Madeleine Parent: Activist

The work and importance of Madeleine Parent, union organizer, feminist, and inspirational heroine of our time, is well portrayed in these ten different essays about this remarkable Quebec woman. The accompanying photos show this active, vital, brilliant woman at her work over the last 50 years, fighting for justice and freedom. Although Parent started with the textile workers, eventually the entire trade union movement in Canada was affected by her leadership, during the difficult times of the Cold War. Parent also led the fight for "equal pay for work of equal value" and enlisted feminist support for native women's rights and immigrant women's rights.

Born in 1917, with few role models, today she is a role model for us all. This collection traces the rise of Parent's social conscience as a university student in 1930s Quebec, her work on behalf of strikers in Quebec textile strikes in the 1940s and 1950s, her union organizing in Ontario in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s where she insisted on Canadian Nationalism in Canadian unions. Lynne Kaye and Lynn MacDonald tell the story of Parent's important role in setting the agenda of the Canadian Women's movement in the 1970s and 1980s by stressing economic issues facing working women. From her policy contributions, came the concept of "pay equity." Parent championed immigrant women's rights as well as Native women's rights.

Rick Salutin's contribution, "An Iron Will and a String of Pearls," captures the political importance of the radical lady, Madeleine Parent, who believes in the fundamental human right of respect for each individual to make the choices that affect their lives, working conditions, and employment.

All in all, in these fine essays, friends and colleagues have painted a well outlined picture of a true Canadian leader, who has made our world a better place for those who were previously powerless.

Madeleine Parent is an iconic figure in the history of the labour and women's movements in Canada. As a student activist at McGill University in the 1930s, Parent played a key role in the epic textile strikes of 1940s Quebec, making her mark as a leading union organizer and co-founder of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU) in 1969. She was one of the founders of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and helped to develop NAC's economic focus. She championed equal pay for work of equal value, first legislated in 1975 by Quebec's Bourassa government.

Union organizing during the Cold War era was fraught with risk, and Parent was variously lampooned as a witch, barred from the town of Lachute, injured by police and accused of being a spy linked to a Russian submarine off the Gaspé coast. Maurice Duplessis personally ordered Parent's 1947 arrest for 'seditious conspiracy' too possible again now in our Bush-whacked, post-Maher Arar society.

The 10 essays collected by Andrée Lévesque, a professor of women's and labour history at McGill, were selected from a conference on 'Madeleine Parent and Her Struggles,' held at McGill in 2001. They shed light on the different facets of Parent's career and bear witness to her courageous commitment to social and economic justice Native and immigrant women, and for child-care workers and others in the pink ghetto. The contributors include well-known Quebec feminists Shree Mulay and Françoise David. David's tribute reads in part: 'Madeleine is our collective conscience. An indefatigable militant, she has been and is part of every struggle.'

Photos help to give the book the look and feel of a feminist scrapbook in which the personal is not dissociable from the political. It leaves one longing for a full biography of a woman who is a living legend in the Canadian union movement.