Quebec Feminists

Quebec Feminist, a new stamp series launched by Canada Post, highlights the lives and achievements of three Quebec women who were lifelong advocates for women’s rights and workers’ rights: Léa Roback, Madeleine Parent, and Simonne Monet-Chartrand. The stamps celebrate their trailblazing activism, which foreshadowed many of the advancements made in equality and justice in Canada.

As the key period of their activism took place from the 1940s to the 1960s, a period with large waves of strikes, the design of the stamps was inspired by the visual language of protest and march posters, events organized to demand action on these key issues. As these posters were large in scale and imposing and often drawn by hand, allowing for a certain freedom in typeface character variation, the selected design approach followed suit, creating compositions with a strong sense of authenticity and which leave their mark on the imagination. This aesthetic was also largely used in newspapers of the time, which were successful in conveying all the excitement of these important moments in Canadian history.