NORTH Vancouver's Madeline Boscoe is one of six Canadian women to be honoured with the 2011 Governor General's Persons Award, in recognition of her three decades of work to further women's health causes.
The award is named after the landmark 1929 Persons Case, which concluded that women were in fact "persons" in the eyes of the law.
Boscoe spoke with the North Shore News shortly after returning from Ottawa to receive her medal.
"It was fabulous, right up there with getting married," she said. "I've never been to Rideau Hall before or met the Governor General before, so it's a whole new world for me."
Boscoe grew up in North Vancouver and attended Queen Mary and Argyle before training to be a registered nurse.
"My mom always said to me, 'Make sure you always have a good job. Have a skill where you can go out and get a job and support yourself.' I went into nursing because I was part of the Vancouver Women's Health Collective and I just fell in love with health care, very shortly after I left high school," she said.
Included in her lengthy list of accomplishments is founding HealthSharing magazine, serving on Health Canada's advisory breast implant panel, co-chairing another federal panel on assisted reproduction legislation, establishing the Canadian Women's Health Network and serving as its executive director for 11 years, fighting to legalize midwifery in Manitoba and opening a birthing centre in Winnipeg, where she lived for many years before recently moving back to Lynn Valley. She also holds an honourary degree from the University of Ottawa.
"The birth centre just opened on Sunday," she said. "I was in the air going to Ottawa just as it was opening in Winnipeg. The birth centre was really about creating a place for normal skills to support women in normal labour and support women working in labour. Most facilities aren't created like that. We did that not just to provide a centre of excellence, but also to challenge the system. We see such use of technologies nowadays - increased caesarian section for instance - to the point that their benefits are outweighed by their risks for some women."
Boscoe also helped lead the campaign to make the morning-after pill available in Canada, and ultimately available without prescription. She is now executive director of the Reach Community Health Centre on Vancouver's Commercial Drive.
"The other thing I was involved with is poverty and health," she said. "What we were trying to do in Manitoba is make the point that it's not just poverty. If everyone is poor, everyone is OK. It's when there are huge difference between rich and poor that we get problems. . . . The people down in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery have got that figured out."
Poverty, Boscoe said, is being feminized, and many of the advances to reduce inequality
made in the middle of the 20th century are being eroded.
"Canadian people have been known for their generosity of spirit," she said. "We laid down unemployment insurance and the Canadian Pension Plan and Medicare, those big programs that came out of the '30s and '40s and '50s. The thought that someone ought to be able to buy their way to the head of the line? That's not a Canadian value, I would argue.
"I think there has been an erosion. I think it's the great tragedy of my generation that the social infrastructure that lifted everyone up is fraying, and it's fraying big-time.
"We know that advancing the social status of women improves the lots of children and families. It's probably the most important intervention we can make."
