Person

Bishop, Mary F.

1913-1997

Mary F. Bishop (née Fraser) was born in Cobourg, Ontario on July 29, 1913, the only child of James Kenneth Fraser and Anna Beeman. In 1935 she received a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Literature from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She married Joseph (Joe) Bishop in 1937 and had three children: Charles Walter Fraser (Chuck) Bishop, Ann Josephine Louise Bishop, and James Kenneth Branson Bishop.

Over the following decades, the Bishop family relocated several times, corresponding to Joe’s duties within the Canadian Military. They lived in Washington, D.C. (1952–1962), where he served as Commander Canadian Army Staff and Canadian Military Attache, then in Vancouver (1956–1962) where he was Commander of the Canadian Army’s B.C. Area. Between 1962 and 1964, they lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where Joe served as a consulting engineer. While in Sri Lanka, Mary began what would become a long-term dedication to voluntary service in family planning movements: she worked as a clinic volunteer, and served on the national executive committee for the Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka.

After her return to Canada, Mary dedicated her efforts to groups concerned with reproductive rights, family planning, and population planning. She served on the board of the Planned Parenthood association of B.C. (PPABC) from the mid-1960s, and was its president between 1971–1973. She also served on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada (PPFC), was involved in the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and served on the IPPF Panel on Population Laws and Policies (Western Hemisphere Region). Her other volunteer involvements include the Canadian Institute of International Affairs; the University Women’s Club of Vancouver’s human rights committee; the University of British Columbia (UBC) Alumni Association heritage committee; Girl Guides of Canada (where she served as National Director from 1939–1949); and the Norman MacKenzie Scholarship Award jury at UBC. In 1984, Mary’s longstanding volunteer service was recognized when she received the Lifestyle Award from Hon. Monique Begin, Minister of National Health and Welfare in Ottawa.

Mary completed a Masters degree at UBC in 1971, her thesis titled “From ‘Left’ to ‘Right’: A perspective on the role of family planning in the West and in South Asia.” She subsequently worked as a research associate with the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine, where she was later appointed an honorary lecturer. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Mary pursued a project of writing a history of the birth control movement in Canada, which she aimed to publish as a book. While her book project never came to fruition, she did publish several articles, including “The Early Birth Controllers of B.C.” (BC Studies, 1984), “The Politics of Abortion: Trends in Canadian Fertility by Larry Collins—Revisited” (Atlantis, Fall 1983), and an entry on “Birth Control” in the first and second editions of the Canadian Encyclopedia. She also contributed a chapter to Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women’s Work in British Columbia on the life of B.C.-based birth control activist Vivian Dowding.

Mary died on November 1, 1997 in Vancouver at the age of 84.

Cobourg, Ontario
Washington, D.C.
Vancouver, B.C.
Colombo, Sri Lanka

Description created by Elizabeth Robertson in April 2024.

Information derived from the following sources:

Mary Bishop obituary. (1997, November 8). The Vancouver Sun, A19.
Records in the fonds.