Rogues and Rebels by Brian Brennan

Author:Brian Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2016-03-04T19:11:32+00:00

Ruth Peacock Gorman. (Thomas A. Edge Archives at Athabasca University, 2009.004/2254(1))

Her father’s law firm gave her the opportunity to article, but practicing law was not high on Ruth’s priority list. She saw the courts as being dominated by men with little time for women lawyers. In 1940 she married a law-school classmate, John Gorman, gave birth to a daughter named Linda, and left the courtroom behind. From that point onward, she confined her legal activity to working as unpaid “convenor of laws” for the Calgary Local Council of Women. This was an umbrella group of women’s organizations formed in 1895 to become what co-founder Lady Isabella Lougheed called a “mothering society,” working to improve the living conditions of women and children through advocacy and education. They had never been able to find a qualified woman lawyer to help them achieve their reforms because few women went to law school in those days. Ruth became the answer to their prayers.

Like her father before her, Gorman took on the cause of fighting injustice when she joined the Local Council as legal counsel in 1942. She did so with a passion that was to burn in her for the rest of her life. Her first major initiative was to put together a brief calling for an amendment to Alberta’s Dower Act, a law that seemed equitable on paper because it prevented a husband from selling the matrimonial home without his wife’s consent. In practice, however, the law provided only limited protection for the wife because her only recourse if the husband sold the home without her permission was to sue him. If the husband then disappeared, noted Gorman, “the wife found herself and her children penniless and on the street.” She proposed that the law be broadened to allow the wife to sue the purchaser as well as the husband. To press her case, she went directly to Social Credit Premier William Aberhart and he, to her surprise, agreed to personally introduce the amendment in the Legislature. He surprised her further by inviting her to become his new Attorney General, because he couldn’t find a suitable replacement for a lawyer he had fired for refusing to support some of his fiscal-reform legislation. Ruth declined the offer, saying, “I have a husband and small baby to care for.”

Her success with the Dower Act amendment proposal whetted Gorman’s appetite for more advocacy. “I realized how powerful the Local Council of Women was, and how valuable to the community and the women of Calgary,” she wrote afterward. “For the next twenty years, I gladly served as their laws chairman.” She lobbied successfully for separate washrooms for men and women in buildings where they worked together. She convinced the justice authorities to hire more women police offers and prison matrons, and to institute improvements in the police lineup system to shield women witnesses from possible reprisal. Above all was her mounting concern for the social problems of Native women, especially those caught up in a prison system that had no basic facilities or programs for women in custody.

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