“Adversity when you are young is a very good thing. I have never objected to it,” says Adrienne Clarkson.
Canada’s 26th Governor General remembers her days at U of T when she completed a bachelor’s degree at Trinity College and a master’s degree in English literature at the School of Graduate Studies.
While Clarkson has fond memories of U of T, she also remembers early struggles.
“I went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto from 1956 to 1960, and one of my clearest memories is of not being allowed into Hart House except into The Buttery coffee shop part. Women were not allowed into the rest of it even though there was the greatest collection of art there [like] the Group of Seven,” said Clarkson.
She distinctly remembers the 1957 debate between then-Senator John F. Kennedy and William Buckley and her disappointment at how women were denied this kind of intellectual debate at Hart House. (Women were finally admitted in 1972.) Clarkson describes this as the “turning point in consciousness” for her about the plight of women in university at that time.
Clarkson also mentioned the U of T’s History Club where admission was limited to male students with the highest marks in their third and fourth year of study. And women were excluded from winning the prestigious Rhodes scholarships.
“Everything that was high and excellent was really only for men so that women, if they were struggling to do the very best that they could to be better than anybody, were considered to be anomalies,” said Clarkson.
This didn’t stop Clarkson from winning a governor general’s medal in English, (created in 1873 by Lord Dufferin, Canada’s third Governor General after Confederation in recognition of academic excellence), and being involved in university politics, serving as vice president of the Students’ Administrative Council and president of St. Hilda’s College.
Nor has it been an obstacle in her professional career. Clarkson has been an award-winning CBC journalist and has had a successful career in public service. She was named the first Agent-General for Ontario in Paris from 1982 to 1987, promoting Ontario’s business and cultural interests in Europe and is only the second woman and the first immigrant to be named as the Governor-General of Canada.
Clarkson sees the 120th anniversary of the official admission of women at U of T as part of a bigger picture in the movement of women’s rights, including the suffragette movement and the landmark Person’s Case in 1929 where women were finally declared persons before the law. She believes that while women have come a long way, it is important to remember their early struggles and the current challenges for women today. And although many barriers such as admission to law school and medical school for women have gradually broken down, the battle is not quite over.
Clarkson says that women need “to look at the rest of society and think what has not been broken down-where is the glass ceiling? What kind of society have women made with the kind of education that they’ve got? I think those are the important questions.”
Asked about her legacy, Clarkson hopes to be remembered for being able to bring the country together by demonstrating the common thread that binds Canadians, no matter where they are: their distinctly Canadian identity.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do travelling 200,000 kilometres, by going to nearly 200 communities, by going to the North to about 40 communities, most of which have never been visited before by a Governor General-that’s what it means to do that,” Clarkson said.
While some might argue, (as The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente recently has with great vehemence) that the office of the Governor General, as the Queen’s representative in Canada, is merely symbolic or even irrelevant, Clarkson disagrees.
“[M]y symbolic presence is that I am the rest of Canada coming to see them … and that legacy is true, I think, in my role as commander-in-chief, where I have gone to visit our troops who are doing peacekeeping in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in the Persian Gulf, this year in Afghanistan because I believe that Canadian people want to be represented to their troops and the troops want to know that [Canadians] are thinking of them,” says Clarkson. “The Governor General, after all, has a very strong symbolic role. That doesn’t mean empty. Symbols are not empty things. Symbols are repositories for very important rituals, very important feelings and I hope that that would be remembered.”
Sheila Dabu is the features writer for the School of Graduate Studies, which will also publish an interview with the Governor General.
