Poet twice won Governor General’s Award
Symbol of feminist movement almost as well known for remarkable life as for poetry
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Among the finest poets of her generation, Dorothy Livesay is a symbol to the feminist movement despite her refusal to wear the term feminist, which she dismissed as labelling. Yet her early, unvarnished approach to female sexuality and to the expectations for women’s roles in society resonate powerfully with the most contemporary feminist issues. She was a Marxist, a literary critic, a social worker, a journalist, a wife, a literary editor, a public intellectual — both political and philosophical — a mother of two, a teacher, a foreign aid worker, and a poet who twice won the Governor General’s Award.
Born Oct. 12, 1909, in Winnipeg, her father was John Frederick Bligh Livesay, a British-born journalist who became the general manager of The Canadian Press and is in the Canadian News Hall of Fame. Her mother was Florence Hamilton Randal, a reporter with the Manitoba Free Press who had gone to Africa during the Boer War to teach in British concentration camps. Florence wrote poems and short stories. John sublimated his desires to write fiction into journalism. He was a strong advocate of women writers. Both parents encouraged her to write from an early age. She published her first book of verse while still a teenager. One of her earliest poems was published by The Vancouver Province more than 90 years ago.
After studying modern languages at the University of Toronto, she attended the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became active in the French Communist movement, then returned to Toronto to earn her social work credentials. She joined the Communist Party. She was a social worker in Montreal and briefly in the United States before moving to Vancouver in 1936, where she met and married Duncan Cameron Macnair, a 40-year-old accountant. After her two children were born, she reported from postwar Europe.
Her husband died in 1959. She went to Africa with UNESCO, returned for a graduate degree in education at the University of B.C., and went on to teach at six universities, was a member of the Royal Society of Canada, the Order of Canada, and the Order of B.C.
She died on Dec. 29, 1996, in Victoria, as well known for Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties, the remarkable memoir of her life as a political, social and literary activist during the 1930s, as for her 24 books of powerful, award-winning poetry.