This Canadian feminist powerhouse (Editor, novelist, journalist, activist, chairperson) passed away in Toronto this week.
As editor of Chatelaine, Anderson combined typical women’s magazine fare with well-written, hard-hitting investigative pieces on abortion, birth control, discriminatory divorce laws and the wage gap.
Among some of the journalists she hired to write these pieces were June Callwood, Christina McCall (later Newman) Michele Landsberg, Barbara Frum, Sylvia Fraser, anf future governor-general Adrienne Clarckson.
One of her first editorials was an appeal for more women in Parliament -- there were only two female MPs in 1958 . She devoted many pages over the years to pushing for a Royal Commission on the Status of Women (she eventually chaired the SoW Council), and to exposing Canada's systemic social problems such as child abuse, racism, and the plight of our First Nations peoples. Some readers felt that she was turning "a nice wholesome Canadian magazine into a feminist rag." However, circulation, which was 480,000 when she became editor, had increased by the late 1960s to 1.8 million readers, the equivalent of one out of every three women in Canada (!!!)
Anderson eventually quit because they refused to hire her as Editor of Macleans, or to raise her salary of $23,000 to match that of the male Maclean's editor, who had less circulation and was paid $59,000.
While Chair of the Status of Women, Anderson contested the wording of Trudeau’s newly written Constitution. The fall-out from this led to her resignation, but finally, following an ad hoc conference on the subject, the wording was changed to: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons”.
Lloyd Axworthy, who cancelled the first conference that had been planned to discuss the wording, appointed Lucie Pepin, one of the women on the CACSW board who had voted
against holding the conference, as Ms. Anderson's successor. [why not get gwendolyn landolt?]
Anderson then become head of the National Action Committee, a coalition of 700 women’s rights organizations. She remained passionate about women’s involvement in parliament, and was a vocal advocate of Proportional representation.
She also wrote four novels:
Two Women, Rough Layout, Affairs of State, The Unfinished RevolutionQuote:
“Every time Lloyd Axworthy opens his mouth, one hundred more women become feminists”
--
DIED TODAY:
Jean Baudrillard
A widely-read French Philosopher and cultural critic. He coined the terms simulacra and hyper-real to describe Western society's mediated reality through technology. I attended a packed lecture he delivered at York University in 2003. I thought I would be all clever and focus on his french delivery, ignoring the subtitles that flashed behind him on screen (weird--most conferences have head-phones and live translators).
Maybe this was his idea of a joke, but he began his french lecture, and the subtitles started too late, then had to speed up to catch up. the words were whizzing by, and a general twitter waved through the crowd as we contemplated our highly mediated and hyperreal moment with the Man himself.
Some quotes:
"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real."
"Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society."
Labels: art and film, feminism, History, pop culture
