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Date of birth: Place of birth: Province: Callings:
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Photo : Thérèse Casgrain © 1981, LIDEC inc.
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Thérèse Forget
was born in a comfortable middle-class family in
Montreal. At the age of 19, she married Pierre
Casgrain who was a federal Member of Parliament
from 1917 to 1941. Despite her active family life,
she became involved in the country's social and
political life at the beginning of the 1920s. A
founding member of the Provincial Committee for
Women's Suffrage in 1921, she campaigned tirelessly
for the social, political and economic rights of
women. Her struggles profoundly marked the feminist
movement in Quebec.
In 1926, she founded the
Ligue de la feunesse féminine, participated
in the foundation of the Fédération
des oeuvres de charité
candienne-française and established the
Montreal Symphony Concerts Society. In 1928, she
led an arduous battle against the clergy and the
political elite of the time, under the leadership
of Henri Bourassa, for the legal rights of women
and to obtain the right to vote for women in
provincial elections. That objective was realized
in 1940 when the Liberal government of
Adélard Godbout came to power. During the
1930s she became a journalist and presented a
broadcast series called Fémina on
Radio-Canada. During the Second World War, she was
one of the two Presidents of the Women's
Surveillance Committee for the Wartime Prices and
Trade Board. In 1942, she spoke out against
conscription and campaigned as an independent
Liberal candidate in the federal elections. In
1946, she joined the CCF (the ancestor of the New
Democratic Party), which was closer to her
political ideals. She became President of the
Quebec wing of that party and ran a number of times
as candidate in the provincial elections without
being elected. In the 1940s, she took part in the
international meetings of socialist parties and
fought beside intellectuals and trade unionists
against the government of Maurice Duplessis. In
1962, she became President of the Voice of Women, a
movement protesting the proliferation of nuclear
arms, and in 1966, she founded the
Fédérations des femmes du
Québec. She took part in organizing aid for
Vietnam war victims and was a three-time President
of the League for Human Rights.
In 1970, she was appointed to
the Senate of Canada, but she had to retire the
following year because she had reached the age of
75. She continued, nonetheless, to fight to promote
the rights of Amerindiens, for the abolition of
mandatory retirement at 65 and to improve the lot
of seniors. A holder of 11 honorary doctorates, the
title of Grande Montréalaise in 1980 and
numerous prestigious distinctions,
Thérèse Casgrain, the Canadian
activist woman of the century, died at 85, on
November 3, 1981. In 1982, the Government of Canada
created the Thérèse Casgrain Award to
emphasize and extend the work of this eminent
Canadian. In 1985, the Canada Post Corporation
issued a stamp in her honour to commemorate the end
of the United Nations Decade for Women.
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