Joanna Miller has become a national spokeswoman for the peace movement in Canada. A tall, slightly gangling woman of sixty, she was named to the newly created Canadian Institute for Peace and Security by the Liberal government in 1984; that fall she was appointed special advisor on disarmanent to the Canadian delegation to the United Nations by Conservative External Affairs Minister Joe Clark. Joanna spoke out on the arms race and the overwhelming need for commitment to the international peace movement at women's peace conferences from Saskatoon to Halifax in 1985.
Joanna didn't start out with her eye on a speaker's platform. She was firmly fixed in the role of a traditional wife and mother, having met her husband at the University of British Columbia, married after graduation, and worked while he studied and garnered scholarships. As soon as Len had a "real" job they started a family, and in less than six years had four children. Joanna found that total immersion in caring for her family was the only way to survive the demands of the job at hand.
"That was the time when they laid the guilt trip on you all the time," she remembers, "that the ideal mother could easily handle four kids, have a beautiful home, make her own bread, be a charming hostess and a delightful companion to her husband, never lose her temper, always have the picnic basket packed and ready to go."
But when a move to Saskatoon in 1961 opened up the chance to get a baby sitter one afternoon a week, she was on her way. "I could go out and do what I wanted--and it transformed my life."
What Joanna wanted to do was to regain the active interest in international issues that was her own personal legacy from her mother, an Oxford-educated British socialist transplanted by a holiday romance to domestic life in Wilson Creek, British Columbia. Joanna began, very tentatively, by helping out with UNICEF card sales and managing the literature table at meetings of the UN Association.
By 1971 Joanna Miller was chairing the Saskatchewan UNICEF volunteer organization, and by the end of the '70s she was its national president. She continues to serve on the national boards of UNICEF, the UN Association, and Ploughshares, and she continues to speak out. She's still totally immersed in the job at hand.
