Women in politics cracking the glass ceiling
When Émilie Thuillier was first elected to city council in 2009, citizens often assumed she was a political assistant rather than a full-fledged councillor.
“We were three young councillors in our early 30s, two men and one woman, and we often went to events together.
“The two others would go in and people would say, ‘Hello, Mr. Councillor.’ And then they’d see me and they’d say: ‘Hello, you must be the attaché!’
“It happened systematically for two years,” she said.
“They weren’t saying it in a mean way. They just naturally assumed that the two men must be councillors and since I was a woman, I couldn’t be. It’s crazy, eh? It didn’t even seem possible to them.”
On Nov. 5, Valérie Plante finally shattered the glass ceiling at Montreal City Hall. Not only did Plante became the city’s first female mayor, but she also heads the first administration where women hold a slight majority — 51 per cent — of elected positions, up from 43 per cent in 2013.
Women won 61 per cent of the 38 borough council seats, 48 per cent of the 46 city council seats, and 39 per cent of the 18 borough mayor jobs.
In a year marked by the #MeToo movement to denounce sexual assault and harassment and the international Women’s March against United States President Donald Trump on Jan. 21, current and past municipal politicians say gender worked in women’s favour in the last election.
“As a woman, we are feeling the effects of discrimination but now it’s positive discrimination, in the sense that people think we will act differently, in particular on issues like corruption,” said Thuillier, now the borough mayor of Ahuntsic-Cartierville.
The question now is whether women can maintain that momentum to change the political culture, open doors for such other marginalized groups as visible minorities, and make gains in the upcoming provincial election.
For Yolande Cohen, a history professor at Université du Québec à Montréal who ran for mayor in 1994, Plante’s victory felt like a vindication.
Cohen, former leader of the leftleaning Democratic CoalitionEcology Montreal in the 1994 campaign, recalled that when journalists asked her questions at press conferences, male colleagues from her party would step forward to answer for her.
“It was as if I was just there as a token and it wasn’t important what I had to say,” Cohen said. “I was furious.”
“After that, I campaigned all alone,” said Cohen, who won only 4.4 per cent of the vote.
Marvin Rotrand, one of two councillors elected that year under the Democratic Coalition-Equality Montreal banner, denied taking questions on Cohen’s behalf.
“It’s not how I recall it at all. I’m sorry if that’s how she recollects it. It’s not my recollection in the least. In fact, I was one of Yolande’s biggest boosters,” Rotrand said.
Cohen said that while women used to be at a disadvantage in politics, the tables have finally turned.
“Women no longer let themselves be pushed aside or intimidated,” she said. “Suddenly, many voters view the idea of having a woman in charge favourably.”
Plante “benefited from an extremely favourable situation. It’s as if a man at the head of the same party would not have been able to win,” she said.
The fact that women are perceived as untainted by corruption scandals is only part of the reason, she said.
“There’s a kind of feminine stereotype that portrays women as better at bringing people together,” Cohen said.
“I’m very happy about the current period. I feel this is a very important moment in the history of feminism,” Cohen said.
But the battle for gender equality in municipal politics is far from over, according to Groupe Femmes, Politique et Démocratie, a provincial coalition pushing for gender parity in politics.
Despite gains for women in Montreal, more than four out of five Quebec mayors and two-thirds of municipal councillors in the province are still men, the group noted.
The election of female mayors in cities and towns like Montreal, Brossard, Saguenay, Rivière-duLoup and Rouyn-Noranda are “strong symbols that are important for democratic equality,” the group’s director, Esther Lapointe said in a statement after the municipal elections.
But at the present rate of increase, “it would take nearly a quarter-century to achieve parity for city councillors and more than 83 years for parity for mayors,” Lapointe said.
From 2013 to 2017, female representation increased by only 2.5 per cent for town councillors and 1.5 per cent for mayors, the group said.
Meanwhile, the number of town councils in Quebec with fewer than 40 per cent of female representatives increased to 673 from 663 from 2013 to 2017, Lapointe noted.
“No, we are not seeing a ‘Pink Wave,’ ” she said.
Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna’s request in November that a far-right website stop calling her “climate Barbie” shows that female politicians are still targets for discriminatory comments.
And in December, a survey of female members of the Quebec National Assembly revealed that 63 per cent of respondents said they had experienced one or more forms of sexual misconduct at work.
FELT LIKE AN OUTSIDER
Bonnie Feigenbaum, a Hampstead city councillor from 2005 to 2013, said she felt like an outsider and was the butt of inappropriate comments during her time in municipal politics.
“I was the only woman on council for eight years,” said Feigenbaum, a former executive assistant to member of Parliament Anthony Housefather, a former mayor of Côte-St-Luc.
Newspaper reports at that time described council meetings in the affluent town of 7,000 as acrimonious.
Feigenbaum, who teaches marketing at Concordia and McGill universities, left local politics after running unsuccessfully against Hampstead Mayor William Steinberg in 2013.
Dida Berku, a lawyer and Côte St-Luc city councillor since 1990, said that in her early years on council, she often felt belittled by older politicians.
Berku, who ran against late mayor Bernard Lang in 1994, losing by only 325 votes, recalled being called “kochleffel,” a Yiddish term meaning “pot stirrer.”
But times have changed, she said. “I think there’s been a shift and that a woman has an advantage,” she said. “There is a trust factor when it comes to direct management.”
It was not until 1940 that Montrealers first elected a woman to city council, Jessie Kathleen Fisher, the daughter of a prominent family who was active in women’s associations and social welfare.
In 1974, when the late Thérèse Daviau and two other women were elected for the Montreal Citizens Movement, there was no women’s washroom on the same floor as the council chamber, noted Léa Cousineau, who would become the first female chairperson of the city’s executive committee in 1990.
“It’s just an anecdote, but it’s revealing,” Cousineau said in an interview.
“It shows that physically, there was no room for women at city hall,” she said.
When the MCM came to power in 1986, electing 15 female city councillors, then-mayor Jean Doré named three women and three men to the executive committee, Cousineau recalled.
“We almost had parity on the first executive committee with Jean,” she said.
But Helen Fotopulos, who was defeated in 2013 after 25 years in municipal politics, including as mayor of the Plateau Mont-Royal and a member of the executive committee, said the small number of women in municipal politics limited opportunities for mentoring.
“There just weren’t too many women who had been through the municipal world that you could go and seek some sort of advice or guidance from,” she said.
“As a woman was I held back? Was I not given my place? I could certainly speculate on that one,” she said.
Women often feel they’re not good enough, that they have to master a subject completely before speaking about it, Fotopulos said.
“I probably did not appear like someone who didn’t have selfconfidence because that’s not what I project on the outside. But all these years afterward, I can certainly admit the fact that I was very nervous,” she said.
Fotopulos said she was never subjected to inappropriate sexual behaviour, aside from the occasional remark on her appearance.
“But I do remember some councillors being a little too friendly with some of the staff,” she said.
“I had a bit of a shell that not too many people would dare to cross, which is a defence mechanism,” she said.
“Like, I wore glasses. I could have worn contact lenses. When you’re blond and relatively good-looking, you don’t want to distract from what’s coming out of your mouth and your actions. You look intelligent and you dress intelligent,” she said.
LIFE-WORK BALANCE
Life-work balance was always a preoccupation for women on city council, Cousineau said.
“City council started at 5 p.m. We wanted to have a break for supper. At that time, it continued all night with no break. We said, ‘We have children and we want to go home for supper,’ ” said Cousineau, who did not have children herself.
When Thuillier’s first son, now 6, was born, her husband would bring him to council meetings so she could breastfeed him during breaks.
After the birth of her second son on Dec. 26, 2014, she demanded the right to monitor city council meetings from home by internet so she could breastfeed and care for her oldest.
“I had children while being a councillor, and I always thought of that as normal until a young woman came to see me with big, wide eyes and said to me: ‘I never thought you could be elected and have children,’ ” Thuillier said.
“That really shocked me. And I said, ‘It’s true, no one will ever tell you have the right.’
“I said, ‘it should be possible, and it’s up to us to make it possible.’ And I realized that without even knowing it, I’d accomplished something very important, by showing that it’s possible to be in politics and have children at the same time.”