Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May. We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. On the podcast today, I speak with Karen Wells about her new book, Women Who Woke Up the Law.
Speaker: Changes in the law that bring about more equality have complex roots, but they almost always start with someone who takes a stand. A new book examines 10 of the legal cases that have advanced women's rights in Canada.
Speaker: The stories it tells of the women who challenged the law and the lawyers, judges, and advocates who supported them remind us that advances in equality are hard won and should never be taken for granted.
Speaker: The book is titled, Women Who Woke Up the Law. Author Karen Wells is best known as a CBC radio documentary maker and is a three-time recipient of the Canadian Association of Journalists Documentary Award. She's also a lawyer and the author of The Abortion Caravan and More Than a Footnote, Canadian Women You Should Know.
Speaker: Karen Wells joins me today from Ontario. Hello, Karen. Hello. What got you interested in tracking down the women behind each of these major advances in women's equality that you write about? Was there a particular woman's story that got you started? You know, people ask me that, and I can't put my finger on it.
Speaker: Some of the cases i had known about, a couple I knew about at law school, you know, strictly in a legalistic way. and Some others I just knew about from newspaper reports and they had just stuck with me. And then you kind of build on that, you know, figure out what else is important and how did this start? And that's how it happened.
Speaker: How did you settle on the 10 stories that you ended up picking? Well, part of it was I was looking, and and it fell into place naturally, I was looking for some sort of historic continuum, if you like. It never works decade by decade, but the first case in the book is about divorce and divorce. Women didn't have nearly the same access to divorce as men did initially, and that case is about 1870. And then it sort of plods its way along as rights have a way of doing until today, pretty much.
Speaker: Now, each story begins with one woman who takes a stand, but it often takes women lawyers and women on the bench to actually create the change in the law. Were you surprised as you went along to see how critical it was to have women as judges?
Speaker: No, it sort of made sense. And of course, I mean, I take your point, and several of the cases did rest on the legal opinions and and legal arguments advanced by women, but an awful lot didn't, you know.
Speaker: There were no women lawyers for a very long time, and therefore these cases were motivated by the individual women who were the accused, a woman accused of murdering her husband, a complainant, a woman who had been sexually assaulted, or the plaintiff in a civil law case.
Speaker: And these were the women whose stories I wanted to tell. And that's the human side, if you like. I mean, somebody who just gets so damn pissed off at everything that they're going to dig in their heels and do something that really made absolutely no sense at the time, because often they were fighting impossible battles. Right.
Speaker: One of the ironies of these stories is that while lawyers and judges will be very familiar with the names of the women who started the ball rolling, they aren't household names in Canada by and large. Did did you want to change that to make these women better known? No, no, I don't think there'll ever be household names. You know, someone like Irene Florence Murdoch.
Speaker: The Murdoch case is known to lawyers because it changed the definition of matrimonial property rights and who was entitled to what when marriages broke up.
Speaker: But nobody really knew who Irene Murdoch was. um you know So I was kind of curious, who was she? And just to put a quick footnote there, she was a ranch wife born in the foothills of Alberta who worked her ranch for 25 years and wound up with nothing, with not a share when the marriage broke up.
Speaker: And people knew the name Murdoch, but they didn't have any idea of her particular story. you know So I don't think there'll ever be household names. Some of them are more so than others, like Chantal Degg out of Quebec.
Speaker: And that case was more recent, 1989, I think it finally went to the Supreme Court. And she was a woman who the Morgenthaler decision had come down a few months, perhaps a year before, that held that prohibiting women, criminalizing abortion, threatened a woman's security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Therefore, it should not be a criminal offense. Well, that was a massive decision in this country, legalizing abortion. And then the Digg case was about the father of of a fetus who insisted that he had the right to veto the abortion. And that was the fight in that case. Chantal Digg was a 21-year-old waitress from Chebougamou, Quebec, population 8,000. And this case went so fast because she was well into her pregnancy and could only get a legal abortion up to 20 weeks in Quebec.
Speaker: So it had to go from the first appearance before four judges to the Quebec Court of Appeal and then to the Supreme Court. in like a month. And that never, never happens. It was a vicious fight that brought 10,000 Montreal women out onto the streets because, as they said, the only woman in Canada who could not get an abortion was Chantal Daigle.
Speaker: And their anger was palpable, to put it mildly. And it did go to the Supreme Court. um It was very dramatic. There were all sorts of demonstrations on the lawn of the Supreme Court. And she won and established the right that only the woman can decide when she wants to terminate a pregnancy.
Speaker: And I understand by the time it came to the Supreme Court, she had actually had the abortion. Oh, what a dramatic moment that was. Yes, she had.
Speaker: The and Quebec Court of Appeal had upheld an injunction that prohibited her having an abortion with the threat of $50,000 And she had passed the 20-week mark by a week or perhaps 10 days.
Speaker: But she was determined, the man she lived with, Jean-Guy Tremblay, no longer lived with, the father of this fetus, was violent. He continued to be violent ah long after this. And she just said, no, I'm i'm not going to bear a child of this violent relationship. And so she went to Boston. And the the lawyer didn't know.
Speaker: At lunchtime in the proceedings in front of the Supreme Court, he stood up. And I mean, he was a young legal aid lawyer who just come out of law school. And sort of with a quaking voice, he said, you know, I understand my client has had an abortion. He didn't know. and the judges were furious, but it was determined that the the matter of principle had to be determined, so it continued. And as it was found in her favor, she did not face that $50,000 fine.
Speaker: And an important point of principle was decided. Now that actually Chantal Diggs' name was one that i recognized. And i I feel like I should have recognized Stella Bliss because there's ah there's a very strong Vancouver connection in her story. And I'm sure some people listening to us now do know her name.
Speaker: What was she fighting for? Stella Bliss was so interesting because nobody remembered her. Prior to the bringing into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and and that's kind of where it ended up, she was a woman who worked as ah a typist at a car dealership in Vancouver, had started and discovered she was pregnant and had a partner and carried on, had the baby. They were tried to fire her. They tried twice. And she argued for maternity benefit, unemployment, as it was then known, maternity benefits. And she was turned down.
Speaker: And she appealed. There were umpteen layers of appeal. It was quite amazing. She argued her own case initially. She was a smart woman. And to continue to appeal, she needed the backing of a union, basically to show, I think, that this wasn't just one person's crazy idea.
Speaker: And she had the backing of a women's union, which had only just been formed, doesn't exist anymore, And it had been pushed and and lobbied and and instituted by a group of strongly labor-minded women in Vancouver springing out of the old Vancouver Women's Caucus.
Speaker: The union was Sorwalk, right? Yes, and I think was later absorbed into CUPE. And continued to argue this all the way up to the Supreme Court where she lost.
Speaker: As I should add, did Florence Murdoch in her bid for half the ranch. But the point was that many of these cases, because they angered and irritated and outraged large numbers of women in the country, not all urban easterners, you know, the Murdoch case, women who lived and worked farms in ranches in Alberta were equally as outraged and they weren't essentially a conservative bunch. And in the case of Bliss, she lost,
Speaker: but it annoyed so many women. I mean, not just irritated, just got them very angry, that it morphed into the impetus for a redefinition of equality under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was just then coming in.
Speaker: And one of the lawyers who argued the case, said something to the effect of, there are cases that stay with us, even the cases we lose, that give the impetus to carry on. And that's what happened with the case of Stella Bliss. I mean, it was so sad in the end because there she was in Vancouver, Madam Justice, as she became Madam Justice Lynn Smith, who became Dean of the UBC Law School, was with her when the decision came down from the Supreme Court, the negative decision.
Speaker: And she told me that Stella Bliss was very upset. She was a young, I mean, you'd have to say a young hippie woman given to long flowing dresses and alternative therapies, et cetera. and was distraught, and she died. She died of brain cancer about eight years later.
Speaker: I mean, that's the stuff that interests me. Who were these women and what happened to them? You know? The legal point was that our definition of equality was redefined and strengthened thanks to her.
Speaker: Now, you write that it's easy to label many of the women in the book as tragic heroines. Do you see them that way? ah I don't know, it seems like too big a term. you know It sounds like something out of fiction and it wasn't.
Speaker: They were tragic in some respects in so much as, I mean, Stella Bliss wasn't the only woman who suffered an early death. A Nova Scotia woman who was accused and convicted of killing her husband. He was very abusive.
Speaker: And what she did that nobody else had done was to speak out publicly about what had happened. And nobody talked about domestic abuse at the time. And the effect of the PTSD, which nobody knew what PTSD was or how to deal with it, wore her to such an extent that she committed suicide.
Speaker: um So does that make her a tragic heroine in some respects? No. They were strong, determined, ah somewhat ornery women, probably not necessarily your best friend, but they were so interesting and they fought such a strong fight.
Speaker: What battles do you foresee in the future that will advance the cause of equality in Canada? Well, one that's going to be interesting, when I wrote the book, the Supreme Court had not yet decided, but they have since decided to hear the appeal about the constitutionality of the Quebec law that prohibits the wearing of religious clothing. And There's a group of women there with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association who are arguing that this law, this Quebec law, affects women disproportionately to men.
Speaker: Orthodox Jewish women who must wear a wig according to their religious principles. Obviously, Islamic women who wear the hijab. Any woman who's working for the state cannot wear any indication of religion. So that will now be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Speaker: And with complex legal system in Canada getting more so, because we already have civil law in Quebec and common law in the rest of Canada. Increasingly now, we're incorporating aspects of indigenous law in some places. The University of Victoria has done a huge job in that area. So we'll see how that affects things. Don't know.
Speaker: It's what will happen. And it's that message you really can't take your eye off the ball rights can be rolled back and we were thoroughly aware of that when the united states rolled back roe v wade so don't assume it's all going to remain the way it is even if you think that's good enough you know Well, it it was a really interesting book. I think you're uniquely placed to tell it as such a good storyteller and also as a lawyer.
Speaker: Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Really appreciate you having me. I've been speaking with Karen Wells, author of Women Who Woke Up the Law, and it's published recently by Second Story Press.
Speaker: You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
