March 2020 was supposed to be a month of celebration and commemoration for the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (PDF, 282KB)opens in new window. The Beijing Declaration, ratified by 189 countries in 1995, serves as a vision and blueprint for policies and actions to address structural and societal barriers to the actualization of the rights of girls and women. Instead, March 2020 has been etched into our minds as the month when the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic was fully realized, a pandemic that has highlighted the essential, too often undervalued, roles women play in our communities. Though the anniversary events were cancelled, our global commitment to the Beijing Declaration must not falter.
Like many graduate students, I returned home during the height of the pandemic. Home for me is Canada. Reflecting on the fight for gender equality and the significance of the Beijing Declaration, I am brought back to a progressive moment in Canada’s march toward women’s rights.
Are women persons? This absurd question was posed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1927. White and Black women in eight provinces gained the right to vote between the years of 1916 and 1925opens in new window, and there was growing support for women to be appointed to the Senate, the upper house of Canada’s Parliament. However, the British North America Act (BNA Act) of 1867opens in new window, which set out rules for Canada’s governance, stated that only “qualified persons” could serve in the Senate. Nowhere in the document did it explicitly state that only men could be considered “qualified persons;” however, at the time of writing in 1867, this was assumed. And so, in 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada, then composed of five men, unanimously ruled that no, women were not “persons” under the BNA and therefore, could not be appointed to the Senate. They reasoned that the BNA Act was to be interpreted as it had been written—61 years earlier.
These five male judges are not the individuals Canadians refer to when we speak of the “Famous Fiveopens in new window.” This title is reserved for the five women—Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, and Henrietta Muir Edwards—who were on the side of justice and equality. These five women who took their case—their rights and the rights of Canadian women—to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London to appeal the Supreme Court decision. The decision was reversed paving the way for women to hold public office. When announcing the decisionopens in new window, Lord Sankey, then Lord Chancellor of Great Britain said, “The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours. And to those who would ask why the word ‘person’ should include females, the obvious answer is, ‘why should it not?’” This is a celebrated constitutional victory in Canadian history.
A lesser known, or perhaps more appropriate to say, repressed, part of the Canadian suffrage narrative is the inequality within the movement for gender equality. While White and Black women celebrated the right to vote in the early part of the twentieth century, this right was not granted to women in the province of Quebec until 1940opens in new window. Asian Canadian men and women did not receive the right to vote until 1948opens in new window, the same year that Canada helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was not until 1960opens in new window that the right to vote was granted to all Indigenous men and women.
Reflecting on this history lesson, I wonder what policies, laws, and societal norms we will look back on in 10, 15, 20 years with disbelief, questioning how they could have been defended, tolerated, and accepted. Will it be the continued policing of women’s bodies? Our treatment of victims of sexual violence? The pervasive invalidation and attacks on the safety and rights of transgender individuals? There is no doubt that each year strides are made toward gender equality and yet, more work remains and new challenges continue to emerge.
As psychologists, we are trained to appreciate and honor individuals and all their identities—recognizing that identities fluctuate and change, and each has the power to lend privilege or marginalization depending on context. The inequity in the Canadian suffrage story is not unique to Canada nor is it confined to that time period. The disturbing rise in rates of maternal mortality among Black mothers in the U.S, the worldwide gender disparity in political leadership, the millions of women and girls around the world who are disproportionately victims of domestic violence—exaggerated now by quarantine measures—and the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada all show that the experience of being a woman cannot be separated from one’s race, education level, socioeconomic status, physical ability, religion, or sexual orientation.
As a society, we may no longer be asking whether women are persons, but we continue to live in a world that implies that the contributions, dreams, and safety of women and girls are less valuable than those of men and boys, and that the value of some women is greater than that of others.
Every five yearsopens in new window the United Nations’ Commission for the Status of Women reviews progress made on the Beijing Declaration. This year, this important meeting was cancelled due to the coronavirus. The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted existing social inequities; it has also illuminated the power of collective action. Let us bring this power and a spirit of determination, courage, justice, and collaboration—the qualities that led the “Famous Five” to victory—to our continued efforts to achieve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal 5opens in new window of gender equality by 2030.