Comments on The Best Kept Secret: The Best Kept Secret Blog - Does She Know Who Rosa...

I guess I'm a bit jaded - Nellie McClung was alway...

2008-02-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm a bit jaded - Nellie McClung was always held out as a role model when I was in school (in Manitoba). But then we found out she wanted to deport Chinese people. She became just an asterisk too.

I think it's important to stress that some of the things we take for granted as feminists (e.g. socialized medicine) came from people who had a broader view of struggle - human rights as opposed to merely women's rights.

I'm not even sure that examples of specific women are particularly inspiring, at least not in the right way. Roberta Bondar has an MD and a PhD; Julie Payette has a master's degree in engineering. I think it trivializes what they do to see them as "astronauts" and not as scientists. Virtually no one becomes an astronaut, so I'm not sure what it does to know that Canadian women have gone to space. But I've yet to meet a woman who says she was inspired to become a scientist or an engineer because of the accomplishments of these two women. So even if every girl in the country knows who Roberta Bondar is, we're still not getting the message across.

Jean, absolutely not do I think I owe my freedoms ...

2008-02-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

Jean, absolutely not do I think I owe my freedoms to Campbell, Bondar and Johanson.

As you rightly pointed out, there are so many Canadian women who have fought for rights and freedoms, have acted as role models and whose stories should be told.

But in educating our kids, we have to start somewhere. Because the women I mentioned have more recently been newsmakers, perhaps our children have heard of them and perhaps they can understand and relate to them at the stage they are at.

But it's only a start. I agree with you that the dialog needs to continue and our children's knowledge of the fight for women's rights needs to expand as their ability to grasp the nature and nuances of that fight expands.

Thank you for offering the examples of Fairclough and MacDonald. They, and any others you want to put forth, are welcomed.

Hold on a second here. Kim Campbell? Roberta Bon...

2008-02-22T21:51:00.000-08:00

Hold on a second here. Kim Campbell? Roberta Bondar? Sue Johanson? These women are asterisks in our history.

Without digging into the early 20th century, I would say you've forgotten Ellen Fairclough (first female cabinet minister, and served as acting prime minister) and Flora MacDonald (a great lesson in sexism if there ever was one) who were both more significant than Campbell.

Do you really think you owe Campbell, Bondar and Johanson for your freedoms????