Celebrating the women who changed how we live and work
Waterloo Region Museum receives grant to create a touring exhibit in conjunction with Canada’s sesquicentennial next year
THE FAMOUS FIVE FOUGHT for a woman’s right to vote, Jennie Trout was the first woman to earn a medical doctorate and Charlotte Whitten was the first female mayor of a major Canadian city.
These are just a small sampling of the influential women over 150 years of Canadian history that have been trailblazers, changing the way women have been regarded in this country since Confederation. The Waterloo Region Museum is getting ready to celebrate what it means to be a woman in Canadian society, and highlight the issues that still affect the female population to this day.
James Jensen is the supervisor of collections and exhibits and is in the process of working with women’s groups, sociology professors and curatorial staff at the museum to put on Going Public – Women Transform Canada. The exhibit is scheduled to open next summer, and museum planners have just received nearly $200,000 from the Minister of Canadian Heritage to go towards the showing in the region and a five-year tour across the country. The show is going to look at major events through a female lens, says Jensen, noting the Canada 150 grant is a big help.
He hopes the displays and artifacts, which will come from the region’s collection, will remind visitors of tougher times and inspire them through education.
“We aren’t shying away from difficult topics. It isn’t going to just be a hall of fame, rah rah rah kind of thing,” he said. “We will highlight exceptional women who did great work, but particularly when looking at First Nations women’s history, it is a difficult topic in general and there are still issues with the murdered and missing indigenous women’s inquiry – that is a facet that still continues with violence against women, which will be one of the sections of the exhibit. But, there are still areas where there have been significant gains like employment, gender issues and rights within the political framework to sort of remove the barrier and difference between the genders.”
The other four sections to be on display are the body, feminism, politics/ law and work.
By looking to the past accomplishments of individual women and examining past movements in history, Jensen says the Waterloo Region Museum will get people thinking about what still needs to be done when it comes to gender equality and phenomena like the wage gap.
“The intent of the exhibit is to try and talk as much about the contemporary situations and things that still need to be accomplished as well as the things that have come before,” he said. “Let’s not forget the fact that 100 years ago, give or take, women couldn’t vote. It is as much built into your experience that you can vote. It is just the way things are now. Why wouldn’t you be allowed to vote? But we
are stopping and saying that there are things that have not been completely resolved in terms of equality.”
The Going Public – Women Transform Canada exhibit has been in the works for quite a long time, starting as just an idea between retired and current professors at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. It has grown from there.
“They brought this to us as an idea in late 2014, early 2015. It went from, ‘this is an interesting idea’ to it being our Canada 150 project,” said Jensen. “We have the capability to design and build a show that can be rented by other museums across the country.”
Creating a touring show presents a challenge outside of determining the exhibit’s content.
“You have to be able to pack it up into boxes and fit it all into one 53-foot trailer to travel in. Often with our shows, we are able to build specific items for an exhibit because we know that we are just going to be taking it apart and moving on to the next. This has to go up and come back down and go back up 10 or 12 times,” said Jensen with a laugh.
The Going Public – Women Transform Canada will be opening in June 2017, and after will visit nearly a dozen Canadian cities.