By Hailey Baldock
With a black coffin strapped to the highest of their van and a fiery willpower to scrap Canada’s abortion legal guidelines, the ladies of the 1970 Abortion Caravan knew they needed to make a scene. And so they did.
Over the course of two weeks, the Caravan moved throughout the nation from Vancouver to Ottawa, rallying supporters and drawing crowds, all whereas carrying the reminiscence of girls who died from unsafe abortions together with them.
Though the Caravan has since been acknowledged as a landmark in Canadian feminist and reproductive historical past, the media protection on the time tells a really completely different story–one which reveals as a lot about Canadian newspapers because it does concerning the ladies concerned within the protest.
After I started this analysis for my Grasp’s diploma, keen to construct on the work of media historians equivalent to Barbara Freeman, I anticipated to come across some unsavoury headlines and articles condemning the protest. And I did. What I didn’t anticipate, nonetheless, had been the quite a few, usually explicitly gendered, criticisms directed towards the ladies concerned. The worth of mixing feminist historical past with media research grew to become fairly clear to me, because the Abortion Caravan’s legacy is as a lot about the way it was reported as about what it achieved.
A Story Buried within the Again Pages
The Abortion Caravan was organized by ladies within the Vancouver Ladies’s Caucus. From the beginning, they mobilized the facility of visibility and publicity. Through the use of props like coffins and coat hangers, and staging guerrilla theatre in cities the place they stopped, the Caravan turned protest into efficiency, designed to seize consideration and be amplified via the press.
The early protection was something however groundbreaking. Articles had been brief, tucked away in way of life or regional sections, and infrequently painted the ladies as “spirited” or “decided”– vibrant, perhaps, however not threatening. In different phrases: not precisely front-page materials.
This was a wave-making, nationwide protest, but within the early levels, this historic second in Canadian feminism was not being handled as such.
Visibility By Confrontation
Every little thing modified in Ottawa. After leaving a coffin and instruments related to abortion on Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s garden, Caravan members did one thing no different group in Canadian historical past had efficiently completed earlier than: they shut down the Home of Commons.
On Might eleventh, 1970, thirty-six ladies entered the Home of Commons gallery with chains hidden of their purses and solid passes of their arms. They mounted themselves to their seats, learn out a declaration of battle, and chanted “abortion on demand!” till guards arrived with bolt cutters. For greater than an hour, Parliament got here to a halt.
After all, the media couldn’t ignore the importance of this occasion. However what did they should say?
Indignant, Shrill, and “Pathetic”
The day(s) after the disruption, newspapers exploded with protest protection, and the tone was removed from celebratory. The Globe and Mail ran the headline: “Indignant, shouting ladies disrupt home sitting.” The Ottawa Citizen described “screaming, ranting ladies.” The Windsor Star dismissed their finale because the Caravan’s “pathetic climax.”
The Vancouver Solar additionally piled on, criticizing the ladies for doubtlessly hurting their trigger:
“Efficient reformers weren’t screaming ladies, chaining themselves to gallery seats and forcing adjournment of the intense enterprise of the land… It will be unlucky certainly if the seizure of this wonderful trigger by a loud, rowdy minority utilizing the blackmail methods of confrontation ought to frighten off those that have fought so devotedly for abortion reform for thus a few years.”
In different phrases, abortion reform was acceptable, however being offended about it was not.
A Few Voices of Assist
Not each article condemned them. One described the demonstration as a “masterpiece of timing and group,” acknowledging the ladies’s talent in planning and execution. One other identified that quiet, well mannered lobbying had failed for many years, and that frustration was certain to boil over.
However these had been exceptions. The dominant story was not concerning the injustice of abortion legal guidelines or the desperation that drove ladies to pursue unlawful and/or unsafe procedures. It was about “hysteria,” “shrill voices,” and the obvious irrationality of girls who dared to disrupt. The behaviour of the ladies grew to become the media’s focus, obscuring the aim of their actions to the general public.
What Made the Information–and What Didn’t
The numbers inform the story. Out of greater than 100 articles on the Caravan in 1970, simply three ever reached the entrance web page–and all ran the day after the Home of Commons disruption. On common, protection of the Caravan was buried round web page 18.
Preventing for abortion wasn’t front-page materials till the ladies pressured Parliament to a standstill. Quiet protest didn’t qualify, and visibility got here solely when the state itself felt threatened, when “critical enterprise” was interrupted.
And even then, that visibility got here via distortion.
Forgotten Virtually as Rapidly
After 1970, protection of the Caravan all however disappeared. A handful of anniversary items had been revealed, and by the Eighties, the protest appeared to have slipped virtually fully out of public reminiscence. Even after the 1988 Morgentaler determination, which struck down Canada’s abortion regulation, the Caravan was not often talked about by the media as a contributing power.
The protest was historic, daring, and efficient in forcing abortion into public debate. Nonetheless, newspapers handled it extra as a blip than a turning level.
Why This Nonetheless Issues
Why does it matter how the press coated a protest fifty-five years in the past? As a result of it reveals us how the media decides what–and who–is vital.
Whereas the Abortion Caravan was by no means outright ignored, it didn’t obtain intensive protection till it grew to become not possible to not acknowledge. When the media did concentrate, its protection was laced with ridicule and doubt.
This isn’t only a story from 1970. It’s a sample that feminist and different activist actions nonetheless confront: invisibility till disruption, and delegitimization as soon as seen.
Right here’s the paradox: the very issues that made the Caravan newsworthy–its spectacle, its militancy, its refusal to remain well mannered–are the identical issues the press used to undermine it.
The Lasting Lesson of the Caravan
The story of the Abortion Caravan serves as a poignant reminder of how media protection influences historic reminiscence. By specializing in battle moderately than content material, newspapers helped body the Caravan as a disruption moderately than a requirement for rights.
Visibility, on this case, got here at a price. The ladies of the Caravan had been remembered in headlines not for his or her arguments, however for his or her anger.
But, their ways labored. Regardless that the media tried to undermine their efforts by amplifying the emotional state of the protestors, the Caravan helped to reignite the abortion debate in Canada and set the tone for a decade of feminist activism to come back.
Right this moment, revisiting how the media coated the Caravan challenges us to assume critically about who will get front-page area, how language shapes legitimacy, and the way rapidly even landmark protests could be forgotten.
Hailey Baldock is a PhD Candidate in Historical past at York College
This put up is a part of an activehistory.ca sequence on media and historical past in Canada. Media have been each remarkably vital and intensely theorized but in addition traditionally understudied. We hope this sequence highlights the range of how the research of media historical past informs and contributes to our data of the previous and our understanding of the function of media within the current. The editors encourage different submissions on matters associated to media historical past, broadly conceived. If you’re occupied with contributing and even simply discovering out extra about this sequence, please be at liberty to put in writing to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Hannah Cooley at hannah.cooley@mail.utoronto.ca.
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