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Bonnie Reilly Schmidt, Ph.D.

~ History Provides Context

Bonnie Reilly Schmidt, Ph.D.

Category Archives: Canadian History

Celebrating Great Canadian Women on International Women’s Day

01 Tue Mar 2016

Posted by Bonnie Reilly Schmidt in Canadian History, Society, Women in History

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A Women's Parliament, Aimee Semple McPherson, Canadian Women, Chatelaine Magazine, Doris Anderson, International Women's Day, Judy LaMarsh, Kathleen Klondike Kate Ryan, Lois Beckett, Manitoba Political Equality League, Sault Ste. Marie Police, Stelco Steel, Women in the RCMP, Women's Suffrage

International Women’s Day is a day set aside to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women around the world. The United Nations began celebrating International Women’s Day during International Women’s Year in 1975, establishing March 8 as the day member states celebrate women.

International Year of the Woman

This year, March 8 is particularly significant because it marks the centenary of the date women first gained the right to vote in Canada. In 1916, Manitoba became the first province to grant women the suffrage in provincial elections, along with the right to hold public office. Women have come a long way since then. For the first time in Canadian history, women now hold half of the federal Cabinet positions in the House of Commons.

To celebrate, here are just some of the women who have helped to make Canada great and who have influenced and inspired me:

Doris Anderson (1921-2007)

Anderson was the editor of Chatelaine magazine from 1957-1977. As an activist, Anderson played an important role in championing women’s rights and advocating for social change through her editorials and the magazine’s content. Anderson’s editorials in particular were instrumental in applying pressure on the federal government to establish a Royal Commission to investigate the status of women in Canada. She also lobbied for the inclusion of women’s rights in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1981. Under her tenure as editor, Chatelaine’s readership rose to over one million.[1]

Doris Anderson Source: CBC News

Doris Anderson
Source: CBC News

The Women of the Stelco Steel Company (1943-1981)

During WWII, Stelco Steel in Hamilton, Ontario supplied steel for the building of ships, shells, and army transports. One of the largest steel producers in Canada, Stelco lost 1,500 men to the war. To fill the employment gap, the company hired women who worked in some of the toughest sections of the mill, including the blast furnaces. After the war, all of the women were fired. Between 1961 and 1977, no women were hired womens-rights1[1]at all. Only twenty-eight women, working in the tin mill and the cafeteria, were employed at Stelco while 13,000 men worked for the company. The disparity was challenged when five women launched a sex discrimination complaint against the company with the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1979. The women won their case and Stelco was forced to hire 180 women, all of whom lost their jobs during massive layoffs by Stelco in 1981.[2]

Julia Verlyn (Judy) LaMarsh (1924-1980)

In 1963, Judy LaMarsh was just the second woman in Canadian history to be appointed to a federal Cabinet position. As a minister, LaMarsh was instrumental in pressuring her cabinet colleagues to establish a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. She was also responsible for the implementation

Judy LaMarsh

Judy LaMarsh

of the Canada Pension Plan, designing Canada’s Medicare system, creating the Broadcasting Act, and overseeing Canada’s centennial celebrations as Secretary of State in 1967.[3] LaMarsh died of cancer in 1980, but her legacy lives on in the medical and social benefits that all Canadians enjoy today.

Kathleen “Klondike Kate” Ryan (1868-1932)

Ryan was the first white woman to arrive in Whitehorse in 1898 during the Yukon Gold Rush, mushing some 600 miles on foot along the Stikine Trail to get there. She established a successful restaurant business and regularly invested in gold. In 1900, Ryan was hired by the North-West Mounted Police as a matron to assist in the care of female prisoners. She was later appointed as a “Constable Special” to work as a gold inspector monitoring female smugglers. Ryan was so esteemed by the RCMP that when she died in Vancouver in 1932, the police force provided an honour guard for her funeral, a rare privilege that few women have been afforded.[4]

Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944)

Aimee Semple McPherson Source: Foursquare Church International

Aimee Semple McPherson
Source: Foursquare Church International

A missionary, radio broadcaster, evangelist, and author, Aimee McPherson was born in the small farming community of Salford, Ontario. McPherson’s evangelistic work landed her in Los Angeles where she established one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the world, Angelus Temple, in 1923. During the Depression, McPherson’s temple fed and clothed thousands of homeless and destitute in Los Angeles. But she is best remembered for her colourful preaching and unconventional approach to spreading her “old-time gospel” message. McPherson was ahead of her time. She used radio broadcasts, stage plays, magazines, newspapers, and even a float in the Tournament of Roses parade to draw people to church and to God, methods that would become commonplace later in the century.

The Women of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Troop 17 (1974-1975)

In September 1974, thirty-two women arrived at the RCMP’s academy in Regina, Saskatchewan to begin training as the first women to join the RCMP. Although the RCMP signed up all thirty-two women at exactly the same time so no one woman would be able to claim that she was “the first,” the members of Troop 17 broke ground as the first female figures of authority in Canada’s national police force.

Female Troop Parade Square

Constable Lois Beckett, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (1949-1968)

Lois Beckett served as a constable with the Sault Ste. Marie Police Force between 1949 and 1968. Although she held the rank of constable during those years, she was paid less than men of the same rank. She was also denied membership in the force’s association because she was a woman. Beckett sued the police force and the association for discrimination. In response, the department dismissed her from her duties as a constable and reclassified her as a clerk-typist. In 1968, her case went to the Ontario Supreme Court where Justice R. Fergusson ruled against Beckett, arguing that she should be paid less than her male colleagues because, as a woman, she did not perform the same duties as men and did not have dependents to provide for. To Fergusson, the lower rate of pay was justified since it conformed to “all the rules of civilization, economics, family life and common sense.”[5] Nevertheless, her demands for equal pay and equal rights brought the issue before politicians and the public, opening the door for women’s rights as police officers.

The Women of the Manitoba Political Equality League (1912-1916)

On January 28, 1914, members of Manitoba’s Political Equality League staged a “A Women’s Parliament” at the Walker Theatre in Winnipeg. The satire starred suffragist Nellie McClung as the premier of a mythical province where women were the political leaders and men were asking for the right to vote. The women acted out a parliamentary debate discussing why men should be denied the vote, using the same arguments Manitoba’s politicians employed. But it was McClung’s thinly-disguised parody of the province’s long-time premier Rodmond Roblin that brought the house down. The satire was a brilliant strategy that placed the issue of voting rights into proper perspective for many Manitobans. In 1916, exactly two years to the day after the mock parliament was first performed, Manitoba women became the first in Canada to exercise their right to vote in provincial elections and to hold public office.[6]

Executive members of the League following the passage of the suffrage bill in Manitoba, 1916. Source: Manitoba Archives

Executive members of the League following the passage of the suffrage bill in Manitoba, 1916.
Source: Manitoba Archives

 

[1] Eberts, Mary. “‘Write It For the Women’: Doris Anderson, the Changemaker.” Canadian Woman Studies 26:2 (Summer/Fall 2007): 6-13.

[2] Meg Luxton and June Corman, “Getting to Work: The Challenge of the Women Back Into Stelco Campaign,” Labour/Le Travail 28 (Fall 1991).

[3] LaMarsh, Judy, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1968).

[4] Edmonds, William Lewis, “The Woman Called Klondike Kate,” Maclean’s (15 December 1922); Brennan, T. Ann, The Real Klondike Kate (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, 1990).

[5] Doris Anderson, “The Strange Case of Policewoman Beckett,” Chatelaine 41:4 (April 1968): 3.

[6] http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/mcclung-played-the-crowd-like-a-vaudevillian-241934181.html.

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Canada Was Not Always So Welcoming

10 Thu Dec 2015

Posted by Bonnie Reilly Schmidt in Canadian History, Social Justice, Society

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Canada's refugee history, Syrian refugees, xenophobia in Canada

Today, as the first Syrian refugees arrive in Canada, I am thinking of those Canadians who oppose the government’s plans to accept 25,000 refugees by February 2016. Social media has been full of racist comments as well as derogatory and discriminatory remarks about the refugees, Muslims, and immigrants generally.

Syrian refugees from Jordan arriving in Canada. Source: http://www.cbc.ca

The roots of discriminatory attitudes toward ethnic groups run deep in Canada. In the past, fear, misinformation, and assumptions about racial difference often compromised the moral and religious ideals espoused by many Anglophones when it came to refugees and immigrants entering our country.

Religious discrimination also has a long history. Specific groups such as Hindus, Buddhists, Catholics, and Jews have all been denied entry into Canada, or their rights as citizens ignored, at some point in our history because of their religious beliefs.

So, it should come as no surprise to learn that Canadians haven’t always been as welcoming to refugees as we’d like to think. Here are just a few examples:

1885 – A head tax of $50.00 is imposed on Chinese immigrants hired by the Conservative government to work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The federal government passes a number of exclusionary laws that forces them to live in segregated areas and prohibits them from voting, serving on juries, and accessing professions.

1907 – White Canadians carry out an “anti-Oriental” race riot in Vancouver damaging homes and businesses owned by Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

The aftermath of Vancouver's race riot, 1907

The aftermath of Vancouver’s race riot, 1907

1910-1912 – Public resistance to 1300 African American homesteaders fleeing persecution in Oklahoma to settle on the prairies causes the federal government to prepare legislation banning all African Americans from entering Canada. The order-in-council is never acted on for fear of reprisal from the United States and African Americans residing in eastern Canada.

1914 – The Komagata Maru, with 376 passengers on board, is detained in Vancouver Harbour for two months before being denied entry to Canada. The ship and its passengers are ordered to return to Calcutta. The action was thought to stem the  “brown invasion” of Canada.

1939 – Canada’s Liberal government refuses to grant sanctuary to 907 Jewish passengers fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the ocean liner St. Louis. The ship is returned to Europe where 254 of the passengers eventually perish in concentration camps.

Passengers aboard the St. Louis, 1939.

Passengers aboard the St. Louis, 1939.

1942 – Following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, almost 22,000 people of Japanese descent, most born in Canada, are sent to internment camps in British Columbia and Alberta. Considered “enemy aliens,” their property and assets are seized and sold at public auction.

There have been times, however, when the Canadian government opened our doors to accept refugees in crisis:

1975 –Thousands of refugees flee the advance of communist rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. At least half a million die in boats trying to escape to neighbouring countries and the safety of refugee camps. Between 1975 and 1976, Canada accepts 5,000 “boat people” as they came to be known. Another 50,000 immigrate between 1979 and 1980. In total, Canada welcomes almost 60,000 refugees from the region.

My grandfather was a 16-year-old Catholic, Romanian farm labourer fleeing conscription in the Second Balkan War in 1913 when he immigrated to Canada with $30.00 in his pocket. I’m grateful that those Canadians who actively resisted the arrival of immigrants in 1913 did not prevail.

Hundreds of thousands of others like my grandfather have successfully risen to the challenge of adapting to a new language, a new country, and a new way of life. History shows us that xenophobia accomplishes little, but inclusion and acceptance can accomplish so much. Today, I’m especially proud to be a Canadian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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