Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie

Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie (19 October 1867 – 1 November 1945) was a Canadian feminist. She was a self-taught legal expert (her father and husband were both lawyers, and she had access to their books). She was a pioneer of the feminist movement in Québec who co-founded the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste with Caroline Dessaulles-Béique (in 1907), an organization which campaigned for social and political rights for women.

Personal life Gérin-Lajoie was the daughter of Marie-Louise Globensky and Alexandre Lacoste. Lacoste came from a wealthy Catholic French Canadian family and focused her self-studying on the history of women and the law. She married a lawyer, Henri Gérin-Lajoie, on the condition that he give her the freedom to continue her campaign for women's rights. She was 20 when they married. The couple raised four children.

Education Gérin-Lajoie was born into a bourgeois family due to the successful career of her father, Alexandre Lacoste. At a young age, she accompanied her mother to upper class charity activities. Over time, at these events, she learned about issues such as poverty and women's lack of power to create their own futures.

At nine years old, she join the convent in Hochelaga and graduated from it at the age of fifteen in 1883 During this time, there were no francophone Catholic university programs in Quebec for women but Marie had a thirst for knowledge. She continued her studies in her father's extensive library. During this time in history, after being married, a woman would be transferred from the guardianship of her father to her husband. She would have little legal power and also no right to consent. This would make the women incompetent dependents on the men which Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie thought was inherently wrong.

In 1992, Quebec City established the Parc Marie-Gérin-Lajoie, straddling the border of the Neufchâtel Est and Lebourgneuf neighbourhoods of the arrondissement (borough) of Les Rivières. In 1995, Quebec City named a street in her honour, Rue Marie Gérin Lajoie, in the Cap-Rouge neighbourhood of the Sainte-Foy–Sillery–Cap-Rouge borough. Mother and daughter are honoured with the singularly named Parc Marie-Gérin-Lajoie in the Montreal borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, while Marie-Joséphine was also honoured with her own stamp in the Prominent Canadian Women series (1993) issued by Canada Post.