In Remembrance of Helen Ralston (1929-2006)

Sister Helen Ralston, RSCJ, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Sociology at Saint Mary's University, and one of the grandes dames of Canadian Sociology, passed away on 25 December 2006, following a brief illness. She was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia in 1929. She maintained her family ties and Australian contacts till the end of her life, travelling to Australia at least once a year and spending a good part of every year there, especially since her retirement. Being active in research till the end of her life, she was usually a visiting fellow at various Australian universities, lecturing and attending conferences. Helen Ralston was educated in convent schools, and eventually entered the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1957 in Albany, NY, and made her final profession in Rome in 1965. She received a diploma in Social Studies from the University of Sydney in 1952, a certificate in Medical Social Work in 1953, following which she worked at the Royal Newcastle Hospital. In 1956 she migrated to Canada, where she worked at the Montreal General Hospital. Sister Ralston launched her teaching career in 1959 at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Montreal. In 1962 she relocated to Halifax where she taught at the Convent of the Sacred Heart till 1965, when she returned to the United States to continue her education. She received a BA in Sociology in 1965, and in 1969 she received her MA, both from Boston College. In 1968, she joined the Faculty of Arts at Saint Mary's University in Halifax. With a reference from Everett Hughes, she obtained a Canada Council doctoral fellowship and went to Carleton, where she graduated in 1973 as their first Ph.D. in Sociology (Eichler 2001). She returned to Saint Mary's University as an assistant professor. She became a full professor in 1989 and retired in 1994 when she was granted the designation of Professor Emerita. Her work focussed on various issues concerning migrant women, with religion, identity, and empowerment as key themes. Critiquing the literature about South-Asian immigrant women as largely focussed on immigrants living in Ontario, and often in Toronto, she introduced a regional perspective, first looking at the Atlantic region, then at British Columbia. She also did comparative work that dealt with Canada, Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand. Her published comparative research focussed on immigration and multicultural policies; interconnected gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion in identity construction, and on experience and empowerment amongst first- and second-generation South Asian immigrant women. Dr. Ralston produced numerous published articles, reports, policy papers, and conference presentations as well as two well-received monographs, Christian Ashrams: A New Religious Movement in Contemporary India (1988) and The Lived Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada: The Interconnections of Race, Class and Gender (1997), a classic text on immigrant women in Atlantic Canada. This is an excellent record for someone who started an academic career as a mature adult. In the last couple of years, she had been working toward a theory of transnational identity in multiracial local, national, and global diaspora space. What is most remarkable about Helen was the unabated zeal and energy with which she continued to be involved in research and with the international academic community, long past her official retirement. In addition to religion, Helen Ralston identified with feminism in both her work and life, a challenging though not impossible combination. She had no difficulty telling the story of the tough fight she endured when she came up for tenure. It was unclear whether this was because she was a woman or because she was a nun. In a sociological universe where practitioners' range of religious identities mostly spans from atheists, to agnostics, to religiously amusical, a religious feminist sociologist might have been seen as an impossible identity--a contradiction in terms. …

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