Of course, the first thing I did was to look up everyone I could think of in the index, so I have to confess that I was reading out of order for a while, skipping back and forth, refreshing my memory of people and events I had at least known about.

I was pleased as punch to be reading a few old friends I'd lost touch with over the years. It is so wonderful to hear those voices again, and to know that people are doing well. Lots of the old grils are going to love this book for that reason.

But I've settled down now and I'm reading through faithfully from the beginning. So much comes back, but there is lots that is news to me, and hearing this history through the voices, often, of the women who organized it is just priceless. These interviews are important historical sources.

Links to the book site and to the Women's Bookstore have been posted before, but I'll repeat them here:

Ten Thousand Roses

Women's Bookstore

I note from the latter site that there will be a book launch and discussion of the book on 8 March at Ryerson University in Toronto (details on the bookstore site). I'm sure there will be events in other towns and cities as well.

Congratulations, and thanks, Judy.

[ 18 February 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

And then there are the stories of the internal political struggles, the nitty-gritty of getting any practical work done -- again, so familiar to feminists everywhere from those last thirty years of the C20, and often so personally moving.

Last thing last night I was reading through the section on the Montreal Massacre of 1989 -- fourteen young engineering students mowed down by a young man who believed that feminism had blighted his life. That is a particularly haunting story here, but it is also one that I think should resonate with feminists and other activists elsewhere.

Judy R. does a wonderful job of setting that horror in the context of an international turn to the right, a backlash against feminism but also against social-justice movements of all kinds. Some of the interviews with Quebec feminists are riveting, heart-stopping. You can see individuals changing even as they struggle to articulate the effect of that massacre on them, and even more the amazingly insensitive first reactions to it from the mainstream press and many, many citizens.