#MicroblogMondays: It wasn't that long ago...

I was having trouble thinking of something to write for today's #MM post, until I saw Mel's, about the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and just how new and tenous some of the rights are that American women now enjoy. 

I didn’t realize until just a few years ago what a critical role RBG played in some of these cases (which also affected women in Canada and around the world). I grew up in the 1960s & 1970s, graduated high school in 1979, went to university 1979-84, got married and entered the workforce in the mid/late 1980s -- so I'm old enough to remember those days -- and I do think a lot of younger women don't know some of the history and/or sometimes take these things for granted. 

Here are just a few of the advances women have made during my lifetime. I've written about some of these things before, but they're stories worth retelling, I think. (I did a bit of Googling to prod my memory, and found a lot of things I had forgotten, too!): 

• I remember the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. in the 1970s, and the historic nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as vice-president on the Democratic Party ticket in 1984.  I remember Sandra Day O'Connor becoming the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, followed by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993. 
• There was a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada in the late 1960s. Its 1970 report identified a host of laws and policies that discriminated against women. By 1977, the federal government had implemented over 80 percent of the report’s recommendations. 
• When a new Canadian constitution and charter of rights was being written in the early 1980s (when I was in university), women's equality rights were initially not included. There was a huge uproar, and equality rights were enshrined in the new charter that came into effect in 1982. 
• The first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada, Bertha Wilson, was appointed in 1982. Eight other women have been appointed to the court since then, including Beverly McLachlin, who served as the court's first female chief justice (2000-2017). Four of the nine justices are currently women, making Canada's Supreme Court among the world's most gender balanced. 
• Murdoch vs Murdoch (1973) is a famous case that I remember from my growing-up years. Upon the breakdown of her 25-year marriage in 1968, an Alberta woman named Irene Murdoch sought a half share in the ranch property held in her husband’s name, to which she had contributed years of labour. The case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which denied Mrs. Murdoch's application, saying her labour was not beyond what was normally expected of a ranch wife. The subsequent uproar over the decision led to substantial reforms to matrimonial property laws across the country over the next several years, giving husbands and wives equal rights to property acquired during the course of the marriage.
• Prior to 1983, it was legal in Canada for a man to sexually assault his wife. 
• Although some limited provisions for pregnancy & maternity leave existed previously, current maternity/parental leave laws & structures didn't really come into being until 1983. They've been expanded several times since then. 
• Legislation providing redress for victims of sexual harassment was introduced into Canada's Labour Code in 1984.
• In 1980, a year after I graduated high school, the Royal Canadian Air Force began accepting women as pilots. One of my high school classmates joined the air force around that same time and became a pilot herself. She wasn't the first, but she was still among the first half-dozen or so women to achieve that position. She flew Hercules transport jets for several years before leaving the military.  
• A woman has never been elected prime minister of Canada -- but we did have one. Kim Campbell became the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party and thus prime minister when Brian Mulroney stepped down in 1993. She called an election a few months later and lost, but she's still in the history books as our first female prime minister. 
• Similarly, the first female provincial premier in Canadian history was Rita Johnston, who served as Premier of British Columbia for seven months in 1991 after she won the leadership of the governing Social Credit Party. The party was defeated in the subsequent general election.
• The first woman to become premier by winning a general election was Catherine Callbeck in Prince Edward Island in 1993.
• To date, just 12 women have served as the premier of a province or territory in Canada. 
• The only one currently serving in that role is Caroline Cochrane, Premier of the Northwest Territories, who assumed office in 2019.
• The Employment Equity Act, which applies to federally regulated employees and requires employers to identify and eliminate unnecessary barriers that limit employment opportunities of women, aboriginal/indigenous peoples, visible minorities and people with disabilities, was passed in 1986. 
• The large Canadian bank I went to work for in 1986 had only allowed women to join the pension plan 10 years earlier in 1976. 
• During my first week of work, one of the older women took me aside and told me, “We don’t wear pants here, dear. What if the chairman saw you?” (!) This was 1986, not 1956!
• I can remember being at a banquet in one of those early years and one of the executives (male, of course -- they were almost all men back then) practically patted me on the head and said to one of the other men there, "this little girl here..."  I was in my late 20s at the time. I decided that I wouldn't say anything because he WAS an executive and older than my father, but if anyone younger than my father ever said anything similar...!
• The first female branch managers, both at my bank and at any bank in Canada, were appointed in 1961, the year I was born (two on the same day). 
• I knew the first female senior vice-president and first woman executive vice-president (there has never yet been a woman president), and I vividly remember the day I saw one of the women vice-presidents, visibly pregnant, and realized she was very likely the first woman executive at the company to give birth and take maternity leave while holding an executive position. This would have been in the early 2000s. 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.