Grace Hartman: A Woman for Her Time

Margaret Conrad is the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair of Women’s Studies
at Mount Saint Vincent University, and the editor of Intimate Relations:
Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800.

Grace Fulcher Hartman was the first woman to hold the top position in a
major Canadian union. President of the Canadian Union of Public
Employees from 1975 to 1983, she was also a founding member of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women in 1971. Earlier, she
had served on the Committee on Equality of Women, an organization that,
under the leadership of Laura Sabia, compelled a reluctant Lester
Pearson to establish a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1967.
Married and the mother of two sons, Hartman was a tough cookie at the
bargaining table and survived maneuvring in union backrooms that
undermined many of her male colleagues. The biography of such a woman
promises many delights.

Although she had access to CUPE archives and Hartman’s papers, Susan
Crean chose to write a “documentary biography” rather than a
critical appraisal of her subject. This is both the strength and the
weakness of the book. The reader learns about Hartman’s family life,
both before and after her marriage to Communist Party member Joe
Hartman; about her meteoric rise through the union ranks after taking a
secretarial position with the municipality of North York in 1954; and
about her high-profile administrative career, including reading the
“Bill of Wrongs” on the steps of the Ontario legislature in 1966,
keeping a cool head as national secretary-treasurer of CUPE, fighting
Trudeau’s wage and price controls, and serving a jail sentence for
counseling an illegal strike of Ontario hospital workers in 1981. An
academic biography might have addressed in more depth the role of Joe
Hartman and the Communist Party in shaping Hartman’s views; the impact
of interwar feminist ideology on Hartman’s decision to “reach for
the top”; and the gendered role she played as the “big mama” of
CUPE. While these and other topics still need to be explored, this is a
sensitive and well-crafted narrative of Grace Hartman’s life. It
benefits greatly from interviews with Hartman and with people who knew
her well, and will serve as a valuable reference for anyone seeking
insights into unionism and feminism in post–World War II Canada.