Reconstructing the Sainte Famille Women's Centre

In this paper, I explore the question of agency in relation to domestic space where threats to the built environment such as demolition and urban renewal create opportunities to subvert traditional gender norms and expectations. I use the example of the Sainte Famille Women’s Centre, a collective, self-proclaimed feminist space located in the inner-city neighbourhood of Milton Parc in Montreal, Canada, between autumn 1970 and late 1972. During this time, the building, a former nineteenth-century single-family dwelling, was part of a neighbourhood-wide proposal for redevelopment, but it was also appropriated as a site of radical feminist experimentation. Here various young women came together under the guise of second-wave feminism to take control over their bodies and to create networks of female support and knowledge. But while the building was ultimately saved, preservation has stripped the structure of its feminist past and traces of the insurgent domestic agency it enabled.

In this paper, I present ongoing research to reconstruct the Sainte Famille Women’s Centre as a work of feminist architecture, following the research of writer Jos Boys and architect Julia Dwyer. Boys and Dwyer argue for feminist architecture as a material intervention that aims to challenge normative assumptions about how space is gendered, and to rethink interpretations of buildings and objects as expressions of feminist processes. At the centre of my work is a collection of photographs documenting the Sainte Famille Women’s Centre as a form of spatial appropriation and the oral testimonies of women whose knew the space through embodied experience. The paper thus evolves as a structured dialogue between people and artifacts, and between academic and practitioner expertise and personal memories.