Introduction

In Alberta, as elsewhere, challenges to heteropatriarchy mounted by women, on the one hand, and by lesbian and gay persons, on the other, initially evolved along two separate paths. Women activists of the 1960s and 1970s could point to what was, in many respects, an enviable record of feminist agitation. During the early decades of the century, the so-called Famous Five—Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, and Emily Murphy—advocated in the province for women’s rights, including the right to vote and to hold office. Edwards, born a generation before the others, was instrumental in the 1893 founding of the National Council of Women of Canada. McClung fought for women’s suffrage, first in Manitoba and then in Alberta, where she was subsequently elected, in 1921, to the Legislative Assembly. In part as a result of her spirited efforts, in January 1916, Manitoba became the first province to extend the franchise to women, followed in March by Saskatchewan and in April by Alberta. That same year, Parlby became the founding president of the United Farm Women of Alberta and, in 1921, Alberta’s first female cabinet minister, while McKinney, also a suffragist, founded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which sought to protect women and children through the prohibition of alcohol. Trained in law, Murphy fought for women’s property rights and, in 1916, became Canada’s first female judge—indeed, the first female judge anywhere in the British Empire. Collectively, the Famous Five are known for challenging the Supreme Court to decide whether women were “persons” (and therefore eligible for membership in the Senate). When the court ruled in 1928 that women were not, in fact, persons, the group appealed the decision to England’s Privy Council, which, in 1929, overturned the Supreme Court’s decision, thereby opening the door of the Senate to women.

Yet, despite their many achievements, the Famous Five were undeniably products of the era in which they lived—women whose vision of social progress was deeply conditioned by White, middle-class, Protestant values. Emily Murphy, for example, harboured racist attitudes toward the Chinese, whose opium dens she blamed for the social ill of drug addiction. The Famous Five have also earned a measure of infamy for their support of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, passed in 1928 (and repealed only in 1972). As Erika Dyck notes, during this period, “discourses about sexual sterilization formed part of social reform movements, including maternal feminism,” with the passage of the act resting on “a delicate constellation of unlikely supporters, from feminists to social gospellers to farmers.”¹ At the time, a host of traits deemed undesirable, from feeble-mindedness to promiscuity to criminal behaviour, were believed to originate in inferior genetic stock, of a sort frequently associated with racialized peoples.² By allowing a provincial eugenics board to approve the sterilization of individuals deemed “unfit” to be parents, the act promised to produce a suitably wholesome, and suitably White, society. One such objectionable trait was, of course, homosexuality, then more or less universally condemned as a character defect that threatened both public morals and the sancity of the nuclear family. Ironically, then, these early feminists would have had little sympathy for lesbian and gay activism.

Discrimination against gay and lesbian people was alive and well in Alberta when the 1960s rolled around. Yet, as several of the following chapters attest, the province was also home to much gay and lesbian activism. Indeed, one Calgary man, Everett George Klippert, inadvertently played an unfortunate but integral role in the national decriminalization of homosexuality in 1969. First arrested for gross indecency in 1960, Klippert was eventually found by the Supreme Court to be a “dangerous offender” and sentenced in 1967 to life imprisonment. His sad story points to the legal discrimination that gay people faced at the time—yet, as Kevin Allen, the lead researcher for the Calgary Gay History Project, points out, “the reforms which led to Canadian legalization of homosexuality were a direct result of the Klippert case.”³ Although not himself an activist, Klippert has amply earned his place in the history of gay activism in Canada.

In December 1967, just six weeks after Klippert’s final sentencing, Pierre Trudeau—then minister of the Department of Justice—famously declared that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”⁴ Trudeau was speaking to the press following the introduction of Bill C-195 into the House of Commons—an omnibus bill that aimed, among other things, to legalize both abortion and acts of homosexuality, if only under certain circumstances. After Trudeau was elected prime minister, the bill was reintroduced in December 1968 as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, otherwise known as Bill C-150, together with a related bill that further proposed to decriminalize the sale and use of oral contraceptives. After months of rancorous debate, Bill C-150 was eventually passed, receiving royal assent on 27 June 1969.

The passage of Bill C-150 was a watershed moment for both the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements in Canada. Activists in both movements used this moment to embark on a struggle for rights that remained out of their grasp, establish needed services in their communities, and raise public consciousness about the issues with which they were grappling. As Erin Gallagher-Cohoon points out in her chapter below, lesbians—as neither gay men nor heterosexual women—sometimes struggled to find a home in either movement. But, as the 1970s progressed lesbians began to create their own organizations and public platforms, distinct from those created by gay men and straight women. In short, while the feminist movement and the movement for gay rights evolved along different trajectories, the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1969 opened a space in which these movements could organize more publicly.

The energy generated in 1969 propelled feminist and gay liberation activism into the 1970s and built up activist support networks would be needed in the battles yet to come. Although the passage of Bill C-150 created a sense of hope and possibility, it did not translate into wholesale change on the ground. Indeed, as victories go, this was a decidedly limited one. Even after the legal reforms of 1969, both abortion services and homosexual practices continued to be regulated and policed. Women could not, for example, simply decide to have an abortion and then make an appointment at a clinic. Rather, women seeking abortions had to present their cases to a Therapeutic Abortion Committee (TAC) made up of at least three doctors, who had the power to decide whether an abortion was “necessary” on a case-by-case basis. In the meanwhile, acts of homosexuality and “gross indecency” were now legal only if they occurred in private between two consenting adults. Police therefore continued to harass gay men, not merely by surveilling gay bars and other popular cruising spots but also by raids on bathhouses.⁵ Indeed, in view of the situation put in place by the passage of Bill C-150, Trudeau may have meant, quite literally, that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. When it came to pregnancy and to homosexual behaviour in public spaces, the state still insisted on having a presence.

Laws change in response to shifts in dominant social attitudes, but social attitudes can be notoriously slow to evolve. Inevitably, efforts to liberalize the laws in the 1960s reflected contemporary heteronormative and patriarchal presumptions about what were, and were not, acceptable sexual relationships. The ideal remained the married heterosexual couple, in which the father was the primary breadwinner and the mother the principal caregiver, and attempts were made to police sexual behaviour that did not conform to this ideal. Unlike men, women were not supposed to engage in sexual activity outside of marriage, and limiting access to abortion (and, previously, to contraceptives as well) was one way to discourage female sexual freedom—while labelling a child born out of wedlock “illegitimate” further stigmatized the behaviour. Restrictions around abortion also safeguarded against the culturally unthinkable possibility that a married woman who found herself pregnant might seek to terminate the pregnancy. Even after homosexual acts were technically legal, at least in some circumstances, construing public expressions of homosexuality as gross indecency effectively coded same-sex relationships as deviant. As “indecency” implies, any public display of homosexuality was deemed to be offensive and potentially corrupting. If policing women’s fertility aimed to ensure that women would seek personal fulfillment only in the context of marriage and motherhood, policing homosexual behaviour aimed to contain what continued to be perceived as some form of moral pollution.

In the face of the unfinished victory represented by Bill C-150, gay activists showed a growing determination to step out of the closet, while women insisted on greater equity and the right to a life beyond motherhood—and what was happening all across the country was happening equally in Alberta. In “Fed Up with the Status Quo,” Tom Langford describes the coalitions formed among professional and working women’s organizations, social workers, and civil servants in Alberta as they took up the campaign for affordable high-quality daycare. As Nevena Ivanović, Kevin Allen, and Larry Hannant similarly reveal, in “Gay Liberation in Conservative Calgary,” the University of Calgary’s student newspaper, The Gauntlet, became a site for building community solidarity, a place where activists could raise public consciousness, combat discrimination, and dismantle stereotypes about gay and lesbian people.

Other activists in Alberta worked to establish safe spaces and adequate services tailored to local needs. Community-centred initiatives such as the Lethbridge Birth Control and Information Centre (LBCIC) and Edmonton’s Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE) were created in response to specific needs and desires within their respective communities. As I explain in my own chapter, “Contraception, Community, and Controversy,” in the small Bible-Belt city of Lethbridge, the LBCIC offered literature, workshops, and counselling assistance regarding sexuality, birth control, and abortion. In “‘Ultra Activists’ in a ‘Very Closeted Place,’” Gallagher-Cohoon describes the work of GATE, which provided phone lines and other counselling opportunities while at the same time lobbying the Alberta Human Rights Commission for the inclusion of homosexuals under the Individual’s Rights Protection Act. The community services offered by LBCIC and GATE illustrate the very concrete achievements of Alberta activists, who worked hard to provide on-the-ground resources that offered immediate aid to anyone in need.

These tangible, community-based forms of activism are often overshadowed by mass demonstrations and national campaigns for legal change, but in the chapters to follow they are highlighted and celebrated. Although these chapters explore only a few examples of Alberta activists who pushed against a conservative heteropatriarchal social order, they enhance our understanding of Prairie attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Hopefully, they will also inspire further research into the communities and coalitions and the local services established and maintained by activists in the province.

Karissa Robyn Patton