Анна Клер Кулс: Долгая служба и борьба за права женщин в Канаде

Canadian senator (born 1943)

Anne Clare Cools (born August 12, 1943) is a Canadian retired senator and the longest serving member of the Senate of Canada. As a social worker, Cools was a pioneer in the protection of women from domestic violence, running one of the first domestic violence shelters in Canada.

Cools was born and raised in Barbados, as the daughter of pharmacist Lucius Unique Cools and homemaker Rosita Gordon Miller Cools. Both her grandfather and an uncle were politically active on the island. When she was four years old, two of her siblings died. In Barbados, Cools attended Queen's College Girls School. In 1957, when she was 13 years old, her family immigrated to Canada, where she studied at Thomas D'Arcy McGee High School in Montreal. Cools received a B. A. degree in social sciences, sociology and psychology from McGill University. Cools is married to business consultant Rolf Calhoun. Her personal interests include classical music, playing the piano, reading, gardening and dogs.

In February 1969, Cools participated in a 13 day long civil disobedience sit in at Sir George Williams University (later Concordia University), where over 400 students occupied the computer center to protest the school's inadequate handling of complaints of racism against a professor. When the riot police stormed the building, some floors were set on fire, computers were destroyed and computer cards and paper rained down from the 9th floor onto the street below, where there was a counter demonstration chanting "let the niggers burn". While Cools was nowhere near the 9th floor, she was one of 97 students arrested, and unlike most of them, Cools refused to plead guilty to be set free, instead, she served two months in jail. About the affair, she has said "it took me a long time to recover it shocked me to my core". Several years later she was pardoned.

As a social worker, Cools was one of the pioneers in the protection of women from domestic abuse. In 1974, Cools moved to Toronto where she founded and served as the executive director for Women in Transition Inc., one of the first shelters for domestic violence victims in Canada. With a high demand for its services, Cools obtained funding for and opened a second shelter in 1987. She co organized Canada's first domestic violence conference, Couples in Conflict. She was candid in her criticism of the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien when proposed legislation to be introduced in the House of Commons was shelved after intense lobbying by women's groups.

While a strong advocate for women and domestic violence victims, she has also criticized certain aspects of the feminist movement, e. g. stating that "this feminism that has grown up suddenly in the last few years, where all virtue and goodness are stacked up on the side of women, and all evil and violence is stacked up on the side of men—well, human nature doesn't work that way." From the retirement of Lowell Murray on September 26, 2011, until her own retirement on August 12, 2018, Cools was the longest serving member of the Senate. She is the first female black Senator in North America. With the retirement of Charlie Watt, Cools was the last Senator appointed by Pierre Trudeau remaining in the Senate.