Callwood, June

CONVOCATION, OCTOBER, 1990
JUNE CALLWOOD
to be Doctor of Letters

She has been called a bleeding heart and an arm-twister by some, and by others, a Good Samaritan and even a saint. But anyone who has encountered her driving commitment to social betterment agrees that she is truly one of Canada's most remarkable women. She is more than social conscience; she is voice, muscle, and clenched fist, yet all of these clothed in gentleness and sensitivity.

June Callwood was born in Belle River near Windsor, Ontario, and she has spent most of her life in Toronto. First a journalist, wife, and mother, she was awakened during the social ferment of the 1960s to a realization that Toronto the Good also had an underside: that here there were homeless children, pregnant teen-aged girls, battered women, and widespread callous indifference. So began her participation in, and often leadership of, various projects designed to help the helpless and simultaneously to confront the unfeeling and indifferent status quo. She organized, she demonstrated, she got arrested; but with her growing confidence that she knew what was right and that justice must prevail, she also got results.

In 1965, she opened Digger House for runaway and abandoned children; and there followed over the years Nellie's, a refuge for battered women, Jessie's, for pregnant teenagers, and in 1987, Casey House, Canada's first hospice for people dying of AIDS. She refuses to duck tough issues, she says what she thinks, and she vigorously defends others' right to do the same. She has formed or joined committees to demand justice for children, abolition of the death penalty, and rights for prostitutes, among numerous others.

June Callwood is an unabashed feminist and in her commitment to the advancement of women's rights she has been both militant and evangelical. Women, she once advised a group she was addressing, 'should do one outrageous act every day." Those who have worked with her can laugh at her iconoclasm; they also know she can be both demanding and persistent as a leader. She expects of others what she gives herself, which is a tireless pursuit of social justice and an unflinching sacrifice of self.

Mixed with this public career, June Callwood has been a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of two dozen books, many of them on the subjects of her social concerns. Her writing has been called 'singular and brilliant" and has gained recognition as recently as this past summer when she was presented a life-time achievement award by the Arts Foundation of Greater Toronto. It is only one of the many awards bestowed upon her ranging from B'nai B'rith Woman of the Year to the Order of Canada

She wears all honours lightly. And so, in presenting her today with a degree of the University of New Brunswick, we acknowledge that we do this as much for ourselves as for her, and as much to magnify a clear unfaltering voice of conscience so that others, ourselves included, may hear and heed.

From: Honoris Causa - UA Case 70, Box 2