Kay Macpherson
August 20, 1999
Peace activist Macpherson dead at 86
TORONTO (CP) -- In the mid-1960s when many Canadian women were at home making tuna
casseroles and waxing the kitchen floor, Kay Macpherson was languishing in a French jail.
She, along with a dozen other peace demonstrators, had tried to present a statement
to the secretary general of NATO during a 1964 conference in Paris. They were
protesting a proposal for a multilateral force that would allow any NATO naval commander
to press the nuclear button whenever he deemed necessary. For their trouble, they were
locked up. Macpherson, the politician, feminist and founder of the peace group
The Voice of Women, died of lymphatic cancer Thursday in Toronto at 86. When
the slim, indomitable white-haired activist received her Order of Canada from Gov. Gen Ed
Schreyer in 1982, he asked her, "and what
have you been up to lately?" "Revolution," she replied. And she
wasn't joking.
Macpherson served humanitarian causes and social concerns, particularly women's rights,
most of her life. She also helped establish Women for Political Action, and in 1977
was elected president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
Born in England in 1913, she trained as a physiotherapist before immigrating to Canada in
1935. After working in Montreal and then Fredericton, N.B., she married political
philosopher Brough Macpherson in 1944. She ran for federal office under the
Feminist Party banner, and in 1973 she joined the NDP and tried three times -- all
unsuccessfully -- to get a seat in the House of Commons.
Macpherson told The Canadian Press in 1994 that she had the ordinary feelings of not
liking force and violence. "I don't believe you solve problems by bopping people over
the head," she said.
June Callwood, a friend and colleague who joined Macpherson in many of the anti-war and
feminist demonstrations, called her" an extraordinary figure. "I have a
feeling of loss that goes beyond remembering that bubbling and sardonic personality,"
the author-broadcaster and social activist said Friday. "It's as if something that
you depend on in order to find your way is gone."