Simonne Monet-Chartrand

Simonne Monet-Chartrand (November 4, 1919 – January 18, 1993) was a Canadian labor activist, feminist writer, and pacifist.

She was an advocate for syndicalist causes and a proponent of women in the labor movement. A co-founder of Concordia University's Simone de Beauvoir Institute, dedicated to feminist studies, Monet-Chartrand also co-founded the Federation des femmes du Quebec, the pacifist movement Voix des Femmes, and the Movement for Nuclear Disarmament. She studied at a Catholic boarding school in Montreal, and began noting the inequalities between boys and girls at a young age. A dark stain on her otherwise idyllic childhood was the death of her brother Roger, of tuberculosis; Monet-Chartrand also caught the disease, but she survived thanks to a long stay in a sanatorium in the Laurentides. She led the organization's provincial-level board of directors and began to work with a number of influential activist figures, including fellow Catholic youth leader Michel Chartrand. Her upper-class family opposed her relationship with the working-class Chartrand—they temporarily sent her to Chicago in the United States in an effort to split the couple up, and three priests refused to marry them before they could find one who would agree to do so. Nevertheless, the two wed in 1942. They would go on to have seven children together and to support each other in their political activism. Her political involvement grew during the Conscription Crisis of 1944, and she joined the Bloc populaire, an anti-conscription political party. She was a member of the socio-political committee for the Quebec Teachers Union, and in the '70s she worked for the teachers' union in Champlain, Quebec. She was also a co-founder of the Movement for Nuclear Disarmament.

Monet-Chartrand's activism, particularly her feminist organizing, extended internationally. She attended women's conferences in Europe and represented the Human Rights League of Quebec at conferences in the Middle East.

In 1978 and 1979, Monet-Chartrand returned to her studies at Concordia University, where she also co-founded the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, a college dedicated to feminist studies.

Monet-Chartrand also worked as a journalist, contributing to various publications as a writer, including Châtelaine, La Vie en rose, and Les têtes de pioche. Her second book, focusing on her pacifist activism, was published in 1988 with the title L'espoir et le défi de la paix. She also wrote a two-volume history of Quebec's women, published in 1990 and 1994.

In 1992, she received the Prix Idola Saint-Jean for her feminist work.

Several buildings and institutions have been named for her, including a center for victims of domestic violence and an elementary school in Montreal.

In September 2023, Monet-Chartrand was one of three Quebec feminists and trade unionists, along with Madeleine Parent and Léa Roback, honoured by Canada Post with a postage stamp.

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