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Scholars and observers have commonly portrayed the 1960s and 1970s as decades of intense political activity. In Montreal, the Quebec neo-nationalist movement, the women’s liberation movement and the “Black Renaissance” exemplified the heightened atmosphere of contestation reigning in the city.1 How did Montreal’s English-speaking African Canadian women fit into this matrix of activism, specifically the resurgence of feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s? The answer lies outside traditional analyses of the “second-wave” feminist movement where only autonomous women’s organisations have been studied. As we will see, black women were involved in multiple political groups during this period, from black women’s organisations, to male-dominated black groups, to mixed-raced, women-only settings.2 By drawing upon the work of critical race and feminist scholars, this article also argues for the importance of transnational analyses in understanding the multi-faceted nature of black women’s political activity.3 Because of their connections with other activists around the world, Montreal’s African Canadian women’s activism not only challenges many of the ways that we have come to understand the “second-wave” feminist movement, but also typical narratives of Canadian nationhood. This article is thus inscribed in the tradition of looking at the competing feminist nationalisms in Canada.4 Montreal’s African Canadian women’s activism was informed by their positionality within multiple nations: the Canadian and Quebec nations (but more so Canadian because they were English-speaking), the Caribbean nations many had left behind, as well as the diasporic Pan-African nation, defined as the international community of black peoples. Further underlining the polyvocal character of Montreal society, this article will concentrate nearly exclusively on the Anglophone black community, since Haitian women had their own distinct brand of 1970s activism.5 More specifically, it will focus on women born in the English-speaking Caribbean and, in particular, on the important role played by Dorothy Wills, a community leader whose activism reflected the political consciousness of the period. Due to the complexity stemming from the multiple, overlapping national imaginaries present in Canada, this article represents a preliminary attempt at discerning the relationship between feminism, Pan-Africanism, and unequal access to political resources in Quebec’s metropolis, itself a highly contested site. While the boundaries delineating “insiders” and “outsiders” are porous in nationalist discourses across geopolitical spaces, in Canada during the period

Searching for Zion: Pan-African Feminist Thought and Practice in English-speaking Black Montreal (1967-1977)