Manuscript Collection MS COLL 00083 - Margaret Fairley Papers

Margaret Adele Fairley (née Keeling) was an activist, author, editor, and member of the Communist Party of Canada and the Labor-Progressive Party. She was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England on 20 November 1885. She attended St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, and graduated with first class honours in English; however, she was not awarded a degree because Oxford did not grant degrees to women at that time. She subsequently worked as a tutor in English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. While at St. Hilda’s, she met Henry Marshall Tory, president of the University of Alberta. Tory invited Fairley to be the newly established university's first dean of women and offered her a B.A. for the work she had completed at Oxford. She moved to Edmonton in 1912, where she met Barker Fairley, a professor of German studies. They married in Edmonton in 1914 and subsequently moved to Toronto. The Fairleys had five children together.

Margaret Fairley edited several publications including Spirit of Canadian Democracy (1945), The Selected Writings of William Lyon Mackenzie (1960), Highways to Peace: A Challenge to Youth (1961). She also edited a quarterly magazine called New Frontiers from 1952 to 1956. At the time of her death, Fairley was working on a book titled ‘With Our Own Hands,’ which sought to document the creative contributions of settlers to Canadian culture.

In the 1950s Fairley participated in two Canadian cultural delegations. In the summer of 1954, Fairley led a delegation of Canadians on a cultural tour of Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The tour was organized by New Frontiers and was led by Fairley in her role as editor. A 1959 delegation to the People’s Republic of China included Fairley, archeologists Paul Sweetman and Frank Ridley, and two other Canadians. As guests of the Republic, they visited numerous historical and archaeological sites.

Towards the end of her life Fairley was instrumental in the creation of a park at Brunswick and Ulster in Toronto’s Sussex-Ulster neighbourhood (now Harbord Village). Fairley began petitioning the city for a park in 1965. Following her death in 1968, friends and neighbours petitioned the city to name the park the “Margaret Fairley Park.” The park was officially dedicated to her on 23 June 1972 and a bronze bust of Fairley was installed at the park in 1973.

References
• James Doyle, “The Canadian Worker Poet: the Life and Writings of Joe Wallace,” Canadian Poetry, Volume 35 (Fall/Winter 1994). https://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol35/doyle.html
• June Ridley and Doris Ridley, “Frank Ridley, 1904-1985,” Arch Notes 89-3 (May/June 1985), https://ontarioarchaeology.org/wp-content/uploads/an1985-03.pdf
• Canada’s Early Women Writers. Margaret Adele Fairley. Canada’s Early Women Writers, 18 May 2018.https://cwrc.ca/islandora/object/ceww%3A30d7deab-101f-4778-bb20-a0645e4654a4