A senior scholar who has published widely on the advancement of women in Canada, McCormack will give an address entitled Women and Crime in Canada: Did the Welfare State Make a Difference? on Wednesday, March 21. She says Canada’s welfare state went a long way to increasing opportunities for women by attempting to put a floor under poverty, and with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the women’s movement, Canadian women came to expect that there would be less crime and more social justice. But that period of reform and nation building is now ending.

"Nothing in the economics of the global economy has forced the Canadian government to engage in the drastic restructuring it is currently undertaking," says McCormack. Nevertheless, she says, the neoconservative state has pushed women against the wall: in cutbacks to women’s groups working with the underprivileged; in workfare programs; in the elimination of universal benefits such as family allowance in favour of needs-based programs; and in the focus in the criminal justice system of treating juveniles as adults.

McCormack says an increase in criminal activity, particularly among young women, is more startling for the negative stereotypes it generates about women. "There is a new media interest in women and crime, that no doubt exaggerates the real figures, and not only generates new stereotypes, but reinforces the older ones, from Lady Macbeth murdering her children out of revenge, to Lolita the nymphet, seductress of a pedophile," says McCormack.

She says feminists in Canada have found themselves bound and gagged by the negative stereotypes of women, pointing to the case in the early 1980s of a young nurse, Susan Nelles, who was accused of murdering infants on her watch at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Nelles was ultimately acquitted. "But in the public imagination, it matters very little if the players are found not guilty. They remain suspect, and every time a woman is found innocent, she is unconsciously found guilty."