Active History

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).

Stacey Zembrzycki

In 1986 and 1987, Stanley G. Grizzle began to cold call old friends, asking them if they would be willing to share their memories of portering during the first half of the twentieth century. This famed Toronto-based labour activist, war veteran, civil servant and citizenship judge, who was also a porter for twenty years, was in the midst of writing a memoir. Beyond his own story, Grizzle sought to fill in gaps in his knowledge about the history of unionization and, in particular, the development of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. This was the first organized union for Black Canadian men who worked as porters for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Some were unabashed in their refusal, making it quite clear that they did not want to revisit the past. Dredging up the details was too complicated, and they had closed the book on that chapter of their lives.^[i] Most, however, said yes immediately, inviting Grizzle into their homes across the country, where they proceeded to banter about life on the rails while hammering out the finer details of the larger processes through which they had lived.

Grizzle donated forty-three of these informal conversations, along with his extensive collection of textual holdings, to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in 2007. Recently, with help from the LAC Foundation, the recordings were digitized and made available to the public; those interested can now listen to the interviews through the Collection Searchtool on LAC’s website. Detailed summaries, which point researchers to the different sound files that make for a complete conversation, are contained in the record details for each interview in the collection. There is no order to the tapes Grizzle donated; he seems to have recorded his conversations on whichever ones had space available! The interviews tell us not just about what life on the rails was like for Black porters, but how close relationships forged on the job bound the men together for life, ultimately shaping the intimate conversations Grizzle had with each of them.

These interviews and others are at the heart of a new Discover Library and Archives Canada podcast series. In particular, Voices Revealed showcases LAC’s vast but little-known oral history collections, making space for those from a variety of marginalized and underrepresented communities from across the country to tell their own stories in their own voices. Narratives of injustice, conflict, resilience and resolution enable us to understand how the past powerfully defines our present, while also providing the insights we need to imagine new directions for our collective future. Everyone has a story to tell, and it is our hope that this podcast series will provide an accessible means through which a variety of narratives can be contextualized and shared.

The first season, “Porter Talk,” which is rooted in Grizzle’s interview collection, introduces listeners to the Black men who rarely had a name, let alone a voice, while they were employed in the extractive and highly exploitative job of portering. Their stories, along with those shared by their wives and children, speak truth to power, emphasizing the anti-Black racism these folks endured both on and off the rails and the strategies they employed to move forward and build community. This season begins by introducing listeners to Grizzle himself, reconstructing his life story and the ways that activism shaped his worldview. This episode provides the essential information needed to wade into his interview collection and the particular clips that are integrated into successive episodes. “Porter Talk” also focuses on who the men were, where they came from, what their working conditions were like, how unionization developed and the various ways that communities, and women in particular, created the necessary foundations on which change could occur. Episodes are contextualized by leading Black scholars, Canadian historians and community storytellers and knowledge keepers, helping listeners make sense of the larger narrative that shaped the kinds of stories porters could tell. It is our intention to launch a new episode every six weeks. Those interested are encouraged to subscribe on their favourite podcast platform to listen to episodes as they are released!

Pedagogy has been central to the design of this series. Encouraging listeners to ponder who created the interviews and the conditions under which these exchanges took place serves as our starting point. Each episode also includes a timestamped and searchable transcript that directs listeners back to the original collection material. Our hope is that teachers and students in particular will engage with the primary sources themselves, listening to the interviews, making their own connections to these men and finding their own unique meanings in the words that are shared. Additionally, we have provided a list of resources for each episode, drawing attention to major works in this field, as well as biographies for each interviewer, interviewee, scholar and community member included in the episode. There are many ways to gain access to this important collection!

Oral histories, once recorded, are rarely listened to again. They tend to gather dust on closet shelves, remain packed away beneath mattresses or simply take up space on our computers and external hard drives. Publicly available interviews are often edited into short clips and presented on engaging websites. Mostly though, whenever possible, the vast majority of us choose to read transcripts rather than take the time to listen. Limited time, resources, and searchability often make this choice for us. Very few of us can commit to listening to a complete interview, let alone an entire collection. “Porter Talk,” and subsequent seasons of Voices Revealed, provides an alternative, albeit long-form, way to engage with the stories that shape who we are as Canadians. The humanity inherent in these narratives allows us to build connections with the past, which rarely looks that much different from the present. This is the power of oral history, however we choose to access it.

Stacey Zembrzycki is an award-winning oral and public historian who serves as a Podcast Development Specialist in the Outreach and Engagement Branch at Library and Archives Canada.

The second episode in the Porter Talk series launches today.

Notes

^[i] Towards the end of his life, Grizzle recorded nearly every telephone message and conversation he had on cassette tapes, in addition to the interviews he conducted. Some of these conversations are available here.

Suggested Readings

Melinda Chateauvert. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

Cecil Foster, “They call me George”: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada(Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019).

Stanley G. Grizzle with John Cooper, My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. Personal Reminiscences of Stanley G. Grizzle (Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1998).

Steven High, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Saje Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Dorothy W. Williams, Blacks in Montreal, 1628-1986, An Urban Demography (Montréal: Les Éditions Yvon Blais Inc, 1989).

Dorothy W. Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1997).

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