Saturday's Child: Memoirs of Canada's First Female Cabinet Minister

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Ellen Fairclough, who was the member of parliament for Hamilton West
between 1950 and 1963, was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in
1995, at the age of 90. Fairclough’s achievements include her cabinet
appointment as Secretary of State under John Diefenbaker in 1957, and
later appointments as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and as
Minister of Indian Affairs, and responsibility, at different times, for
the National Gallery, the National Film Board, the Dominion Archives,
and the National Library.

Written in Fairclough’s ninth decade, the memoir is crisp and very
readable. Margaret Conrad (a professor of history at Acadia University
and an expert on women’s history), who edited the memoir, calls it
“an honest attempt to describe the progress of a life by a woman who
sees it as ‘bad manners’ to take oneself too seriously.”
Conrad’s substantial preface charts Fairclough’s slow rise to
prominence in the industrial city of Hamilton. The editor’s short
introductions to the four main sections provide an overview and a wider
perspective that complement the text.

The memoir, from a “Saturday’s child [who] works hard for a
living,” is a warm and modest account of an exceptional life. With
persistence and chutzpah, women could break the barriers they faced in
the 1950s and 1960s. Fairclough sums up her life as “pretty
satisfying.” Readers of this memoir will likely do the same.