But how did she get where she is today? What were the major influences that led her to this life work?
As the first born in a family of all girls, McPhedran was fortunate to be very independent from her parents at an early age. Growing up in rural Neepawa, Manitoba (this writer’s home province!), allowed her and her younger sisters the freedom to roam the grounds near her family home, on horseback no less, as they were all skilled riders by the time they were 6 years old. Daughter of a veterinarian, McPhedran believes that this freedom given to her as a child gave her the motivation to work for human rights – simply put, for the freedom of others. Relative to other members in the community, McPhedran’s family was well-off. “I had access, choices and opportunities that at the time were natural and invisible to me.”
When McPhedran became financially responsible for herself at 18, she began to realize that the freedom and opportunity she had from early childhood on, was a privilege. “I had internalized it as a right, but my more mature analysis made me realize that it was a privilege accorded to a tiny population of the world that I had been lucky enough to be born into. What I had - the privilege of enjoying personal freedom and genuine choices - should in fact be extended to girls and boys all over the world.”
At 15, McPhedran experienced what she describes as “a wake-up call.” She began to understand that there was unequal distribution of privilege in Canada and in a global context. This she learned from the international and inner-city projects she was involved in as a young teenager. One particular project involved fundraising and collecting books then shipping them to St. Lucia schools, but it wasn’t until she volunteered as a child and family care worker in Winnipeg’s inner-city, that she realized the irony of assuming poverty was only in “developed” nations. “Even in Canada, we were perpetuating economic and social disadvantage to our First Nations people, in ways that were at least as terrible in St. Lucia, that I thought was so far away from Canada.”
At the University of Winnipeg (also in Manitoba) she chose to pursue Religious Studies, because McPhedran knew she was an inquisitive and interested scholar, and found the diversity of Religious Studies to be just what she was looking for. What she wasn’t looking for, was in her first year of university (“freshman”) to be picked out of a crowd and asked to run for a campus beauty contest of sorts. She was completely shocked that anyone would find her attractive. McPhedran looks back on this time and cringes, since she entered the competition and won to become “the freshie queen”.
McPhedran relives this “embarrassing” anecdote because it became relevant when she decided to run for student government. She entered her candidature for the position of President in 1971. McPhedran won, and was the first woman to become president of the student association at the University of Winnipeg – but some people had a hard time accepting her.
“In the year that I was student president…many of the experiences that actually taught me a lot were actually quite traumatic because they were drenched in sexism. A lot of what was said to me, done to me, tried to be done to me, probably was fed by the simple fact that I was a woman. And it was complicated by the fact that everybody knew that I had been the “freshie queen.” McPhedran was only 19 years old at the time.
“I learned the hard way that when you’re a woman you don’t get to just ‘do things on your own merit.’ You don’t get to have the same credibility or authority that’s usually given to a male when you’re in a position of responsibility. A lot of things can happen in front of your face or behind your back that are motivated by misogyny. And I learned all of those in really hard ways.”
She moved to Toronto after that year and realized. “No matter what, I would never allow myself to be dependent financially on a man, and that whatever I did with my education and my training I had to make sure that I had the capacity to support myself so that I could be making my own choices.”
The following part of the article recorded in interview style, tracks Marilou McPhedran’s experiences and reactions to academia, law school, feminism, and international peacekeeping.
Q: How did you get from religious studies to law?
MM:I thought I was going to go on and get a Ph D and become an academic and teach religious studies, but then I ended up doing an oral exam with one religious studies professor, based on one very long text (1300 pages). Halfway through the exam my professor said to me, “You’re going to pass, but I need you to answer the following question, and I need you to promise me you’ll answer it honestly. Have you read this text?” And I said, “All of it?… I read the table of contents, the index, and I followed the index to stuff that I thought would be of interest to you, and then I read the beginning and the end of each chapter.” He said, “You’re headed in the wrong direction. You should not be trying to be an academic. You do not have the interest that you need in order to be steeping yourself in extensive amounts of reading, reflection, and writing. You are a ‘bullshit artist’ and you should become a lawyer.” Then I said, “How do I do that?”
“And I left that class and found out what I had to do! I wrote the LSAT, and found myself in law school. That’s how that major life decision got made.”
In the beginning, I hated law school. Especially when we started to study rape cases, devoid of the reality for rape victims. I realized my brain was not the least bit trained to deal with law school. It was like going to a strange country.
Now when I talk to other law students, mostly women, I tell them, law school is a different country with a different culture, with a different language, with a different system of morals and ethics and with a different rewards system. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can change that country significantly. And that was something that I didn’t do, until I started to fail in first year law school. Do whatever you can to learn the ropes, but most of all treat it as a survival exercise and learn the language, so you have the skills to go up against the power-holders.
Q: It sounds like you have learned how to balanced working from within structures and on the margins.
MM: I’m still learning, it’s a lifelong learning.
Q: Much of your work is working in areas of reform and reconstruction. How do you find advocating for women’s rights in developing countries from a Western woman, lawyer’s perspective?
MM: I think I’m still in the midst of learning that as well. I think that I’ve often made mistakes. Thinking that because I was Canadian, because I come from a privileged class in a Canadian context, because I was deeply involved in the grassroots women’s political movement in Canada, that I had a kind of expert status that entitled me to provide advice to women in countries that are considered to be developing countries - that the learning was going to be much more on their end. I was totally wrong about that. It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to direct the ten county impact study on CEDAW (the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) that I appreciated what an arrogant and stupid mistake it was.
Part of what woke me up was when I first started going to the United Nations sessions dealing with women’s rights. I saw very quickly that the key leadership was primarily women of colour and/or women from the south. And that they had an acuity, a tenacity, a savvy sophistication about systemic change in the international context that I couldn’t begin to touch. I was lucky and honoured to be in situations where I could learn from them.
These were activists, lawyers and academics, but they were committed to grassroots involvement in their countries and they understood what it really means to bring about change that actually makes a difference in the lives of women and girls. And as a result of my being able to work with these activist researchers, some from countries that rate really low on the UN HDI (human rights index) – Ukraine, Panama, Nepal – they really taught me about the circumstances they were struggling under. And that I couldn’t begin to situate my opportunities for activism in Canada on a par with what they were struggling with, which only increased my respect and admiration for them.
We published the First CEDAW Impact Study (2000), which remains the first and only major impact study on a UN human rights treaty from the perspective of citizens rather than governments. It was a good example of participatory action research for advocacy and systemic change, which for me is the only research I’m interested in doing.
Q: How can western and ‘third world’ feminists (or north and south) work together on women’s rights issues?
MM: With the massive cuts to social and educational programs in Canada, seemingly in response to the International Monetary Fund criticizing Canada for carrying too much debt, many women in this county now have much more in common with their southern sisters. In addition to an increase in poverty, access to services for women is more restricted. And many women’s organizations that I’ve grown up with have disappeared. There is an evisceration of the Canadian women’s movement that can be directly attributed to actions on the part of governments in this country.
I started to use the term “lived rights” in my writing because I think that we can be seduced and misled by talking in terms of women’s human rights as though we have them. We do have them, in law, but we can’t necessarily live them. I think that that is the common ground for…”feminists” – men and women committed to gender equality. I actually think that the term feminism itself, not only being tainted by anti-feminists, and misogynist media, but also by women’s rights activists themselves who for one reason or another, either feel uncomfortable with the term because they feel betrayed, or they reject the term because the people around them reject the term.
I’m not for imposing a label on anybody. But I think that the actual definition of feminism is a very honourable label, a very justice driven label. But at the same time whether its aboriginal women in Canada or women from the south who say ‘I’m not going to define myself as a feminist,’ then I say ‘Fine, let’s just stay focused on the common ground of achieving lived rights for women and girls.’
[McPhedran wrote an article (published in McGill International Review, Spring 2005) based on her experience in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2004]
Q: Since our readers will not have the opportunity to read your article as I did, can you summarize what you learned from your experience in post-Taliban Afghanistan? I was moved by your thesis ‘there is no peace without justice.’
MM: That’s a quote from the amazing Dr. Sima Samar, the chair of the new Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. One of the best uses of military force is to support the building of civil society. They have to be there to build the peace, keep the peace and strengthen the peace, and only way to do that is to also support civil society leaders and the building of social justice mechanisms, and mechanisms of accountability. It’s ironic, but western style democracy that just gets plunked down through armed force has as much a chance of consolidating the power of, for example, an Afghan warlord, as an elected president like Karzai. Unless the guns and the soldiers are used to protect the civil society leaders and to allow them to shape and build a culture of peace in the context of their own situation and the context of their own country, than it’s not going to be a peace that will last, or a peace that will be just.
Q: Thank you for your candidness and your stories. Is there anything else you would like to add before we end?
MM:Thank you for listening! There is a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, do you know it? Let me find it (looks for quote). Ok here, it is. My mentor (just retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice) Claire L’Heureux-Dubé referred to Roosevelt describing human rights as “Beginning in the small places close to home, and unless they have meaning there, they do not have meaning anywhere.”
Recommended links:
www.shuhada.org
Shuhada Organization (the NGO started by Dr. Sima Samar)
www.womenwagingpeace.net
Guide to advocacy and action: “Inclusive Security, Sustainable Peace”
www.iwrp.org
International Women’s Rights Project (co-directed by Marilou), with a full online copy of the First CEDAW Impact Study and an annotated bibliography on CEDAW, kept up-to-date by law students at the University of Victoria.
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