Merna Forster - 100 Canadian Heroines

CANADIAN
HEROINES

Famous and Forgotten Faces

By Merna Forster

THE DUNDURN GROUP
TORONTO

Copyright Merna Forster, 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-Editor: Heather Sanderson

Design: Andrew Roberts

Printer: Transcontinental

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Forster, Merna, date.

100 Canadian heroines : famous and forgotten faces / Merna Forster.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55002-514-7

1. Heroines--Canada--Biography. 2. Women--Canada--Biography. 3. Canada--Biography. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred Canadian heroines.

FC26.W6F67 2004 920.72'0971 C2004-904461-3

1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada

Printed on recycled paper

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FOR JOYCELYN DUFRESNE AND GRACE LATIMER

They planted the trees so we could enjoy the shade.

Dora Nipp, from an old Chinese saying

In virtually all societies, leadership is gendered masculine. This is not because women do not lead, but because the positions that define leadership have been dominated by men. When women occupy these positions, they are not seen to belong there in the same way that men are seen naturally to do. Rather than revise their predispositions about women and leadership, people are more likely to find ways around the contradiction, for instance by seeing the woman leader as an anomaly. Her story may simply be forgotten, for, if women are not to be leaders, why do we need to keep their stories alive to inspire girls? Worse, the stories of courageous women get rewritten. That is why it is so important that Merna Forster gives us back the true story of Laura Secord, whose extraordinary feat of courage and endurance has been diminished to a tale of a stroll with a cow. I was glad to see the story of Marie Guyart included in this book. I have had the good fortune to visit the museum of the Ursulines in Quebec City, and to see first hand what kinds of hardy, brave women founded our country. The term weaker sex should make ones blood boil after reading this book!

Merna Forsters celebration of one hundred Canadian women of extraordinary accomplishment has a very serious purpose. Of course the stories of these women entertain and inspire us, but more importantly, they contribute to changing the understanding that determines how societies define the roles of women. Throughout my life, I have found myself in positions where I was the first female starting with my election in the spring of 1963 as student council president of my high school. In the course of my political career I had many perplexing experiences that I suspected were related to my sex, but which I didnt know how to analyze. Since 1993, when an election thrust me into political retirement, I have had the opportunity to read a great deal of research on gender and how it plays out in the way we see leaders in Western societies. For several years I taught a course called Gender and Power at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and I travel around the world speaking on this subject. What I have learned is this: human beings are pattern makers who transform what they observe and learn into hypotheses that enable them to function in a complex world. Among the most powerful hypotheses that children create are those related to the social construction of sex, or what we call gender roles.

My generation of baby boomer women was told that all we needed in order to succeed was to be good at what we did. However, many women became frustrated at finding that this was not enough. Social science research confirms what they suspect that there are deep, underlying preconceptions about femininity that dramatically affect the way women are perceived and that can override empirical observation. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin discovered that when symphony orchestras audition musicians behind a screen, they hire 25 percent more women the screen filtering out the negative preconceptions about women musicians. In Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, psychologist Virginia Valian tells how hypotheses about height lead men and women to judge men to be as much as 3 1/2 inches taller than women of equal height. In Closing the Gender Gap, Marie Wilson, one of the founders of the White House Project (whose purpose is to elect a woman as U.S. president), tells of research that revealed that the ratio of men to women on the influential Sunday morning news programs in the United States is 9 to 1, rising to 13 to 1 after 9/11. Not only do the networks not feature women who hold key committee chairmanships in Congress, but they also call as commentators men who are former holders of such positions rather than the women who currently hold the positions.

These and other similar situations reflect the difficulty faced by women in overcoming deeply rooted notions of where leadership lies. That is why this book is so important. The only way to open up the full scope of opportunities for women is to reprogram the way people see gender roles. This is not a simple task. Research shows that by the time children arrive at school, they already have clear ideas about gender. But if we tell the stories of women who defy the stereotypes, we contribute to changing the social landscape from which children derive their views of how the world works.

For Canadians, whose worldview cannot escape the powerful influence of our neighbour to the south, telling these Canadian stories counteracts another form of invisibility. From 1996 to 2000, I served as Canadas Consul General in Los Angeles. The key issues I dealt with included Canadas position in the global film industry and our cultural policies relating to Canadian content. Canada has one of the most open media markets in the world, but living next door to the worlds largest economy guarantees that many Canadians see more Americans than Canadians in their media and entertainment.