Lyn Gough is most definitely not the kind of woman to blow her own horn.
She would prefer that reporters interview someone else.
It's blowing other women's horns that Gough enjoys. The Saanich amateur historian was so incensed by the overlooked accomplishments of other women that she spearheaded the drive to create Women's History Month, now being celebrated with various degrees of enthusiasm across Canada.
Even she seems a bit dismayed that her long-ago letter-writing campaign quickly got the federal government onside to designate the first such month in 1992.
It's held in October because it was on Oct. 18, 1929, that Canadian women officially became persons in Canadian law, eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate.
Gough's role had its roots in a book she wrote in 1988 called As Wise As Serpents. It centred on the social reformers of the early Women's Christian Temperance Union in Victoria. Although they laid the groundwork for modern social services amid a proliferation of pubs -- founding both a men's mission and rescue home for women -- she was astounded to see them negatively portrayed as tea-drinking busybodies.
"That was my motivation," she says. "I thought people didn't appreciate what women had done in the past.
"Basically I thought what we needed was a women's history month."
She started writing letters and exhorting other individuals and organizations to do the same. "Everybody I met, I would hand a form to and ask them to do something ... I thought I'd be doing it forever, but it came to pass within a year."
But it's up to local organizers to keep things going -- Status of Women Canada generally does not provide funds related to Women's History Month.
"I understand there's not too much happening in the rest of Canada, anymore," Gough says.
Her personal heroines are Maria Grant and Cecilia Spofford, both of them Victoria temperance union members who began campaigning in 1885 for B.C. women to get the vote in provincial elections. It finally happened in 1917.
She's happy that schools now teach women's accomplishments, but says that even the Internet falls short. "There really aren't enough biographies -- you get women in politics and women in sports and then there's really not much in between."
She applauds Oak Bay's Merna Forster and says Forster's book 100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces (see quiz page C3) is "a good place to start."
"I think women's history month is a big deal in Canada," says Forster, who gives Gough a public thank-you for her efforts to gain recognition for women's significant contributions. The more women and organizations who participate, the better, she says, noting that so many great women are still virtual unknowns. She cites Dr. Leonora Howard King. Who?
King was the first Canadian doctor to serve in China -- decades before Dr. Norman Bethune got there -- spending her life tending to women and soldiers there and becoming the first Western woman designated an honorary Mandarin.
But she wasn't even allowed to study medicine in Canada.
"Who knows, if the CBC ever decides to repeat its 2004 quest for the greatest Canadian, maybe more women will make the list because more of us will be familiar with the contributions of some of the amazing women in our history," she says.
"Last time, not one woman made the Top 10."
kdedyna@tc.canwest.com
