WRITER AND ACTIVIST Doris Anderson was on the front lines of all our battles for equal rights.
The illegitimate daughter of a rooming house keeper and an itinerant tenant, Doris had grown up in her mother’s rooming house in Calgary, where she learned a great deal about taking care of herself: no one else was doing the job.I When she decided she wanted to go to university, her high school teacher told her it would be better if she allowed boys with lower marks to go ahead of her: girls ended up marrying and didn’t need degrees.
Doris was stubborn. She went to university.
Eventually she became the editor of Chatelaine, a women’s magazine, during the 1960s and most of the seventies. In addition to the usual women’s magazine content, like cooking, baking, decorating, and perfect housewifing, she ran articles on abortion, rape, women’s choice not to have children, and violence in the home, stories of women juggling family and career and on being “successfully single.” We had come from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Charlie’s Angels. Doris’s editorials on pay equity, child care, custody arrangements, and women’s sexual fulfillment were discussed, disputed, applauded—depending on who you were. I was in the applause section.
In 1967 Doris served on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. Its 167 recommendations on such matters as equal pay for work of equal value, maternity leave, daycare, birth control, family law, and pensions were hardly revolutionary, though they caused considerable debate both in and out of Parliament. It was not until 1969 that Dr. Henry Morgenthaler opened the first abortion clinic in Canada. His clinic was soon raided by police and he was charged with performing illegal abortions. The Criminal Code prohibited abortions unless the woman could prove to a panel of doctors—usually all male—that the pregnancy would threaten her life or that it was the result of incest or rape. In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada effectively legalized abortion and confirmed a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. Yet abortion remains a contentious issue both here and in the United States, where some states still do their best to prevent access to the procedure.
Doris had an impressive grasp of a range of ideas, and she always knew she could bring an audience along, even if they disagreed with her at the beginning. She spoke with a wonderful western drawl; she was statuesque, tall, broad-beamed, confident. Her magazine was like herself, outspoken, no nonsense, tell it as it is. Doris knew how to lean in long before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead became a bestseller.
We used to have lunch at various Toronto eateries and discuss issues of our time and how our lives were still affected by perceptions of suitable roles for women. The only woman in a senior management role in book publishing in the 1960s was Gladys Neale of Macmillan. She had worked her way up with dogged determination to become one of the best educational publishers in Canada.II
In addition to running Chatelaine, Maclean Hunter’s most successful magazine, Doris managed a household with three rambunctious boys and a very busy husband, a lawyer with a serious interest in politics. On summer evenings we were often at their Rosedale home, where the boys took turns leaping from the roof into the pool amid great whooping shouts of joy and derring-do. Doris, though she growled her disapproval, was proud of her sons and remained calm in her role as host and mother.
Under her stewardship, Chatelaine doubled its circulation, yet when Doris applied for the job of publisher, she was denied. The job went to a less-experienced insider—a man with similarities to the character “Laughing Horse” in her novel Rough Layout, which featured a woman not unlike herself running a magazine, not unlike Chatelaine. It was one of the last novels I signed when I was at M&S. Doris used to joke that I chose to resign rather than face a potential lawsuit.
When she applied to be editor of Maclean’s, she was, again, deemed unworthy by the boys’ club that owned the magazine. One of those men told her that she simply couldn’t represent the company publicly. Maclean’s was losing more than a million dollars a year, yet management wouldn’t trust a woman who had run a profitable magazine with fixing its flagship monthly.
Doris resigned from Chatelaine in 1977. That was about the same time as her marriage began to unravel. She used to talk to me about weighing her options. What would be more difficult: staying in a broken marriage or becoming a single mother? It took a few months of thinking and debating with herself before she decided to end her marriage. Peter, her oldest, was in high school and stayed with his father, while Doris took a long camper trip with the other two boys in Europe.
For a while after the trip, she experimented with staying at home and writing, but she had too much energy to remain sedentary. Besides, she was determined to keep fighting for women’s rights, even if she no longer had Chatelaine’s platform. She had championed the need for more women in politics and now, when the opportunity presented itself, she grabbed it.III She ran for the Liberal Party in Eglinton and lost.
Afterwards, still licking her wounds, she accepted the post of chair for the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Although Doris had been a lifelong Liberal, many of her staunchest supporters turned out to be Tories. Inevitably, she crossed swords with Lloyd Axworthy, an influential Liberal member of parliament. He seemed to be under the impression that Doris could be persuaded to toe the party line. Needless to say, he was wrong. When he pushed the executive, over Doris’s objections, to cancel a national meeting to discover what women wanted from the new Charter of Rights, Doris and a small group of women organized a non-governmental ad hoc conference that drew thirteen hundred women from across the country. None of them was paid. In the end, Section 28 of the Charter stated simply that men and women are equal under the law. That may not seem like such a revolutionary gain by today’s standards, but up until 1982 such recognition had eluded us.
I was not the only friend who advised Doris not to accept the ungenerous offer of the presidency of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. It didn’t pay. Its members were chosen from two hundred organizations, representing 3.5 million women, with a myriad of issues. At the time its members were battling it out over a range of issues, including whether homemakers should be allowed to join the Canada Pension Plan. They had approached Doris because she had become a celebrity and, as she told me, nobody else would take the job.
Yet the job was, in some ways, the right choice for Doris. It gave her a close connection with women across the country and, eventually, around the world. She could not have written her 1991 book, The Unfinished Revolution, had she not been with NAC. She could rely on her reputation and connections to reach women around the world and provide a significant overview of the status of women in twelve countries. The book tackles some of the tough issues—daycare, the workforce, safety, violence against women, availability of jobs—and it examines how far women had come in their own countries since their mothers were their age.
I am ending this chapter the way Doris ended her Rebel Daughter:
If women had more say in how the world is run, we wouldn’t be worrying about the next quarter’s profit picture, or whether Moody’s is going to award us an A++ rating. Our priorities would be more focused and practical than that: we would be thinking of nothing less than the future of the planet. . . . Isn’t it time women stopped holding up half the sky and began making at least half the decisions right down here on earth?
I. Key Porter published Doris’s aptly named autobiography, Rebel Daughter, in 1996.
II. Francess Halpenny didn’t become associate director of the University of Toronto Press until 1979.
III. By 1984 there were six women in the cabinet, including Barbara McDougall, Minister of State for Finance, and Pat Carney, Minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources and later, Minister of International Trade, a post she held when Canada negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Key Porter published her memoir, Trade Secrets, in 2000.