Heather Morrison was feeling sorry for herself as she sat in a library at Queen's University in Kingston earlier this year. She did not particularly want to be working on her paper, part of her coursework for a master's degree in education. Then she looked out the window and caught site of the imposing, abandoned building across the street, which was once declared "unfit for bears, much less women."
Until it was closed in 2000, the federal Prison for Women, or P4W, was notorious, even by prison standards. More than a dozen commissions and inquiries had been called into the degrading conditions female prisoners were subject to during the 66 years it operated; many officials recommended it be shut down. The last inquiry, led by Louise Arbour, followed in the wake of an infamous 1994 incident in which a male riot squad strip-searched a group of female prisoners. The Arbour commission slammed the "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of the inmates.
For Ms. Morrison, who had spent 15 years working in a women's shelter and with sexual assault survivors, the building represented the weight of history: "I was sitting there whining about having to study and thinking about how those women were [once] locked in cages across the street," she said in an interview. "… And it occurred to me that the building was being neglected, the way women's participation in Canadian history had been neglected."
And so, the idea for a Museum of Canadian Women's History was born – a centre not just to recognize the half of the population overlooked by history, but also a place of education and advocacy for women's rights. Ms. Morrison put the idea on Facebook and suggested that P4W could be its home.
The idea of a Canadian Women's History Museum is still in its infancy; it exists in the imagination of Ms. Morrison and a small group of supporters. They deliberately haven't done any ambitious outreach yet, well aware that any initiative such as this needs to have a large and diverse set of opinions behind it. "We don't want to formalize this yet, because we need more voices at the table," Ms. Morrison said.
The idea has already won the approval of one high-profile supporter, a lifelong advocate for incarcerated women, Senator Kim Pate. For nearly 25 years, Ms. Pate was the head of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, an advocacy network for women in the criminal justice system.
"Being able to chronicle the history of women's emancipation in this country would be very useful," Ms. Pate said in an interview. "We have the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, we have the Museum of History, we have lots of different places looking at different parts of our history but nowhere do we have the chronicling of the growth of women's rights. … Something like this could be important from the point of view of Indigenous women and other groups, looking at the history of Canada from the perspective of those who have been most marginalized."
Rediscovering the lost women of history has gained momentum recently – we will soon have civil-rights pioneer Viola Desmond celebrated on our $10 bill – but it would be extraordinary to have all their stories gathered in one place. The United States already has the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y. More recently, New York announced that a former women's jail, the Bayview Correctional Facility, would be turned into the Women's Building, a centre for education and activism. According to its creators, repurposing the prison "provides an historic opportunity to reclaim a site of women's confinement and pain, and transform it into a new home for those working for justice and equality for girls and women."
Could the same thing happen with P4W? It's entirely unclear. The prison was bought by Queen's University in 2008 and has been unused since. There has been no great debate about its future, unlike the fate of the neighbouring Kingston Penitentiary, which closed in 2013, and has been the subject of much speculation. Tours of the Kingston Pen are hugely popular, but there's been no similar attention paid to the place where more than 300 women were incarcerated at a time. I suppose it's apt, in some historical-irony way: As Ms. Morrison says, "Isn't it interesting that even the men's prison gets more attention than the women's prison?"
Queen's University declined comment for this story. However, in a recent interview with the Queen's Gazette, the principal of the university, Daniel Woolf, talked about his immediate goals, which included "an infrastructure strategy, which will look at the question of how we eliminate $300-million worth of deferred maintenance in the next 10 to 12 years and, of course, how we will pay for it."
Kingston, first capital of the United Province of Canada, would seem a natural location for a Canadian women's history museum. It would be a place to celebrate all the stories that history forgot, a tourist destination and an educational hub. And, if it were housed in a former prison, it would be a way to honour the spirit of the women who were incarcerated at a time when justice was unavailable to a large part of the population. Its time has come.