Margaret Lowe Benston

By Anne Roberts

Famous as Maggie was for ground-breaking work in chemistry, computing science and women’s studies, what I remember most is her complete commitment to the collective good. She believed in community; she lived and worked cooperatively, and, until her dying days in 1991, she joined with women and workers around the world to resist capitalism and build a better society based on socialist ideals.

Maggie and her identical twin sister Marian Lowe were born in 1937 and were raised in a small town south of Seattle. Maggie earned a PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University of Washington and was hired as a charter faculty member of SFU’s chemistry department in 1966. When SFU opened, women made up only 12% of the faculty and 37% of the student body. Though respected for her work in infrared spectroscopy, publishing numerous books, book chapters and journal articles, Maggie never felt at home in chemistry. She did find common cause with student and faculty radicals in the PSA Department, supporting their experiments in democracy and defending their efforts to transform the university into serving the needs of the working class. During those struggles, Maggie joined students, several SFU staff members, and one other female faculty, Andrea Lebowitz in the English Department, to found Women’s Caucus.

I don’t think there could be a more egalitarian personality than Maggie’s. She pitched in, did the work that needed to be done — whether taking notes or helping produce the Pedestal — and had a way of sincerely appreciating other women’s ideas and suggestions. Maggie never did all the talking. When she did speak, it was usually to offer a solution to the problems at hand, for example, how best for the Caucus to grow as a movement, be effective, and remain open and democratic without elected leaders. A prime example of Maggie’s commitment to collective action was the development of the proposal for SFU’s Women’s Studies program. Spurred by the interest of students in Women’s Caucus, Maggie and Andrea set up a committee and invited anyone who was interested to join. As many as 20 students, staff and faculty came to the meetings. The Women’s Studies program was approved by the Senate in 1975, the first in Canada.

In 1969, Maggie rocked the Marxist academic world by publishing in Monthly Review “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” challenging the received wisdom of that time that men do all the productive work of society and therefore are the ones with revolutionary potential to organize and overthrow capitalism. Using Marxist analytical tools, Maggie was “the first to argue that women formed a reserve army of labour, a group that could be manipulated in certain ways because women are responsible for the reproduction of labour power. She argued that women’s domestic and wage labour were essential to the flow of capitalist production and that women could not be fully integrated into wage labour without a full transformation in both of the forms of labour.” (Wikipedia) Because women have a different relationship to the means of production than men do, she wrote, women form a class. The article was a sensation at the time and is still widely read. Monthly Review reported they couldn’t keep up with the demand for reprints. It’s been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, German and Japanese and widely anthologized. For a time, some women in Latin America called themselves “Benstonistas.” Maggie’s influence can be seen decades later in the work of Betsy Warrior in the U.S., Christine Delphy in France, Marilyn Waring in New Zealand, Maria Mies in Germany and Margaret Randall in Cuba.

Maggie loved music, taught herself to play the guitar, and was a founding member of the Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet, a group of women who taught feminist labour and anti-war songs at picket lines and at rallies. She helped found Vancouver Mayworks, a cultural festival celebrating workers.

During the 1980s, Maggie’s intellectual interests shifted to include the newly emerging field of computer science. She eventually ended up with a joint appointment in both computing science and women’s studies. As her sister Marian remembered, “Maggie loved to say that she was then in two fields for which she had no credentials.” Unlikely as it seems, Marian followed a similar career path as her twin sister. After earning a PhD in chemistry; Marian taught at Boston University and later obtained a joint appointment with women’s studies there.

Maggie turned her keen scientific mind to doing research on the effect of technology on women and work. In 1981, Maggie joined with five women to found the still-thriving Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST) to support and promote the education of girls and women through programs and activities developed in partnership with the community.

Maggie died in 1991, just 52 years old, a gentle warrior struck down by cancer. Students at SFU voted in 1996 to name the new student centre building on campus the Maggie Benston Centre.