The Spokesman: Gender and the Liberal Party in 1960s New Brunswick

On 21 October 2024, New Brunswickers elected Susan Holt as their premier, the first female to hold that office in the province’s 240-year history. Politics has long been gendered as a male game, and for an equally long time men have excluded both from voting and running for office.[1] Given that Holt’s win was accompanied by the election of a record number of women MLAs, it is tempting to see this as a sharp break with the past and the beginning of a new era.[2] But to do so would be to lose sight of the larger local and global context, in which anxieties about gender and sexuality in the public sphere were (and remain) heightened,[3] and it would also downplay how deeply-seated and slow to change such concerns have been.

The Cold War era is a fruitful place to examine these deep roots and aversion to change, for it was another period in which concerns about gender and sexuality were at the fore. Indeed, historians have documented how concerns about returning to traditional, patriarchal gender norms in the aftermath of the Second World War only intensified with the onset of the Cold War. As Patrizia Gentile notes, the period’s “cultural and national insecurity … led to a rallying cry for the strengthening of the family and heterosexuality. Family stability was considered the only ‘antidote’ to ‘moral fallout.’”[4] 

The following case study of how Liberal politicking in the early 1960s was deeply gendered demonstrates how rural New Brunswick was not immune from anxieties over nuclear weapons and nuclear families. It does so by examining the content of The Spokesman, “N.B.’s Biggest Little Newspaper,” published in the small town of St. Stephen. Unusually, in an era of decreasing overt partisanship in the press, the short-lived Spokesman was explicitly designed to be a “weekly tabloid newspaper of Liberal news.”

The paper was the brainchild of publisher George E. Copping. On 15 August 1961, he pitched the idea to Charles McElman, who was simultaneously working as the Executive Director of the New Brunswick Liberal Association and as Executive Assistant to the newly elected Liberal Premier, Louis J. Robichaud. In a follow-up letter, Copping explained that neither the government nor the Liberal Party would be responsible for it, “yet at the same time we are inviting the Liberal Organization to make the rules.”[5]

The Spokesman was both a partisan and a gendered project right down to its name. Styled as a male mouthpiece for the Liberal Party, and aimed primarily at the heterosexual male reader, it presented the worlds of work (outside the home) and politics as male. The first issue set the basic format that subsequent issues would follow. The cover featured a group of rugged young men, the first class of the government-sponsored training in shipbuilding in Saint John, which emphasized that the government was getting men back to the workplace. (This image had won out over the original cover image, shown above, which was to feature Premier Louis J. Robichaud posing with a beauty pageant winner.)

Inside each issue were fairly crude attempts to attract the male gaze. These included a photo of a scantily clad woman with a risqué caption, sexist cartoons, and a heavy emphasis on topics considered manly, like sports such as boxing or hunting. For maximum effect, these were sometimes combined, such as a picture of a “showgirl” hoisting a rifle and a bird to mark the beginning of hunting (“bird-busting”) season. Yet the paper also had small attempts to reach female readers by including content aimed at the imagined domestic housewife: typically, recipes, a dress pattern, and a note on a significant woman’s achievement. Even the advertisements also reflected the gendered assumptions of the age. For example, the New Brunswick Telephone Company recommended a gift-boxed extension telephone as a perfect gift “for Mother in her kitchen” and “for Dad in his den.”

The centre spread of the fourth issue typified these divisions and anxieties. “All We Can Do Is Point It,” the headline on the left read, above a collage of photos of Bomarc-B missiles, which captions noted were designed to carry conventional or nuclear warheads. Across the page, however, was the “Especially for Women” section, filled with “Recipes, Patterns, and Chit-Chat.” This was followed by a two-page spread of spring fashions “from some of the world’s leading Fashion Houses” in New York.

Ironically, these fairly weak attempts to reach female readers inadvertently served to undercut some of the paper’s foundational assumptions, namely by highlighting the place of women in formal party politics. So, for example, the paper ran a letter from Senator Muriel Fergusson (Liberal) approving of the venture. Fergusson had been New Brunswick’s first female judge of a probate court, Fredericton’s first female city councillor, first female deputy mayor, and was the third woman to be appointed to the Senate; she would go on to become the first woman Speaker of the Senate in 1972. Similarly, the paper satirized the (Progressive Conservative) government’s immigration policy with a cartoon featuring Minister of Immigration Ellen Fairclough, Canada’s first female Cabinet minister and the first woman to ever be given the duty of Acting Prime Minister.

In reflecting on gender and the Cold War, Gentile remarks that “Men and women together had to play their part in the gender game in order to secure the safety and future of the nation … Gender practices were therefore central to the construction of the Canadian national security state.”[6] While the election of a female premier suggests that in New Brunswicker fewer people are interested in playing the gender game, or that its significance has diminished, unfortunately this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, the anxieties around gender and sexuality that marked the Cold War in New Brunswick have been forced the forefront again by the intentional cultivation of a moral panic around the use of preferred pronouns in public schools.[7] That a candidate who has “been accused of harbouring extreme views on issues such as gay rights” lost by less than three percent of the vote suggests that the politicization of gender and sexuality is not yet past.[8]

Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University and an Archivist (Private Sector Records) at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. The views expressed in this post are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

Further Reading

John Boyko, “Bomarc Missile Crisis,” Canadian Encyclopedia (2006).

Richard Cavell, ed., Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

Valerie J. Korenik, Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

“Meet Muriel McQueen Fergusson, the Senate Speaker Who ‘Blazed a Trail Through Established Conventions,’” SenCA+ Magazine (15 December 2022).

Patricia Williams, “Ellen Fairclough,” Canadian Encyclopedia (2008).

Notes

[1] Heidi MacDonald, We Shall Persist: Women and the Vote in the Atlantic Provinces (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2023).

[2] “Holt’s Historic N.B. Win Also Sees Record Number of Women, Several Francophones Elected,” CBC News (23 October 2024).

[3] See for instance Andrea Bellemare, Kit Kolbegger, Jason Vermes, “Anti-Trans Views Are Worryingly Prevalent and Disproportionately Harmful, Community and Experts Warn,” CBC News (7 November 2021); and Carol Johnson, “Gender is Playing a Crucial Role in this US Election – And It’s Not Just About Kamala Harris,” The Conversation (29 October 2024).

[4] Patrizia Gentile, “‘Government Girls’ and ‘Ottawa Men’: Cold War Management of Gender Relations in the Civil Service,” in Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, ed. Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto: BTL Books, 2000), 131-41, at 131.

[5] These quotes and all otherwise uncited material in this article are drawn from the unprocessed Senator Charles McElman fonds (MC2988), Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.

[6] Gentile, “Cold War Management of Gender Relations,” 139.

[7] For an overview, see John Mazerolle, “What is New Brunswick’s LGBTQ Student Controversy All About?” CBC News (27 June 2023).

[8] Nipun Tiwari, “PC Candidate Who was Symbol of Higg’s Rightward Shift Defeated,” CBC News (22 October 2024).