Personal Stories of the Women of Women’s Caucus

Scroll down to read the bios of: Jackie Ainsworth, Bonnie Beckman, Margaret Lowe Benston, Elizabeth Briemberg, Andrea Lebowitz, Drena McCormack, DJ O’Donnell, Jean Rands, and Anne Roberts. We are continuously adding stories to this page, so check back to see more!

Jackie Ainsworth

In the summer of 1971 I was 20 years old and working as a waitress at Smitty’s Pancake House in Vancouver. I had recently decided not to return to university. There was a lot happening in the world that interested me more than going to school. Demonstrations against the war in Vietnam were happening almost daily it seemed and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were becoming household names. Read more.

Bonnie Beckwoman

I’ve been asked to give a brief summary of my experience on the “Abortion Caravan” of 1970. How I came to be on that escapade is a story in itself.

I was 24 years old, had hitchhiked 1/2 way round the world myself – starting at 17 when I dropped out of school (today I’d be labelled with an acronym), but then it was just I couldn’t learn and saw no reason to torture myself in the alien atmosphere of a school anymore. Read more.

Margaret Lowe Benston

Famous as Maggie was for ground-breaking work in chemistry, computing science and women’s studies, what I remember most is her complete commitment to the collective good. She believed in community; she lived and worked cooperatively, and, until her dying days in 1991, she joined with women and workers around the world to resist capitalism and build a better society based on socialist ideals. Read more.

Elizabeth Briemberg

Born in 1939 and raised in a village in the south of England, a village where the word ‘abortion’ was never mentioned and divorce was treated as shameful and spoken of only in whispers. My awakening to political realities was when I learned of the H-bomb in 1952 and the state killing of the Rosenbergs by the US in 1953.  I attended a ‘progressive’ co-educational school where my father was a teacher and discrimination against girls was minimal, but class differences were significant. It was when I went to University to study Physics that, despite my college being dedicated to women’s education and one of the earliest higher education colleges for women in England, the discrimination against women physicists obtaining work as other than teachers led me to abandoning Physics altogether and I decided to train to be a social worker. Read more.

Andrea Lebowitz

Born in 1941 in Connecticut, Andrea Pinto Lebowitz received her B.A. from The College of New Rochelle, a women’s Catholic college in New York, and her M.A. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1965, she and her then husband Michael Lebowitz moved to Vancouver to take positions at the newly established Simon Fraser University, he to teach economics and she to teach English.  The marriage was short-lived, and Andrea soon formed a life partnership with high school teacher Wayne Wiens. Read more.

Drena McCormack

Drena was a member of Vancouver Women’s Caucus and involved in many of its activities from its beginnings on the SFU campus. She was active in the Abortion campaign and then became very much involved in the Working Women’s Association, founded by the Caucus, and with the subsequent women’s unions that were created.- the Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC) and the Union of College Employees (AUCE). The following is an account of an interview with Drena in 2016 about her memories of that time. Read more.

D.J. O’Donnell

Doreen-Jean became active in the Women’s Caucus in 1969 and contributed much to our internal debates, the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference and later by initiating discussion on Lesbianism in the women’s movement. She was interviewed about her memories of the Caucus in November 2015. Read more.

Jean Rands

I grew up in Saskatchewan in the 50s – a time and place without human rights legislation or women’s rights. Indigenous people had no right to vote and were segregated.

Our family had moved to Saskatchewan after my father was fired for being a communist. The CCF government attracted left-wingers from across Canada and beyond, but the CCF was also full of McCarthyism and racism. Read more.

Anne Roberts

Born in 1944, I was raised in that proverbial “village” of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who farmed in a small rural area west of Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, gender roles were rigidly defined – the women cleaned the house, preserved and cooked the food, and took care of children, the garden and the chickens.  The men did the farming outside the home, in the fields and barns. But, as kids, both boys and girls were expected to contribute whatever they were physically capable of doing.  Until puberty, that is. What a shock to find out I had to hang up my tractor hat and do the women’s chores inside. The 1950s were a conservative time across North America, but the dominance of the Dutch-Calvinist religion made Western Michigan a particularly conservative place to grow up. The Bible was the only book in many neighbours’ houses, friends were not allowed to go to movies or dances, and “godless commies” were felt to be enough of a threat kids volunteered after school to man watch towers, ready to sound the alarm for oncoming Soviet planes. Read more.