Conference connections: identity, ideology and institutions in the congress of black women of canada (cbwc), 1973-2003

The Congress of Black Women of Canada (CBWC) is a social movement organization that has represented the interests of black women in this country for more than three decades at both the national and local level. While black Canadian feminist scholars have started to explore women's organizations, the CBWC's organizing efforts is missing from the feminist record. This study seeks to redress this gap by using an integrative black Canadian feminist synthetic and interpretive organizational model of movements to document the CBWC's identities, ideologies and institutions between 1973 and 2003. Focusing on its activities, this study uses organizational documents and semi-structured interviews with 22 organizational leaders and 5 rank-and-file members to analyze the CBWC's campaigns concerning discrimination, sexism, education, youth, immigration and the woman's movement. Given the CBWC's focus on black women and their families, understanding how its members used their identities, ideologies and institutions as critical categories to interpret their experiences is a particular concern. To this end, this study argues that the categories of identities, ideologies and institutions shapes the women's sense of themselves as mothers, activists, professionals and the CBWC's work against oppression. More importantly, at the heart of the CBWC's struggles for securing equality and social justice lay issues of great importance related to community development and social change. The data confirm four key findings. First, the conferences of the CBWC are mechanisms or vehicles for establishing the priorities for empowerment and authentic community engagement. In actual and symbolic terms the conferences seek to establish the priorities of identities, institutions and ideologies. Second, the findings indicate that identities are shaped by institutions. That is, black Canadian women's consciousness is influenced by the family, community organizations and their own respective woman's movement. Third, the findfogs show that institutions mediate the impact of ideologies on identities. Institutionalization is the objectification of the ideological, in terms of both its content and emotion, providing a place for the projection of the collective through the manifold, ever changing interpenetrations of culture and consciousness. By formalizing representations ambiguity becomes attenuated. Moreover, institutionalizing a movement affirms and extends the ability of members to self express and self- actualize. Indeed, institutions are particular ways of structuring and articulating experience. As this study argues, an institution is linked to ideologies. The institution becomes just as ideological as identity. Fourth, this study demonstrates that the relationship between identities and ideologies is filtered through organizational structures. As the organization becomes more institutionalized with formal rules, divisions of hierarchy, specialization of tasks, the movement is perceived as more embedded. Although the original mission and vision are still in place, the focus on that which brings black feminists into the organization is gradually attenuated. In time, this situation presents itself as an opportunity to reposition and return the movement to its base. Therefore, this work addresses a critical gap in the literature on black Canadian women's organizations.