Women, support for sovereignty, and feminism: the case of Quebec

Independence movements are a feature of multiple stateless territorially concentrated nations in established democracies including Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom. Women's and feminist movements in democracies are directly engaged in these nation-building processes. Multiple investigations have examined the factors that lead citizens to favor independence but none to date have focussed on the potential role of feminist identity in shaping these attitudes. In this paper, we investigate the link between feminism and support for independence via the example of the debate over sovereignty in the province of Quebec in Canada. Using an original 2010 survey of French-speaking women in the province, we find that even after controlling for the dominant explanatory factors in the literature, women who self-identify as feminist are more likely than other women to support sovereignty. Moreover, this association varies with the strength of women's feminist identity and with the movement's engagement with sovereignty across generations. We argue that research on the determinants of independence attitudes needs to expand the set of groups included in investigations beyond those traditionally examined.