Muriel Helen Duckworth CM ONS (née Ball; October 31, 1908 – August 22, 2009) was a Canadian pacifist, feminist, and social and community activist.

[8] In her later years, Duckworth performed with the Halifax chapter of the Raging Grannies, a group that composes and sings satirical ballads promoting social justice.

As they grew older, Muriel and her two sisters helped their mother with cleaning, cooking, making beds and waiting on tables.

[17] Her mother's career as a successful businesswoman and her dedication to community service in the Methodist church and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had a powerful influence on Muriel.

She fed hungry men and gave shelter to homeless young women who came to Magog on the trains and raised funds to establish a home for the elderly and started a community lending library.

Muriel especially remembered James Endicott, then a missionary in China, who went on to become a prominent church leader and a lifelong acquaintance.

[19] Muriel undertook studies at Montreal's McGill University with the help of a small college bursary and money from her Aunt Abbie.

[20] She was enrolled in the university's Bachelor of Arts program and in her graduating year, took the education courses required to qualify for a high school teaching diploma.

To practise teaching in front of a classroom full of children as well as her fellow education students was especially difficult for her, but Muriel hid her fear so well that the supervising professor praised her apparent lack of nervousness.

"[22] The SCM conducted small study groups in which students were encouraged to discuss their beliefs freely and come to their own conclusions about how to interpret the Gospels.

She was also registered as a part-time UTS field student and worked with poor teenage girls at a community church in Hell's Kitchen on New York's West Side.

She also visited their homes gaining first-hand knowledge of the conditions experienced by working-class immigrants who lived in cramped, windowless flats beside "booming and clattering" elevated trains.

[29] Her teachers at UTS included Harry Ward, a Christian socialist who campaigned for civil and political rights and the noted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

"The Social Gospel and pacifism were linked in my mind," Duckworth said adding that she remembered hearing about Eugene V. Debs "a labour hero who had gone to prison for opposition to the First World War and who ran for president of the U.S. while he was in jail.

[31] The family moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1947 where Jack Duckworth served as general secretary of the YMCA, while Muriel worked in adult education.

It also condemned the Canadian government's tacit support for the war and its policy of quietly encouraging the sale of Canadian-made weapons to the US military.

In 1971, she helped establish the Movement for Citizens' Voice and Action (MOVE), a coalition of community groups in Halifax, Nova Scotia working for a wide range of goals including improvements in education, housing, social assistance and municipal planning.

[8] Duckworth became the first woman in Halifax to run for a seat in the Nova Scotia Legislature when she campaigned as a New Democratic Party candidate during the provincial elections of 1974 and 1978.

[39] Duckworth was the recipient of numerous honours including the 1981 Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case and the Order of Canada in 1983.

[43] Her biographer, Marion Douglas Kerans said, "She showed women how to become true leaders in their community, and in the world, without losing any feminine grace.