Cover Image: Black and white photograph of NAWL event, Winnipeg (1987), 10-036-S8-F5-I4, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
On March 14th, 1974, women from the University of Windsor Faculty of Law made history, convening Canada’s first ever National Conference on the Law and Women. In an introductory statement for the conference, coordinator Gabriella Lang outlined its aims and motivations, noting that treatment of the subject would be “exploratory, educational, and consciousness-raising.” In referencing “consciousness-raising,” Lang’s opening remarks made use of activist terminology popularized by U.S. feminists in the late 1960s; Lang thus underscored the conference’s role not only as a networking space for women lawyers and legal professionals, but also as a feminist call to action aimed at rectifying the status of women in Canadian society: “The remedies for the malaise that permeates the Canadian legal system are yet to be effected,” Lang claimed, further noting that “Women run second place in the human race, sharing that berth with racial minorities. That status is not only reflected in the laws of this country but is preserved by them.” [1]
Introduction to the 1974 Windsor Conference Program, box 9, file 11, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
Conference participants embodied Lang’s perspective when Sydney Robins, panelist and treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada, advocated patience in achieving equality for women in law. “What more do you want?” he asked 300 female law students, who shouted back “ACTION!” [2]
Lang concluded her introductory remarks by stating that “What the outcome will be depends on the use made of this occasion,” and that “Ultimately this conference should make some contribution to the recognition of woman as a human being worthy of dignity and respect.” [1] In fact, the outcome of her faculty’s conference would be the formation of the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), a national network of women in the legal profession dedicated to research, education, and action. Since its formation by women law students including Shirley Greenberg, Lynn Kaye, and Peggy Mason in 1974, NAWL has advocated tirelessly to dismantle legal barriers to women’s equality.
This year, in partnership with NAWL, the University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections celebrates NAWL’s 50th anniversary by delving into the organization’s history, including their landmark achievements, legal interventions, organizational challenges, and their undeniable impact on Canadian society. While this section focuses on NAWL‘s founding conference in 1974, you may click the following links to learn about their work on various cases and issues including Women and Work, Violence Against Women, Reproductive Justice, and Marriage Equality.
In convening the 1974 National Conference on the Law and Women, women in the University of Windsor Faculty of Law sought to highlight the law’s infringement of women’s rights and illuminate gender discrimination in the legal profession. According to panelist Eileen Mitchell Thomas, although women had been entering the legal profession since the late 1800s, rampant inequality persisted, with Canadian courts frequently sanctioning discrimination against women. Thomas provided listeners with the 1968 example of Beckett v. City of Sault St. Marie Police Commissioners et al., during which the Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario ruled that “[the plaintiff] is not being discriminated against by the fact that she received a different wage, different from male constables, for the fact of difference is in accordance with every rule of economics, civilization, family life, and common sense.” [3] Over a decade later, NAWL and a coalition of other women's groups would be instrumental in shaping Sections 15 and 28 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sex.
“[The plaintiff] is not being discriminated against by the fact that she received a different wage, different from male constables, for the fact of difference is in accordance with every rule of economics, civilization, family life, and common sense"
- Justice Robert Irvin Ferguson, Ontario High Court of Justice, 1968
The 1974 Murdoch v. Murdoch case further galvanized conference attendees when the Supreme Court of Canada gave a ruling on matrimonial property law that many women viewed as inequitable. The wife in this case claimed an interest in land which was under her husband’s name, on which she performed work for several cattle ranches owned by him. According to the evidence, her work on these ranches included “haying, raking, swathing, moving, driving trucks and tractors and teams, quietening horses, taking cattle back and forth to the reserve, dehorning, vaccinating, branding, and anything that was to be done.” She often performed this work while her husband was away for months at a time. Nevertheless, four of the five judges dismissed her claim, stating that “her labour in the fields merely amounted to the work expected of any ranch wife.” [4] For many women’s rights activists, this case represented Canadian society’s extreme devaluation of women’s labour in the home, despite its indisputable economic value.
Further underscoring the devaluation of women’s labour in Canadian society, the 1974 conference included legal secretary Joan Sullivan in a panel on “Women in the Law School, the Law Firm, and the Legal Profession.” Sullivan had spearheaded the drive to unionize Windsor legal secretaries in their struggle for job security and a fair wage. Six months later, Janet Martin and Mary Anne Fox would make history launching the first strike by unionized legal secretaries against a law firm in Canada, the Windsor firm Weingarden and Hawrish. Martin and Fox faced many challenges including partners crossing their two-person picket line, scab labour, and their fellow white-collar worker’s reluctance to unionize. [5] Nevertheless, their historic action demonstrated the invigorating effect that The National Conference on the Law and Women had on female legal professionals in Windsor and beyond.
Equally unprecedented, of course, was the formation of NAWL itself. According to NAWL co-founder Shirley Greenberg, “no group ever before” had been “formed specifically to deal with the legal aspects of women’s existence.” [6] In an article titled “Saving Our History,” Greenberg chronicled NAWL’s formation at an ad hoc meeting over lunch hour at the Windsor Law School conference, during which a handful of women pledged to create a national network focused on women and the law. Reflecting language from Gabriella Lang’s opening remarks, Greenberg noted that the conference was “a raising of consciousness for many,” as women were able to speak with one another about discriminatory professional practices, including invasive interview questions about birth control, restriction to certain areas of the law, and in one particular case, termination from employment on the grounds of wearing a pantsuit. [2] But, said Greenberg, “the conflicts were exposed too,” particularly in response to Justice Minister Otto Lang’s defense of the Murdoch decision. The minister provoked hisses and boos from one section of his audience, while other conference attendees were “very much disapproving of this unladylike behaviour.” [7]
Left Image: Notes from the ad hoc meeting during which NAWL was formed (16 March 1974), box 2, file 1, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
Irrespective of these disputes, the women of NAWL came together to work toward a common goal: to rectify the inferior legal status of women enshrined over centuries of judicial patriarchy. Meditating on NAWL’s founding principles in an article titled “Why Bother?," Greenberg summarized this history and its continued effect on the lives of Canadian women in the following passage:
"It was common to regard women as fit only for one role and function by nature, or by decree of Divine Providence. Their world was the private world of domesticity, where they were to provide the services of domestic and sexual servants. Excluded by law and custom from participating in public affairs, tied to a husband for life and unable to escape until divorce became possible, women had no alternative. To ensure their confinement, laws aimed at control of women’s behaviour, especially in marriage. The denial of the economic value of their work was especially crippling, as it still is...
...For a long, long time women have been under this yoke of confinement to the home and the label of inferiority. Has this ended? Not in the law. Look at the law of husband and wife, rape and abortion, the lack of recognition of the contribution of women whether in marriage or in the paid labour force. In all these areas, the effects of discriminatory laws and practices occur daily, part of our objective reality. The facts are there, if one is prepared to acknowledge them
- Shirley Greenberg, "Why Bother?" (1977), box 9, file 19, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
NAWL’s early focus on labour reflected Greenberg’s assertion that denial of the economic value of women’s work had been “especially crippling.” In the year following The University of Windsor’s groundbreaking conference, NAWL convened their first biennial conference on “Women and Work” in Winnipeg, 1975. At this inaugural conference, members ratified the organizational resolutions that would form the basis of their long-term goals, working “late into the night to build the beginnings of a body of policy that would give form and direction to the desire for change and a basis for action [in the local caucuses].” [8]
Left Image: Photograph of Shirley Greenberg, from the article "Women in Business," Ottawa Magazine (May 1981), box 6, file 14, Shirley E. Greenberg fonds (10-185), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
Right Image: Black and white photograph of NAWL event, Winnipeg (1987), 10-036-S8-F5-I%, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
Resolutions passed at the 1975 Winnipeg conference included a philosophy of solidarity with all working women; the creation of a constitution to serve as a model and guide for women seeking to organize trade unions; a strategy for implementing better equal pay laws; endorsement of affirmative action; advocacy for full rights and protections for domestic and part-time workers; affirmation of the right for legal secretaries to organize and bargain collectively; improvement of existing human rights legislation; support for the rights of Metis and non-status Indigenous women; commitment to study the issues faced by immigrant women workers; demands for legal equality in marriage and recognition of housewives’ economic contributions; endorsement of free, government funded child care; recognition of abortion as the “inalienable right of all women”; and insistence that a complainant's sexual history be inadmissible in assessing credibility during sexual offense trials. [8]
The resolutions listed above reflect NAWL’s “integration of community experience and legal expertise” which distinguished them from other organizations, especially in their focus on women workers and domestic labour. [8] After their founding conference on “Women and Work” in 1975, NAWL would go on to effect positive legislative changes in many of the areas detailed above, effectively transforming the Canadian judicial system and its treatment of women as legal subjects. To learn more about the “Women and Work” conference and NAWL’s influence on workplace discrimination law, CLICK HERE.
This exhibit was created by Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande, ARCS storyteller-in-residence
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WORKS CITED
[1] Lang, Gabriella. Introduction to Conference Program. National Conference on the Law and Women. Windsor, ON, 14-16 March 1974, box 9, file 11, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[2] Rex, Kathleen. “Law Society opposes sex bias in articling jobs,” The Globe and Mail, 18 March 1974, box 9, file 11, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[3] Thomas, Eileen Mitchell, “Sisters-in-Law.” Presentation at The National Conference on the Law and Women, Windsor, ON, 14-16 March 1974, box 9, file 11, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[4] Payne, Julien D., and Wuester, Terrance J. Presentation at The National Conference on the Law and Women, Windsor, ON, 14-16 March 1974, box 9, file 11, NAWL fonds (10-036), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[5] Platiel, Rudy. “Two Windsor legal secretaries launch profession’s first strike,” The Globe and Mail, 20 September 1974, box 68, file 24, CWMA Collection (10-001), Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[6] Greenberg, Shirley. “Why Bother?” Draft article, February 1977, NAWL fonds (10-036), box 9, file 19, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[7] Greenberg, Shirley. “Saving Our History.” Draft article, February 1977, NAWL fonds (10-036), box 9, file 19, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.
[8] National Association of Women and the Law, Women and Work Conference Program. Winnipeg, MB, January 30-February 2, 1975, box 9, file 12, NAWL fonds (10-036), box 9, file 19, Archives and Special Collections, University of Ottawa.