Feeling Feminism: Activism, Affect, and Canada’s Second Wave by Lara Campbell, Dawson Michael and Catherine Gidney (review)

Abstract

in religious and political upheaval, had a long gestation, and its implementation developed incrementally over decades. Secondly, utopia is not inevitably dangerous, bound to end in dystopia. In fact, B. Compton Limited conducted an orderly dissolution when the group’s religious and communal practices no longer suited enough of the members to logically continue. Members could see more appealing ways to be in the world. This is how most Canadian-built utopias have ended. Eventually, all utopias wear out. But just because a specific implementation of an ideal collapses does not mean the ideal itself dies. Discontinuity, yes; but the ideal can be expected to reappear elsewhere, in another form, at another time. Thanks to the full picture the author presents, readers can see what the Comptons chose to resist and what they had to negotiate to creatively configure a settlement in PEI that worked satisfactorily for them and was tolerated by outsiders. While the story is about the Compton utopia, it is also about the character of the surrounding non-utopian culture that supported the way of life Comptons resisted for reasons generations of the family found rational. The insertion of the Compton utopia into the non-utopian PEI milieu happened despite that difference. Traces of the power dynamics exerted inside and outside the settlement to make that happen are part of the history of how ideas were championed at that particular time and place.