Deborah Gorham - Marion Dewar: A Life of Action

Marion Dewar is best remembered as mayor of Ottawa. Many people (myself included) believe she was the best mayor Ottawa has ever had. From 1978 to 1985, Mayor Dewar worked for non-profit housing, better public transportation, and support for the arts, peace, and womens rights. She advocated for First Nations people, and she supported the revitalization of Ottawas downtown core. Dewars advocacy for all these causes, but most especially for peace and womens rights, drew me to her as a subject for a biography.

Dewars success as mayor, important as it was, is only part of her legacy. Marion Dewar cared deeply about social issues, the poor, and the disadvantaged. She would never ignore a man or woman who was begging in the street, and she not only gave money but also words of encouragement and friendship. When she encountered those in need, she would reach out to help them other more important people could wait. She was a genuinely compassionate woman.

Moreover, Dewar truly did think globally and act locally. While she was mayor, Ottawa became the first municipality in Canada to pass a referendum on global disarmament. She advocated for mothers who lived in public housing, for visible minorities, and for gays and lesbians. And she was the driving force behind Project 4000, an initiative that aimed to bring 4,000 boat people to Ottawa from Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Dewar was a prominent member of the New Democratic Party ( NDP ), serving as president of the federal party from 1985 to 1987 and then sitting as a Member of Parliament ( MP ) for the federal riding of Hamilton-Mountain in 19871988. She worked to raise the consciousness of party members about womens political rights and was one of the most important backers of MP Audrey McLaughlins successful bid for the party leadership.

Describing how Marion Dewar achieved these goals is a major purpose of this book. But how did she come to believe in these issues? What intellectual paths and personal experiences led to her belief in inclusiveness, in the rights of women, in social welfare, in peace?

Passion, pragmatism, and hard work fuelled Dewars success. Her public actions speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the historian, however, she did not record her personal beliefs. Unlike Audrey McLaughlin, for example, she left behind no memoir. Nor are there diaries or collections of intellectually revealing letters, and while she gave some powerful speeches as mayor, they represent collaboration between her and her staff. The most personally revealing document I encountered in the course of my research is the extraordinary interview conducted by researcher Greta Hofmann Nemiroff in the mid-1990s.

Marion Dewar had strong beliefs on which she had the courage to act, but she was never much interested in abstract, theoretical approaches to ideas. Did her belief in social justice rest upon her Catholic faith? On women and peace, did she believe that women have a gift for consensus and a special responsibility to oppose war and violence? In what follows, I speculate about these questions, but I cannot provide definitive answers. What is clear is that Dewar gave considerable thought to her actions, but for her it was the actions that counted.

By the early 1970s, when her public life began, Marion Dewar identified herself as a supporter of womens rights. Later she would call herself a feminist, and she was identified as such by others. But what kind of feminist was she? What circumstances led her to advocate for an end to discrimination against women in public life and to fight the oppression that women all too often experienced within the family, as mothers and wives?

The 1960s and 1970s saw a revival of feminism. Many women discovered feminism for the first time. I was a feminist before the revival of the 1960s and 1970s because I was raised in a mid-twentieth-century feminist family with a working mother who had a satisfying, well-paying job. My mother was forthright about her feminism, and she made it clear to my sister and me that we needed to rely on ourselves and prepare ourselves to earn a living and that we must never think we should be dependent on a man.

But I was profoundly affected by the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. I read groundbreaking books like Kate Milletts Sexual Politics. I began to teach womens history and womens studies and to write about women in history. I was fortunate: As a professor at Carleton University, I earned a living doing work to which I was deeply committed.

Before I began this project, I assumed wrongly that Dewar became a feminist during the revival of feminism, as so many other women did. In fact, her transformation from a girl who accepted patriarchal gender divisions to a woman who advocated for womens rights came about in surprising ways. She does not fit the standard framework. She was not reading