University of Toronto Press, 1998
This book should be called: Work Shouldn't Hurt: The Hows and Whys of RSIs. Wounded Workers reviews the medical, WCB, legal, ergonomics, union/management, computer workstations, self-help and international legislative ramifications of work-related upper extremity disorders. With lengthy lists of resources available online and in the real world, this book provides a map for the labyrinth in which so many MSI patients find themselves. While peer review through the University of Toronto Press confirmed that the scholarship is accurate and up-to-date, the text is written for the general public and provides plain language translations for many technical terms. For more information, click here.
Women of Influence: Canadian
Women and Politics
Doubleday Canada, 1985
Women of Influence refutes the widely-held belief that the women’s movement in Canada disappeared after winning suffrage. Decade by decade and issue by issue, this book uncovers women’s progress since 1920. Drawing on historical research as well as interviews with leading feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, Women of Influence details women’s breakthroughs in various fields, including legal, medical, political and family planning. Women of Influence is widely used in women’s studies courses across Canada.
The Taking of Twenty-Eight:
Women Challenge the Constitution
Women's Press, 1983
The Taking of Twenty-Eight is a play-by-play narrative description of how women in Canada won the equivalent of a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment, at the same time that US women were losing their fight for an ERA. Extensive interviews with politicians and activists resulted in an exciting account of how women’s groups re-wrote Sec 15 of the Charter of Rights, and inserted a new Sec 28. The Taking of Twenty-Eight is widely cited in legal papers and briefs that review the development of equality rights in Canada. Two US scholars have contacted me to say that this book was central to their doctorate dissertations.
Somebody Has to Do It:
Whose Work Is Housework?
McClelland & Stewart, 1982
Based on 3200 responses to a tongue-in-cheek
questionaire that appeared in my Woman’s Place column, supplemented with
32 in-depth interviews with homemakers across Canada, Somebody Has
to Do It documents the dollar value and personal costs of unpaid work
in the home, done mainly by women. Centennial College used to make a hundred
photocopies of this book at a time, according to Cancopy. Athabasca University
still buys rights to excerpt one chapter, every year or two.
Every Voice Counts: A Canadian
Women's Guide to Initiating Political Action
Canadian Council on the Status of
Women, 1989
Every Voice Counts gives readers step-by-step instructions on how to initiate political action around urgent issues. My father, Hal Kome, also used it as a primer for teaching public relations in a course he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.