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Responding to the admonition of numerous scholars that contemporary social and political formations in the West must be viewed in relation to histories of colonialism and contemporary relations of neo-colonialisrn, this study undertakes a contrapuntal reading of the production of white First World women as acting political subjects through their material and discursive relationship to Third World women and immigrant women of colour. Focused on a very specific feminist initiative - the movement to revive the practice of midwifery in Ontario, Canada - this research untangles the paradox represented by the conspicuous under-representation, relative to the their numbers in the Ontario population, of immigrant midwives of colour in the ranks of the province's newly-legalized midwifery profession. Moving from an examination of (global) macroprocesses of power, to an explication of institutional foms of racist exclusion and concluding with an examination of microexpressions of racism, unequal relations between women are shown to underlie the successful challenge to patriarchal medical authority mounted by provincial midwifery activists.