Flora!: A Woman in a Man’s World

Flora Isabel MacDonald – politician, humanitarian, adventurer, and role model for a generation of women – was known across Canada and beyond simply as Flora. In her memoir, co-authored by award-winning journalist and author Geoffrey Stevens, she tells her personal story for the very first time.

Flora! describes her amazing journey from her childhood and her time at secretarial school in Cape Breton, through her years in backroom Progressive Conservative politics, to elected office and her appointment as Canada’s first female minister of foreign affairs. Finally, she details her exceptional humanitarian work in India and in war-torn Africa and Afghanistan. Flora was driven by a lifelong conviction that there is nothing a woman cannot achieve in a world controlled by men, and she pursued this conviction in everything she did, carving a path for women in Parliament. She won international acclaim for bringing 60,000 Vietnamese refugees to Canada, and for engineering the rescue of six American hostages in Tehran in a top-secret collaboration with the CIA known as the Canadian Caper. She exposed the inhumane treatment of inmates at Kingston’s Prison for Women. She defied male chauvinists in the Progressive Conservative party by running for its leadership, and she introduced the Employment Equity Act to guarantee women equal access to federal jobs.

Flora was brave. She was relentless. She was controversial. She was a force of nature. In her own words and drawing from interviews with those who knew her, Flora! grants us insight into this exceptional woman who changed the course of history.

Book Available at Amazon.ca

Book Launch Event on October 28th, 2021 at 4pm. Register ici

 

Note aux chercheurs

Un formulaire de consentement a été signé par chacune des personnes interviewées dont les vidéos sont publiées ici sur le site web. Elles ont toutes consenti à rendre la vidéo accessible au public et ont autorisé l'utilisation du contenu de leurs vidéos par les chercheurs du projet Hearts of Freedom. Le consentement n'est pas disponible pour les chercheurs externes pour citer ou publier à partir de ces vidéos. Les chercheurs intéressés par le sujet ont la possibilité de visionner un film documentaire, Passage to Freedom, qui a été réalisé et est disponible auprès d'un distributeur https://www.mcintyre.ca/ Les chercheurs du projet sont en train de terminer un livre complet basé sur les entretiens. Une fois ce livre disponible, les chercheurs auront l'occasion de l'examiner et de s'y référer à des fins de recherche.