Doris Anderson dead at 85

A giant among Canadian magazine editors, Doris Anderson, has died at the age of 85. A long obituary in the Globe and Mail, well worth reading, details the life of this whiskey-voiced woman who took Chatelaine magazine by the scruff of the neck and and for more than 20 years turned it into a platform for feminism, women's rights and progressive causes. She also made Maclean Hunter a lot of money by driving its circulation up in the late '60s to the point where it was being read by one out of every three women in Canada.

"As the enormously successful editor of Chatelaine magazine from the mid-1950s-the mid 1970s, she began making her feminist mark nearly a decade before Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963," said the obituary, by Sandra Martin.

“ 'She was tremendous, like a rock,' said former politician Flora MacDonald. Ms. MacDonald particularly remembered the issue of Chatelaine in which she commissioned “a big article on 50 women who would make good parliamentarians and then she took 12 of us and put us on the cover” of the magazine. “She was always doing things to promote women and she would keep an eye out for people whom she thought might be encouraged to get into the political arena,” said Ms. MacDonald."

Floyd Chalmers, president of Maclean Hunter, publishers of Chatelaine, once said of Anderson: Floyd Chalmers, president of Maclean-Hunter, once said about her: “What I like about Doris is that she looks like a woman, acts like a lady, and works like a dog.”

She started with Chatelaine as an editorial assistant, after freelancing and stints in retail.

Six years after joining the magazine, she had risen through the ranks to become editor, a job she was reluctantly given after she had threatened to quit if management appointed another man to the position.

She went on to try federal politics, but was defeated, had mixed success in championing the status of women and significant success as an author; she wrote three novels. In the last 15 years of her life, she worked tirelessly to promote proportional representation, until a variety of illnesses and, finally, pulmonary fibrosis, stopped her.

But she will always be remembered as the woman who gave the term "women's magazine" a new meaning for a whole generation of Canadian women and who provided a platform for some of the best women magazine writers in this country.

[UPDATE: There is also a large takeout on Anderson's life in the Toronto Star.]