During a visit to Sarnia, on Monday, conversation around the dinner party table gravitated to the state of women’s rights past and present. One of the women I met at the partly recalled that back in the 1950s, an Ontario board of education had forced her mother, a teacher – the moment she got married – to resign from her position at the school.

My mother, an American immigrant to Canada at the time, expressed her disgust at such discriminatory rules at the time.

“What makes a wife or mother less effective as a teacher?” I remember my mother saying. (more…)