Victoria’s Read

Florence Bayard Bird, (January 15, 1908 – July 18, 1998) was a Canadian broadcaster, journalist and Senator.

Born Florence Rhein in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College and in 1928, married journalist John Bird. They moved to Montreal in 1931.

In 1937, they moved to Winnipeg where her husband worked for the Winnipeg Tribune. She also appeared on CBC Radio and Television as Anne Francis, a political analyst. Francis [Bird] made several appearances on the panel show, Fighting Words in the early 1960s.

She is best remembered for her work as chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She was also a member of the Canadian Senate from March 23, 1978 until January 15, 1983. In 1971, she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

The Royal Commission on the Status of Women was a Canadian Royal Commission that examined the status of women and recommended steps that might be taken by the federal government to ensure equal opportunities with men and women in all aspects of Canadian society. The Commission commenced on 16 February 1967 as an initiative of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Public sessions were conducted the following year to accept public comment for the Commission to consider as it formulated its recommendations. Florence Bird was the Commission’s chair.

The Commission discovered that in 1970 only 3.9% of managers were women, women were still paid less than men for doing the same work and two thirds of people that were on welfare were women.

In 1970, a report came out with 167 recommendations to ensure that men and women had equal opportunities. Some recommendations were “gender” and “marital status” be prohibited as grounds for discrimination by employers, training programs be made more open to women, name more women judges to all courts, more qualified women be appointed to the Senate and employed women be granted eighteen weeks of unemployment benefits for maternity leave.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Bird

January 1916, the Manitoba legislature gave unanimous approval to a bill that made Manitoba the first province in Canada to give women the right to vote. 

The new Liberal premier, Tobias Norris, had been elected on an ambitious platform of political reform. He was committed not only to granting women the vote, but to banning alcohol, making education compulsory, establishing workers’ compensation, allowing citizens to have more control over politicians through the use of referendums, and reforming the education system.

While a number of the reforms brought in by the Norris government, such as prohibition and binding referendums, were relatively short-lived, others were permanent, reflecting a new role for government in society. The women’s suffrage campaign played a central role in the reform movement that ushered in these changes. Its leaders were often active in other campaigns, calling for prohibition, an end to political corruption, laws that would provide factory workers with safe and clean working conditions, and improved services for rural communities.

Writers such as McClung and Lillian Thomas developed national reputations as social reformers. The suffrage movement, which had been founded and led by women from the outset, could trace it roots back to the 1890s in Manitoba. Its leaders cut their political teeth on the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement’s campaigns to ban the liquor trade, through their activities in the women’s section of the Manitoba Grain Growers’ Association, and while volunteering in the missionary societies of the Protestant churches.

 Their case was strengthened with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 as women were called upon to play a more active role in the paid economy. The fact that Manitoba was the first province to give women the vote was in many ways a tribute to the Political Equality League, which was founded in 1912. Its pamphlets, petitions, and public events succeeded in making suffrage a popular issue in a very short period of time.

Source: http://manitobia.ca

A native of Canada, Maud L. Menten is a little-known scientist who discovered an equation that has been hailed as a foundation in the modern study of enzymology.  Menten was one of the first Canadian women to earn a medical degree.

Menten was born March 20, 1879, in Port Lambton, Ontario, Canada.  After completing secondary school, Menten attended the University of Toronto where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1904 and a master’s degree in physiology in 1907. While earning her graduate degree, she worked as a demonstrator in the university’s physiology lab.

A talented student, Menten was appointed a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City in 1907.  After a year at the Institute, Menten worked as an intern at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. She returned to Canada and began studies at the University of Toronto a year later. In 1911 she became one of the first Canadian women to receive a doctor of medicine degree.

Armed with her doctorate, Menten joined the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh as an instructor in 1918. She remained at the university until her retirement in 1950 and was promoted to full professor in 1948 at the age of sixty-nine.

Menten was portrayed as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore “Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes.” She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies. She played the clarinet, painted paintings worthy of art exhibitions, climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition and enjoyed astronomy. She also mastered several languages, including Russian, French, German, Italian, and at least one Native-American language.

After her retirement from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950, she returned to Canada where she continued to do cancer research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute. Poor health forced Menten’s retirement in 1955, and she died July 20, 1960, at the age of 81, in Leamington, Ontario.

Known as the “mother of birth control in Canada,” Dr. Marion Powell was a physician, longstanding activist and leader in the field of women’s health.

Graduating with a medical degree from the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto in 1946, a diploma in public health from the school of hygiene at the University of Toronto and an FRCPC in community medicine, Dr. Powell went on to intern at Women’s College Hospital and at Toronto General Hospital.

Her career path next led her to a teaching position at St. Mary’s Hospital in Timmins, Ontario and a family practice in Japan. In 1960, she and her husband returned to Canada and Dr. Powell started another general practice in Scarborough, Ontario.

In 1966, Dr. Powell was appointed medical officer of health for the City of Scarborough and successfully lobbied for wider access to birth control and family planning. She was responsible for establishing the first municipally funded birth control clinic in Canada. She was also responsible for the development of a health- and sex-education curriculum for the Scarborough Board of Education, which became a model for other school boards across Canada.

Dr. Powell was next appointed as a professor of the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto in 1972. She would hold this position until her retirement in 1988. Dr. Powell taught medical students about sexuality and women’s health.  Dr. Powell influenced a generation of medical professionals to take a more responsive and caring approach towards the health-care needs of women.

In 1981, Dr. Powell became the director of Women’s College Hospital’s Bay Centre for Birth Control, a position she also held until her retirement. Under her directorship, the range of services available at the Centre broadened.

Over the course of her career, Dr. Powell was presented with numerous awards.

Dr. Marion Powell died in 1997 at the age of 74. She left all of her research papers as well as her personal library to Women’s College Hospital.

October is Canadian Women’s History Month. It was in this month in 1929 that five women took to task not only the Canadian but British justice systems to have women in Canada declared “Persons”

One of the “Famous Five” women was Nellie Letitia McClung (née Mooney) Born Chatsworth, Ontario October 20, 1873. Died September 1, 1951.

At the age of 16, she left home and attended Normal School (Teachers College) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. While teaching, she was introduced to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and its strong philosophy by her future mother-in-law. Marrying Druggist Robert Wesley  McClung in 1896, they would raise five children together. 

Nellie pursued a career as an accomplished writer and in 1908, she had completed her first novel, a national best seller, Sewing Seeds in Danny. She was a member of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. In 1912, she became a founding member of the Political Equality League, helping female wage earners.

When the family relocated to Edmonton in 1914-15 this effective speaker who captivated audiences with her humorous arguments was welcomed enthusiastically by local women’s groups. She became the single woman delegate at the Canadian War Conference of 1918 and was a Methodist delegate to the World Ecumenical Congress of 1921, where she advocated women as clergy. From Edmonton, she represented her ideas as a member of Alberta’s Legislature from 1921 through 1925. In 1927 she was one of the “Famous Five” who forced the courts to recognize women as “Persons’ in Canada. She was the first woman to be appointed to the Board of Directors of the Canadian Broadcast Network. In 1936, she was also a Canadian representative to the League of Nations.

A popular author, she wrote newspaper and magazine articles, columns, short stories and published 16 books and 2 autobiographies.

As a member of the Famous Five she is part of the famous tea party statue of the women which has been erected in Alberta and outside the door of the Canadian Senate in Ottawa. To date, these are the only Canadian women to have statues on Parliament Hill. 

By Dawn Monroe. www.famouscanadianwomen.com

Louise Crummy McKinney. Born Frankville, On , Sept 22nd  1868. Died July 10, 1931.

One of 10 children of an Irish immigrant farmer, Louise obtained a good education graduating from the Ottawa Normal School (Teachers’ College). In 1886 she joined her sister in the west where she met and married James McKinney. The young couple started life together in Ontario but in 1903, along with their son, Willard, they settled in Claresholm Alberta. Here the couple helped organize the local Methodist Church. In 1925 they embraced church unification as the United Church of Canada.

Louise was a social activist and became an organizer of not only local and provincial but national and international Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) promoting temperance and a Christian lifestyle. She had a major role in the 1915 Alberta provincial campaign to ban alcohol which made Alberta the 2nd province to adopt prohibition.
Two years later, she was the 1st women to be elected to the Alberta Legislative Assembly. This was the 1st Alberta provincial election in which men and women could vote. Louise ran for the Non-Partisan League candidate in a hotly contested race. She believed strongly that liquor and brewing companies influenced the major political parties through their donations.  Mckinney was sworn into parliament and is therefore considered the “1st female legislator in the British Empire!”. An impressive debater, she perused prohibition and fought for laws to aid immigrants, widows, the disabled and separated women. She ran but was defeated and became semi retired. In 1929, she was the 2nd woman to sign the famous “Persons” Act which lead to women in Canada being able to be considered “persons” She is one of the group now called “The Famous Five”.

She died at Claresholm, her old legislative territory at the age of 63. Her gravestone simply reads “Mother”. Among many honours, in October 2009, the Senate voted to name McKinney and the rest of the Five Canada’s first “honorary senators. She is also one of the women in the Famous Five statue that is situated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

By Dawn Monroe. www.famouscanadianwomen.com

 Private Lowry, CWAC, tightening up the springs on the front of her vehicle, Chelsea & Cricklewood Garage , England, July 7, 1944

The Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWAC) was established on August 13, 1941, in response to a shortage of personnel caused by the increase in the size of Canada’s navy, army and air force. At first the organisation was called the Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Corps and was not an official part of the armed forces. On March 13, 1942 the women were inducted into the Canadian Army and became the Canadian Women’s Army Corps. They wore a cap badge of three maple leaves, and collar badges of the goddess Athena.

A February 1943 CWAC advertisement in the Edmonton Journal noted that prospective recruits had to be in excellent health, at least five feet tall and 105 pounds (or within 10 pounds above or below the standard of weight laid down in medical tables for different heights), with no dependants, a minimum of Grade 8 education, aged 18 to 45 and a British subject, as Canadians were at that time. Since women were not allowed to enter in combat of any kind the CWACs worked as secretaries, clerks, canteen workers, vehicle drivers and many other non-combat military jobs. They were only paid 2/3 of what the men were paid in the same occupation (this figure later became 4/5).

CWACs served overseas, first in 1942 in Washington DC and then with the Canadian Army in the UK. In 1944 CWACs served in Italy and in 1945 in north-west Europe, usually as clerks in headquarters establishments. After VE Day, more served with Canadian occupation forces in Germany. In all, approximately 3000 served Canada overseas.

While no members of the CWAC were killed due to enemy action, four were wounded in a German V-2 missile attack on Antwerp in 1945.

By the end of the war 21,624 CWACs had served in the ranks. In August 1946 the CWACs were disbanded but were reconstituted on March 22 1948. The CWACS were disbanded for good in 1964.

Source: wikipedia.org

Marie Thérèse Forget Casgrain. (10 July 1896 – 3 November 1981)

Thérèse Casgrain was a feminist, reformer, politician and senator in Quebec, Canada.

She was raised in a wealthy family, the daughter of Lady Blanche MacDonald and Sir Rodolphe Forget. She married Pierre-François Casgrain, a wealthy Liberal politician with whom she raised four children.

Casgrain led the women’s suffrage movement in Quebec prior to World War I. She founded the Provincial Franchise Committee in 1921 and campaigned for women’s rights and for the right to vote in Quebec elections, a right that was not won until 1940. From 1928 to 1942, she was the leader of the League for Women’s Rights. In the 1930s, she hosted a popular radio show Fémina. In the 1942 federal by-election, she stood as an “Independent Liberal” candidate in the Charlevoix-Saguenay riding, the same seat formerly held both by her father and by her husband.

Following World War II, she left the Liberal Party and joined the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). In 1948, she became one of the federal vice presidents of the CCF. She led the Quebec wing of the party, the Parti social démocratique du Québec, from 1951 to 1957 through three provincial elections using her position as a platform to campaign against the government of Maurice Duplessis. She was therefore the first female leader of a political party in Canada.

In the 1960s, she became a campaigner against nuclear weapons, founding the Quebec wing of Voice of Women. She also was a founder of the League for Human Rights and the Fédération des femmes du Québec. In the 1960s, she was president of the Quebec wing of the New Democratic Party, the CCF’s successor.

In 1967, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 1974, she was promoted to Companion.
In recognition of her achievements, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed her to the Canadian Senate in 1970, where she sat as an independent for nine months before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75.
In 1985, Canada Post honored Thérèse Casgrain with a postage stamp. She also was commemorated in 2004 on the back of the new Canadian $50 bill.

Olga Alexandrova Kulikovsky. Born June 1882 at Peterhof Palace, near Saint Petersburg, Russia.

 Died Nov 24, 1960 in Toronto Ontario.

Grand Duchess and sister to Czar Nicholas, Olga Kulikovsky made her society Debut, saying she felt like an animal on display! Married to Duke Peter Alexandrovich of Oldenberg, she was never comfortable. Speculation was that Peter was homosexual. It was also in 1901 when she was appointed the Commander-in-Chief of the 12th Akhtyrsky Hussar Regiment of the Imperial Russians Forces, a relationship endearing and lifelong.

Olga’s many charitable works included founding a hospital. Here, doctors taught her medical treatment and care.
In 1903, she was introduced to a Blue Cuirassier Guard Officer, who was eventually appointed as an Aide-de-Camp for her husband. Gossip abounded. Peter seemed satisfied to have Nikolai Kulikovsky live at the family home rather than provide a divorce.

During World War I, Olga cared for wounded near the Russian front. Her service was awarded with the Order of St. George and reverence of the troops. In 1916, the Czar annulled her marriage and finally on November 16, 1916 she married her Nikolai.

1917. Royal family members were under arrest! Olga celebrated the birth of a son, Tikhon while under arrest in the Crimea. When the Allied Army took over the area, Olga and her family escaped to the Caucasus area where, in April 1919 a second son, Guri, was born. November that year they fled again. By Easter 1920 they took refuge in Denmark, Here, Olga was secretary and companion to her Danish mother.

In the 1930’s there were annual vacations with Swedish Royalty and Olga began to sell some of her paintings to help charities.

After World War II, Russian allegations against the family forced them to flee again. By the summer of 1948, Olga and her family, now including daughters-in-law, grandchildren and her Russian maid, arrived in Canada. They purchased a 200 acre farm in Halton County, Ontario. Olga grew food, did shopping and cared for her ailing maid. She also cared for a paralyzed Nikolai, selling jewellery to raise funds for his care. He died in 1958 and in 1960, Olga was buried beside him in Toronto. Officers of the Akhtyrsky Hussars and the Blue Cuirassiers stood guard at her funeral.

Olga’s paintings, shown internationally, continue to help fund The Russian Relief Program founded by her son Tikhon.
By: Dawn Monroe. famouscanadianwomen.com

Beatrice Gladys Lillie. Born Toronto, Ontario, May 28, 1894. Died , Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire England, January 29, 1989.

Beatrice Gladys Lillie had her start in the business by performing on stage with her mother and her sister Muriel as The Lillie Tri. Bea had a ‘sweet’ voice and when singing, would add jokes between songs until she was better known for the jokes than her music.

In 1914, her mother moved the family to London, England where they debuted in London’s famous west end theatre district. Within 10 years, Beatrice would debut in New York City.
She married Sir Robert Peel and became Lady Peel in January 1920. Beatrice continued her career and professionally she became known as Bea Lillie and well renowned for her gift of satire. She had one son, Robert Peel. Beatrice and Robert separated but never divorced. Lord Peel died in 1934 and her son was killed in action 1942. 

Beatrice would boast a successful recording career with many recordings made with songs specifically written for her. Today she can even be located performing on the internet site Utube. She touched on work in the movies but did not concentrate in this medium. Her first film, ‘Exit Smiling’ was with Jack Pickford, the younger brother of the famous Canadian actress, Mary Pickford. Retro film festivals often screen the film. The film ‘On Approval’ was done in 1944 and put Beatrice at the top of her game.  In WW ll, she was an energetic and popular entertainer for the troops.

She won a Tony in 1953 for the revue ‘An Evening With Beatrice Lillie’ with which she toured worldwide. In 1954, she earned the Sarah Siddons Award for her work with Chicago theatre.
She has a star on Hollywood Boulevard, the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame.

By 1948, she entered into a controlling “friendship” with a younger man, John Philip Huck. While he may have been controlling, she was cared for after she retired from the stage in 1971 because of Alzheimer’s disease. John  Huck died within two days of Beatrice in January 1989.

Beatrice Gladys Lillie was never forgotten in her home town of Toronto. On the 100th anniversary of her birth in 1984, the Parkdale Clinic on Queen Street, was named in her honour.

Submitted by Dawn Monroe. famouscanadianwomen.com