Feminist Eventfulness, Boredom and the 1984 Canadian Leadership Debate on Women's Issues

Abstract This study seeks to dispel the cultural amnesia surrounding a feminist-organized televised leadership debate on women's issues during Canada's 1984 federal election, by articulating a parallel history of the debate's creation and staging, one that foregrounds the concept of feminist eventfulness. I distinguish contemporary ideas about eventfulness from scripts of media spectacle by locating political eventfulness in the less glamorous, more tedious work of feminist organizing. Drawing on archival records, feminist historical accounts, and print news media coverage of the debate's planning and implementation, I examine the organizational strategies used by the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) to stage the 1984 federal leaders' debate on women's issues. The negotiations with the political parties over venue, audience constitution, media numbers and NAC's overriding determination to preserve the "publicness" of the debate demonstrate the ways the women's group approached a long-standing struggle facing feminist organizing within the mainstream: how to accommodate or manage the difference between staging a feminist media event as opposed to a normative media event. Contrary to mainstream media reports which characterized the debate as a "boring non-event," I argue that NAC carried out the unprecedented appropriation and transformation of a "masculine" political ritual into a feminist media event that captured a larger audience share than that year's Stanley Cup ice hockey finals. Keywords: feminist eventfulnesstelevised political debatemedia eventCanadian feminist historyNational Action Committee on the Status of Women Notes 1. Sports broadcasts became an unofficial standard by which to measure the perceived importance of women's issues debates to the Canadian public more generally. For instance, in 1988, NAC President Lynn Kaye justified pursuing a second women's issues debate because the 1984 event had garnered fifty-four percent of the viewing audience (fourteen percent of the total population) or, as she put it in a letter to NAC's member groups, "more viewers than watch the Stanley Cup playoffs" (Kaye 1988 Kaye, Lynn (1988) Lynn Kaye letter to member groups, 11 Jul., [typed letter] National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 696, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). 2. In May 1984, the CACSW, a NAC member group, sent copies of its Shocking Pink Paper to the umbrella organization for broad distribution. A small, foldable document no bigger than a credit card, the Shocking Pink Paper is "[p]rinted in a special small format" that gives the reader at-a-glance information on ten election issues, outlining their relevance to women specifically. Playing with the stereotypically feminine pink color, the design of the pamphlet was carefully crafted to meet the perceived needs of female voters. Small enough to "fit in pocket, wallet or handbag," the hot pink color not only mitigates the risk of it becoming lost in a jumble of papers or other everyday objects found in a briefcase or bag, but also symbolically invests the issues addressed in its folds with a sense of urgency and importance. The Pink Paper is most "shocking" in the facts it sets forth on a diverse range of issues, including violence against women ("…as adults and as children we are raped and sexually abused"), poverty (e.g. "Over 2/3 of the single people in Canada who are poor are women"), microtechnologies (…by 1990, nearly a million Canadian women may be unemployed due to technological change"), job ghettoes ("Over 62% or all employed women, compared to 29% of employed men, hold clerical, sales and service jobs") and parental benefits ("Women in the labour force are penalized for becoming mothers") (CACSW 1984b Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (1984b) Shocking Pink Paper, May, National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 803, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). A staple of CACSW and NAC pre-election consciousness-raising efforts, the paper was intended "to prepare Canadian women to better influence the political process" (CACSW 1984a Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (1984a) Press Release, 7 May, National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 803, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). Beyond this, in a CACSW press release, Lucie Pépin, President of the CACSW, describes the Shocking Pink Paper as a strategic tool to empower and embolden women to effect concrete political change: "'As women make up such a small portion of our elected representatives—15 women out of 282 federal Members of Parliament, or 5.3%—we believe the time has come for women to stand up and ask major questions that will give them a chance to change how Canadian political parties now handle women's concerns'" (CACSW 1984a Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (1984a) Press Release, 7 May, National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 803, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). What this last statement reveals is that the goal of the feminism advocated by NAC and its member group at this time was to ameliorate the way women were treated within the political process, whether as individual voters, as a constituency, or as candidates themselves. Resisting the temptation to endorse and campaign for a particular party (like their American counterpart, the National Organization for Women (NOW)), NAC focused their pre-election efforts on building channels of communication through which information on women's policy issues could flow. In the case of the Shocking Pink Paper, this meant that NAC and the CACSW quite literally gave women the words with which they could elicit that information from their candidates. 3. Despite repeated calls for some public act of contrition, Turner refused to apologize for the gaffe until two days prior to the debate on women's issues. 4. In attendance at the debate planning meetings were representatives for the Progressive Conservative party including Brian Armstrong, Tom Gould, media advisor to Mulroney, and Jocelyn Côté-O'Hara, Mulroney's personal advisor on women's issues; the Liberal party, including Ratna Ray, director of the Women's Bureau in the federal Department of Labour from 1979 through 1984, and Gordon Ashworth, the top campaign operative for Turner; and the NDP, including Ellen McQuay and Valerie Preston, the federal coordinator of women's activities for the NDP. NAC's representatives included President Chaviva Hošek, NAC Executive member (and future president) Lynn Kaye, Nadine Nowlan, Betty Stanley (media liaison for NAC), and MaryLou Murray (meeting secretary). 5. In Canada, televised leadership debates are typically organized by a consortium of major broadcast networks, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada's public broadcaster), Global (a privately-owned English language television network), TVA (a privately-owned French language television network), and CTV (Canada's largest privately-owned network) (Michelle Rogers 2010 Rogers, Michelle. 2010. Reforming Federal Election Debates in Canada: Centre for the Study of Democracy Conference, Kingston: Queen's University. [Google Scholar], p. 17). 6. The debate's bilingualism was a contentious topic under negotiation, as NAC underestimated the significance of the language issue both for the networks and the political parties. In late July, Hošek had predicted that the debate questions "will be primarily in English, but […] one or two will be in French as well" (Canadian Press 1984a Canadian Press (1984a) 'Debate on, women's group says', Montreal Gazette, 4 Aug., n.p., National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 779, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). However, the networks mandated that the debate be bilingual in accordance with national policy. Moreover, Mulroney's strategic courting of Quebec voters during the 1984 election meant that his advisors pushed hard for a precise fifty-fifty split between English and French language segments (Meeting Minutes 1984a Meeting Minutes (1984a) 2 Aug., [handwritten minutes] National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 779, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). Hošek's miscalculation surprises in light of her organization's ongoing struggles to maintain a positive relationship with the Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ), a prominent francophone women's organization. As the debate preparations progressed, the FFQ publicly criticized NAC for neglecting its francophone sisters. In one report, FFQ president Denise Rochon remarked, "It's a fact that francophone women have been neglected so far […] We were not invited to prepare questions and if we were promised tickets, they were for watching and not participating" (Canadian Press 1984b Canadian Press (1984b) 'Networks eye third debate', Globe and Mail, 25 Jul., n.p., National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 779, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). 7. In an attempt to circumvent the passive audience guideline, Hošek suggested that the debate include a live question and answer segment, when audience members could ask their own prepared questions of the leaders. Her idea failed to impress: "Terrible idea," was one party representative's immediate response (Meeting Minutes 1984b Meeting Minutes (1984b) 6 Aug., [handwritten minutes] National Action Committee on the Status of Women fond. 779, Canadian Women's Movement Archives [Google Scholar]). 8. A rebellion reminiscent of Michel Foucault's observation that "where there is power, there is resistance" ([1978 Foucault, Michel. ([1978]1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume 1), trans Robert Hurley New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]]1990, p. 95).

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