Inspiring Public History
The Top 10 list of Inspiring Canadians contained no women, so I set out to correct that.
You never forget your first time.
Sure, I had lots of experiences in university. But the first time I practiced public history because I saw an injustice that I thought needed to be corrected? I haven’t forgotten.
And now I get to tell you.
In June 2014, the federal Department of Canadian Heritage released the results of a national survey that included the question: “Which Canadians have inspired you the most over the last 150 years?”
From the question a “Top 10” list was compiled. At Number One? Pierre Trudeau. The other nine were also all men. This irked me. A majority of Canadians surveyed couldn’t think of one inspiring Canadian who was also a woman?
I could. The first that came to mind was the namesake of my Vancouver Island high school – Frances Kelsey. So, I did what any budding public historian would do – I wrote about it on a blog [You can read the original post by clicking here].
Dr. Kelsey is inspiring because in 1960, during her first month on the job at the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she stood up to pressure to approve the release of a sleeping pill for pregnant women called thalidomide. The pill caused birth defects and it is because of Kelsey that the drug was ultimately banned in the United States. Canada took much longer to listen to her advice, and there are those who continue to be impacted by that decision.
In 2014, Twitter (as it was then called) was not the cesspool of white supremacy and artificial ‘intelligence’ it is now. At the time, it was a place where journalists might see your obscure blog post and choose to report on it.
That’s what happened when CBC morning radio show host Gregor Craigie saw a tweet about my blog post and had me on the show. We talked about Dr. Kelsey, her early life on Vancouver Island, and the glaring omission of women in the “Top 10” list.
In my blog post and on the radio, I encouraged people to write to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC) and nominate Frances Kelsey as a person of national historic significance. It was a call to action for whoever was reading/listening.
My blog post and radio interview did not result in her nomination or designation as a nationally significant person. However, someone listening to the radio that morning had another idea; they wrote to me later that week to let me know they intended to nominate Dr. Kelsey to the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honour.
This is eventually what happened: “For her efforts to protect public health, notably by helping to end the use of thalidomide, and for her contributions to clinical drug trial regulations,” Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey was invested into the Order on August 6th, 2015.
She died the next day, at the age of 101.
Dr. Kelsey may not have made the Top 10 list of inspiring Canadians in 2014, but she remains Number One on my list of powerful public history moments. It’s one I won’t soon forget.