The West Kootenay Women’s Association presents:
IMAGES – Kootenay Women’s Paper: A Primer on Feminism (1973-1991)
Edited by Dr. Marcia Braundy, Format: CD
Nineteen years of IMAGES – Kootenay Women’s Newspaper represents the early writings of many of British Columbia’s prize-winning women authors and artists as they struggled to develop their personal and political perspectives on Second Wave Feminism.  It documents the struggles for effective and satisfying economic, social and political lives for women in rural BC, and links arms and words with women from around the world, telling their stories along with our own. Theme issues address the major challenges of our times: Aging, Health, Machinery, Sexuality, Reproductive Rights, Working, Lesbian life, Mothers and Daughters, The Arts, Media, Feminism, Technology, Violence Against Women, Travel and Relationships. “Mixed” issues covered local, regional and national news from feminist perspectives.
IMAGES, produced by volunteers, and supported solely by advertisements, subscriptions and donations, is a record of small business development in the Kootenays from 1973 to 1991. The creative advertisements for both male and female owned businesses provided long term financial support. It is a record of the challenges, successes, failures and learnings of social, political, educational and economic development in the West Kootenays over a period of significant period in Southeastern British Columbia. The quality and thoughtfulness of the writing is some of the best produced in Canada during the time, and we are thankful to the BC150 Heritage Legacy Fund for allowing us to bring this historical and still quite relevant journal back into the public eye. We have been told by young women who have volunteered on this project of the essential importance these articles have to current issues being faced by them.
85 issues of the paper were scanned, digitized, made readable and searchable, and placed on a CD, which is being made available to individuals ($20) and institutions ($50) in continuing efforts to support the Nelson Women’s Centre, the oldest rural women’s centre in Canada, still an activist and going concern.
Producing IMAGES-A Primer on Feminism is the first phase of a larger project documenting and digitizing the development of 2nd Wave Feminism in the West Kootenay area of British Columbia, a veritable hotbed of feminist activism. From Canadian founders of the Voice of Women, Project Ploughshares, and Canada’s first rural women’s centre, through B.C.’s first Women’s Festivals, early women’s economic development initiatives and founding the National Network for Women in Trades and Technology, documents and reports, posters, interviews and soundtracks will, over the next year, be launched as www.kootenayfeminism.com, and connected to the Nelson Women’s Centre website, freely available to the public, thanks to the Barber Historical Digitization Project at the University of British Columbia.
Please order the CD from the West Kootenay Women’s Association, 250 352-9916
or email wkwomyn@netidea.com with IMAGES in subject line,
and send a cheque for $20 individual/$50 institutional to
WKWA-IMAGES, 420 Mill Street, Nelson, BC, V1L 4R9
For project information, contact Marcia Braundy
