Doris Hilda Anderson, CC OOnt (November 10, 1921[2][3] – March 2, 2007[4]) was a Canadian author, journalist and women's rights activist.
She is best known as the editor of the women's magazine Chatelaine, mixing traditional content (recipes, décor) with thorny social issues of the day (violence against women, pay equality, abortion, race, poverty), putting the magazine on the front lines of the feminist movement in Canada.
[2] Mrs. Buck, whose first husband had abandoned her and her two young sons, leaving them in debt, met McCubbin when he was a guest at her mother's boarding house in Calgary.
She was staying with her sisters in Medicine Hat when Anderson was born and briefly placed her "illegitimate" child in a home for unwanted babies in Calgary, reclaiming her several months later.
[4][13] Upon receiving her degree, Anderson wrote and sold pieces of fiction and spent time in Europe[14] before she returned to Canada and secured a job writing advertising copy for Chatelaine in 1951.
[16] The female writers she employed (June Callwood, Barbara Frum, Adrienne Clarkson, and Michele Landsberg) would go on to have successful careers as journalists.
[14] In 1969, she campaigned for, and did not receive, the editorship of Maclean's magazine, losing the job to Peter Gzowski despite her significantly longer tenure with the company and her track record of success.
[6] The specific wording reads: "Notwithstanding anything in the Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed to male and female persons.
[21] Her frustration with the status quo was evident in a column published in Maclean's in 1980, where she wrote of wage inequality, domestic violence, and being ignored by politicians.
[23] She was named a recipient of the Governor General's Awards in Commemoration of the Persons Case in 1991,[24] and served as Chancellor of the University of Prince Edward Island from 1992 to 1996.
In 1994, Doris Anderson was invited to be an observer in the South African election that brought Nelson Mandela to power and ended apartheid, an opportunity her son Mitchell described as "one of the greatest thrills of his mother's life.
[27] Anderson's autobiography, Rebel Daughter, was transformed into a play by students at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College in 2014, which became the subject of a radio documentary entitled Daughters and Sons Her impact on Canadian feminism was documented in a 2007 edition of Canadian Woman Studies, entitled Celebrating Doris Anderson.