Once heard or read, never forgotten. That voice -- measured, steady, powerfully persistent, kindly and yet devastatingly frank -- was unlike anything most young women had ever heard in Canada in the 1950s or 1960s.
If ever any editor or publisher in this country earned the epithet "legendary," it was Doris Anderson, who died yesterday in Toronto at the age of eighty-five. Among the (still too few) women who have broken through glass ceilings to become power-brokers on their own, Anderson was unique. She was obviously propelled by an unshakeable faith in the dignity and competence of women, grounded in her own sense of self-esteem, but she ran as well on just the right level of piss and vinegar to wake up some of the boys in the backrooms and to give heart to a lot of women who hadn't yet found the kind of courage she had.
Sandra Martin's fine obit in yesterday's Globe and Mail tells such a story. Many people will remember Anderson best as the editor who turned a women's magazine into a journalistic powerhouse in the fifties, sixties, and seventies:
As editor of Chatelaine, Ms. Anderson wanted to give readers what they expected in the way of recipes, beauty and parenting tips, but she also wanted to give them “something serious to think about” and to “shake them up a bit” with well-written, hard-hitting investigative pieces on abortion, birth control, discriminatory divorce laws and the wage gap.
And she hired excellent journalists to write them, including June Callwood, Christina McCall (later Newman) Michele Landsberg, Barbara Frum and Sylvia Fraser. “I had fabulous women,” she said later, explaining that many of them came to her because they couldn't find places to write elsewhere.
One of her first editorials was an appeal for more women in Parliament -- there were only two female MPs in 1958 --another early one was for reform of the draconian abortion laws. She quickly learned that effecting social change meant frequently revisiting issues in editorials and articles and so she devoted lots of space over the years to push for a Royal Commission on the status of women, and to expose horrors such as child battering, racism and the plight of Canada's Native peoples. Some readers felt that she was turning "a nice wholesome Canadian magazine into a feminist rag." However, circulation, which was 480,000 when she became editor, had increased by the late 1960s to 1.8 million readers, the equivalent of one out of every three women in Canada.
[My emphasis. Gee: how the world hasn't changed.]
Anderson walked away from the flaccid boy-publishers, though, when she realized that they were never going to give her an even break, no matter how successful she was. She charged into politics, and then she charged into making our Charter a serious declaration of human rights and freedoms.
