Muriel Duckworth
A founding member of VOW, Muriel Duckworth showed women how to become leaders. For more than 60 years, she worked tirelessly as an advocate for peace initiatives, social reform, and educational development.
After the failure of the Paris Peace talks in 1960 and the resulting concern for world peace, women across Canada joined together to form VOW, what would become a women’s organization advocating for cultures of nonviolence. Muriel was among them. Soon after, she became a founding member of the Nova Scotia Voice of Women for Peace and within a month, the group had successfully blocked the United States from dumping nuclear waste off the coast of Nova Scotia.
Muriel went on to serve as VOW’s national president from 1967-1971. Throughout her term, she was instrumental in leading protests against the Canadian government’s support for the U.S. war in Vietnam. Muriel arranged a tour for three South Vietnamese women in which she personally accompanied them across the country to packed public meetings in major cities and at U.S border checkpoints. She also led a delegation to meet with the Director General of the Suffield Experimental Station to protest Canada’s involvement in chemical weapons testing and its connection to the chemical warfare in Vietnam.
“If you’re going to talk about peace, you’ve got to talk to the people on the other side”
-Muriel Duckworth
Both during and after her presidency at VOW, Muriel regularly represented the organization at many international conferences. She chaired a delegation of Canadians who presented the Women’s Petition for Peace, signed by 125,000 people, to Ambassador Pelletier during the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament. She visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. She even returned to Moscow to film “Speaking Our Peace”, a documentary film about women’s peace initiatives.
Not only a founding member of VOW, Muriel was also a founding member of The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW) where she worked on the national board and served a term as president. She also became a founding member of a number of other organizations, including: the Canadian Conference on Education, the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport, the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, the Nova Scotia Women’s Action Coalition, and the Movement for Citizens’ Voice and Action Halifax. Muriel campaigned as an NDP candidate in two elections, advocating for social issues such as health care, education, day care, women’s equality, and economic development.
Muriel Duckworth played a pivotal role in the creation and development of Canadian women’s social and peace movements at the local, provincial, and national levels. Recognized for her contributions by many institutions, she received eight honorary doctorates from universities, is a member of the Order of Canada, and received the Person’s Award. But despite these and many other awards, it was her ability to motivate and mobilize communities into activism, her championing of diversity, and her relentless commitment to creating a better world that are truly her greatest achievements.
As friend and VOW colleague Ursula Franklin has said, “her life is an example of what love and selfless intelligence can do.”
Ursula Franklin
Ursula was a scientist, feminist, commentator, Quaker and activist. She was involved in VOW from its beginnings. Ursula’s lifetime of accomplishments include many campaigns, books and public speaking, a life devoted to seeing the world differently and working tirelessly to make it so. Ursula believed that ‘peace is not the absence of war; it is the absence of fear, and the presence of justice.’ Her thoughts and writings can be found in Ursula Franklin Speaks (2014), The Ursula Franklin Reader (2006) and The Real World of Technology, based on her 1989 Massey Lectures.