In Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center, hooks first challenges the liberal feminist premise that
men largely inhabit the public sphere and women the private. In response to
these assumptions, hooks brings into view the fact that Black men have been
denied access to the public sphere and that Black women have a long history of
working outside the home. The vast majority of women of colour, she writes,
have worked “in jobs that neither liberated them from dependence on men nor
made them economically self-sufficient” (hooks [1984] 2015: 96). By making
that argument, hooks theorises that work beyond the private sphere of home
does not produce emancipation and equality for a large number of women. On
the contrary, hooks argues that if “college-educated white women” find eman-
cipation through work in the public sphere, it has the consequence for
“exploited, underpaid and working” women of colour that they accomplish the
domestic work bourgeois women no longer have to do (2015: 97).
Finally, hooks challenges the liberal feminist argument that women need to
fight oppression, most importantly the oppression of patriarchy, amongst
themselves as women. hooks points out that Black feminists have led battles
against oppression alongside men. As a result, Black feminists need to cultivate
their close connection to Black men to uproot the many systems of oppression
that prevent them from achieving substantive equality, not only with white
men, but also with white women. In a word, hooks develops a compelling cri-
tique of the liberal feminist reading of the public/private divide by showing
how racism and patriarchy intersect to produce particular forms of oppression
for Black women. The theory of intersectionalism for Black women calls not
only for an enlargement of the public sphere, but also for a complete re-­
articulation of the relationship between the two spheres and of the place of
women and men in them.

8
Sangster (2015: 383) emphasises that “shoehorning second wave feminism into a white, mid-
dle-class liberal category” is misleading, for many of these feminists did strive to understand gender
as it intersected with other systems of oppression, in particular capitalist exploitation and Western
imperialism.
26 É. CHOQUETTE

Franco-Québécois Feminism
Black feminist critique mostly developed in the United States, but its theoreti-
cal and practical import travelled to Canada through the works of feminists of
colour, as well as Indigenous and Franco-Québécois lesbians and feminists.
Starting in the 1970s, a number of radical Franco-Québécois feminists gradu-
ally espoused an intersectional approach to oppression by combining an analy-
sis of their domination as women with an analysis of their oppression in Quebec
as a subordinated society within Canada. Indeed, many Franco-Québécois
feminists regarded their struggle for gender equality as part of a wider struggle
for national liberation. The very slogan of radical feminism in Quebec—“No
women’s liberation without Quebec liberation, no Quebec liberation without
women’s liberation!”—hints at the intersectionality of its analysis.9 For this
reason, contemporary Franco-Québécois feminists may be very well positioned
to embrace intersectionalism (Pagé 2014: 201).

Indigenous Feminism
The Franco-Québécois model, however, is not without its problems. When it
compares the situation of Franco-Québécois women with that of colonised
women, Franco-Québécois feminism eclipses Indigenous women and obscures
the role Franco-Québécois women played in sustaining racism and colonialism.
Indigenous feminism furthermore challenges liberal feminism in its prioriti-
sation of gendered oppression over another violent form of oppression: coloni-
sation. Particularly, Indigenous feminists invite settler women to appreciate
and act on their complicity in the perpetration of colonial violence which
Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous women in particular, continue to
endure today.10
Like Joyce Green, many Indigenous feminists maintain that “colonialism is
indubitably the single most urgent structural condition affecting Indigenous
women” (2017: 5). Indigenous feminists and LGBTQ/Two-Spirit critiques
have shown that heteropatriarchy profoundly shaped processes of colonisation.
In particular, they show that the colonisation of Indigenous peoples proceeded
through the regulation of sexual relations, gender identity, marriage, and
reproduction, such that patriarchal systems of government concretised within
Indigenous communities (Starblanket 2017: 23).11 In a word, Indigenous

9
It is not clear to Franco-Québécois feminists today that theorising gendered oppression as
intersecting with other systems of oppression helped empower Franco-Québécois women. On the
one hand, nationalism provided Franco-Québécois women with a vocabulary through which they
could analyse their oppression (Lamoureux 1987: 51; see also Dumont 1992). On the other hand,
Quebec nationalism, as other nationalisms, sprung from masculinised memory and masculinised
hope and mainly valorised women as mothers of the nation to be born (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis
1995: 5; Lamoureux 1987: 51).
10
Indigenous women and children experience the highest rates of violence, sexual abuse, rape,
and suicide (Gabriel 2012: 186).
11
Impositions of patriarchal practices are especially visible in the various articulations of the
Indian Act, which has defined Indigenous identity in ways that disenfranchised and dispossessed
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 27

f­ eminists show that the single most important system of oppression that affects
Indigenous women is colonisation, but that this colonial violence intersects
with gendered and racial forms of oppression in significant ways.
Indigenous feminism furthermore challenges the liberal feminist assump-
tion that all women are similarly affected by patriarchy. According to Rauna
Kuokkanen, the dismissiveness of white liberal feminism takes the form of
“non-recognition, indifference, or plain ignorance” about the distinct circum-
stances of gendered oppression for Indigenous women (Knobblock and
Kuokkanen 2015: 278).12 One Indigenous response to the exclusionary
assumptions and practices of liberal feminism is a feminism that is distinctively
Indigenous. According to Green, Indigenous feminism is analogous to other
feminism in its problematisation of patriarchy and its foregrounding of wom-
en’s experiences with it. It is distinct, however, in its “fundamental familiarity
with the oppressions enacted through colonialism and in its formulation of a
feminist critique derived from that experience” (2017: 5). Indigenous femi-
nism has often been positioned as inconsistent with Indigenous struggles for
decolonisation and self-determination.13 Notwithstanding that difficulty,
Indigenous feminism first looks to set the terms of the empowerment of
Indigenous women as Indigenous women (Maracle 1996: 17).
Indigenous feminism further challenges liberal feminism in showing that
some women, most importantly settler women, were complicit in the colonial
enterprise of dispossessing Indigenous Peoples, including Indigenous women.
In settler societies like Canada, the emancipation of white women was predi-
cated upon the racialisation and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples. According
to Lee Maracle, “the dictates of patriarchy demand that beneath the Native
male comes the Native female. The dictates of racism are that Native men are
beneath white women” (1996: 18; see also Carter 2016: 16). For this reason,
Indigenous feminists refute the liberal feminist argument that women need to
address inequality amongst themselves as against men. In the words of Mary
Ellen Turpel, who serves as inaugural director of the University of British
Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, “it is
wholly distracting and irresponsible for us to place the blame for First Nations
women’s experiences at the feet of First Nations men” (1993: 183).
“Decolonisation will only succeed if Indigenous men work alongside us,” adds

large numbers of women (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; see also: Perry 2009, 2011; and Stasiulis
and Yuval-Davis 1995).
12
One important consequence of this dismissiveness is that when Indigenous women are invited
to speak to the women’s movement, they are not considered authorities on “women in general.”
In the words of Lee Maracle, Indigenous women are expected to deal with the question of gen-
dered oppression in “segregated Native fashion”: “No one makes the mistake of referring to
[Indigenous women] as ordinary women” (1996: 18).
13
In the words of Green, “Indigenous feminism has routinely been denigrated as untraditional,
inauthentic and non-liberatory for Indigenous women” (2017: 2). According to Gina Starblanket,
however, “Indigenous feminism has the potential to nuance and advance the way in which
[Indigenous Peoples] think about Indigenous resurgence” (2017: 22; see also Gabriel 2012).
28 É. CHOQUETTE

Onkwehón: we rights activist Ellen Gabriel. The idea that Indigenous women
need Indigenous men more than liberal feminists in their resistance to patriar-
chy and colonisation is echoed in the writings of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg
scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “I don’t want to have to seek
out allies in white feminists, who don’t really get it,” she writes. “I want
Indigenous men to have my back, even when they feel uncomfortable about
what I am saying. … This is co-resistance. This is community” (2014).
In short, Indigenous feminism challenges the liberal feminist prioritisation
of gendered oppression over colonial oppression and the liberal feminist
assumption that all women are similarly affected by patriarchy.

Lesbian Feminism
Lesbian feminism offers another very interesting challenge to the theory and
practice of liberal feminism, especially as it questions the relationship of liberal-
ism with both gender and sexualities simultaneously. One of the most signifi-
cant contributions of lesbianism to political thinking is that it challenges the
imperative to heterosexism that is inherent to patriarchy and, lesbian feminists
argue, to liberal feminism.
Most lesbian feminists first argue that lesbianism cannot be reduced to a
sexual orientation (Turcotte 1998: 365; Lamoureux 1998: 172). To many,
lesbianism is a political way of contesting both patriarchy and heteronormativ-
ity. According to Monique Wittig, an eminent lesbian feminist, lesbianism is
akin to Marxism in that it treats heterosexuality in the same way Marxism prob-
lematised capitalism: as a regime with both economic and ideological under-
pinnings that need to be dismantled to attain genuine equality amongst social
classes/the sexes. From the perspective of radical lesbianism, patriarchy, con-
joined with heterosexism, allows for the appropriation of women by men. By
building intimate relationships with women as women, lesbians partly escape
and combat the appropriative structure inherent to patriarchy, for instance in
the form of the heterosexual marriage and family, which sustains traditional
gender roles.
The relationship between the lesbian and the feminist movements has at
times been uneasy (see Ross 1995: 6; Smith 1999: 29; Millward 2015: 20).14
Many lesbians have argued that liberal feminism, through its articulation of the
public/private divide, has dismissed lesbian claims. In problematising the divi-
sion between the public and private sphere, liberal feminism has continued to
assume that the private sphere is defined by the coexistence of a wife and hus-
band as heads of family. To the extent that it overlooks the heterosexist under-
pinnings of families and assumes women have relationships with men within
the privacy of their home, lesbian feminists have argued that liberal feminism
has not sufficiently “politicised the personal,” that is, the oppression women

14
Straight feminists were often apprehensive about advocating lesbian claims, “allegedly for fear
of jeopardising the political success of the [women’s] movement with respect to other issues”
(Smith 1999: 29).
 2 CANADIAN LIBERALISM AND GENDER EQUALITY: BETWEEN OPPRESSION… 29

and LGBTQ people face in relation to their sexuality. In response to that

oppression, Ross writes that lesbianism politicises and publicises “the per-
sonal—clothing, work, relationships, housing arrangements, and sexuality—in
ways that enabled them to be lesbian in all facets of their lives, just as hetero-
sexual women are presumed to be heterosexual in every facet of their lives”
(1995: 15).
Lesbianism thus contributes to rethinking the liberal feminist distinction
between the private and the public in at least one important way: it addresses
the heterosexual privilege that is left unchallenged in the liberal feminist prob-
lematisation of the relationship between the two spheres. In a word, lesbian
feminists challenge the imperative to heterosexuality inherent to patriarchy and
liberal feminism by working towards the dismantling of heterosexuality as a
political regime based on the privatisation and appropriation of women
by men.15

Conclusion
Indeed, a growing diversity of voices has defined feminist theory and practice
since the 1980s. In the process of its redefinition, feminism has undertaken to
account for the lived experience of different women, including by contesting
the heterosexism of the private sphere and the prioritisation of gender oppres-
sion amongst other forms of oppression. For the reason that it challenges the
liberal feminist understanding of the private/public divide, the third wave of
feminism in Canada is less liberal-friendly than the other two.
Liberalism remains the backdrop of Canadian politics.16 Given its ubiquity,
it is particularly important to assess the promises and limits of liberalism for
achieving equality for gendered and sexualised communities. The identification
of the forms of oppression and inequalities liberalism authorises is the first step
to rectifying them. Liberalism is a long and rich tradition that has sustained
many different—and sometimes contradictory—principles and practices. In
particular, activists have used liberalism and the liberal distinction between the
private and the public to make some gains for women and sexualised minori-
ties. However, the liberal articulation of the relationship between the two
spheres overlooks the intersectionality of oppression and the heterosexism
15
Despite some of its problematic assumptions, Turcotte (1998: 275) and Lamoureux (1998:
170) argue that lesbians should maintain strong ties to the feminist movement, for it alone can
address the material inequality lesbians face as women. Queer theory and activism—which along-
side lesbianism seeks to deconstruct both gender and the imperative to heterosexuality—are insuf-
ficient to address the discrimination against lesbians, for they “overlook lesbian specificity and the
difference that gender makes” (Rudy 2001: 217). As a result, queerness can “lead to the valoriza-
tion of those things associated with the male, public sphere” (216; see also Turcotte 1998).
16
According to feminist and political scientist Jill Vickers, liberalism undergirds not only
Canadian politics, but also Canadian political science. In her presidential address to the Canadian
Political Science Association, she stated that feminist political science has not yet fully penetrated
Canadian political science in its definition of power as inclusive of relations of power that are
embodied in everyday structures like the family (2015: 762).
30 É. CHOQUETTE

inherent to patriarchy. Notwithstanding these challenges to the premises and

practice of liberal feminism, it is critical to appreciate that women and sexual
minorities have changed liberalism itself throughout its development by
accounting for their different positionings in the liberal regime of citizenship.
As a result of the leadership of feminists and the LGBTQ movement, liberalism
adapted and has incorporated feminist insights, such as the understanding that
the two spheres should only be considered in relation to each other. It may
only be a question of time before liberalism adapts to more radical perspectives
on the public/private divide, including by embracing the intersectional model
and fully addressing heteronormativity.

References
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Woman’s Liberation Movement. In A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945–1980, ed.
Joy Parr, 252–280. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Arneil, Barbara. 1996. John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism.
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1999. Politics and Feminism. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell.
Baillargeon, Denyse. 2019. Repenser la nation: L’histoire du suffrage féminin au Québec.
Montreal: Éditions du remue-ménage.
Bégin, Monique. 1992. The Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada:
Twenty Years Later. In Challenging Times: The Women’s Movement in Canada and
the United States, ed. Constance Backhouse and David H. Flaherty, 21–38.
Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Bell, Duncan. 2014. What Is Liberalism? Political Theory 42 (6): 682–715.
Brennan, Teresa, and Carole Pateman. 1979. “Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth”:
Women and the Origins of Liberalism. Political Studies 27 (2): 183–200.
Brodie, Janine. 1995. Politics on the Margins: Restructuring the Women’s Movement.
Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
———. 1997. Meso-discourses, State Forms and the Gendering of Liberal-democratic
Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 1 (2): 223–242.
Canada. 1970. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada.
Ottawa: The Commission.
Carter, Sarah. 2016. Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British
Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics,
and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–1299.
DeGagne, Alexa. 2012. Queering the Language of “Sexual Minorities” in Canada. In
Beyond the Queer Alphabet: Conversations on Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality,
ed. Malinda S. Smith and Fatima Jaffer, 24–27. Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the
Humanities and Social Sciences.
Dumont, Micheline. 1992. The Origins of the Women’s Movement in Quebec. In
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University Press.
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radial canals. Carmarina of the Mediterranean and other seas
becomes larger even than Geryonia, from which it differs in the
arrangement of the centripetal canals.

Liriantha appendiculata sometimes occurs on the south coast of

England during September, October, or at other times.

Order VIII. Narcomedusae.

The Narcomedusae differ from the Trachomedusae in having the
margin of the umbrella divided into a number of lobes, and in bearing
the gonads on the sub-umbrellar wall of the gastral cavity instead of
upon the radial canals. The tentacles are situated at some little
distance from the margin of the umbrella at points on the aboral
surface corresponding with the angles between the umbrella lobes.
Between the base of the tentacle and the marginal angle there is a
tract of modified epithelium called the "peronium." The manubrium is
usually short, and the mouth leads into an expanded gastral
chamber which is provided with lobular diverticula reaching as far as
the bases of the tentacles. The marginal sense-organs are in the
form of unprotected statorhabs. Very little is known concerning the
life-history of any of the Narcomedusae. In Cunoctantha octonaria
the peculiar ciliated larva with two tentacles and a very long
proboscis soon develops two more tentacles and creeps into the bell
of the Anthomedusan Turritopsis, where, attached by its tentacles, it
lives a parasitic life. Before being converted into a Medusa it gives
rise by gemmation to a number of similar individuals, all of which
become, in time, Medusae. The parasitic stage is often regarded as
the representative of the hydrosome stage reduced and adapted to
the oceanic habit of the adult.
In Cunina proboscidea, and in some other species, a very
remarkable method of reproduction has been described by
Metschnikoff, called by him "sporogony." In these cases young
sexual cells (male or female) wander from the gonad of the parent
into the mesogloea of the umbrella, where they develop
parthenogenetically into ciliated morulae. These escape by the radial
canals into the gastric cavity, and there form a stolon from which
young Medusae are formed by gemmation. In C. proboscidea these
young Medusae are like the genus Solmaris, but in C. rhododactyla
they have the form of the parent. In some cases the ciliated larvae
leave the parent altogether and become attached to a Geryonia or
some other Medusa, where they form the stolon.

This very interesting method of reproduction cannot be regarded as

a primitive one, and throws no light on the origin of the order. It might
be regarded as a further stage in the degeneration of the hydrosome
stage in its adaptation to a parasitic existence.

The Narcomedusae have a wide geographical distribution. Species

of Aeginopsis occur in the White Sea and Bering Strait, but the
genera are more characteristic of warmer waters. Some species
occur in moderately deep water, and Cunarcha was found in 1675
fathoms off the Canaries, but they are more usually found at or near
the surface of the sea.

Fam. Cunanthidae.—Narcomedusae with large gastral diverticula

corresponding in position with the bases of the tentacles. Cunina and
Cunoctantha, occurring in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, belong to this family. In Cunina the tentacles may be
eight in number, or some multiple of four between eight and twenty-
four. In Cunoctantha the number of tentacles appears to be
constantly eight.

Fam. Peganthidae.—There appear to be no gastral pouches in this

family. The species of Pegantha are found at depths of about 80
fathoms in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Fam. Aeginidae.—The large gastral pouches of this family alternate
with the bases of the tentacles. Aegina occurs in the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans. Aeginopsis.

Fam. Solmaridae.—In this family the gastral pouches are variable,

sometimes corresponding with, sometimes alternating with, the
bases of the tentacles. The circular canal is represented in some
genera by solid cords of endoderm. Solmaris sometimes appears in
the English Channel, but it is probably a wanderer from the warmer
regions of the Atlantic Ocean. It is found in abundance during
November on the west coast of Ireland.

Order IX. Siphonophora.

In this order the naturalist finds collected together a number of very
beautiful, delicate transparent organisms to which the general term
"jelly-fish" may be applied, although their organisation is far more
complicated and difficult to describe than that of any of the Medusae.
In several of the Hydrozoa the phenomenon of dimorphism has
already been noticed. In these cases one set of individuals in a
colony performs functions of stinging and catching food and another
the functions of devouring and digesting it. In many of the
Siphonophora there appears to be a colony of individuals in which
the division of labour is carried to a much further extent than it is in
the dimorphic Hydrozoa referred to above. Not only are there
specialised gastrozooids and dactylozooids, but also gonozooids,
zooids for propelling the colony through the water ("nectocalyces"),
protective zooids ("hydrophyllia"), and in some cases a specialised
zooid for hydrostatic functions; the whole forming a swimming or
floating polymorphic colony. But this conception of the construction
of the Siphonophora is not the only one that has met with support.
By some zoologists the Siphonophoran body is regarded not as a
colony of individuals, but as a single individual in which the various
organs have become multiplied and dislocated.
The multiplication or repetition of organs that are usually single in
each individual is not unknown in other Hydrozoa. In the Medusa of
the Gymnoblast Syncoryne, usually known as Sarsia, for example,
there is sometimes a remarkable proliferation of the manubrium, and
specimens have been found with three or four long manubria
attached by a tubular stalk to the centre of the umbrella. Moreover,
this complex of manubria may become detached from the umbrella
and live for a considerable time an independent existence.[333]

If we regard the manubrium of a Medusa as an organ of the animal's

body, it might be thought obvious that the phenomenon observed in
the Medusae of Syncoryne is a case of a simple repetition of the
parts of an individual; but the power that the group of manubria
possesses of leading an independent existence renders its
interpretation as a group of organs a matter of some inconvenience.
If we can conceive the idea that an organ may become detached
and lead an independent existence, there is no reason why we
should not regard the Medusa itself of Syncoryne as an organ, and
we should be driven to the paradoxical conclusion that, as regards
several genera and families of Hydrozoa, we know nothing at
present of the individuals, but only of their free-swimming organs,
and that in others the individual has degenerated, although one of its
organs remains.

There is, however, no convincing argument to support either the

conception that the Siphonophoran body is a colony of individuals, or
that it is an individual with disjointed organs. These two conceptions
are sometimes called the "Poly-person" and "Poly-organ" theories
respectively. The difficulty is caused by the impossibility of giving any
satisfactory definition in the case of the Hydrozoa of the biological
terms "organ" and "individual." In the higher animals, where the
correlation of parts is far more complex and essential than it is in
Coelenterata, a defined limit to the scope of these terms can be laid
down, but in the lower animals the conception of what is termed an
organ merges into that which is called an individual, and no definite
boundary line between the two exists in Nature. The difficulty is
therefore a permanent one, and, in using the expression "colony" for
the Siphonophoran body, it must be understood that it is used for
convenience' sake rather than because it represents the only correct
conception of the organisation of these remarkable Coelenterates.

Regarding the Siphonophora as polymorphic colonies, then, the

following forms of zooids may be found.

Nectocalyces.—The nectocalyces are in the form of the umbrella of

a medusa attached to the stolon of the colony by the aboral pole.
They are provided with a velum and, usually, four radial canals and a
circular canal. There is no manubrium, and the marginal tentacles
and sense-organs are rudimentary or absent. There may be one or
more nectocalyces in each colony, and their function is, by rhythmic
contractions, to propel the colony through the water (Fig. 142, N).

Gastrozooids.—These are tubular or saccular zooids provided with a

mouth and attached by their aboral extremity to the stolon (Fig. 142,
G). In some cases the aboral region of the zooid is differentiated as
a stomach. It is dilated and bears the digestive cells, the oral
extremity or hypostome being narrower and more transparent. In
some cases the mouth is a simple round aperture at the extremity of
the hypostome, but in others it is dilated to form a trumpet-like lip.

Dactylozooids.—In Velella and Porpita the dactylozooids are similar

in general characters to the tentacles of many Medusae. They are
arranged as a frill round the margin of the colony, and each consists
of a simple tube of ectoderm and endoderm terminating in a
knobbed extremity richly provided with nematocysts.

In many other Siphonophora, however, the dactylozooids are very

long and elaborate filaments, which extend for a great distance from
the colony into the sea. They reach their most elaborate condition in
the Calycophorae.
 Fig. 141.—A small Crustacean (Rhinocalanus) caught by a terminal filament (f.t)
of a battery of Stephanophyes. b, The proximal end of the battery with the
most powerful nematocysts; e, elastic band; S, stalk supporting the battery
on the dactylozooid. (After Chun.)

The dactylozooid in these forms has a hollow axis, and the lumen is
continuous with the cavity of the neighbouring gastrozooid. Arranged
at regular intervals on the axis is a series of tentacles ("tentilla"), and
each of these supports a kidney-shaped swelling, the "cnidosac," or
battery, which is sometimes protected by a hood. Each battery
contains an enormous number of nematocysts. In Stephanophyes,
for example, there are about 1700 nematocysts of four different
kinds in each battery. At the extremity of the battery there is a
delicate terminal filament. The action of the battery in
Stephanophyes is, according to Chun,[334] a very complicated one.
The terminal filament lassos the prey and discharges its somewhat
feeble nematocysts at it (Fig. 141). If this kills it, the dactylozooid
contracts and passes the prey to a gastrozooid. If the animal
continues its struggles, it is drawn up to the distal end of the battery
and receives the discharge of a large number of nematocysts; and if
this also fails to put an end to its life, a membrane covering the
largest and most powerful nematocysts at the proximal end of the
whole battery is ruptured, and a final broadside of stinging threads is
shot at it.
The larger nematocysts of these batteries in the Siphonophora are
among the largest found in Coelenterata, being from 0.5 to 0.1 mm.
in length, and they are frequently capable of inflicting painful stings
on the human skin. The species of Physalia, commonly called
"Portuguese Men-of-War," have perhaps the worst reputation in this
respect, the pain being not only intense but lasting a long time.

Hydrophyllia.—In many Siphonophora a number of short, mouthless,

non-sexual zooids occur, which appear to have no other function
than that of shielding or protecting other and more vital parts of the
colony. They consist of an axis of firm mesogloea, covered by a layer
of flattened ectoderm, and they may be finger-shaped or triangular in
form. In Agalma and Praya an endoderm canal perforates the
mesogloea and terminates in a little mouth at the free extremity. In
Athoria and Rhodophysa the hydrophyllium terminates in a little
nectocalyx.

Pneumatophore.—In all the Siphonophora, with the exception of the

Calycophorae, there is found on one side or at one extremity of the
colony a vesicle or bladder containing a gas,[335] which serves as a
float to support the colony in the water. This bladder or
pneumatophore is probably in all cases a much modified nectocalyx.
It shows great variations in size and structure in the group. It is
sometimes relatively very large, as in Physalia and Velella,
sometimes very small, as in Physophora. It is provided with an apical
pore in some genera (Rhizophysa), or a basal pore in others
(Auronectidae), but it is generally closed. In the many chambered
pneumatophore of the Chondrophoridae there are several pores.

In many forms two distinct parts of the pneumatophore can be

recognised—a distal region lined by chitin,[336] probably
representing the sub-umbrellar cavity of the nectocalyx, and a small
funnel-shaped region lined by an epithelium, the homology of which
is a matter of dispute. It is believed that the gas is secreted by this
epithelium. In the Auronectidae the region with secretory epithelium
is relatively large and of a more complicated histological character. It
is remarkable also that in this family the pore communicates, not with
the chitin-lined region, but directly with the epithelium-lined region.

There is no pneumatophore in the Calycophorae, but in this sub-

order a diverticulum of an endoderm canal secretes a globule of oil
which may serve the same hydrostatic function.

The stolon is the common stem which supports the different zooids
of the colony. In the Calycophorae the stolon is a long, delicate, and
extremely contractile thread attached at one end to a nectocalyx,
and bearing the zooids in discontinuous groups. These groups of
zooids arranged at intervals on the stolon are called the "cormidia."
The stolon is a tube with very thick walls. Its lumen is lined by a
ciliated endoderm with circular muscular processes, and the surface
is covered with an ectoderm, also provided with circular muscular
processes. Between these two layers there is a relatively thick
mesogloea showing on the outer side deep and compound folds and
grooves supporting an elaborate system of longitudinal muscular
fibres. In many Physonectidae the stolon is long and filamentous, but
not so contractile as it is in Calycophorae, but in others it is much
reduced in length and relatively stouter. The reduction in length of
the stolon is accompanied by a complication of structure, the simple
tubular condition being replaced by a spongy complex of tubes
covered by a common sheath of ectoderm. In the Auronectidae the
stolon is represented by a conical or hemispherical spongy mass
bearing the zooids, and in the Rhizophysaliidae and
Chondrophoridae it becomes a disc or ribbon-shaped pad spreading
over the under side of the pneumatophore.

Gonozooids.—The gonozooids are simple tubular processes

attached to the stolon which bear the Medusae or the degenerate
medusiform gonophores. In the Chondrophoridae the gonozooids
possess a mouth, but in most Siphonophora they have neither mouth
nor tentacles. In some cases, such as Anthophysa, the colonies are
bisexual—the male and female gonophores being borne by separate
gonozooids—but in others (e.g. Physalia) the colonies appear to be
unisexual.

As a general rule the gonophores of Siphonophora do not escape

from the parent colony as free-swimming Medusae, but an exception
occurs in Velella, which produces a number of small free-swimming
Medusae formerly described by Gegenbaur under the generic name
Chrysomitra. This Medusa has a velum, a single tentacle, eight to
sixteen radial canals, and it bears the gonads on the short
manubrium. The Medusa of Velella has, in fact, the essential
characters of the Anthomedusae.

Our knowledge of the life-history of the Siphonophora is very

incomplete, but there are indications, from scattered observations,
that in some genera, at least, it may be very complicated.

The fertilised ovum of Velella gives rise to a planula which sinks to

the bottom of the sea, and changes into a remarkable larva known
as the Conaria larva. This larva was discovered by Woltereck[337] at
depths of 600-1000 metres in great numbers. It is very delicate and
transparent, but the endoderm is red (the colour so characteristic of
animals inhabiting deep water), and it may be regarded as
essentially a deep-sea larva. The larva rises to the surface and
changes into the form known as the Ratarula larva, which has a
simple one-chambered pneumatophore containing a gas, and a
rudiment of the sail. In contrast to the Conaria, the Ratarula is blue in
colour. With the development of the zooids on the under side of this
larva (i.e. the side opposite to the pneumatophore), a definite
octoradial symmetry is shown, there being for some time eight
dactylozooids and eight definite folds in the wall of the
pneumatophore. This octoradial symmetry, however, is soon lost as
the number of folds in the pneumatophore and the number of
tentacles increase.
It is probable that in the Siphonophora, as in many other
Coelenterata, the production of sexual cells by an individual is no
sign that its life-history is completed. There may possibly be two or
more phases of life in which sexual maturity is reached.

An example of a complicated life-history is found in the

Calycophoran species Muggiaea kochii. The embryo gives rise to a
form with a single nectocalyx which is like a Monophyes, and this by
the budding of a second nectocalyx produces a form that has a
remarkable resemblance to a Diphyes, but the primary nectocalyx
degenerates and is cast off, while the secondary one assumes the
characters of the single Muggiaea nectocalyx. The stolon of the
Muggiaea produces a series of cormidia, and as the sexual cells of
the cormidia develop, a special nectocalyx is formed at the base of
each one of them, and the group of zooids is detached as an
independent colony, formerly known as Eudoxia eschscholtzii. In a
similar manner the cormidia of Doramasia picta give rise to the
sexual free-swimming monogastric forms, known by the name
Ersaea picta (Fig. 142). In these cases it seems possible that the
production of ripe sexual cells is confined to the Eudoxia and Ersaea
stages respectively, but it is probable that in other species the
cormidia do not break off from the stolon, or may escape only from
the older colonies.

Fig. 142.—Free-swimming Ersaea group of Doramasia picta. B, B, batteries of

nematocysts borne by the tentilla; D, dactylozooid; G, gastrozooid; H,
hydrophyllium; N, nectocalyx; O, oleocyst; f.t, terminal filament of a battery;
t, t, tentilla. The gonozooid is hidden by the gastrozooid. × 10. (After Chun.)
The Siphonophora are essentially free-swimming pelagic organisms.
Some of them (Auronectidae) appear to have become adapted to a
deep-sea habit, others are usually found in intermediate waters, but
the majority occur with the pelagic plankton at or very near the
surface of the open sea. Although the order may be said to be
cosmopolitan in its distribution, the Siphonophora are only found in
great numbers and variety in the sub-tropical and tropical zones. In
the temperate and arctic zones they are relatively rare, but
Galeolaria biloba and Physophora borealis appear to be true
northern forms. The only British species are Muggiaea atlantica and
Cupulita sarsii. Velella spirans occasionally drifts from the Atlantic on
to our western shores, and sometimes great numbers of the
pneumatophores of this species may be found cast up on the beach.
Diphyes sp., Physalia sp., and Physophora borealis are also
occasionally brought to the British shores by the Gulf Stream.

The Calycophorae are usually perfectly colourless and transparent,

with the exception of the oil-globule in the oleocyst, which is yellow
or orange in colour. Many of the other Siphonophora, however, are of
a transparent, deep indigo blue colour, similar to that of many other
components of the plankton.

Most of the Siphonophora, although, strictly speaking, surface

animals, are habitually submerged; the large pneumatophores of
Velella and Physalia, however, project above the surface, and these
animals are therefore frequently drifted by the prevailing wind into
large shoals, or blown ashore. At Mentone, on the Mediterranean,
Velella is sometimes drifted into the harbour in countless numbers.
Agassiz mentions the lines of deep blue Velellas drifted ashore on
the coast of Florida; and a small species of blue Physalia may often
be seen in long lines on the shore of some of the islands of the
Malay Archipelago.

The food of most of the Siphonophora consists of small Crustacea

and other minute organisms, but some of the larger forms are
capable of catching and devouring fish. It is stated by Bigelow[338]
that a big Physalia will capture and devour a full-grown Mackerel.
The manner in which it feeds is described as follows:—"It floats on
the sea, quietly waiting for some heedless individual to bump its
head against one of the tentacles. The fish, on striking, is stung by
the nettle-cells, and fastened probably by them to the tentacle.
Trying to run away the fish pulls on the tentacle. The tension on its
peduncle thus produced acts as a stimulus on apparently some
centre there which causes it to contract. The fish in this way is drawn
up so that it touches the sticky mouths of the squirming siphons [i.e.
gastrozooids]. As soon as the mouths, covered as they are with a
gluey substance and provided with nettle-cells, touch the fish they
stick fast, a few at first, and gradually more. The mouths open, and
their lips are spread out over the fish until they touch, so that by the
time he is dead the fish is enclosed in a tight bag composed of the
lips of a dozen or more siphon mouths. Here the fish is digested. As
it begins to disintegrate partially digested fragments are taken into
the stomachs of the attached siphons (gastrozooids). When they
have become gorged they detach themselves from the remains of
the fish, the process of digestion is completed in the stomachs, and
the nutrient fluid is distributed...."

In consequence of the very unsatisfactory state of our knowledge of

the life-history of the Siphonophora the classification of the order is a
matter of unusual difficulty.

Sub-Order I. Calycophorae.
The character which distinguishes this sub-order is the absence of a
pneumatophore.

The colony usually consists of a long, slender, contractile stolon,

provided at one end with one, two, or several nectocalyces. Upon
the stolon are arranged several groups ("cormidia") of polymorphic
zooids.
The nectocalyces have a well-developed velum, four radial canals,
and a muscular umbrella-wall. A special peculiarity of the nectocalyx
of this sub-order is a diverticulum (oleocyst) from one of the radial
canals, containing a coloured globule of oil. The function of this oil-
globule is probably similar to that of the pneumatophore, and assists
the muscular efforts of the nectocalyces in keeping the colony afloat.
One of the nectocalyces of each colony exhibits on one side a deep
ectodermic fold, which is frequently converted into a pit. At the
bottom of this pit is attached the end of the stolon, the whole of
which with its numerous cormidia can be withdrawn into the shelter
of the pit when danger threatens. The cormidia consist of at least
four kinds of zooids: a gastrozooid with a trumpet-shaped mouth
armed with nematocysts, a long dactylozooid provided with a series
of tentilla, and a rudimentary gonozooid bearing numbers of male or
female medusiform gonophores. These three kinds of zooids are
partially covered and protected by a bent shield-shaped phyllozooid
or hydrophyllium.

Each of the cormidia is unisexual, but the colony as a whole is

usually hermaphrodite, the male and female cormidia regularly
alternating, or the male cormidia being arranged on the
nectocalycine half and the female cormidia on the opposite half of
the stolon.

The families of the Calycophorae are:—

Fam. 1. Monophyidae.—In this family there is a single conical or

mitre-shaped nectocalyx. The cormidia become detached as free-
swimming Eudoxia or Ersaea forms.

Sub-Fam. 1. Sphaeronectinae.—The primary nectocalyx persists

throughout life—Monophyes and Sphaeronectes.

Sub-Fam. 2. Cymbonectinae.—The primary nectocalyx is thrown

off, and is replaced by a secondary and permanent nectocalyx—
Cymbonectes, Muggiaea, and Doramasia.

Fam. 2. Diphyidae.—The primary mitre-shaped nectocalyx is thrown

off and replaced by two secondary rounded, prismatic, or pyramidal,
heteromorphic nectocalyces.

This family contains several sub-families, which are arranged in two

groups: the Diphyidae Oppositae, in which the two secondary bells
are opposite one another, and do not exhibit pronounced ridges; and
the Diphyidae Superpositae, in which one of the two secondary
nectocalyces is situated in front of the other, and each nectocalyx is
provided externally with very definite and often wing-like ridges. In all
the Diphyidae Oppositae the cormidia remain attached, whereas in
most of the Diphyidae Superpositae they become free-swimming, as
in the Monophyidae.

The sub-families of the Diphyidae Oppositae are:—

Sub-Fam. 1. Amphicaryoninae.—One of the two secondary

nectocalyces becomes flattened above to form a shield, and at the
same time its sub-umbrellar cavity is atrophied, and its radial canals
reduced. Mitrophyes, Atlantic Ocean.

Sub-Fam. 2. Prayinae.—The colony exhibits a pair of large, obtuse

nectocalyces, with a relatively small sub-umbrellar cavity. Praya,
Mediterranean and Atlantic.

Sub-Fam. 3. Desmophyinae.—The colony bears a large number of

reserve or tertiary nectocalyces arranged in two rows. Desmophyes,
Indian Ocean.

Sub-Fam. 4. Stephanophyinae.—There are four nectocalyces

arranged in a horizontal plane. Each one of the cormidia bears a
nectocalyx, which is periodically replaced. This sub-family is
constituted for Stephanophyes superba from the Canary Islands. It
attains a length of 25 cm., and is probably the largest and most
beautiful of all the Calycophoridae.[339]

The group Diphyidae Superpositae contains the following:—

Sub-Fam. 1. Galeolarinae.—Galeolaria.

Sub-Fam. 2. Diphyopsinae.—Diphyes.

Sub-Fam. 3. Abylinae.—Abyla.

These sub-families differ from one another in the character and

shape of the nectocalyces and in other characters. They have a
world-wide distribution, Diphyes and Galeolaria extending north into
the Arctic Seas. Diphyes is British.

Fam. 3. Polyphyidae.—The nectocalyces are numerous, and

superposed in two rows. The cormidia remain attached.

The family contains the genera Polyphyes and Hippopodius, both

probably cosmopolitan in warm waters.

Sub-Order II. Physophorae.

In this sub-order the primary nectocalyx gives rise to a definite
pneumatophore. There are four families.

Fam. 1. Physonectidae.—In this, the largest family of the sub-order,

there is a monothalamic pneumatophore supporting a stolon, which
in some forms is of great length, but in others is reduced to a stump
or pad, on which there are usually found several nectocalyces,
hydrophyllia, gastrozooids, gonozooids, and tentilla.
The principal sub-families are:—

Agalminae.—With a long stolon, bearing at the upper end (i.e. the

end next to the pneumatophore) two rows of nectocalyces. The other
zooids are arranged in cormidia on the stolon, each covered by a
hydrophyllium. Dactylozooids with tentilla. Agalma and Cupulita,
Mediterranean Sea.

Apoleminae.—Similar to the above, but without tentilla. Apolemia—

this genus attains a length of two or three metres. Mediterranean
Sea. Dicymba, Indian Ocean.

Physophorinae.—The pneumatophore larger in proportion than it is

in the preceding families. The stolon is short, and bears rows of
nectocalyces at the upper end. The gastrozooids, dactylozooids, and
gonozooids are arranged in verticils on the lower expanded part of
the stolon. Hydrophyllia absent. Physophora, cosmopolitan in the
areas of warm sea water.

Fam. 2. Auronectidae.—The pneumatophore is large. The stolon is

reduced to a spongy mass of tissue on the under side of the
pneumatophore, and this bears numerous cormidia arranged in a
helicoid spiral. Projecting from the base of the pneumatophore there
is a peculiar organ called the "aurophore," provided with an apical
pore. This organ has been described as a specially modified
nectocalyx, but it is probably a specialised development of the
epithelium-lined portion of the pneumatophore of other Physophorae.
The Auronectidae are found only at considerable depths, 300 to
1400 fathoms, and are probably specially adapted to that habitat.
Rhodalia, Stephalia, Atlantic Ocean.

Fam. 3. Rhizophysaliidae.—The pneumatophore is large, or very

large, in this family. The zooids are arranged in horizontal rows on
the under side of the pneumatophore (Physalia), or in a helicoid
spiral on a short stolon (Epibulia). There are no nectocalyces nor
hydrophyllia.

The genus Physalia is the notorious "Portuguese Man-of-War." The

pneumatophore is a large bladder-like vesicle, sometimes attaining a
length of 12 cm. One species described by Haeckel under the
generic name Caravella has a pneumatophore 30 cm. and more in
length, and dactylozooids attaining a length of 20 metres. It is a
curious fact that only the male colonies of Physalia are known, and it
is suggested that the female may have quite a different form.[340]
Epibulia has a much smaller bladder than Physalia. Both genera
have a cosmopolitan distribution at the surface of the warm seas.

Fam. 4. Chondrophoridae.—This family stands quite by itself in the

sub-order Physophorae, and is placed in a separate division of the
sub-order by Chun, who gives it the name Tracheophysa. The
essential distinguishing characters of the family are the large
polythalamic pneumatophore and the single large central
gastrozooid.

The colony is disc-shaped, and has a superficial resemblance to a

Medusa. On the upper side is the flattened pneumatophore, covered
by a fold of tissue continuous with that at the edge of the disc. In
Velella a vertical triangular sail or crest rises from the upper side, but
this is absent in Porpita.

The mouth of the gastrozooid opens into a large digestive cavity, and
between this and the under surface of the pneumatophore there is a
glandular spongy tissue called the liver. The liver extends over the
whole of the under side of the pneumatophore, and sends processes
round the edge of the disc into the tissues of its upper surface.
Intimately associated with the liver, and penetrating its interstices, is
an organ which appears to be entirely composed of nematocysts,
derived from the ectoderm, and called the central organ. At the
margin of the disc there is a fringe of simple digitiform dactylozooids,
and between the dactylozooids and the centrally placed gastrozooid
are numerous gonozooids. Each of the gonozooids is provided with
a distinct mouth, and bears the gonophores, which escape before
the ripening of the gonads as the free-swimming Medusae called
Chrysomitra. The pneumatophore consists of a number of annular
chambers arranged in a concentric manner round the central original
chamber formed from a modified zooid. These annular chambers are
in communication with one another, and have each two pores
(pneumatopyles) opening above to the exterior. The most
remarkable feature, however, of the system is a series of fine
branching tubes ("tracheae"), which pass from the annular chambers
of the pneumatophore downwards into the hepatic mass and ramify
there.

There are two well-known genera: Velella with a sail, and Porpita
without a sail. They are both found at the surface of the warmer
regions of the great oceans and in the Mediterranean. Velella
sometimes drifts on to British coasts from the Atlantic.

The genus Discalia has a much more simple octoradial structure. It

was found at depths of 2600 and 2750 fathoms in the Pacific Ocean.

CHAPTER XII

COELENTERATA (CONTINUED): SCYPHOZOA = SCYPHOMEDUSAE

CLASS II. SCYPHOZOA = SCYPHOMEDUSAE

The Scyphozoa are jelly-fishes, usually found floating at or near the
surface of the sea. A few forms (Stauromedusae) are attached to
rocks and weeds by a stalked prolongation of the aboral region of
the umbrella. With this exception, however, they are all, in the adult
stage, of the Medusa type of structure, having a bell-shaped or
discoid umbrella, from the under surface of which depends a
manubrium bearing the mouth or (in Rhizostomata) the numerous
mouths.

Although many of the species do not exceed an inch or a few inches

in diameter, others attain a very great size, and it is among the
Scyphozoa that we find the largest individual zooids of the
Coelenterata. Some Discophora have a disc three or four feet in
diameter, and one specimen obtained by the Antarctic Expedition of
1898-1900 weighed 90 lbs.[341] The common jelly-fish, Aurelia, of
our coasts belongs to a species that appears to be very variable in
general characters as well as in size. Specimens obtained by the
"Siboga" in the Malay Archipelago ranged from 6 to 64 cm. in
diameter. The colour is very variable, shades of green, blue, brown,
and purple being conspicuous in many species; but a pale milky-blue
tint is perhaps the most prevalent, the tissues being generally less
transparent than they are in the Medusae of the Hydrozoa. The
colour of the Cubomedusae is usually yellow or brown, but
Charybdea xaymacana is colourless and transparent. The deep-sea
species, particularly the Periphyllidae, have usually an opaque
brown or dark red colour. The surface-swimming forms, such as the
common Aurelia, Pelagia, Cyanaea, are usually of a uniform pale
milky-blue or green colour. Generally the colour is uniformly
distributed, but sometimes the surface of the umbrella is freckled
with irregular brown or yellow patches, as in Dactylometra and many
others. There is frequently a special colour in the statorhabs which
renders them conspicuous in the living jelly-fish, and the lips, or parts
of the lips, of the manubrium have usually a different colour or tone
to that of the umbrella.

There is no reason to believe that the general colour of any of these

jelly-fishes has either a protective or a warning significance. Nearly
all the larger species, whether blue, green, or brown in colour, can
be easily seen from a considerable distance, and the colours are not
sufficiently bright or alarming to support the belief that they can serve
the purpose of warning either fish or birds of the presence of a
dangerous stinging animal. It is possible, however, that the brighter
spots of colour that are often noticed on the tips of the tentacles and
on the lips may act as a lure or bait in attracting small fish and
Crustacea.

Some of the Scyphozoa are phosphorescent, but it is a singular fact

that there are very few recorded observations concerning the
phosphorescence or the absence of it in most of the species. The
pale blue light of Pelagia noctiluca or P. phosphora can be
recognised from the deck of a ship in the open ocean, and they are
often the most brilliant and conspicuous of the phosphorescent
organisms.

The food of the Scyphozoa varies a good deal. Charybdea and

Periphylla, and probably many others with large mouths, will capture
and ingest relatively large fish and Crustacea; but Chrysaora
isosceles[342] apparently makes no attempt to capture either
Copepoda or small fish, but preys voraciously upon Anthomedusae,
Leptomedusae, Siphonophora, Ctenophora, and pelagic worms.
Very little is known about the food of the Rhizostomata, but the small
size of the mouths of these forms suggests that their food must also
be of minute size. The frequent association of small fish with the
larger jelly-fish is a matter of some interest that requires further
investigation. In the North Sea young whiting are the constant guests
of Cyanaea capillata.[343] Over a hundred young horse-mackerel
(Caranx trachurus) may be found sheltering under the umbrella of
Rhizostoma pulmo. As the animal floats through the water the little
fishes hover round the margin, but on the slightest alarm dart into the
sub-umbrella cavity, and ultimately seek shelter in the sub-genital
pits.[344]

Two species of fish accompany the American Medusa Dactylometra

lactea, one a Clupeoid, the other the young of the Butter-fish
(Stromateus triacanthus). According to Agassiz and Mayer[345] this is
not an ordinary case of mutualism, as the fish will tear off and devour