God bless Gwen Jacob
Why don't they have protests like that here?
Obviously, you don't remember Gwen Jacob, who won this ground-breaking right almost 20 years ago for women in Ontario:
The right to go topless:
Nearly 20 years later, Gwen Jacob says she’d do it again
August 30, 2010
BY CHELSEA MIYA,
FOR THE GUELPH MERCURY
It was just a shirt.
But for Gwen Jacob it changed her life and made history.
It’s nearly 20 years since Jacob’s arrest for walking topless through downtown Guelph on a sweltering summer day.
The case sparked headlines and controversy, earning Jacob the wrath and admiration of countless people who had heard her story.
Today, Jacob lives in Toronto with her two children and runs her own business. But she still sometimes wonders if she made the right decision.
“That day changed my life,” said Jacob. “In ways I never could have imagined, good and bad.”
It started with a simple stroll through a park. Then 19, Jacob and a friend spotted men taking off their shirts during a sports match.
“I thought, why not?” said Jacob. “If guys can do it, why not us?”
But it was more than that, she said.
“So many people, especially young women, are made to feel ashamed of their bodies. I wanted to do something. It was about changing the way women — and men — see each other, and accepting ourselves for who we are.”
Not long after, Jacob shed her shirt on a stroll through the city. After neighbours complained, she was arrested for public indecency.
Jacob successfully defended herself in the 1996 Ontario Court of Appeal, and won the right of women in Ontario to be topless in public.
But the fight for her personal freedom and privacy had just begun.
“I was exhausted,” Jacob recalls of the months around the trial. “At the time, I was still basically a kid. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
“People would come and confront me all the time,” said Jacob. “I was surprised at how angry some of them were. They thought they knew who I was and what I was about because of something they’d read in the paper.”
Work could be a challenge, says Jacob. “It was hard to get people to see me as a person. I would go for job interviews and worry that the employer wouldn’t hire me if they Googled my name.”
“I lost faith in the media,” she said. “I was tired of being intruded upon.”
For years since, she’s avoided the limelight.
It was her children, now aged 11 and 15, who convinced her to return to Guelph on Saturday for the Top Freedom Day of Pride. “They said they were proud of me and what I had done,” Jacob said.
When Jacob arrived at the event with her family in tow, there were “hugs, tears and smiles.”
“It was magic,” said Lindsay Webb, a University of Guelph student and one of the festival’s organizers.
“After the festival ended, we all went to get dessert together, and along the way Gwen, Andrea Crinklaw (the event’s co-organizer) and I took off our shirts and walked down Wyndham Street.”
It’s a different world than in 1991, says Jacob. Then, she was “just one lone student.”
Today, the movement has grown, with entire organizations such as the Topfree Equal Rights Association fighting for the equal right of women to bare their chests in public.
If Jacob could go back in time, would she do over again?
She hesitates.
“In the end, absolutely,” Jacob says. “But it’s not about me anymore. In a way, it never was.”
“It’s about generations of daughters and mothers and grandmothers, and being able to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m OK with my body. I don’t have to be ashamed.’ ”
------------------------------------
Also around the time of her Ontario court victory in the mid-90s, Gwen Jacob and a group of friends marched topless across the bridge from Fort Erie to Buffalo, thereby making an indelible imprint on the history of Canadian/American relations.
Perhaps not as significant as the war of 1812 when Upper Canadians marched on Washington and burned down the White House, but then again, what American remembers that whipping?
To celebrate Gwen Jacobs, Guelph held a bare breast event this summer:
http://news.guelphmercury.com/article/682489
