Women's rights champion Doris Anderson dies at 85

Doris Anderson, a vocal proponent of women's rights and proportional representation, made Chatelaine the best read magazine in the country under her editorship in the 1960s and 1970s. She died this afternoon in St. Michael's Hospital of pulmonary fibrosis. She was 85.

As editor of Chatelaine, Ms. Anderson wanted to give readers what they expected in the way of recipes, beauty and parenting tips, but she also wanted to give them “something serious to think about” and to “shake them up a bit” with well-written, hard-hitting investigative pieces on abortion, birth control, discriminatory divorce laws and the wage gap.

And she hired excellent journalists to write them, including June Callwood, Christina McCall (later Newman) Michele Landsberg, Barbara Frum and Sylvia Fraser. “I had fabulous women,” she said later, explaining that many of them came to her because they couldn't find places to write elsewhere.


LINK: Read the entire article at the Globe and Mail