STUDIES OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN IN CANADA have identified a number of individual women who might be thought of as the principal players in a historical drama that was to have far-reaching effects. In the beginning, Judy LaMarsh and Laura Sabia played “complementary roles of behind-the-scenes pressure and public advocacy” in persuading the government to establish a commission.[1] Once the commission was appointed, Florence Bird (its chair) and, to a lesser extent, Elsie Gregory MacGill, moved into the spotlight. It is these four women, along with Monique Bégin, the commission’s executive secretary, whose names most often surface in the historical narrative.[2] In the discussion that follows, I offer a parallel and intersecting narrative based largely on the papers of Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson, a leading member of a generation of women activists whose broader contributions to the women’s movement, while acknowledged, have rarely captured the imagination of scholars.[3]

Among three women appointed to the Canadian Senate in 1953, Muriel McQueen Fergusson was the first woman senator from Atlantic Canada.[4] A proud New Brunswicker, Muriel McQueen Fergusson nonetheless saw her mandate as extending beyond provincial or even regional representation. Like other articulate, well-educated New Brunswickers before her, she moved seamlessly from the provincial to the national scene. As a well-established and already highly respected member of a number of women’s organizations with national and even international networks, and highly attuned to the issues of greatest concern to those organizations, she brought both a woman’s perspective and considerable professional knowledge and experience to the task at hand. A lawyer by profession, she had, for the previous seven years, served as regional director of family allowances for New Brunswick. Through that position, she had forged national connections, at the same time gaining both insight into and a working knowledge of the federal bureaucracy. Her legal training, her professional experience, and the national network of women she had met through the voluntary organizations to which she belonged all assured her an easy transition from the provincial to the national stage.

In analyzing the women’s movement, scholars have identified two major waves: the first crested in the late-19th and early-20th centuries as women united to demand, through a very public campaign, the right to vote, while the second crested in the glory days of the late-1960s and early-1970s, with the very vocal grassroots women’s liberation movement.[5] Whether these were actually crests in activity or merely crests in the publicity accorded the movement is perhaps moot. Certainly scholars generally agree that credit for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (RCSW) belongs to the generation of activists – middle class club women, usually characterized as liberal feminists – who predominated during the long interval between these two waves.[6] Whether the achievements of the women involved in first- and second-wave feminism were greater than, or their feminisms qualitatively different from, those of the activists of the inter-wave generation whose “determination and thoroughness”[7] resulted in the establishment of a royal commission that became a “watershed in women’s history”[8] are more interesting questions. The “determination and thoroughness” of the liberal feminists did not involve public protests or public meetings, though when we look, we find such women protesting, both individually and collectively, and consistently involved in the quest for equality and justice for themselves and for other women.[9] To this end, they undertook research and disseminated that research, speaking about ways to achieve their goals not only to the particular voluntary organizations that claimed them as members, but to many other voluntary groups as well. These liberal feminists have also been called institutional feminists, for they focused on reforming the institutions, and sometimes even the legal and institutional framework, of their society.[10] Who were these women? What, precisely, was the nature of their activities? In what ways and to what extent was their feminism shaped by the society in which they lived, contingent on time and place? And would they have recognized themselves in the scholars’ characterization of them: would they have considered themselves liberal feminists?

In addressing these questions I focus on one member of that larger group: Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson. Like other leading activist women of the inter-wave generation, Senator Fergusson participated in both “behind-the-scenes pressure and public advocacy” in support of the royal commission, at every stage of its history from 1966 through the mid-1970s. Yet the story presented here is not based on her recollections of that period, for although she and I talked on numerous occasions in the final decade of her life, the royal commission is not a topic that we discussed. Instead, this narrative was culled from the documents she chose to retain in her papers and the public record of her statements and activities on behalf of women and of the commission. My analysis, then, is based largely on a close examination of the senator’s collected papers, housed in the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.[11] Beginning with, but moving beyond, a consideration of her as an individual activist, I draw upon her papers to situate her within a network of women who worked collectively to achieve agreed-upon goals. And, again using the senator’s papers as a point of departure, I situate the campaign for a royal commission within the broader context of women’s ongoing activities that made the commission not only possible but also successful.

Muriel McQueen, born in Shediac, New Brunswick, in 1899, would certainly have identified herself as both a lower-case and an upper-case liberal, for she grew up in an intensely Liberal family. Though he never ran for election, her father was a major force in New Brunswick’s Liberal Party; her elder brother served as a Liberal MLA in her home province; and, as a young woman, Muriel herself was occasionally enlisted by her father to give speeches on behalf of Liberal candidates. Yet as a senator, she was determinedly non-partisan. Serving during a period when there were more women senators than women members of Parliament, she and her female colleagues in both houses, regardless of party affiliation, regularly supported legislation intended to improve the status of women.[12]

Senator Fergusson did not publicly identify herself as a feminist, but the issue came up more than once in her career. During the 1956 debate on the Female Employees’ Equal Pay Bill, which she had introduced in the Senate on behalf of the government, she noted:

Perhaps I should explain that when I gave a slight historical background of the women’s equal rights movement I certainly did not do so as a feminist, because I do not consider that I really am one. I simply believe that women should have the same opportunities as men. Instead of laying stress on their sex and seeking special privileges on that account, the purpose of this bill is to give women equal rights with men which they do not have now, but certainly not to give them additional rights.[13]

Of course, statements made within the context of a formal debate should not necessarily be taken at face value. In this case, the senator, speaking in a forum in which women were outnumbered by a ratio of 84 to 5, was responding to a male colleague who, while pledging himself to support the bill “in spite of the fact that it is on behalf of women,” had commented:

I hope that this growing equality of the sexes in these fields will not resolve the women into a unionized body seeking through the Department of Labour and its machinery of arbitration to obtain privileges because of their sex. Frankly I do not think it is necessary at any time for anyone who is advocating support of a bill like this to emphasize the idea of equality and rights of women as opposed to men. The old feminist movement of Mrs. Pankhurst is gone.[14]

Given the direction that the debate had taken, and the likelihood that the bill would gain speedy passage, was Senator Fergusson simply being politic in her self-positioning? Certainly it seems likely that, even at this early stage in her Senate career, she realized that she had already gained a reputation as something of a feminist.

Years later, in a 1971 interview, she would acknowledge that her colleagues in the Senate contested her protestations that she was not a feminist. By that time, second-wave feminists had moved well beyond the liberal-feminism with which scholars usually associate the women activists of her generation. Asked to comment on her relationship to the women’s liberation movement, Senator Fergusson responded that while she believed that women were entitled to many of the things they were asking for, “I don’t like the methods they adopt, I could not go about it their way but I suppose if they want to catch the public’s attention they have to go about it in a different way. . . . Probably if I lived in the time of the suffragettes I wouldn’t like their methods either. . . . I definitely sympathize with many of the women’s lib ideas and I am always known in the senate to be for the women’s lib point of view. . . . However, I would not walk in any of their parades.”[15] The senator’s self-positioning regarding her feminist proclivities, or lack thereof, was both contingent on the particular context and contested by her contemporaries. For the historian, her consistent political advocacy on behalf of women must qualify her as a feminist, but her feminism defies easy classification. Indeed, while categorizing feminists may sometimes be methodologically useful, in practice it implies value judgments on some groups of feminists as compared to others. And, rather than acknowledging the complexity and nuance in alternative approaches to feminism, it tends to essentialize them.[16]

In analyzing the approach of Muriel McQueen Fergusson’s cohort of activist women, it is necessary to consider the significance of both the human rights framework and the equal rights framework that are usually associated with liberal feminism. In avoiding the temptation to consider liberal feminists an undifferentiated group, this account identifies individual women who were members of Fergusson’s network of fellow activists and, in particular, highlights the role of the women’s organization that claimed her strongest and most enduring loyalty, the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women (CFBPW). My point of departure is not the moment in 1966 when a group of middle-class, middle-aged, mid-career women came together to initiate the formal campaign for the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, but rather the issues that had drawn such women into organized activism at a much earlier stage in their lives. For many women of Senator Fergusson’s generation, the RCSW was the culmination of decades of involvement in status of women issues and campaigns. As Louise Card, president of the CFBPW put it, “This is what we have been striving for and working towards, since we wrote our aims and objectives 37 years ago.”[17]

Then, as now, women’s activism usually arose out of their own experience. Certainly this was the case for Muriel McQueen Fergusson. Before her marriage, Muriel McQueen had trained and then briefly practised in her father’s law office in Shediac; her father, who had “quite a large probate practice,” turned that over to her “thinking that was kind of a lady-like law practice.”[18] As a result, his daughter became well acquainted with the inequities of probate law. Almost a decade later, in 1935, she was appointed a judge of probate, the first woman in New Brunswick to be appointed a judge at any level.[19] By that time, she had long been involved in speaking to women’s groups in her community, drawing upon her expertise to educate them about women and the law.[20] While she was well placed to ensure that she herself was not troubled by the systemic discrimination inherent in probate laws, in 1943 the recently widowed Fergusson would face a more covert but no less insidious form of gender discrimination when she decided to abandon both her law practice and her insurance business and make a new life for herself far from the small town of Grand Falls in which she and her husband Aubrey had lived for more than 15 years. She applied for a position with a large company in Montreal but, although impressed by her qualifications, the board of directors lost interest upon discovering that “M. McQ. Fergusson” was female. She accepted a lesser position, as assistant enforcement counsel with the Wartime Prices and Trade Board in Saint John; when, soon thereafter, her superior left, she was awarded the position of chief enforcement counsel.[21] Following the war she was also appointed to the New Brunswick Reconstruction Council. In 1946, with the work of those bodies winding down, Fergusson cast around for new opportunities. Noting that the federal government was advertising for a provincial director of family allowances, a job that would fit very well with her interests and expertise, she was disappointed to find that the advertisement was directed to “males only.” By this time, however, Muriel McQueen Fergusson was part of a network of business and professional women who shared her commitment to the struggle for equality.

Senator Fergusson never forgot the moment when she gained her first inkling of the potential power of women’s organizations – and of the support a strong network of women could offer each other. Sitting in the Admiral Beatty Hotel in Saint John, she had watched, with a degree of envy, a group of women, members of the New Brunswick Business and Professional Women’s Club, saying their farewells to one another as they dispersed following a provincial meeting. How she wished that she were one of them! As a widow engaged in the struggle to carve a niche for herself within the government bureaucracy of a country at war, she saw not only the potential power in the strength of numbers but also the warmth of the friendship and support these women clearly found in one another. Despite her legal training and acknowledged expertise, Muriel Fergusson had faced barriers in applying for positions for which she was more than qualified. The notion of a support network looked very attractive indeed. Then she met Dr. Jessie Lawson, the president of the New Brunswick club, and, to her great delight, was invited to join. “From then on,” she later recalled, “I was very close to them.”[22] Fergusson would become a member of a number of other voluntary organizations, including the Local Council of Women, the New Brunswick University Women’s Club, and, eventually, Zonta, among others.[23] Taken together, these organizations became something of an old girls’ network for Muriel McQueen Fergusson. Thus it was that, “at the request of the New Brunswick Provincial president, Dr Jessie Lawson,” the national president of the CFBPW “protested vigorously to the Federal Government when it was found that the advertising for the position of Regional Director of Family Allowance in New Brunswick had been limited to male residents of the Maritimes.” The Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) similarly protested. As a result of such protests, coupled with Fergusson’s own enquiries, “the restriction was removed and a very able and qualified woman, Mrs Muriel McQueen Fergusson was appointed, the first woman in Canada to hold such a position.”[24]

Over the years, Fergusson’s primary loyalty, and primary identity, would remain with the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women, which attracted her as much by the wide range of its activities and reach as by the personal support network it offered. From its founding in 1930, the CFBPW reflected the broad interests of Canada’s professional women. As in the case of other women’s organizations, the membership was comprised of middle-class women; but unlike the membership of most other women’s voluntary organizations of the day, it was comprised entirely of career women.[25] By the time Muriel McQueen Fergusson joined their ranks, members of the federation had more than a decade of activism behind them. As an organization, the CFBPW perceived issues through a human rights lens, and couched pertinent demands within a human rights and equal rights framework. In outlook, and in approach to status of women issues, then, the federation and, through it, its activist members, were part of the rights revolution stimulated by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The scope of the Federation of Business and Professional Women was international, and the organization’s significance was recognized when it was granted consultative status in Category B of the non-governmental organizations at the United Nations. In this context, the Canadian clubs took a particular interest in the work of the UN Human Rights Committee’s Status of Women Commission.

At home, the CFBPW lobbied governments on both provincial and federal levels, seeking legislation to improve the status of women. Given that the federation was largely composed of professionally trained women, it is scarcely surprising to find members writing formal letters and presenting formal briefs, operating within traditional institutions, and seeking increased opportunities for women within those institutions. In so doing, they were often seeking improved status for themselves or for women very like themselves.[26] They mounted a concentrated campaign to expand opportunities for women in the civil service. They demanded an end to discrimination based on sex, and called for legislation guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work[27] and the right – as well as the duty – to serve on juries. But this construction of their goals neglects their more broadly based agenda, for the reach of the reforms they promoted extended well beyond women like themselves: they promoted educational programs for girls and women of all classes, they called for the reform of legal inequities that affected women of all classes, and they concerned themselves “with the largely overlooked claims of unemployed women workers of all classes.”[28] Interested in social justice issues, they took up the cause of women prisoners, particularly those sentenced to serve their terms in the federal penitentiary for women in Kingston. On the national as well as the international stage, they were interested in issues of poverty as well as in women’s legal status.[29]

Moreover, if their approach was not radical, their thinking often was. From her earliest involvement with the federation, Muriel McQueen Fergusson exemplified this thinking. In November 1946, speaking to the Moncton Local Council of Women on the subject of “Laws Which Affect Women and Children,” she urged her audience to inform themselves about legal matters and to join together with other women to exert influence on their governments. Referring to the franchise as “a weapon which, if we stick together, we can wield to bring about the passing of any laws which we feel should be enacted,” she particularly encouraged them to lobby for the adoption of progressive legislation that had been passed in other provinces, such as the appointment of women to juries, free hospitalization for maternity cases, cruelty as a grounds for divorce, and a women’s minimum wage law. Reminding her audience that women comprised more than 50 per cent of the voters, she asserted that “we should see that the candidates for whom we vote are pledged to support and work for the laws which we want put into effect. If none of the candidates nominated are willing to do so we should nominate our own candidate . . . and see that the candidate pledged to carry out our program is elected.”

Echoing the maternal feminists of the first wave and presaging the radical feminists of the second, she drew upon two very different sources to reinforce her own conclusion. Reminding her audience of Eleanor Roosevelt’s assertion that “women seek to cooperate where men only seek to dominate,” she commented that “in looking over the tragic international scene today I think we can say with some truth that men can lay no claim to supreme wisdom in the working out of human relationships.” But it was the second source, the writer and early sociologist, Benjamin Kidd, whose words would be cited in a local newspaper.[30] According to the reporter, “Mrs. A.S. Fergusson, the recently appointed director of Family Allowances for New Brunswick,” had claimed that “Benjamin Kidd had been right when he said the male was a fighting pagan and had carried the spirit of war into every institution he created,” and had gone on to declare that “if we are to build a more human civilization in the days to come, women and not men must be the future centre of power.” We will never know whether Fergusson was correctly quoted or whether she stuck to the more qualified statements in her prepared text: that “we might even go so far as to agree with Benjamin Kidd” and that to build a more human civilization “men must have the assistance of women.” Whichever the case, Muriel McQueen Fergusson would retain the clipping as well as the original text, filing both without note or comment.[31]

Nor should we assume that this kind of thinking was fostered only by the CFPBW, for Fergusson’s activism had evolved over a lifetime of involvement in a wide variety of voluntary associations. While a university student she had organized a nondenominational C.G.I.T. (Canadian Girls in Training) group in her home town of Shediac and had been a founding member of the Student Christian Movement in 1921. As a young wife in Grand Falls, she had joined the Women’s Institute, become a leader in the Girl Guide movement, and helped to found the Grand Falls Literary Society. And, as a civil servant in Saint John and Fredericton, she not only joined the Business and Professional Women’s Club and the Local Council of Women, but became provincial president of both those organizations. Through these groups, and others she would join in later years, she became part of a very large and impressive network of women, whose membership in various voluntary organizations overlapped with, and whose work and lives intersected with, her own. Thus it was that, upon her appointment to the Senate in 1953, Muriel McQueen Fergusson received congratulatory messages from women across the country. Fellow members of the CFBPW who had, for many years, actively lobbied for the appointment of more women to the Senate, took particular pleasure in the appointment of one of their own, secure in the knowledge that Senator Fergusson would represent both their interests and the interests of Canadian women in that body.[32]

During her time in the Senate, Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson supported, both on and off the Senate floor, the call for policy changes and progressive legislation on a wide variety of fronts. Again and again she called on the women’s organizations with which she had long been affiliated to support causes she had identified as important, and she also, in turn, took up causes supported by other members of the clubs. Within months of her appointment, she wrote to inform the national chairman of the Employment Conditions Committee of the CFBPW that, being “concerned about Civil Service positions advertised for ‘males only’ . . . I have had my name put on the list to receive all posters and I examine them when they come out. Unfortunately, there is no way to get my name on a list for competitions regarding promotions within a department and I have to depend on my friends to provide me with these.”[33] With the help of both the CFBPW and the CFUW, she was very soon involved in a concerted and continuing campaign to increase the numbers of women in the civil service by eliminating job discrimination on the basis of sex.

In this and in other campaigns, Senator Fergusson consistently situated her arguments within human rights and equal rights frameworks. As early as June 1954, the newly appointed senator had occasion to remind her colleagues that they were citizens of “a country which has subscribed to the declaration of human rights, under which discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, creed and sex was recommended to be abolished.”[34] Her eloquent defence of the right of female civil servants to choose whether to opt in or out of a proposed Civil Service Life Insurance plan was not only lauded by her Senate colleagues, but led to victory for the many single women civil servants who had sought to make their position known through the women senators. Senator Cairine Wilson strongly supported her new colleague.[35] In the end, the bill was amended to make the plan optional. This was the first of many instances when Senator Fergusson took the lead among the small contingent of women senators on issues pertaining to women. Whether making a formal speech or rising to ask a telling question, she concerned herself with status of women issues. An active supporter of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Fergusson, like other members of the CFBPW, followed its activities with interest and drew on its publications to compare Canadian women’s status to that of women in other nations. In 1962, finding that Canada’s reply to a “Questionnaire on Inheritance Laws as they affect the Status of Women,” circulated at the request of the UN Status of Women Commission, was not included in the annual Report of the Secretary General, she rose in the Senate to ask whether Canada had, in fact, submitted a reply.[36] Activist women counted on her to raise such questions. Margaret MacLellan, Canada’s representative on the Legal and Economic Status of Women Committee of the International Federation of University Women, immediately contacted her to ask whether she had received a reply to her query. Responding that “through negligence . . . the report had not been sent in early enough to be included,” the senator added: “My private opinion is that not too much attention is given to these inquiries about the Status of Women and I thought a formal inquiry would not be out of place.”[37]

By 1966 the senator’s “private opinion” had become a publicly shared concern among activist women. And when, in April of that year, Laura Sabia, then president of the CFUW, began mobilizing women in support of a call for a Royal Commission on the Status of Women, one of the women she looked to for support was Senator Fergusson. Convinced that “a Commission on the Status of Women has indeed become mandatory,” Sabia asserted: “It is time women came together and acted as one. Let’s stop being so terribly polite,” she urged, “and wield instead ‘the big stick’.” She enclosed a call to action, which had been sent to more than 35 national women’s organizations, inviting each to send two members to a meeting in Toronto on 3 May.[38] This would not be the first time women’s groups had cooperated to achieve a specific goal: in 1954, a coalition of women’s groups including the CFBPW, the National Council of Women, the CFUW, and the YWCA had lobbied successfully for the establishment of the Women’s Bureau in the federal Department of Labour.[39] But never before had so many Canadian women’s groups come together. As a result of Sabia’s initiative, representatives from no less than 32 women’s organizations constituted themselves as the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC) and selected a nine-member steering committee headed by Sabia. Also prominent on the steering committee was Margaret Hyndman, a lawyer who had, in the past, served terms as president of both the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women and the International Federation of Business and Professional Women. She would write the brief to be presented to the prime minister. The timing was right. Not only was Canada approaching its centennial year, but the following year – 1968 – had been proclaimed Human Rights Year by the United Nations.

On Parliament Hill, Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson began a quiet lobbying campaign, calling upon her by-now well-established network among Ottawa’s business and professional women. The majority of those women shared membership in one or more of the organizations to which she herself belonged – most often the CFBPW. The civil servants among them not only outnumbered her colleagues in the Senate and the House of Commons, but were often, potentially at least, more influential. Prominent among them were those likely to have the ear of government ministers or even the prime minister himself. Senator Fergusson regularly used the old-fashioned medium of a ladies’ lunch for a fruitful exchange of opinions. With just such a meeting in mind, she wrote to Mary Macdonald, executive assistant to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson: “I had been hoping to have a chance to talk to you about the Commission on the status of women in which so many of the Women’s organizations are interested. . . . I hope we may be able to have a chat . . . as there are a number of things about which I would like to have your views.”[40]

In October, when Laura Sabia received a letter informing her that “the Prime Minister and those of his colleagues concerned will be pleased to receive a delegation . . . for the presentation of a brief prepared by the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada,” “those of his colleagues” who received copies of the letter included not only Judy LaMarsh and two male cabinet ministers, but also Senator Muriel Fergusson, Senator Elsie Inman, Mrs. M. Rideout, MP, Mrs J. Asselin, president of the Women’s Liberal Federation, and Mrs. B. Kemp, executive director of the Women’s Liberal Federation.[41] The potential presence of so many Liberal women would seem to imply that the delegation might expect a sympathetic hearing from the government, though we cannot know how many of these women chose to attend. Senator Fergusson did plan to attend, and invited Sabia and the delegation making the formal presentation – Margaret Hyndman of the CFBPW, Margaret MacLellan of the National Council of Women, Julia Schwart of the National Council of Jewish Women, and Réjane Laberge-Colas of the Fédération des Femmes du Québec – to dine with her at the Parliamentary Restaurant.[42] The meal was a success, but the meeting turned out to be something of an anti-climax for the prime minister failed to attend.

In a letter to the prime minister written four days later, Laura Sabia expressed her general dissatisfaction with the response the delegation had received from two of the three cabinet ministers who had represented him at that meeting: “We indeed appreciated the Honourable Judy La Marsh’s whole-hearted support for a Royal Commission but found the attitude of the Honourable Chief Justice [Lucien] Cardin[43] and the Honourable [Jack] Nicholson, Minister of Labour, difficult to accept. Both suggested that either a Senate or Parliamentary Committee would be sufficient. Neither Committee will be acceptable to the two million women who were represented on the delegation. Too few women are represented either in the Senate or in Parliament.”[44] Within the week, Senator Fergusson, too, wrote to the prime minister, offering a slightly different view: “Although the women were greatly disappointed that they could not make the presentation to you personally I believe they felt Mr. Cardin was fairly sympathetic. Honourable Miss LaMarsh, of course, has supported a Commission such as they were requesting, but I believe they did not feel that they made much impression on the Honourable Mr. Nicholson.” She left no doubt as to her own sympathies: “For some time I have been in favour of a Commission . . . to study the Status of Women in Canada and I would like to go on record as supporting the request made by Mrs. Sabia and her delegation. . . . A suggestion was made that if a Royal Commission were not appointed, a Senate Committee might be set up to study this problem and I would like to say that I would be entirely opposed to referring this matter to a Senate Committee.”[45] The prime minister sent Fergusson a favourable response, and she waited upon events.[46]

Laura Sabia proved much less patient. On the fifth day of Canada’s centennial year, a front-page article in the Toronto Globe and Mail reported: “Mrs. Michael Sabia of St. Catharines, head of the Committee for the Equality of Women said yesterday her organization, representing 2,000,000 women in 33 groups across Canada, has given an ultimatum to the Government: establish a royal commission or face the consequences.” The reporter further noted that Sabia went on to assert: “We’ll use every tactic we can, and if we have to use violence, damn it, we will.”[47] Four days later Judy LaMarsh, who had seen her own earlier hopes for a royal commission dashed by unfavourable press reports,[48] undertook some damage control, warning the CEWC to “stop ‘harping’ for a royal commission on women’s rights or risk antagonizing male Cabinet ministers to the point where they will refuse to do anything. . . . I am very much afraid that if the strident tone that has been used in the last couple of days continues, it will constitute pushing too hard on an open door and will undo all the good that has been done.”[49] Following two weeks of silence from the prime minister, Senator Fergusson gently reminded him of the reassurance he had given her following the November meeting. Making no mention of the headline news stories of a few weeks earlier, she wrote: “Further to my letter to you of November 17th and your reply of November 23rd regarding the Commission on the Status of Women requested by the Committee on the Equality of Women in Canada, I am hopeful that this request is receiving favourable consideration and that some announcement may be forthcoming in the near future.” In urging timely action, the senator recognized “that choosing personnel for such a body must necessarily be a very great problem and I am presuming to send you a list of names of people who it seems to me would be excellent appointments.” Heading the senator’s list was “Mrs. John Bird (Anne Francis)”, whose name was followed by five other potential candidates for the position as chair – among whom was “Miss Elsie Gregory MacGill (Engineer)” – and a further 18 potential commission members, 15 of whom were women. Assuming that “the Commission will certainly require an adviser, consultant or counsel,” the senator suggested three qualified women as candidates for this position.[50]

On 3 February, when Prime Minister Lester Pearson announced the establishment of a royal commission to be chaired by “Mrs John Bird,” no one was more pleased or more optimistic than Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson. Florence Bird seemed a logical choice as chair of the commission. Not only was she well-known to Canadian women through her feature articles and newspaper columns (under her byline “Anne Francis”), she had also been a long-time advocate of women’s rights.[51] The announcement, on 16 February, of the names of the remaining six commissioners gave Senator Fergusson further reason for optimism, for another of her recommendations had made the list: Elsie Gregory MacGill, the pioneer aeronautical engineer who had served as a technical advisor to the International Civil Aviation Organization of the United Nations. Not only was MacGill a long-time friend and trusted ally, she was also a fellow member of the CFBPW, giving the federation a representative on the commission. MacGill would become virtually a co-chair of the commission.[52] And Doris Ogilvie, a Fredericton lawyer and a deputy judge of both the New Brunswick juvenile and magistrate’s courts, while a generation younger than the senator, had, over the years, become a good friend. The remaining members of the commission were Lola Lange, the director of the Farm Women’s Union of Alberta; Jeanne Lapointe, a professor of literature at Laval University who had also served as a member of the Royal Commission on Education in Quebec; Donald Gordon, a former journalist who was then a member of the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo; and Jacques Henripin, the director of the Department of Demography at the University of Montreal.[53]

The commission’s mandate was couched in the language of equal rights that both complemented and followed from the human rights framework within which the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women had been established. This fit well not only with the stated purpose of the CFBPW “to improve the status of women,” but also with the focus of their long-term and ongoing campaign to gain equal opportunities for women within the prevailing institutional framework, for the commissioners were called upon “to recommend what steps might be taken by the Federal Government to ensure for women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society, having regard for the distribution of legislative powers under the constitution of Canada, particularly with reference to federal statutes, regulations and policies that concern or affect the rights and activities of women.” Nonetheless, the scope of the commission’s inquiry was broadly conceived and potentially flexible, with commissioners enjoined to inquire into issues involving women’s political rights, women’s labour force participation and opportunities, taxation laws pertaining to women, marriage and divorce, the position of women under the criminal law, immigration and citizenship, and “such other matters in relation to the status of women in Canada as may appear to the Commission to be relevant.”[54]

Although some feminists would later argue that, both in its mandate and in its recommendations, the RCSW did not go far enough, at the time some saw even the notion of such a commission as a threat. As early as the day after Prime Minister Pearson’s initial announcement, the political pundits began their tongue-in-cheek commentary. Poking fun at men’s fears while at the same time sharing them in full measure, the author of “Women in Bunches,” published in The Ottawa Journal, sought to disarm through humour. Yet the message, which evoked a number of common stereotypical images of women, was clear: this was not a commission Canadians should take seriously.[55] A few weeks later, a cartoon in Saint John’s Telegraph-Journal portrayed the “Commission on Women’s Rights,” a trio of three elderly women in absurd hats, pouring over briefs while a man in a business suit commented to the commissionaire, “We should also have more respect for their lefts.” Under this, in a column entitled “Our Resident Prophet Takes a Disconcerting Peek Ahead,” the author, echoing George Orwell, imagined quite a different “1984,” a time when “the girls” had “attained all the status they are ever likely to want,” sporting clubs and taverns had been shut down, night clubs featured only “handsome male singers and strong-man acts,” and liquor stores sold “only fancy wines, ready-mixed Martinis and Pink Ladies.”[56] Faced with these kinds of responses, the network of women whose combined efforts had achieved the establishment of the commission were on the alert.

Meanwhile, as the commissioners, sworn to secrecy, began planning their approach to the task they had been assigned, control of the RCSW slipped not only from the hands of the lobbyists but, for a time at least, from the hands of the women commissioners as well.[57] In their early sessions the commissioners would be guided by Leo LaFrance, supervisor of royal commissions in the Privy Council Office, and a man whom Florence Bird would later characterize as “a courteous, correct and patient public servant who did much to guide me through the labyrinth of official procedures.”[58] LaFrance also provided essential background reading for the commissioners; one such reading – “Should Canada be De-Commissioned? A Commoner’s View of Royal Commissions” – by political scientist J.E. Hodgetts, would influence their thinking as much as it had his. In his analysis of royal commissions, Hodgetts pointed to a recent shift away from the traditional model, characterized by reliance on public hearings and dependence on counsel, and towards a model characterized by reliance on research work conducted by a large team of experts and which did not, therefore, require counsel. The latter, according to Hodgetts, was often treated as a temporary government department.[59] Given the terms of their mandate, a sociological study, which lent itself to dependence on experts in the field, seemed the most logical to the commissioners. A sub-committee, comprised of the chair and the two social scientists on the commission, Gordon and Henripin, took on the responsibility of hiring a suitable research director. They selected David Kirk, a sociologist, who proposed, as the centrepiece of the commission’s research, the development of a questionnaire, to be distributed to 1200 women and 600 men in each of Canada’s four regions (the West, Ontario, Quebec, and the Atlantic Provinces), for a total of 7600 potential respondents.[60] The commission seemed headed towards the newer-style royal commission, one which would put its major resources into a research survey, designed and administered by experts. This appealed to LaFrance, who explained to the commissioners that a royal commission was treated in the same way as a government department for budgetary purposes.[61]

By early July, then, when Florence Bird called Senator Fergusson to ask her advice about possible consultants for the commission’s research team, some significant decisions had already been made. Responding to Bird’s queries about various women, Fergusson highly recommended Margaret MacLellan, whose experience on the International Federation of University Women’s Legal and Economic Status of Women Committee would be particularly valuable. When Margaret Hyndman’s name was mentioned, Fergusson took the opportunity to inquire about the appointment of independent counsel for the commission. Only then did she learn that the commissioners had not appointed, nor did they intend to appoint, independent counsel.[62] Instead, Bird informed her, “specially qualified lawyers would be called on, on an ad hoc basis, regarding matters on which they were especially knowledgeable and . . . the Commission would also ask advice ‘from the Department’.” Puzzled, the senator, who had not read Hodgetts and knew nothing about the existence of Leo LaFrance, asked whether Bird meant the Department of Justice, to which, as she later reported to Elsie MacGill, “Florence said ‘I suppose so’ or words to that effect.”[63]

This information unsettled Fergusson, who believed that royal commissions should operate at arm’s length from government, and her attention and concern shifted away from the irritating but relatively minor issue of occasional unsympathetic publicity to more substantive issues. In a measured but pointed letter, she informed Bird that she was “much concerned over the Commission’s decision not to have their own Counsel,” and commented: “I do not think referring matters to the Justice Dept is a good idea. I have had considerable experience with officials in the dept of Justice and although I like them personally I do feel many of them are prejudiced on the subject of the equality of women. I think too that their advice might reflect the attitudes of the govt. or even if it does not I believe that the public will believe it does.” Moreover, the absence of a commission counsel “will look to people as if the govt is trying to have the Commission only ‘on the cheap,’” she warned, “and is typical of the down grading of women.”[64] She decided, as well, to consult another member of her women’s network, Marguerite Ritchie, a constitutional lawyer who, she hoped, would be able to offer insight as an insider having served for some years as senior advisory counsel in the Department of Justice.[65] And in the Senate debate on the appropriations bill, Senator Fergusson made a veiled reference to her fears that the government might be “trying to have the Commission . . . ‘on the cheap’.” Reminding senators that “the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women supports the establishment of such commissions in member countries,” she commented: “I trust that the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada will be given every assistance, financial and otherwise.”[66]

Senator Fergusson’s quiet, determined, and ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the appointment of a commission counsel is suggestive both of the extent to which the women who had united to achieve a royal commission had lost control of the process and also of the very different perspectives, priorities, and approaches of women who sought to achieve similar goals. In response to the senator’s arguments, the commission chair replied that “leading authorities on Royal Commissions think that the use of counsel . . . during public hearings is outdated. They also feel using lawyers with different disciplines and experience on an ad hoc basis is more efficient, especially when the terms of reference involve such a wide variety of laws.”[67] Commenting that “I would certainly like to know who are the leading authorities on Royal Commissions on whose opinions you are relying and if they are Public Servants,” Fergusson remained unconvinced “that using lawyers with different disciplines and experience on an ad hoc basis is more efficient than for the Commission to have its own Counsel . . . [although] . . . it may be less expensive . . . which I trust is not the principal objective of the Commission.”[68] Over the course of the next few months, through correspondence and discussion with both her friends on the commission and other key members of her extensive women’s network, Senator Fergusson learned the identity of the experts upon whom the commissioners were relying. Marguerite Ritchie discovered that “there is a special section of the Department of the Secretary of State (apparently one person named Mr. Lafrance) which is responsible for providing general advice to Commissions about the matters of procedure.”[69] From Doris Ogilvie, the senator learned that the advisors the commissioners planned to consult “were not lawyers attached to the Department of Justice but were advisers to the P.M. himself. Who would these be?” she wondered. She had also learned about and read the Hodgetts article, which seemed to suggest “that Commissions either have Counsel or a large research staff.” Since she “gather[ed] Florence doesn’t want a large staff,” she feared that the commissioners “may fall between two stools,” confiding to Ritchie: “I do hope it will not prove to be an exercise in futility.”[70]

Whatever their private concerns, Senator Fergusson and other activist women remained publicly supportive. But over the summer, whenever her broad network of professional women, and, in particular, the members of the Business and Professional Women’s Club, met, the conversation soon turned to the royal commission. And Senator Fergusson’s was not the only concern that was aired. The commission’s first press release, “which appeared to limit presentations to organizations,” was not well received. The commissioners responded in a second press release, stating unequivocally that they were “anxious to hear from individuals as well as organizations.” Perhaps it was this apparent willingness to respond to criticism as much as it was the letter from Trecia Kyle, a friend and fellow member of the CFBPW, informing her that Elsie MacGill “would like to hear from you . . . [as] she was much interested in your suggestions regarding legal counsel,”[71] that convinced Fergusson to make one final attempt to persuade the commissioners to employ an independent counsel. Fergusson and MacGill had worked together on the CFBPW executive, held similar views, and fought for the same issues. She wrote to MacGill, briefly outlining her concerns, and enclosing a copy of a letter she had written to Bird in which she had more fully developed her arguments. Addressing Hodgetts’s article directly, she stated that despite the arguments made in the article, she remained “much distressed that no Counsel is to be appointed.” She further raised the spectre of public condemnation, stating her belief “that when the women of Canada learn that no Counsel is to be attached to the Commission” they will “have the same feeling that I have, that the Commission is doing their work ‘on the cheap’ and that this Commission is not getting the help and service that most other Royal Commissions have had.” Noting that she had also given Doris Ogilvie a copy of the letter to Florence Bird, she concluded: “I certainly am glad that you are on the commission and I am very anxious that it does not expose itself to unnecessary criticism.”[72]

MacGill’s response would be disappointing. After discussing Fergusson’s letter “privately,” MacGill and Ogilvie determined to take up the matter with Professor Hodgetts himself, “who was talking to us about Royal Commissions,” and, as MacGill reported to Fergusson, “he saw no disadvantage in using a lawyer from the Department of Justice, and . . . seemed to see nothing but advantage in engaging various legal specialists as we turned from one field of inquiry to another.”[73] Unlike Bird, MacGill had consulted more widely, going beyond the “authorities on Royal Commissions” brought in by the government to discuss the issue with Margaret Hyndman, who, she admitted, “could see use for a regular counsel who had broad experience and knowledge of laws and practices which affect women.” But when MacGill had presented the counter-argument “that maybe a sociological background might give us good service,” Hyndman “did not disagree.” Acknowledging that “a person of Margaret’s experience and accumulated knowledge would certainly be able to supply” the necessary expertise, MacGill opined that “the problem is that whoever takes it on disqualifies herself from making public representation to the Commission, and this Margaret herself might be reluctant to do.” Moreover, she concluded, “As you know, the decision was taken some months ago to engage lawyer specialists. . . . I don’t think that the money is the important thing at all.”[74]

Yet Senator Fergusson’s analysis had fallen closer to the mark than her friends on the commission would admit. Money as well as direction would soon be very much at issue, for in identifying research priorities the commissioners had not imagined the costs involved. Their director of research had been absent since late May, and the plans for the central survey had not moved forward over the course of the summer. Implicit in the original research design, which involved a study of individual experience through the medium of a central survey, was the assumption that formal presentations to the commissioners would come mainly from organizations. Whether or not their second press release reflected a shift in the commissioners’ thinking even before Kirk’s return in early September is unclear. But when the commissioners learned the estimated cost of administering a survey of the magnitude Kirk proposed to undertake – $450,000 – they began to have doubts about the viability of the project as originally conceived. After much discussion, and on the advice of the Privy Council Office, the survey was scrapped and Kirk, along with his male assistant, left the project. Commissioner Donald Gordon resigned soon thereafter.[75]

For the commission, this meant that women would regain the ascendancy. This was especially significant for the CFBPW, for Elsie Gregory MacGill assumed a more central role, becoming, according to Florence Bird, “the moving force behind the RCSW.”[76] With the departure of Kirk, the organization and direction of the commission’s research program devolved onto three key women.[77] Although they knew little about the machinations occurring behind closed doors, activist women continued to exchange views about the commission’s approach. Writing to Dorothy Flaherty on 2 November, Senator Fergusson enclosed a copy of the Hodgetts’s article, “which I believe has been the basis of some of the decisions of the Commission.” She further reported that Elsie MacGill “has come to accept my point of view on the subject of a Counsel although she had not wholeheartedly done so when I first wrote her.”[78]

Nonetheless, the commission would move forward without a counsel. Kirk’s departure had come “at considerable financial cost” to the commission and necessitated the creation of a new post. And perhaps there were intimations from the Privy Council Office that the commission would be facing a two per cent budget cut just as its work was about to begin.[79]

For Senator Fergusson, and perhaps for other women as well, the commissioners’ decision to move forward without a counsel meant that even more vigilance would be required to ensure that this commission would be taken seriously. When, in February 1968, John Humphrey, a McGill University law professor from New Brunswick who had drafted the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was appointed to replace Donald Gordon, the shuffle in personnel occasioned comment in the media. Senator Fergusson sought to quell rumours of internal dissension within the commission. Speaking to the Quota Club at a dinner in Winnipeg, for example, she addressed a recent news article on Gordon’s resignation that had implied “that there was discord in the Commission and that it was running into difficulties.”[80] Commenting that the general reaction of the press “seems to have been to attack the work of the Commission continuously from the time of its appointment,” she noted that withdrawals from earlier commissions had not been considered newsworthy and asked: “Why then should similar changes within the Commission on the Status of Women receive so much unfavourable publicity? Is it because there is in Canada a desire to belittle the Commission before it has even had a chance to make a report?”[81]

As the commission’s hearings got underway, Senator Fergusson, like other long-time women activists, monitored their progress, prepared to respond to any real or implied criticism. Above all, she was alert to critics who seemed to dismiss or trivialize the commission’s work. Thus, following an episode of CBC’s “The Way It Is” that aired in April 1968, she wrote to John Saywell, the host of the program, commenting that “I find it strange that any TV program would deliberately select only humorous and frivolous items from a Commission hearing to present to the people of Canada, unless it were for the purpose of holding the Commission up to ridicule.” Pointing out that “the appointment of this Commission was requested from the Government and the Prime Minister in November 1966, by a delegation of 50 Canadian women representing 33 National Women’s groups,” she asked that “even if you are not convinced that . . . women in Canada . . . are entitled to an investigation to determine their status, . . . if you give the Canadian public further glimpses of the Commission at work . . . will you please treat the hearings with the dignity due a Royal Commission?”[82] June Menzies, writing on behalf of both the CFUW and the National Council of Women, asked Saywell whether he believed that the Status of Women hearings “fitted into the description of ‘contemporary entertainment scene’,” and informed him that “many of the women who looked at this programme would say ‘We are not amused’.” She, too, called upon him, in any future “glimpses of the Commission at work” to “give this Commission the same treatment it would be afforded were it a Commission on the Status of men.”[83] Responding to the senator, Saywell assured her that “it was not our intention to hold the Commission up to ridicule nor was it our intention to demean the attempts of this body to determine the rights of women. I hope our further investigation will prove this.”[84] Largely dependent on media coverage to keep them abreast of the progress of the commissioners as they travelled across the country holding hearings, long-time activist women took the opportunity to attend hearings whenever possible, and Senator Fergusson was present for those held in Ottawa. And, of course, a number of the organizations to which she belonged, including the CFBPW, the CFUW, and the National Council of Women, presented briefs before the commission. In all, the commission received 468 briefs and more than 1000 letters.

Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson’s comments on the final RCSW Report, debated in the Senate on 10 February 1971, reveal a good deal about the nature of her feminism and about the feminism of the CFBPW with whom she most strongly identified. Certainly, her speech reflected both the human rights and the equal rights contexts within which the women of her generation, who had worked so long and struggled so hard to achieve improved status for women, viewed the royal commission. Senator Fergusson considered the recommendations of the report “a sweeping charter of women’s rights,” for “they recommend that in Canada, federally, provincially and in the private sector, we put into law and into practice the principles to which our country gave its support when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted unanimously by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 . . . [that] ‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’.” The royal commission, she further noted, “asks for no special status for women; it asks only for equal status.” She reminded senators that for many years women’s organizations had been working for many of the reforms recommended by the commission and mentioned, in particular, the CFBPW’s clubs, “of which most of the female Senators are members.”[85]

But Senator Fergusson went beyond the traditional human rights stance, which found its clearest expression in Commissioner Humphrey’s minority report. Humphrey had balked at the notion of affirmative action inherent in the recommendation that “in certain areas women will for an interim period require special treatment to overcome the adverse effects of discriminatory practices.” To Fergusson, it seemed that “any reasonable person would agree with this temporary giving of special help to women to bring them up to equal status.” Professing herself “considerably shocked to read Commissioner John Humphrey’s minority report,” she wondered aloud whether Commissioner Humphrey – “a very busy man with many demands on his time, who joined the commission . . . a year after it commenced its exhaustive work, and who for the preceding 20 years had been absent from the country – may not have absorbed the full import of the studies.”[86]

While rejecting Humphrey’s minority position, which surely embodied a pure human rights as opposed to a women’s rights position, Senator Fergusson went further than the commission majority and identified herself squarely with her old friend and fellow member of the CFBPW, Commissioner Elsie Gregory MacGill: “I agree with Commissioner Elsie Gregory MacGill on both matters mentioned in her minority report, the first being that abortions should be regarded as a private medical matter between a patient and her doctor, and the second being that she is opposed to the introduction of the marriage unit basis for taxation purposes.” In this stance on abortion, both MacGill and Fergusson had stepped beyond an equal rights framework by privileging the mother over the father in such decisions. Nonetheless, Fergusson was prepared to accept the majority report, concluding that “the commission has done its work and done it well.” She noted, however, that “it is of little value for a doctor to diagnose a disease unless the proper treatment to cure the disease is employed. In this case we have a complete and exhaustive diagnosis, and the proper treatment has been prescribed. It remains for governments and the public to apply the remedies.”[87] No doubt this last comment was meant to encourage some action on the part of the Liberal government of the day, for the House of Commons had yet to discuss the report.[88]

Senator Fergusson and other activist women had no illusions about the speed with which governments respond to the recommendations of royal commissions, and they did not intend to sit back and wait for their government to act. For four years, they had focussed their energies on ensuring the success of the RCSW. Now it was time to seize the initiative once again. And women began doing just that. Senator Fergusson supplied background information to Margaret MacLellan, who was, by 1972, working for the recently established National Action Committee on the Status of Women in developing their “Strategy for Change.”[89] In Fredericton, a speech to the Local Council of Women, in which she asked whether New Brunswick women were going to “let George do it,” served as a call to action for a group of “young concerned women” in the audience. They formed “a Woman’s Action Coalition” and produced a booklet entitled Women and the Law in New Brunswick. Although the Local Council of Women “dissociated itself from any connection” with the group, the young women involved clearly did not believe that the senator would feel the same way, and proudly sent her a copy of the booklet as their way of informing her that some women in her home province were not waiting around for “George” to take action.[90] Convinced that for women, who were not after all a minority, there was power in numbers, Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson – unlike some members of her generation – believed in building bridges with emerging activists. In her own political activism, however, the senator had always chosen to work within the system, and she continued to do so. In 1972, she became the first female speaker of the Senate.

Even at the pinnacle of her career, Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson well understood both the limits of her power and influence as a single individual and the leverage to be gained by working in concert with other women of like mind. It was a view shared by the generation of women activists whose crowning achievement was the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. As a member of the CFBPW, the CFUW, and the National Council of Women, Muriel McQueen Fergusson became part of a network of fascinating and influential women – women whose lives intersected and who were, as Laura Sabia put it with reference to the campaign for a royal commission, “all asking for the same damned thing.”[91] Engaged, educated, and often professional women, from cities, towns, and rural communities across the country, wrote briefs, conducted unpaid investigations, and in many other ways worked in the cause of women. Organized and active, they achieved significant reforms ranging from the right to vote in municipal elections through the right to sit on juries, equal pay for equal work legislation, a Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labour, to a Royal Commission on the Status of Women. They were, with few enough exceptions, middle class women, but so too were the activists of the next generation, the second-wave feminists of the women’s liberation movement.[92]

The nature of women’s feminism is contingent upon the particular circumstances of their lives. Not until the baby boom generation started entering first university and then the workforce would there be a critical mass of activist women to make possible the emergence of a women’s liberation movement.[93] The generation of women who raised and mentored the baby boomers provided the impetus for that movement. This article calls into question scholars’ tendency to overlook the contributions and essentialize the feminism of that earlier generation of which Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson was a member – a generation of women limited neither by the breadth of their thinking nor by their goals. For historians and other scholars, women activists such as Senator Fergusson have remained in the shadows, as club women, civil servants, and even senators often do. In the eyes of her contemporaries, however, Senator Fergusson was a very visible and impressive public figure. Trained in the law, when she sought to influence policy she undertook research and argued her case cogently and effectively, and often successfully. During more than 20 years in the Senate, she rose again and again to question legislation that by accident or design, privileged men over women. And even as her career in the Senate drew to a close, she understood that many battles remained to be won, that discrimination and the lack of political will could deny women equality. Indeed, she came to believe that the Liberal government, of which she was a member, lacked the necessary political will.[94]

In October 1974, less than a year before her retirement from the Senate and in response to the throne speech, the 75-year-old senator reminded her colleagues that the government had been too slow in implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. To her, the proposed anti-discrimination legislation then before the House of Commons seemed “to give only a perfunctory bow to women’s demands in that it focuses attention on matters which are peripheral to the causes espoused by women’s rights groups.” She went on to pose the questions that continue to haunt activist women today: “While we have done things in the area of the status of women, have we done the most important things? The fundamental question is: Are we going to do the most important things?”[95]