Good deal for Canadian women

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33155, 20 February 1973, Page 7

Good deal for Canadian women

(By

JANET WATTS)

(Reprinted from the "Guardian" by arrangement)

LONDON. Irritating straws in the chilly English wind convinced Sylva Gelber, on a recent visit to Britain, that we’ve got a long way to go to catch up with Canada when it comes to women’s liberation. (The fact not the movement). Little things like the letter to “The Times,” suggesting that a woman solicitor be called a “solicitress,” or the fact that a woman inspector in the British Government service is called an “inspectress,” had to her “an archaic ring, which starts me asking a lot of questions.”

And she noticed that in ail the talk of high prices, the person who was supposed to suffer the most from them was always “the housewife.” “In Canada,” Sylvia Gelber said crisply, “men and women go shopping together. It’s the consumer that buys the food.” BEGAN CAMPAIGN She embarked on an intensive public relations campaign. The statistics that the bureau continued to dig out and add up became the ammunition for her fight: she travelled anywhere and talked to anyone about what was happening in Canada in the field of women’s employment. Dramatic relevations of “sex ghettoes” in the health professions — “in nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, there are only women; in dentistry, there are only men” —made more drastic by exact satistical evidence. For example, from 1960 to 1970 the number of women in the Canadian labour force grew by a million from 26 to 32 per cent; in the same 10-year period, the percentage of women in management rose from 3.8 to 3.9. The campaign began quietly, “with polite invitations from some women’s organisations. But it soon broadened.” ROYAL COMMISSION She judged the ripeness of the time right. “To use Mr Macmillan’s phrase, the winds of change were blowing across the land,” she intoned engagingly. While she was getting it together at the Women’s Bureau, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (set up by Mr Lester Pearson in 1967) was going about its investigatory work in a very noticeable way. The commissioners travelled from coast to coast holding open hearings in every important centre, getting opinions from experts in law, sociology, education, taxation, welfare, and labour: all generously covered by the press.

Sylva Gelber is a senior Canadian civil servant, though you might not guess it from her style. She is also, she admits cheerfully, “a ham.” Give her an audience, and she is away. Even with an audience of one: closeted alone with me in the steadying atmosphere of Canada House, she still spoke with such point and emphasis as almost to inspire the taking of lecture notes. (Her youth-

ful amateur dramatics mucked up her university career, and did not persuade her father to let her go on the stage; but, she declares, the experience of theatre stood her in excellent stead for the future all the same.) Miss Gelber is the director of the Women’s Bureau of the Canadian Department of Labour; which is not the cosy outfit it might sound. When Sylva Gelber arrived there in 1968, fresh from a varied career in health insurance, welfare work, and social research, the Women’s Bureau was an academic little body quietly carrying out studies, compiling statistics, and publishing documents about women in the country’s labour force. Sylva Gelber decided it was time to initiate something a little more dynamic into its programme. “The public was seeing for the first time a lot of things they had not realised had existed in our society,” says Miss Gelber (who had nothing to do with the commission herself): prejudices, myths, entrenched attitudes, discriminatory legislation. She thinks that it was during this period that the commission had its biggest effect; though it also produced a “good, sound report” in 1970. RECOMMENDATIONS There were 167 recommendations in the report: proposals including a pension plan for housewives, a Federal Human Rights Commission, a network of daycare centres, abortion on request for any woman pregnant for 12 weeks or less, and the opening to women of enlistment in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Government is havering over most of them, but there have been improvements. The commission asked for 18 weeks’ maternity leave (the International Labour Convention recommends 12): it has got 17. The Labour code has been amended to forbid discrimination. Even the Government Service has taken notice: Ministers in all the Government departments have had instructions from the Cabinet to review their programmes and staffs for the better utilisation of women. If no woman, member is included in departmental delegations overseas, the Prime Minister needs to know why. Some hope, then; some dissatisfaction; and all on a highly respectable level. A few rungs down the respectability ladder, in the meantime, the Canadian Women’s Liberation Movement is doing its bit to bring women’s needs, frustrations, and hopes to the surface. Women’s action committes have been

formed all over the country to bring pressure on (provincial) governments to implement the report’s recommendations. Sylva Gelber is a far cry from your actual freedom fighter; all elegant raspberry suit, good jewellery, waveci coiffure, and careful make-up (which she doesn’t need to belie her 62 years). But you don’t spend 23 years in the Public Service without acquiring the gentle arts of diplomacy and the elastic outlook. “I’ve . never seen social change come about without some fanatics,” she says good humouredly. “For that reason I’m not disturbed when Women’s Lib. talks a language I can’t understand. Women’s Lib. contains feelings of frustration, feelings of injustice, based on facts which we know to be unjust. To that extent if we want to hear less of the emotional and irrational fanaticism we must remove the injustice.” Which is where she meets the fighters, and gratefully. “Women’s Lib. has made my presentation that much more acceptable.” Sylva Gelber admits that she faces “a long, long road ahead to educate the women themselves—-to train themselves, make good use of their brain power; to counteract all the publicity that flows north of the border from Madison Avenue, teaching women that the only way to be feminine, to be really loved, is to be | unintelligent.” AHEAD OF U.S. She thinks that in many ways Canada is ahead of the United States. “It was only in 1972, after 49 years of trying, that Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure full rights for its women before the law; and it still hasn’t been ratified by the necessary number of states. In Canada, we’ve had that law for. 12 years, and nobody’s ever heard of it—the question of sex discrimination was never an issue.” But for those who might be bridling a bit at all that confidence, it might be worth noting a slightly sourer view taken by the chairman of the Royal Commission herself, Florence Bird, writing under the journalistic name of Anne Francis in the Canadian press. “So far, the present Government has moved with dragging feet to implement some 20 recommendations. . . . Political pressures make it unlikely that the Government will carry out even the reasonable, necessary change recommended by the commission . . . that an abortion be a matter to be decided between a woman and her physician up until the twelfth week of pregnancy. ... I am far from sanguine about any great, immediate improvement in the status of woman in the private employment sector. . . . Unless businessmen, as seems unlikely, make a concerted, enlightened effort to train, encourage and recruit women for executive positions, as is now being done in the Public Service, the majority of women will not get the promotions they deserve.”

! So Sylva Gelber’s very! ■ optimism might be seen as ’ the caution of the true and loyal cicil servant. But a / civil servant with an unde--1 niable power of projection. 7