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An Interview with Marilou McPhedran: Feminist and Human Rights Lawyer Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by C. Gudz, Canada Feb 28, 2005
Human Rights   Interviews

  

An Interview with Marilou McPhedran: Feminist and Human Rights Lawyer
Q: How did you get from religious studies to law?

MM:I thought I was going to go on and get a Ph D and become an academic and teach religious studies, but then I ended up doing an oral exam with one religious studies professor, based on one very long text (1300 pages). Halfway through the exam my professor said to me, “You’re going to pass, but I need you to answer the following question, and I need you to promise me you’ll answer it honestly. Have you read this text?” And I said, “All of it?… I read the table of contents, the index, and I followed the index to stuff that I thought would be of interest to you, and then I read the beginning and the end of each chapter.” He said, “You’re headed in the wrong direction. You should not be trying to be an academic. You do not have the interest that you need in order to be steeping yourself in extensive amounts of reading, reflection, and writing. You are a ‘bullshit artist’ and you should become a lawyer.” Then I said, “How do I do that?”

“And I left that class and found out what I had to do! I wrote the LSAT, and found myself in law school. That’s how that major life decision got made.”

In the beginning, I hated law school. Especially when we started to study rape cases, devoid of the reality for rape victims. I realized my brain was not the least bit trained to deal with law school. It was like going to a strange country.

Now when I talk to other law students, mostly women, I tell them, law school is a different country with a different culture, with a different language, with a different system of morals and ethics and with a different rewards system. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can change that country significantly. And that was something that I didn’t do, until I started to fail in first year law school. Do whatever you can to learn the ropes, but most of all treat it as a survival exercise and learn the language, so you have the skills to go up against the power-holders.

Q: It sounds like you have learned how to balanced working from within structures and on the margins.
MM: I’m still learning, it’s a lifelong learning.

Q: Much of your work is working in areas of reform and reconstruction. How do you find advocating for women’s rights in developing countries from a Western woman, lawyer’s perspective?

MM: I think I’m still in the midst of learning that as well. I think that I’ve often made mistakes. Thinking that because I was Canadian, because I come from a privileged class in a Canadian context, because I was deeply involved in the grassroots women’s political movement in Canada, that I had a kind of expert status that entitled me to provide advice to women in countries that are considered to be developing countries - that the learning was going to be much more on their end. I was totally wrong about that. It wasn’t until I had the opportunity to direct the ten county impact study on CEDAW (the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) that I appreciated what an arrogant and stupid mistake it was.

Part of what woke me up was when I first started going to the United Nations sessions dealing with women’s rights. I saw very quickly that the key leadership was primarily women of colour and/or women from the south. And that they had an acuity, a tenacity, a savvy sophistication about systemic change in the international context that I couldn’t begin to touch. I was lucky and honoured to be in situations where I could learn from them.

These were activists, lawyers and academics, but they were committed to grassroots involvement in their countries and they understood what it really means to bring about change that actually makes a difference in the lives of women and girls. And as a result of my being able to work with these activist researchers, some from countries that rate really low on the UN HDI (human rights index) – Ukraine, Panama, Nepal – they really taught me about the circumstances they were struggling under. And that I couldn’t begin to situate my opportunities for activism in Canada on a par with what they were struggling with, which only increased my respect and admiration for them.

We published the First CEDAW Impact Study (2000), which remains the first and only major impact study on a UN human rights treaty from the perspective of citizens rather than governments. It was a good example of participatory action research for advocacy and systemic change, which for me is the only research I’m interested in doing.

Q: How can western and ‘third world’ feminists (or north and south) work together on women’s rights issues?

MM: With the massive cuts to social and educational programs in Canada, seemingly in response to the International Monetary Fund criticizing Canada for carrying too much debt, many women in this county now have much more in common with their southern sisters. In addition to an increase in poverty, access to services for women is more restricted. And many women’s organizations that I’ve grown up with have disappeared. There is an evisceration of the Canadian women’s movement that can be directly attributed to actions on the part of governments in this country.







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Comments


Great Read!
Charity Fadun | Mar 12th, 2005
This is the best interview I've read in a long long time. Very well done. I learnt a lot.



Cheryl Gudz | Mar 16th, 2005
thanks for your comments - i appreciate the feedback. MM is a really fascinating person -- she has a very inspiring personnality!



Fantastic article!
Jane Poata | Jul 14th, 2009
Thanks for your inspired choice to interview Marilou McPhedran. I would like to show my high school students your work as an example of what they could do in the research component of our next unit.

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