Canadian Women's Movement Archives
The Canadian Women’s Movement Archives (CWMA), also known in French as Archives canadiennes du mouvement des femmes (ACMF), collects records about Canada’s second wave of feminism from the 1960s to the 1990s. Since 1992, the University of Ottawa Library’s Archives and Special Collections has housed the collection.
Origins: After The Other Woman, a Toronto feminist newspaper, stopped publishing in 1977, editor Pat Leslie kept its files and began gathering more feminist materials with colleagues. They formed the Women’s Information Center (WIC), a non-profit group. With a community development grant, they rented office space in Toronto and opened the CWMA to researchers, asking activists and organizations across Canada to donate their records.
In 1992, facing funding shortages, the CWMA donated its collection to the University of Ottawa Library. The CWMA was built by many volunteers, including Pat Leslie, Nancy Adamson, Sandy Fox, Weisia Kolansinka, Lorna Weir, and others. The collection includes many formats: documents, photos, audio and video recordings, and objects like banners, T-shirts, buttons, and ephemera. It is organized into 11 series: organizations, individuals, photographs, buttons, posters, conferences, thematic files on women’s liberation, textile documents, sound recordings, ephemera, and other documentary resources. It also contains a feminist periodicals collection of over 1,400 titles.
The goal was to preserve women’s achievements and activist history so future generations could learn from them. Pat Leslie emphasized keeping materials important to the movement. CWMA used a flexible approach, organizing materials by people and groups rather than by strict provenance, and by multimedia formats to highlight photographs, posters, banners, and buttons.
The CWMA is similar to other independent archives such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and The ArQuives in Toronto. It is a key source for researchers studying Canada’s second wave feminism and helped establish the University of Ottawa’s Women’s Archives, which holds about 170 archival fonds.
The University of Ottawa Library now offers virtual exhibits drawn from the CWMA, including Women and Politics, Our Bodies, Our Stories, Women at Work, and The Pro-Choice Movement in Canada. Items from the CWMA have appeared in external exhibitions as well, like a Morgentaler Clinic plate at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, and CWMA buttons in Trailblazing: Women in Canada since 1867 (Waterloo Region Museum, 2017–2018) and Desire Lines at Artexte Gallery in 2022.
Inspired by CWMA and Margaret Fulford’s national guide to Canadian feminist archives, the University of Ottawa created the Canadian Women’s Movements Portal. Launched on March 8, 2023, this bilingual tool helps researchers find Canadian archival collections on women’s activism from the 1960s to today and documents the history of women’s activism.
CWMA was named a national documentary heritage and was added to the Canada Memory of the World Register on March 5, 2025.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 17:55 (CET).