March 7, 2010: This was a special Women's Show!

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Music

Song: Rise up
Artist: Parachute Club
Album: Parachute Club

Michael's Essay

In this week's essay, Michael reflects on why the word "bitch" is so prevalent in the titles of modern feminist literature.


The Women are Coming - Documentary

What a day it was. Monday May 11, 1970.

Thirty-five women, with chains hidden in their purses, infiltrated the public galleries of the House of Commons. They shackled themselves to their chairs. During Question Period, they started to shout. The business of parliament came to a halt. It was the culmination of what became known as the Abortion Caravan, a defiant country wide trek aimed at putting the issue of abortion access on the national agenda. It called to mind some of the more audacious tactics of the suffragettes more than fifty years earlier - in the first wave of feminism. But this was very much a "second wave" event, in which abortion on demand symbolized a fight for women's autonomy on every front.
What happened on Parliament Hill that Monday afternoon 40 years ago was one of the most remarkable and successful pieces of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

It never should have worked. There were no cell phones, there was no e-mail back then. But this was a time when the young believed they could change the world.

A handful of women in Vancouver started planning on Valentine's day. Seventeen of them set out from Vancouver in March in a yellow Oldsmobile convertible, a Volkswagen bus and a pick up truck. They gathered women as they went. And they rolled into Ottawa on Mothers Day Weekend. On the Saturday, a thousand women rallied on the Hill. On Monday they shut down Parliament. Forty years later, the impact is still with us.

This documentary by Karin Wells is called, The Women Are Coming.

Music

Song: Buried Alive in the Blues
Artist: Janis Joplin
Album: Pearl: Legacy Edition


Listen to Hour One:

 

Music

Song: Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be!
Artist: Elizabeth Knight
Album: Songs of the Suffragettes


Music

Song: Chakavak
Artist: Chakavak Ensemble
Album: Journey of Love


My Prison, My Home

In 2006, Haleh Esfandiari was just another Iranian-American visiting her elderly mother in Tehran. But seemingly out of the blue, Iran's brutal Security Agency detained the scholar and writer. It accused her of trying to mastermind an Eastern European style velvet Revolution.

Esfandiari, a 67 year old grandmother, found herself caught in the complicated web of deteriorating US-Iranian relations. After 105 days in Iran's notorious Evin prison, she was released and went on to produce a searing memoir of the experience called, My Prison, My Home.

But her story echoes that of hundreds of other Iranian women, targeted as political prisoners. That number is tragically growing.

Many of these women, interestingly enough, have also gone on to write their stories in powerful memoirs, resulting in what could be called an expanding oeuvre or genre. A body of literature is emerging about the unique experience of Iranian women past and present; their memories of a changing Iran and their aspiriations for the future.

Esfandiari was an early feminist pioneer in Iran under the Shah. She was a journalist and a leader in Iran's then nascent women's movement. After Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, she emigrated to the US and became of professor of Persian studies at Princeton and then the director of Middle East program at the Washington-based think tank, The Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars.

She joined Michael from our Washington studio.

Music

Song: Danse de la Corne, SZ 56 No 4
Artist: Angèle Dubeau et La Pietà
Album: Let's Dance


Remembering Nellie McClung

She was a prairie girl with a hungry mind and a love of the limelight.

Standing all of five foot four, she was a tiny titan - a teetotaler who fought like a tiger for women's rights. Her mother wanted her to pipe down, her brother accused her of being a show-off, but Nellie McClung was undaunted. She was one of this country's first feminists. She said she wanted to be like Charles Dickens -- a "voice for the voiceless" and a "defender of the weak" - and it was her innate sense of justice that lead her to write about women's lives, both fictional and real.

In the early 1900's she became an activist, a suffragette who helped women win the vote in Canada. She was one of the Famous Five, which lead a campaign to have women recognized as "persons".

The public Nellie McClung was tough and tireless. She took to the political arena long before the phrase, "the personal is political" became a rallying cry of the women's movement - but she personified the sentiment speaking out against gender inequality and unfairness in the lives of women around her. But there was a price to pay for becoming a public figure. Her 6-year-old son once told an audience, "I am the son of a suffragette and I've never known a mother's love".

On the eve of International Women's Day, we remembered Nellie McClung, with the help of her youngest granddaughter, Marcia McClung. She joined Michael in our studio in Toronto.

Music

Song: Beautés Du Diable
Artist: Angèle Dubeau
Album: Infernal Violins


Miss G Project

Next year, Ontario's Ministry of Education will offer, for the first time, a course called Gender Studies in its high school curriculum. It's an optional grade 11 course that incorporates elements of the history of feminism. It's also an introduction to a complex set of issues dealing with gender and equity, sexism and violence.

Students will analyse how the media shape ideas about body image. They'll study power relations between men and women. They'll look at the campaign for rights for sexual minorities. And they'll study bullying and violence prevention
strategies. A course well overdue, some might say although the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Ontario have rejected the course, and is recommending that Catholic schools not offer it.

The Gender Studies course came about, in large part, because of the activism a few years back, of four young women who were students at the University of Western Ontario.They were taking classes in women's studies for the first time, and wished that they had been exposed to these ideas earlier. They felt that high school kids needed a course to better navigate teenage life.

So they formed a group called "Miss G" aimed at getting a gender studies course in the high schools. They got the attention of politicians and the media and became symbols of so-called Third wave feminists. Five years later, they have achieved their goal. And in the process they say learned a lot about activism and politics.

Michael was in conversation with three of the original Miss G group. Sheetal Rawal and Laurel Mitchell were in Toronto, and Sarah Ghabrial in Montreal.

Music

Song: Hang on Little Tomato
Artist: Pink Martini
Album: Hang on Little Tomato

Listen to Hour Two:

 


Music

Song: CRS Craft
Artist: Only Trust Your Heart
Album: Diana Krall


Voice of Women

They were Canada's bake-sale feminists and anti-war housewives.

It was 1960 and the world seemed to be on the brink of nuclear war. An American U2 plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union, the Paris Summit on Disarmament had failed and Prime Minister Diefenbaker had agreed to install missiles on Canadian soil.

But in the spring of 1960, among Canadian women, something shifted.

Young mothers who'd never joined anything more than the PTA - became so worried about the Cold War - and fed up with war talk - that they began to get organized. Many had seen a column in the Toronto Star by Lotta Dempsey, speculating that if there were a "summit conference of women dedicated to the welfare of children all over the world we might reach an understanding" ...and that "men were too concerned with political systems and economic considerations - while women were more concerned with people" .

The primary focus of the Voice of Women was international peace. It petitioned the UN, launched scientific inquiries and taught women to become expert lobbyists. Members included physicist Ursula Franklin; Maryon Pearson, the wife of Lester Pearson; and Quebec's Therese Casgrain. This year the Voice of Women celebrates its fiftieth birthday.

Joining Michael to mark this anniversary are three women who share an ongoing interest in the Voice of Women:

Marilou McPhedran is the Principal of the Global College at the University of Winnipeg. She has been a tireless advocate for gender equality protections in the Canadian constitution. She is a co-founder of LEAF - the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund; METRAC - the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children and the International Women's Rights Project. She is also a former member of the board of the Voice of Women. She was in our Winnipeg studio this morning.

Nancy Ruth is a member of the Canadian Senate. She's spent most of her life advocating for social change for women and girls in Canada. She is a also co-founder of LEAF, and the Canadian Women's Foundation and the Charter of Rights Coalition. For many years she paid the salary of the Voice of Women's coordinator out of her own pocket.

Landon Pearson is an author, children's rights activist and the founder of The Landon Pearson Resource Centre for the Study of Childhood and Children's Rights. She is also the daughter-in-law of Mike and Maryon Pearson.

Some of the historical clips played were from the documentary: Voice of Women: The First Thirty Years by Margo Pineau And Cathy Reeves.

You can also visit the Feminist History Society for more information about the women's movement in Canada.


Music

Song: Bread and Roses
Artist: Judy Collins
Album: Forever: An Anthology


Bread and Roses - Music Feature

Bread and Roses, the song, originated as a poem by James Oppenheim. It was inspired by the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence Massachusets. Called The Bread and Roses Strike, it involved more than twenty thousand workers, most of them immigrant women.

The song, which was reborn when Mimi Farina set it to a new melody in 1976, has become an anthem of International Women's Day. In the version that we played on this show, it is sung by Judy Collins.


I am a Girl - Documentary

The cafeteria at Humber Summit Middle School in Rexdale - a melting pot suburb of Toronto -sounds and looks like any other. Kids slouching at tables, sharing french fries covered in brown, goopy gravy. Jeans hanging half way down their behinds. Pushing and shoving and making plans. But every Wednesday, just steps past the cafeteria, in an aluminum sided portable, something special happens.

A flock of 13-year-old girls - short and tall - quiet and noisy - sullen and spirited - crowd in and bring the room to life. They call themselves "The Sisterhood".
Grade 8 girls who come together to pour their hearts out. To talk about friendship and gossip. About their hopes and their worries. About sex and boys and family.

Their teacher and mentor, Juanita Taylor, asks questions, listens, only occasionally offers advice, and keeps it all moving. But one recent Wednesday was extra special. Because The Sisterhood was stepping out - preparing to perform the poem that is their anthem for a school-wide assembly.

I Am A Girl was produced by Alisa Siegel. In the documentary you heard the voices of Juanita Taylor, Hirrra Malik, Sakshi Khurana, Shivani Bhatt, Carol Walford, Sashay Simmons and their friends.


Music

Song: Zapateo
Artist: Sharon Isbin
Album: Latin Romances For Guitar


Listen to Hour Three: