How women at The Globe watched the world change while, too often, the newsroom didn’t

Perhaps no one on the editing desk saw the irony. In February, 1976, The Globe and Mail profiled Maureen McTeer, the wife of new Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark. She was a law student and a feminist – though not, as The Globe’s reporter was careful to point out, a strident one.

“Maureen McTeer won’t disappear in Clark’s shadow,” read the headline on the profile. She was determined to have her own views, her own career, her own name. At least that was the plan; but The Globe was not playing along. “Mrs. Clark – who has kept her maiden name … ” The story referred to her throughout as “Mrs. Clark.”

A flame war, 1970s-style, broke out on The Globe’s normally sedate letters page. Peppery missives denounced Ms. McTeer’s convention-flouting – but more readers supported her. “Don’t you think it’s time The Globe and Mail came of age and recognized that women’s choices are our own to make and not yours to restrict?” wrote Rosemary Billings of Ottawa, who pointedly did not include her husband’s name.

One important group of women agreed that yes, indeed, it was time The Globe grew up. And that call was coming from inside the building: A number of female Globe journalists were incensed enough to write a petition to management demanding that the paper call the opposition leader’s wife by the name she chose.

Sylvia Stead, who joined The Globe as a summer student in 1974 and retired in 2023 as the newspaper’s public editor, remembers signing the petition: “Women in the newsroom were very unhappy about that, and said, ‘Women have the right to their own name.’”

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It was not the first or last time that turbulent social currents would rock the comfortable Globe boat. During the periods of second- and third-wave feminism, roughly from the 1950s to the present, women who worked at the newspaper were put in the uncomfortable position of watching the world take new shape out the window, while it remained stubbornly unchanging inside. They were witnessing, and writing about, the seismic transformations taking place as women fought for legal, social and political rights. At the same time, they were arguing for equality in their own careers, in a business that did not always adapt to change at the speed of light.

For example, despite the petition, The Globe did not adopt the honorific Ms. until 1984 – eight years after the Oxford English Dictionary recognized it, but two years before The New York Times took it up. Unfortunately, the recognition of Ms. came too late for The Globe’s reporting on the important work of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, created by prime minister Lester Pearson in 1967. Doris Ogilvie, a distinguished judge and panel commissioner, was described this way in the paper: “Mrs. Ogilvie, formerly Doris Dyer of Halifax, is a dentist’s wife with four teenage daughters. She is also a law graduate.” And the commission was headed by Anne Francis, who used that name professionally, but was referred to in the announcement establishing the commission as “Mrs. John Bird.”

Decades earlier, the women’s pages had been created as an advertising-friendly cocoon of recipes, sob stories and distractions from the unladylike harshness of a cruel world. The Globe and The Toronto Mail newspapers learned early that publishing women writers was good business – especially if they didn’t have to be paid as well as men. One of the most popular columnists in the country in the late 19th century was The Toronto Mail’s Kit Coleman, a dispenser of advice and pithy aperçus in her Woman’s Kingdom (she also became the first accredited female war correspondent while covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba). The journalist-adventuress also made for good copy: Readers of The Globe eagerly awaited the dispatches of Alice Freeman, writing under the pen name Faith Fenton, as she reported on the gold rush in Yukon Territory.

Though famous, these women were anomalies, and poorly paid anomalies at that: Only 35 women were listed as journalists in the Canadian census of 1891, according to Carole Gerson’s Canadian Women in Print, 1750-1918. A male journalist in Ontario in the late 19th century could hope to make $550 a year, while a woman would be lucky to take home $300. (The fight for equal compensation would continue at The Globe, and other newsrooms, until today.) Women also had to fight to write about serious topics, which were seen as the proper real estate of men.

Battles for women’s suffrage raged on the streets and in parliaments, and they were echoed on the letters page, often among women readers, and cloaked in early 20th-century ideas about the proper sphere of feminine influence. “Is there any vocation or walk of life where women are not showing daily they are as able as men?” wrote A Woman Who Pays Taxes in 1908. A reader who gave her name only as Nelly countered: “A thoughtful, intelligent, loving woman who loves her family and her home will exercise a long and far-reaching influence that a suffragette can never possess.”

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By the time the Second World War and its labour shortages rolled around, notions of where women belonged began conveniently to shift. The newsroom’s floodgates opened and young women with a taste for adventure (if not for luxurious living) poured in. In the early 1940s, a spirited teenager named June Callwood found a job as a reporter at The Globe, where, according to David Hayes’s 1992 history of the paper, Power and Influence, owner George McCullagh “used to chase her around the newsroom, because, as she would later recall, ‘he collected virgins, which I was at the time.’”

Callwood started out writing stories about women’s participation in the war effort, such as one from 1943 that appeared under the headline: “Airwomen accorded praise by once-skeptical airmen.” Decades later, after a career reporting on social issues, she was admitted to the Order of Canada, an honour also given to another Globe trailblazer, medical reporter Joan Hollobon.

Hollobon’s illustrious career took off when she replaced the male medical reporter, who took a one-year sabbatical in 1959 and came back as the science reporter. She covered the medical beat for the next 26 years, breaking stories about everything from surgical mistakes to disease outbreaks. Hollobon’s career began at a time when it was unusual to see female reporters covering “hard” beats, and also at a time that allowed memorable leads such as this one from 1959, about a weight-loss study: “Sad news for weak-willed fatties,” she wrote, a sentence that would probably cause an editor to faint today.

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While the paper was only lightly populated with women, each one shone ferociously bright. There was Jean Howarth, “empress of the editorial board,” as Hayes described her, “a gnomish figure with an acid tongue,” and Kay Kritzwiser, an influential feature writer and art critic, whose charms were summed up by Richard Doyle, a former editor of The Globe, in his memoir Hurly-Burly: “The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow.” Maybe there was a reason women struggled to find a place in the newsroom after all.

Christie Blatchford’s career would take her to all of Toronto’s major daily newspapers, but she started at The Globe, with her first story appearing in January, 1973, when she was still at journalism school. Already she possessed that ineffable quality called “voice,” as she wrote about a shabby hotel and strip club where “a fellow with too much time on his hands can find himself in time-consuming arguments that mean nothing when they’re over.”

Blatchford joined The Globe’s sports department as a columnist that year. Like many female journalists of the time, she cultivated a tough and witty exterior, preferring to laugh off the everyday sexism she encountered. But in her first book, Spectator Sports, she offered a more introspective reason for leaving The Globe for the Toronto Star in 1977: “I was also, I think now, a little lonely; being one of a handful of women writers was always interesting, but after a few years it was also isolating and unnerving.”

This was the dichotomy for The Globe’s women journalists in those decades: They were grateful for opportunities, often given to them when they were quite young, but also desperate for female mentorship and leadership.

“When I started, it was a real male bastion, there were very few women in the newsroom,” says Gwen Smith, who joined The Globe in the early 1980s as a copy editor and made a rapid ascent through the ranks. She was the paper’s national editor when she was still in her 20s, and later became deputy managing editor. When she left after a decade, “there were a lot more women at The Globe.”

Some of that hiring was done by progressive-minded men such as managing editor Geoffrey Stevens, but the snowball really picked up speed when women such as Smith and deputy managing editor Shirley Sharzer made a concerted effort to diversify the newsroom. This diversity, of course, was limited to gender; racialized journalists continued to be dramatically underrepresented well into the 21st century.

In this way, the atmosphere for women at The Globe continued to reflect the world outside: still chilly, but growing warmer. Editorials appeared in favour of increasing access to abortion, legalizing divorce and equalizing pay. But there remained a suspicion about the political enterprise of feminism, and how it might turn otherwise nice girls into gorgons. As one Globe reporter wrote in a profile of a women’s-rights activist in 1970, “Justly or not, there is an image printed on the minds of men and women of what women’s liberationists are like – strident, shrill, emotional and paranoid hawk-faced females who go around burning bras and trying to wear pants.”

It bears noting that the activist in that profile was fighting to return to her job as a university researcher after her maternity leave – a struggle that was mirrored in the Globe newsroom, where it was not uncommon for women to return postchildbirth to find they’d been reassigned to different beats, or even new sections of the newspaper.

It became the work of female journalists to turn the page on women’s-lib stereotypes. “Dispelling the myth of feminists as monsters” was the headline on a column by Adele Freedman, who was soon to make her mark as The Globe’s architecture critic. In the 1980s, Linda Hossie’s unofficial beat was “women’s issues,” and she wrote stories about issues – some of them irritatingly unresolved to this day – including pay equity and discrimination against Indigenous women. She left the Toronto newsroom to become one of the paper’s first female foreign correspondents (in Latin America) and was soon followed in the correspondent ranks by Jan Wong in China, Isabel Vincent in Brazil and Stephanie Nolen in several bureaus around the world.

But even as the news pages were grappling with the rise of women in the work force, and bowing to that pesky honorific Ms., the manpower on the masthead – and it was almost exclusively man-powered – failed to see the need for corresponding progress at The Globe itself.

“We were busy writing daycare stories and pay-equity stories,” says Vivian Smith, who was the national beats editor and a feature writer in the 1980s. “But the managers didn’t look around the newsroom and think that they needed to change as well.”

The irritation built up until it was ready to blow. A group of women began to organize what they called “femfests” – raucous, sometimes-boozy gatherings where they could share their irritations and triumphs, trade war stories and discuss how to achieve a fairer newsroom through collective action. It was solidarity with a side of sauvignon.

The femfests were a place to vent about sleazy behaviour, such as the senior editor who asked a female journalist to sit on his lap while discussing her news plans, or the other senior editor who called across a room to a reporter: “Hey, are you pregnant? Your boobs look bigger.”

As Gwen Smith and others pointed out, though, the casual sexism of the newsroom was just one part of a brusque culture that also rewarded resourcefulness and ambition. A young woman could rise quickly through the ranks, get fascinating assignments and run large departments. When Chrystia Freeland was in her early 30s, with no hint yet of the success she’d find in federal politics, she became The Globe’s deputy editor. Depending on where you stood, Freeland’s energy was either bracing or shrivelling. “In a buttoned-down environment like The Globe, she was a curiosity,” Leah McLaren, who worked for Freeland, wrote in a profile in Chatelaine. “As a manager, Freeland quickly developed a reputation for being demanding. She brimmed with energy and new ideas at a paper then primarily known for its unwavering resistance to change.”

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Not everyone enjoyed the winds of change, as the women at the femfests discovered when they began to demand more systemic transformation. At one point, they pushed for the company to conduct a survey of daycare possibilities for the newsroom. In the end, the majority of Globe staff did not want toddlers anywhere near the building, and a human-resources executive told them they could have a daycare when she could bring her cat to work.

Working through their union, women at The Globe also fought for maternity pay top-ups and won better compensation for parents in a series of contracts beginning in 1992. The issue of women being reassigned when they returned from maternity leaves continued to be a problem, though, with one reporter yanked from her beats twice (once for each baby).

Pay equity, of course, was another major challenge, although it was not taken up as a cause until the past decade, when union representatives studied newsroom wages and discovered that “a substantial pay gap exists between male and female employees.” The issue continues to be a contentious one at contract-negotiating time, as the union pushes for The Globe to study and improve wage equity – not just between genders, but for racialized journalists as well.

With the pay-equity issue, the tension between what women at The Globe write about and what they experience in their own careers continues. One of the newspaper’s most resonant investigations in recent years was Power Gap, a series of articles about income discrepancy in Canada by staff journalists Robyn Doolittle, Chen Wang and Tavia Grant. “For women in the workplace,” they wrote, “progress has stalled. By almost every metric, they continue to lag generations behind men.”

The Power Gap series examined vast chasms in influence and income in various fields – law, business, medicine, academia, public service. But the very newspaper in which it ran – and which continues to run important stories and opinion pieces about gender inequality – has never had a woman in the very top positions of editorial leadership, as either publisher or editor-in-chief.

There’s a famous phrase that former prime minister Kim Campbell has said: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. Over the years, The Globe and Mail’s leadership table has become more inclusive, providing a richer experience for staff and readers alike. But the best seats, at the head of the table, still remain out of reach.

Elizabeth Renzetti is an author and former columnist at The Globe and Mail.

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