Doris Anderson (from Facebook)

[Sid Shniad]

"Her name was Doris Anderson. And in 1957, she walks into one of the most powerful editorial chairs in Canada - not because they want her there, but because she threatens to quit if they appoint another man.

She is 35 years old. She has worked her way up from advertising copy at Chatelaine magazine with no connections, no family money, and no safety net. She grew up in poverty in Calgary, raised by a single mother running a boarding house during the Depression.

They give her the job. What happens next, no one expects.

Late 1950s. Toronto.

Chatelaine is a conventional women's magazine - recipes, décor, advice on hosting dinner parties. Doris picks up that formula and quietly sets it on fire.

By 1959, she runs an editorial on legal abortion. In 1960, child abuse. In 1961, the failures of Canadian divorce law. 

In 1962, a blunt call for equal pay for women. She is writing about these things years before they appear in mainstream newspapers. Years before most of North America even has the vocabulary.

Some readers write in furious. They call it a "feminist rag." They demand the old Chatelaine back.

Doris keeps going.

Within a decade.

Chatelaine's circulation when Doris takes over is 480,000 copies. By the late 1960s, it reaches 1.8 million. 

She has nearly quadrupled the readership - not in spite of the feminist content, but because of it. Canadian women are hungry for someone to take them seriously.

June Callwood, one of Canada's most respected journalists, will later say: "Doris was quietly putting out the most seditious magazine in the country. She was saying to women, 'Stand up.'"

Doris also hires the writers who will define Canadian journalism for the next 40 years. June Callwood. Barbara Frum. Adrienne Clarkson. Michele Landsberg. She spots them. She publishes them. She gives them a platform when no one else will.

1977.

After 20 years as editor, Doris steps down. She runs for Parliament in a federal by-election in 1978. She loses.

But she is not done.

1979. Ottawa.

The Liberal government appoints her President of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. It sounds like a reward. It is about to become a battlefield.

Parliament is in the middle of something enormous - the repatriation of Canada's constitution and the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

The Charter will enshrine the fundamental rights of Canadians in law for the first time. And Doris can see a problem no one in government wants to discuss.

Women are not explicitly protected.

The Charter includes a general equality clause. But Doris knows what general clauses mean in practice - lawyers argue about them for generations. She wants something specific. Unambiguous. A guarantee that Charter rights apply equally to men and women, full stop.

She organizes a national conference through the Advisory Council - "Women and the Constitution" - to push for stronger language.

January 1981.

The government cancels it.

No real explanation. The conference is simply called off. Behind the scenes, Minister Lloyd Axworthy's office is believed to have pressured the Advisory Council board to vote it down. The vote is 11 to 6 against holding the conference.

Here's what makes it worse: Doris is the President of the Advisory Council. Her own board - some of them appointed by the very government blocking the conference - votes to shut down the meeting she organized.

She has two choices. Stay quiet and work within the system. Or walk away.

She resigns.

February 1981. Ottawa.

The resignation detonates something.

Within days, women across Canada start organizing. Not through official channels. Not with government funding. On their own, with their own money, in their own time. 

A loose coalition forms - the Ad Hoc Committee of Canadian Women on the Constitution. Flora MacDonald, a Conservative MP, helps them book a meeting room on Parliament Hill.

On February 14, 1981 - Valentine's Day - more than 1,300 women arrive in Ottawa from every corner of the country. By plane, by train, by car. Some take days off work. Some bring their children. 

They pack into the West Block of Parliament Hill.

They are not invited. They are not sanctioned. They are not welcome.

They show up anyway.

The outcome.

The women spend the day doing exactly what the government tried to prevent - examining the Charter, clause by clause, demanding an explicit guarantee of gender equality.

The pressure works.

Section 28 is added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It reads: "Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons."

14 words. Won by 1,300 women who were told not to meet.

Doris goes on to lead the National Action Committee on the Status of Women - a coalition of more than 700 women's organizations - from 1982 to 1984. She writes for the Toronto Star for 10 years. She receives the Order of Canada.

She dies on March 2, 2007, aged 85.

Section 28 still stands.

When you think about what she built - not just Section 28, but the careers she launched, the readers she woke up, the issues she forced into the open - it adds up to something that shaped the daily lives of half this country. She did it from a magazine office. 

Before it was safe. Before it was popular. Before most people even knew what they were fighting for."