Madeleine Parent RIP

[blake 3:17]

She was the best that the trade union movement had.

Quebec labour leader Madeleine Parent dies
CBC News Posted: Mar 12, 2012 7:18 PM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2012 10:06 PM ET Read 0 comments0
Madeleine Parent organized Quebec textile workers in the 1940s.


Madeleine Parent, a Quebec trade union activist and feminist best remembered for organizing textile workers in the 1940s, has died in Montreal at the age of 93.

Parent devoted her life to union activism and feminist causes, beginning in 1942, when she organized a strike against Dominion Textile on behalf of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

"The overwhelming majority of striking workers were women, and francophone women," Parent is quoted as saying about that labour conflict. "Their interests were being betrayed by the union leadership."

Parent's union activism on behalf of textile workers in Montreal, Valleyfield and Lachute – and later throughout Ontario, alongside her husband and fellow union activist Kent Rowley – turned her into an lifelong advocate for the rights of poor working women and a fighter for equal pay for work of equal value.

A lifelong battle against social injustice
Parent was born in 1918 into a liberal middle-class family. She was a boarder at the Villa-Maria convent and, according to Library and Archives Canada, she was appalled by the difference in treatment received by the girls employed as servants and boarders like herself.

"I simply could not accept that," Parent is quoted as saying.

Parent attended the exclusive Trafalgar Academy before going on to McGill University – a rare choice for a young francophone woman in 1936. Her battle against social injustice began there, fighting for bursaries for low-income students.

Throughout the 1940s, Parent was arrested five times, threatened and labelled a communist by Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis.

In 1947, Parent was charged with seditious conspiracy for her role in organizing Dominion Textile workers and sentenced to two years in prison – a sentence she never served after a new trial was ordered. In the second trial, in 1955, she was acquitted after just 30 minutes of deliberation.

Madeleine Parent remained an activist well into her retirement
Parent retired from the union movement in 1983 but remained an outspoken feminist, becoming a founding member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

"The influence of Madeleine Parent on Quebec's feminist movement is immense," said Alexa Conradi, president of the Quebec Womens' Federation, in a news release. "She always looked for ways to build bridges between women in the movement and those of diverse origins."

"She took the time to exchange, to share and to encourage others," Conradi said. "We miss her already."

Among other honours, Parent received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Concordia University in 2009.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/03/12/quebec-madeleine-parent-obit.html

[NewLeft]

I've only heard of her today (on rabble), she sounds like a real fighter. What a loss..

[Le Rouge]

May she rest in peace. She was real.

[blake 3:17]

She was a great great radical and exactly the kind we need dozens of.

She was the mentor of a dear friend who is in terrible grief at present. I never met her, but had the chance to send some jokes when she was quarantined in hospital a few years ago. Most were bad puns in franglais.

[blake 3:17]

Rick Salutin on Parent's death. Salutin wrote a biography of her life partner who was also a radical union activist.

Madeleine Parent, 1918-2012: Death of an icon
March 15, 2012

Rick Salutin


Madeleine Parent in 1972: During the Cold War, rumours were spread that she was Russian.
Keith Beatty/Toronto Star file photo
I received a call Monday morning saying Madeleine Parent had died, at 93, in a Montreal nursing home. She was a labour leader and fighter for social causes through a career that spanned the country and, though it wasn’t as big news here, it was a front-page story in Quebec. It recalled an early morning call from her over 30 years ago, when she lived in Toronto. “Kent has had another stroke,” she said. “I think this is it. We’re on our way to the hospital.” Her husband, Kent Rowley, with whom she’d battled on behalf of working people since the 1930s, died later that day. They really were the last of a breed and it really is the end of an era. There are times when only cliché will suffice.

She was a true daughter of Quebec’s French-speaking bourgeoisie (and also fluent in English). But in the social lab of the 1930s she chose to side with workers and the poor, which placed her on “the left.” During the war, she began working with Kent. He was organizing women workers in textile mills, though most union leaders then felt they weren’t worth the trouble. He was also rare in being willing to work with a young woman as an equal. In 1946 they won a hard strike against mighty Dominion Textile in Valleyfield. Quebec’s autocratic leader, Maurice Duplessis, saw them as personal antagonists. Kent went to jail for six months. Madeleine was indicted for “seditious conspiracy.” Duplessis rewrote the charges himself to strengthen them. She was convicted but it was overturned.

She became emblematic. Painter Marcelle Ferron called her, “The greatest figure of our time, the one who did the most to change Quebec.” In a still pious society, she was labelled a slut and whore; Rush Limbaugh didn’t originate that stuff. During the Cold War, rumours were spread that she was Russian and had been smuggled ashore from a submarine. Nor was she just a leader of women; the respect and deference of woodworkers or hard-rock miners when they sought her advice were palpable in their body language.

She and Kent fought ceaseless battles with their union headquarters which, like most then, was U.S.-based. When ordered to sign a sellout contract in 1953 they refused, and were expelled. They retreated to a small base of loyal workers and for decades, joined by other small unions with the same bitter experience, fought to build an independent, Canadian labour movement. They argued this case before workers everywhere in Canada. It was an era of labour rhetoric and both could turn around a dire situation on the picket line or in a union hall with the power of their words. They made plenty of enemies. When Kent — a master strategist on and off the picket line — died, people from rival unions came to the “viewing,” probably to verify it was really him in the coffin. Eventually, Canadianization succeeded. Most unions here are now national. Their own union joined the Canadian Auto Workers after it went independent in the 1980s.

That’s a lot in a few words but I’ve left something out: the romance. They fell in love while Madeleine was married to another organizer who was off at war. Afterward they all worked together but it “came out” during a strike. Eventually there was a divorce and new marriage in 1953. But almost simultaneously they were fired by their union bosses and Kent moved to Ontario to try to build a presence while Madeleine held on in Quebec. They lived apart for 15 years, then reunited in Ontario for a decade. After Kent died I wrote a biography on him. Going through the manuscript with her was the hardest bargaining I’ve ever done. But it probably should’ve been an opera. In the hospital that day after Kent’s second stroke, Madeleine told me they were making love at the time. As I said, “That’s wonderful,” she went on: “I always tried to be gentle.”

When I say “end of an era,” it’s not with despair. History moves on but there’s continuity. Class warfare may sound off-key today but We are the 99 per cent strikes a chord. Nor should people’s meaning be confined to the strict details of their lives. Kent, for instance, loved his four-volume Journals of Boswell from the 1700s. God knows why. Young Boswell was a rich Scottish twit who went to London for all the sex he could cadge and to hobnob with famous names. Maybe it shows that no one’s potential can be exhausted by the setting into which they’re born. There’s always something left over in a life.

Rick Salutin's column appears Friday. [email protected]

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1147106--madeleine-parent-1918-2012-death-of-an-icon