Brown was Beautiful

It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vancouver Status of Women and Rosemary Brown was reminiscing about the early days of the women’s movement.

“We were so naïve in those days,” she told the packed audience. “We thought if we just explained the problems women were facing to the politicians, things would change.”

Other pioneer feminists told me they were never that naïve but the thing about Rosemary was that she always believed that change would come if only people would understand the need for it. She had that rare kind of positive spirit. That’s why it’s so hard to believe she is gone. Rosemary passed away this weekend at the age of 72.

The first black woman to serve in a legislature in Canada, Rosemary was an MLA in British Columbia in 1972. When women were still a rarity in politics, Rosemary served for fourteen years. In 1975, she took on the battle for leadership of the federal New Democratic Party, the first woman to ever run for the leadership of a party. She came in second after four ballots on a wave of feminist organizing that would change that party in a profound way. Rosemary just didn’t accept any barriers. Her slogan was “Brown is Beautiful.”

In a biography of Brown published by CoolWomen [1], the origins of her feminism are explained: By 1967, Rosemary Brown had three children, a Masters of Social Work, a hysterectomy and an unyielding depression. Somebody gave her a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. ‘Suddenly it was all there,’ she recalled, ‘the story of my life... The fact that I was not alone reassured me and mobilized me.’ Yet she felt conflict, externally and internally; white women did not seem to understand racism, and people of colour did not consider sexism a major issue. She explained her perspective in a 1973 speech, saying in part, ‘...to be Black and female in a society which is both racist and sexist is to be in the unique position of having nowhere to go but up!’

About ten years ago, when the women’s movement was suffering from divisions caused by racism, I went to talk to Rosemary to get more insight into what was happening. From the outside, it seemed that as a black woman Rosemary had always been integrated into the leadership of the women’s movement. Was racism a problem she faced inside the women’s movement? I asked.

Rosemary spent a long time telling me stories of the racism she faced over the years in the women’s movement. It was often subtle but always present. The fact that the early women’s movement is always described as white and middle class when she and other women of colour and aboriginal women played a key role in those early days was a sign of their invisibility.

That the first woman to run for the leadership of a political party in Canada was a black woman should be a matter of pride for the feminist movement — for the entire country — but it is rarely even mentioned. Every school child in the United States knows the name of Rosa Parks, but how many know in Canada the name of Rosemary Brown?

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