Editors' Introduction

Welcome to our thirty-second general issue which is almost literally bursting at the seams! It has been another busy year for feminist scholarship and organizing and we are pleased to report that our collection of authors, while once again representing a wide range of scholars, includes a significant number of new scholars. In addition to the articles that came to us through the Open Call for Papers, we have a cluster of articles that were originally presented at the conference on "Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond," held in Toronto in fall 2005. Atlantis was one of the co-sponsoring journals of the conference, whose aims included challenging established definitions of labour history and female activism and showcasing younger scholars' research. As editor of this thematic cluster, Ruth Percy, a conference co-organizer, has written a separate introduction below. We also thank Linda Kealey for providing us with our cover image of a sculpture honouring suffragists in Christchurch, New Zealand. It fits nicely an issue that has plenty to say about feminist identities and activism.
We begin with four articles on literature. In "Le développement de l'identité féminine chez Françoise de Graffigny: Cénie et Lettres d'une Péruvienne," Marijn Kaplan explores the feminism of this eighteenth-century writer through a comparison of the female protagonist, Zilia, in Graffigny's highly successful epistolary novel, Lettres d'une Peruvienne, published in1747, and that of Cenie in the less-known play of the same name published three years later. While Graffigny's re-discovery as a feminist writer largely derives from her novel and its tragic Peruvian heroine, Zilia, Kaplan shows that Graffigny's more sentimental comedy, first performed to enthusiastic audiences at the Comedie Française in 1750, is also noteworthy for its exploration of the themes of feminine identity and feminism.

Cinda Gault's "'Not Even a Hospital': Abortion and Identity Tension in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing," challenges older interpretations of the abortion plot in the 1972 novel as a metaphor for the dual victimization of women and of the Canadian nation under the onslaught of United States economic and cultural imperialism. She shows that a sensitivity to the fraught relations between national and gendered identities, as evidenced by how women are used and abused by nationalist struggles, allows for a re-reading that emphasizes the dilemmas faced by women in nation states that outlaw abortion - as Canada did at the time that Atwood wrote the novel - and impose other constraints on women's choices and freedom.
Turning to two of Atwood's more recent novels, Ellen McWilliams' "Keeping Secrets, Telling Lies: Fictions of the Artist and Author in the Novels of Margaret Atwood" explores Atwood's efforts to convey the distinctive features of female creativity and the paradoxes and dilemmas faced by female artists - including herself through her portrayal of the female protagonists in Cat's Eye and The Blind Assassin. Adopting the concepts of Bildungsroman (novel of development) and Künstlerroman (novel of the artist), McWilliams suggests that in these novels Atwood combines fiction and critical commentary on the woman as artist and is involved in a conscious act of writing at both the personal and political level.
Laurie Kruk's "Mothering Sons: Stories by Findley, Hodgins and MacLeod Uncover the Mother's Double Voice" explores the literary and maternal feminist concept of the "double voice" that shifts between subject/object, passive/active, and resistant/conforming practices in three Canadian short stories. Each one provides emancipatory narratives that de-stabilise conventional gender scripts. Noting that the "double voice" holds an attraction for both maternal feminist critics (who see the mother role as culturally constructed

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but also recognize the embodied experiences of mothers) and for Canadian writers, she explores how the stories, involving dutiful mothers and "mothering sons" who have refused to perform their patriarchal role, serve as the basis for exposing family secrets and social hypocrisies particularly damaging to women. The characters thereby deconstruct the patriarchal family and reaffirm communal values.
Our Women's Studies in Focus feature for this issue is "Infusing Feminism: A Discussion of Methodology, Pedagogy and Praxis" by Vicki Hallett, Emily van der Meulen, May Friedman, Diana Gibaldi and Claire Carter. Written as a conversation, the various contributions provide critical reflections of feminist graduate students on the challenges and dilemmas of carrying out feminist pedagogy.
In "When Black Feminism Meets Canadian Women's Studies: A Psycho-Social Analysis of Discursive Contradiction and Psychical Conflict in the Classroom," Jessica Ringrose describes how she carried out student interviews and observed classroom dynamics in order to explore how the insertion of a Black feminist curriculum (that centres race analyses and anti-racism and emphasizes difference) into a Women's Studies program (with its emphasis on commonalities among women) affected white and Black students in the classroom. Her research suggests that while white students felt challenged by the anti-racist curriculum, and on occasion rose to the challenge by recognizing their own racism, the continuing privileging of white women students served to marginalize the Black students who were expected to valourize the truth claims of the Black feminists being discussed and were troubled by classroom debates. She notes the need for further research on the potentially traumatic effects that Black students experience in the contradictory site created by the meeting of Black feminist studies and women's studies.
Jennifer Henderson, in "Can the Third Wave Speak?", considers the metaphor of feminist "waves" and finds it wanting. She argues moreover that the term

"third wave" feminism emphasises generational conflict, and so at once reproduces the problematics of identity politics and overlooks the complexity of feminist history. Henderson goes on to locate and define an alternative movement: cryptofeminism. This she identifies as an intellectual and political consciousness informed by the history of feminist thought. In the end, says Henderson, the current trends in feminism are in part responses to neoliberal imperatives. For that reason, it is crucial for feminists to interrogate our language and self-assumptions.
Zelda Abramson's "(Re)Producing Family: Women Surviving the Holocaust" examines the survival stories of several Jewish women survivors, stressing in particular the gendered features of women's remembered experiences of the Holocaust. Her analysis of the narratives of individual and collective survival so central to women's recollections highlights the ways in which women - more so than men - coped with the loss of loved ones in part by creating surrogate families with non-kin in similar predicament. The findings show us female agency even in intolerable conditions and confirm the findings of other feminist research on women and war.
In "Maintaining An Influence: The Sisters of Saint Martha, Charlottetown, Respond to Social and Religious Change, 1965-85," Heidi MacDonald reminds us that the modern welfare state, though heavily securalized in the post-1945 era, still owed some of its functioning to the activities of the Roman Catholic Church and its women religious. Specifically, she shows how one order in Charlottetown, and certain indefatigable women in particular, successfully carved out a niche for themselves within Prince Edward Island's health and welfare sector, particularly in the area of alcohol addiction, post-graduate education, and hospital services in spite of their continuing adherence to religious Catholic positions such as opposition to abortion.
Franca Iacovetta and Rhoda Zuk

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Editors
NOTE ON THE COVER ART: Located in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Kate Sheppard National Memorial honours the struggle of New Zealand women to obtain the vote, the first women in the world to do so on 19 September 1893. Margriet Windhausen completed the monument for the 100th anniversary of the event. Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leader, Kate Sheppard (1848-1934), led the petition campaign for women's suffrage. See more at www.christchurchartgallery.org.nz/Publications/1997/Public ArtInChristchurch/KateSheppardNationalMemorial/"