Donna Jean Stewart: Teacher. Activist. Matriarch. Devout. Born Sept. 26, 1929, in Iroquois Falls, Ont.; died Dec. 18, 2024, in North Vancouver, B.C., of a brain injury; aged 95.
Donna Stewart.Courtesy of family
Donna MacDougall was a brilliant child who loved to read and skipped grades in school. But she also had to endure her father’s drinking and violent rages. She saved up and earned scholarships to attend university. There, she thrived, trying out for the University of Toronto women’s hockey team, taking classes with Northrop Frye and earning an English Honours degree at Victoria College. She also discovered a Christian faith that healed her and inspired her to care for others.
She met Gordon Stewart working at a summer camp. The handsome, athletic camp leader had a kind heart, a deep faith and a great sense of fun. Donna was immediately smitten and the feeling was mutual. They married in 1955 and moved to Orillia for their first teaching jobs. Donna and Gordon trusted and respected each other and were each other’s best advocate, support and friend.
Almost immediately pregnant with Ruth, the first of five children, Donna had to quit teaching. She soon gave birth to Cathy, John, Elizabeth and Alicia.
In 1963, the family moved to Winnipeg for Gordon’s work. Donna breast-fed her five children when formula feeding was the norm, baked bread and taught her children to cook, sewed her own curtains, knit beautiful sweaters and made room at the table for many a lonely soul. (She later said of those years, “The CBC kept me sane!”) Spending summers at Manitoba Pioneer Camp where Gordon was camp director, Donna mentored staff members and bravely shepherded her children on family canoe trips.
Donna returned to teaching when her youngest reached school age. She taught Canadian women writers long before CanLit was canonical and earned an MA on Emily Carr’s writings in the 1970s.
In 1981 the family moved to North Vancouver when Gordon was offered a new job. There were no openings in teaching for Donna, so she took a pay cut to run the North Shore Women’s Centre. Horrified by her clients’ stories of abuse and limited options, she pivoted to a career as an eloquent and tireless advocate for women. At one rally she organized, someone in the crowd sneered, “Who cares about the women and kids anyway?” Donna raised her fist and shouted fiercely, “WE care!” It made the national news, but she was not posturing – she meant it.
Donna co-ordinated campaigns to regulate violent pornography and served on the National Action Committee for the Status of Women in the 1980s. She also ran for city council and the federal NDP. In the 1990s she helped women find work in the trades and developed resources to prevent elder-abuse. In her later years she took on affordable housing, served on multiple boards and started her own charitable society. In 2010, Donna received the BC Achievement Award and the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award. But Donna was always invested in people and not accolades.
Habitually honest and kind, Donna earned many lifelong friends. While she sometimes spoke before she thought and could be judgmental or reactive, Donna could also admit, mid-argument, “Oh, well, that’s true.” Whenever her children challenged her, she listened and tried to learn.
Donna followed the prophet Micah’s teaching: Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. When Gordon required a decade of care for cancer and Parkinson’s disease, she never flinched. When her youngest urgently needed a place to live with her three sons, Donna underwrote the lease. And when her own home tripled in value, she used the proceeds of its sale as seed-funding for affordable housing: At endless municipal meetings she fought for low-cost apartments for single mothers in a North Vancouver development – it was her proudest achievement.
Shortly after her 95th birthday, she fell and suffered a brain injury that led to seizures and a rapid decline. Over the next two months, she managed – on a good day – to vote in the provincial election from her hospital bed, to smile at visitors and to tell us that she loved us all and was not afraid to die.
Donna was caring, honest, impulsive, generous, intelligent and courageous. It was a gift to have known her.
Elizabeth Hodgson is Donna Stewart’s daughter.
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