No Plaster Saint: The Life of Mildred Osterhout Fahrni

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

The daughter of a preacher, Mildred Osterhout grew up to be a lifelong
socialist and pacifist. She started work as a teacher and social worker,
sat on school boards, lost provincial elections under the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation banner, taught Japanese Canadians interned in
camps during World War II, and eventually reached out around the world,
donating time and money wherever she felt they were needed and welcoming
refugees into her Vancouver home. An early friend was J.C. Woodsworth of
the CCF, but when she met Gandhi and later visited him in his ashram in
India, he became one of her lifelong heroes who inspired her to work
more and more exclusively for peace. In the 1940s, she declared the
incipient United Nations a recipe for a police force, and went to a
World Peace Conference in India while the Western world was still
chanting “Better dead than Red.” In the 1950s, she joined other
pacifists in calling for the unilateral disarmament of Canada, and
traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, during the infamous bus boycott, where
she met Martin Luther King. In her later years, she worked a few months
every year at Quaker centre in Mexico City.

Mildred was in her 40s when she finally married a persistent lifelong
friend in an unconventional union in which both partners were frequently
away from home. She lived a long life packed with service to others and
attracted enormous affection from those who shared her ideals. When she
was dying, an extraordinary support circle gathered around her to ease
the end. Nancy Knickerbocker inserts wisps of her subject’s quiet wit
and suggestions of why she was “no plaster saint,” while
meticulously showing how her story reflects that of Canada through
several cataclysmic events. Although sources such as Mildred’s diary
and many letters are carefully noted and a bibliography is included,
there is much historical information in this solid biography; it
deserves an index.