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Feminist and Lesbian Organizing in 1970s Newfoundland

By: Rhea Rollmann

Rhea Rollmann

Historical Contributor

Rhea Rollmann (she/her) is an award-winning journalist, writer, and audio producer based in St. John’s, NL, and is the author of A Queer History of Newfoundland (Engen Books, 2023). She’s a founding editor of The Independent NL and her journalism has appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, CBC, Xtra Magazine, Chatelaine, PopMatters, Riddle Fence, Macleans and more. Her academic work has been published in the Journal of Gender Studies, Labor Studies Journal, Canadian Woman Studies, Journal of Work and Society, Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Review of Sociology, Screen Bodies and elsewhere.

Her work has garnered three Atlantic Journalism Awards, the Andrea Walker Memorial Prize for Feminist Health Journalism and multiple CAJ award nominations. Her 2023 book A Queer History of Newfoundland was longlisted for the Winterset Award, and in 2024 she was a short-listed nominee for the NL Provincial Human Rights Award. She’s President of CUPE Local 4554 at Memorial University, a member of CUPE’s National Pink Triangle Committee, and also serves on the Board of Directors of Trans Support NL, the National Community Radio Association, and the Global Association Against Traffic in Women. She also has an extensive background in labour organizing and queer/trans activism, and is Station Manager at CHMR-FM, a community radio station in St. John’s, NL.

It’s often said that Newfoundland and Labrador experiences social trends a decade after the rest of North America. So while others experienced the 1960s, in Newfoundland it was the 1970s that were a period of radical, revolutionary change, as the spirit of feminism and other social movements swept across the province. 

In early 1972, in the provincial capital, a series of mass meetings were held at St. John’s City Hall. Hundreds of women attended, fired up by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which had travelled the country hearing submissions and developing recommendations for improving the lives and equality rights of Canadian women. In 1970, it delivered its final report along with 167 recommendations, which federal and provincial governments then took to deliberating, debating which recommendations to adopt and how. Not content to leave these decisions up to the male-dominated legislatures, women’s organizations from all points of the political spectrum came together in organizing public meetings of local women to discuss the report and its recommendations. The meetings brought together feminists of every stripe and creed, from the wool-suited conservatives of the Business and Professional Women’s Club (known today as the Federation of Business and Professional Women) to the university student activists calling for abortion rights. In St. John’s, at that first mass meeting of women in April 1972, those activists caused an uproar by distributing a petition in favour of abortion rights; staunch Catholics yelled at them, and they yelled back just as loudly. 

“It was mass confusion,” one eyewitness recalled. 

That meeting culminated in a broad consensus to meet again the following month to determine how best to put the report’s recommendations into action. What emerged from those tumultuous meetings was a commitment to create a new organization, dedicated purely to the cause of acting on the Status of Women report and improving the situation of women in the province. Over the next several months, a steering committee (selected from volunteers at the May meeting) met to fine-tune the organization’s bylaws and mission statement, which on September 18, 1972, was formally adopted at a founding meeting of 52 members. The Newfoundland Status of Women Council (NSWC) came into being. 

The NSWC wasn’t the only feminist organization to emerge at that time. A collective calling itself A Woman’s Place also materialized, formed out of local feminist consciousness-raising groups. The more radical and working-class activists of A Woman’s Place dreamed of a permanent headquarters for feminist organizing in the capital city, and with the aid of grants, donations, and fundraising they opened rental offices in the city’s downtown. Finally, St. John’s had its first women’s centre. 

The more conservative women of the NSWC also set their sights on a women’s centre but went about it more methodically, drawing up detailed and ambitious plans and applying for large federal grants. They collaborated closely with feminists from Toronto and elsewhere who were doing the same thing. Both groups – NSWC and A Woman’s Place – recognized the need for solidarity, and for a time they united forces, pooling grant money and sharing offices. They co-published a newsletter and collaborated on some political campaigns. 

But tensions also emerged. The Woman’s Place activists included communists and socialists and resisted hierarchical organizing structures in lieu of a collective model that made decisions by consensus. They adopted a fearlessly in-your-face approach to their activism, crashing and disrupting Catholic anti-feminist and anti-abortion events. They devoted much of their work to supporting women seeking abortions, which at that time were all but inaccessible in the province (members would help women fly to Montreal or New York to obtain them). NSWC set its sights on legislative change, including pay equity and property rights for women. These, of course, are broad generalizations: there was a great deal of collaboration and crossover between the two groups, and overlapping campaigns. But eventually tensions proved too much and they parted ways, opening their own separate women’s centres. A Woman’s Place lasted only a few months after the split, but NSWC lives on today. By the end of the decade, other women’s centres had formed across the province – in Corner Brook (1974), Grand Falls-Windsor (1976), Labrador West (1977), and elsewhere (there are today nine) – and a contentious debate emerged as to whether NSWC in St. John’s – the oldest and largest of the women’s centres – ought to continue to aspire to lead the provincial feminist movement or cede that role and work with the province’s other women’s centres collaboratively as equals. In 1980, NSWC voted for the latter approach, changing its name to the more humble St. John’s Status of Women Council, but today it remains the province’s largest and most well-organized feminist organization, operating a wide swath of services and programming, from sex worker advocacy to shelters; diversity training to political activism. 

Organizing models, radical politics, and abortion weren’t the only issues that caused tension in Newfoundland’s early modern feminist movement. The issue of lesbianism, and the role of feminism in the queer liberation movement, became a catalytic issue as well. A significant number of the activists in both A Woman’s Place and NSWC were lesbians, but they remained in the closet (some activists from the period assert that lesbians had a more public presence in A Woman’s Place, although others don’t recall this). As a queer liberation movement began to emerge, NSWC allies like the nascent Newfoundland-Labrador Human Rights Association warned NSWC activists to not have anything to do with it, and to avoid “distractions” like gay and lesbian rights. The province’s first formal queer community organization – the Community Homophile Association of Newfoundland (CHAN) – reached out to NSWC seeking support and offered to give them a presentation about their work. CHAN activists recall the joint meeting as polite, awkward, and poorly attended, and no further efforts at collaboration were made. 

But lesbians continued to play a key role in NSWC. When a rape crisis committee formed at NSWC in 1977, it was led primarily by lesbians. It rapidly grew into a Rape Crisis Centre (RCC), which operated a telephone support line and provided advocacy initiatives and in-person support; volunteer training sessions incorporated overt discussion of the important role of lesbianism in the feminist and anti-rape movement. The RCC’s co-founder and for many years leading organizer, Diane Duggan, became increasingly and publicly out about her lesbian activism and helped bring the fight for lesbian rights to the regional and national level through the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres.

Lesbians were becoming more visible in other areas of NSWC operations. In 1982, Beth Lacey, a local activist who had previously conducted workshops on lesbianism, became executive director of the St. John’s Status of Women Council (SJSWC). Workshops on lesbian issues were increasingly incorporated into SJSWC events like film festivals and art festivals. Activists recall the annual Take Back the Night marches as important not only for their empowering chants and speeches against sexual violence, but also because they were a space where lesbians were not afraid to be loud and visible and public as lesbians. By the mid-1980s, SJSWC was deeply involved in the fight for queer rights, working with queer community groups like Gay Association in Newfoundland to lobby the provincial government for human rights protections (by the mid-1980s, the Newfoundland-Labrador Human Rights Association had also finally come round, and incorporated the fight for queer rights as a key component of its activism too). In 1991, when Memorial University of Newfoundland’s student newspaper The Muse was threatened with closure (and a police investigation) after it published a lesbian- and gay-themed special issue that sparked enormous controversy across the province, SJSWC spoke out powerfully in its defence and helped organize a rally and press conference in support. 

But tensions lingered. Some SJSWC members felt that the increasingly public presence of lesbians at the Women’s Centre, and demands for queer liberation and same-sex rights, were a distraction from issues of economic and political equality for women and threatened the credibility and appeal of the organization’s work. Many lesbians, for their part, felt that SJSWC paid insufficient attention to the discrimination they experienced, both in society and within the feminist movement, and they called for autonomous organizing spaces within SJSWC and the Women’s Centre it operated. These tensions – which the SJSWC leadership struggled to mediate – culminated in a human rights lawsuit in 1991, which contributed to a temporary closure of the Women’s Centre later that year and an organizational restructuring before it reopened in 1993. That restructuring moved SJSWC further away from its collectivist routes – deepening hierarchical structures and reporting mechanisms in an effort to address the complex needs of a growing employee base – but it also publicly acknowledged the need for SJSWC to do a better job of addressing the needs of lesbian and queer members. 

These were painful moments for the Newfoundland and Labrador feminist movement, but the growing pains shaped the forward trajectory of feminist activism in the province. Out of these divisive struggles emerged the province’s most significant lesbian organization – Newfoundland Amazon Network (NAN) – which was formed by lesbian activists around the time the Women’s Centre shut down because of the lawsuit. Even after it reopened and lesbians returned to work there, NAN continued to operate autonomously; among other accomplishments, it led the struggle for amendments to the province’s Human Rights Code around sexual orientation. NAN was the wise elder sister to Newfoundland Gays and Lesbians for Equality (NGALE), a provincial queer rights group that subsequently formed in 1993. NGALE activists recall members of NAN providing critical training and political support to their activism. Together the two groups finally succeeded in making the provincial government amend Newfoundland’s Human Rights Code in 1997 to include sexual orientation as a prohibited ground of discrimination (gender identity and gender expression wouldn’t be added to the code – protecting trans and gender-diverse residents of the province – until 2011). 

Although it moved away from its roots as a consensus-based collective in the 1990s, SJSWC continues to play a critical role in the struggle for queer liberation today. It now occupies a sprawling facility in the city centre, in addition to stand-alone housing and other units across town. It offers a growing array of counselling services, sex worker support and advocacy, training, and other programs. Its support has expanded to include trans and gender-diverse people as well. The lack of support for trans community members in the province was keenly felt by gender-diverse Newfoundlanders in the 1980s and 1990s, many of whom felt alienated by the feminist movement’s very binary focus, which appeared to acknowledge lesbianism as the only valid form of queer expression for those involved with SJSWC. That gradually changed in the 21st century, as SJSWC became increasingly involved in trans advocacy at the local and provincial levels. The early struggles of lesbians for recognition within the feminist movement were in many ways echoed by those of trans and gender-diverse people two decades later.