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.

Drena grew up in a working class family in Vancouver and Burnaby and then for the last two years of High School she lived in the Okanagan Valley and, prior to attending Vancouver City College, spent a year in Montreal with a friend. She was hoping to earn enough money to go to Europe but found that to be impossible. During that cold winter in Montreal she came across an article about the Humanist Society of Canada and this led to her attending a public meeting of the Society held at George Williams University. She had expected the speaker to be speaking on Humanism and was surprised and astounded that the speaker was a Dr Morgenthaler speaking on the subject of Abortion. She said he was a very good speaker and made ‘total sense’ but she was overwhelmed that he was speaking about abortion in public and she was hearing him. She had never heard the word ‘abortion’ spoken out loud before. She had not encountered any feminist discussion in Kelowna and any reference to abortion was spoken of secretly and with shame. After she asked a question following his talk she was then horrified by the thought people back in Kelowna might hear about her being at the meeting. She was 20, on her own, and thought most of those present were much older. This discomfort led to her not attending future meetings. She felt very strange at the time but believes that that exposure to the struggle for abortion rights made her ready to join the wider struggle for women’s rights when she later encountered the SFU women student activists. She had also been influenced by the writings of Mary Beard, a US feminist historian, ‘who had written ‘impure’ thoughts that the world is not fair to women’.

On returning to BC Drena enrolled at VCC and in 1968 became Vice-President of the Student Union. She worked with the Student Union President, Lyle Osmondson, on a project to clarify, simplify and make transparent, the requirements for students to transfer from colleges in BC to degree awarding universities. This project brought her in contact with the Student Union officers of both Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia and led to them working together to develop a coalition of unity in order to develop demands and solidarity relating to the transfer issues. It was in the course of doing this that Drena met the women students at SFU who had decided to develop their own women’s organization because, although engaged in the student movement called the Student Democratic University, they rejected the male chauvinism of the leaders of that movement. She quickly joined these women and became one of the leaders of the occupation of the SFU Administration building in 1968 and was arrested along with 114 other students. This was the time when the Administration Board Room was taken over and converted into a Day Care. It was from that action the demand for Day Care on campus developed.

Drena described the focus of the SFU women’s movement as quickly moving away from solely University issues and why it was decided to move off campus. It retained the name of Women’s Caucus (VWC) but was never the caucus of any other organization. She had left VCC and became more involved and active in the Caucus work after this move off campus. She remembers the many planning meetings held at the Labour Temple office to plan and develop the Abortion campaign in 1969 and she was involved in producing pamphlets about abortion issues. She clearly remembers distributing them to all the gynaecologists listed on the directory at the Broadway Medical Building and also remembers marching with several women downtown, dressed as witches, in a street theatre action to highlight the issue of access to abortion. They threw red paint at the door of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and then made a quick getaway in a friend’s van. She spoke at a few High Schools on women’s rights, and in particular at Eric Hamber School where students in the class she spoke to were the backbone of the High School Student movement. She also spoke to a Youth group at the Jewish Community Centre.

Drena did not go on the Abortion Caravan to Ottawa in May 1969 but was one of the people in the anchoring group in Vancouver who provided information to the Press and involved themselves in actions back in the City in support of the Caravan. In June 1970 she was present at the Strategy meetings held by the Caucus after the office had moved to Carroll Street in the Downtown eastside and remembers the heated discussions which went on at that time. In those meetings she identified with those who proposed that the Caucus should be a multi-issue organization. She wanted to see included, as a major part of our work, the rights and needs of working women in addition to the abortion access issue and the educational work on women’s rights generally. She strongly supported the development of a working women’s union which in October 1972 was realized in the form of SORWUC, the Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada.

Between early 1971 and 1973 Drena was less active in the Caucus because she was living some way out of Vancouver and gave birth to her older child in September 1972. During that period she would come into Vancouver for specific activities and was always in touch with the Caucus but was unable to take part in much of the work. She returned to the City with her partner and son in September 1973 and soon after started working as a secretary at SFU. She became involved with the further development of SORWUC and some of the actions and pickets related to that but was most involved with the formation and certification of ‘The Association of University and College Employees’, AUCE Local 2, the union promoted by the Working Women’s Association of the Caucus and formed by the women workers at SFU. She recalled that Jean Rands and Jackie Ainsworth always stressed the necessity of organizing working women where they are at and AUCE Local 2 provided that opportunity for her. She remembered many of the SFU women staff being enthusiastic but others were ‘terribly afraid’ of joining a union, seeing themselves as semi-professionals.

In reviewing these years of action Drena is incredibly proud of the boldness and articulation of all sorts of demands the Caucus made for the rights of women. It is amazing to her that we were so sure that our ideas were right and that we had the right to pursue them. She said she did not understand ‘power’ at that time and thought that, given our ideas about women’s rights made sense and were logical, she fully expected we would achieve them. She describes the Abortion Caravan as being a very important historical moment in Canadian history and that the women’s unions which were formed were also greatly significant. At the time many of the long established unions rejected the innovative contract clauses in the AUCE contracts designed to specifically meet women’s needs saying ‘that’s not going to work for women’. Now numbers of those innovative clauses have been incorporated into present union contracts to the benefit of all women workers.

Looking back, Drena noted with surprise the total absence of the concept of the Patriarchy in the discussions, writings and formulations within the Caucus. Our focus was almost entirely on our rights – regarding our reproductive choices; our rights and needs as women workers; our rights for a non-sexist education; our rights as mothers and our concerns internationally about imperialism. She noted that there was no mention of violence against women or the abuse of women. Those concerns came to the fore in the midseventies after women started sharing what they thought were personal experiences only. She mused on the way in which ideas that germinated during those years of the Women’s Caucus came to fruition to the point that now many women take them for granted.

By Liz Briemberg and Drena McCormack