Joan Hadrill is one of the founders of the Montreal chapter of the Raging Grannies, a human rights group known best for their colourful outfits and protest songs. The 77-year-old grandmother had been working on the peace movement and organizing educational events for several years before deciding to look for something that was more fun and different. Hadrill sat down with the Tribune to talk about her work with this unique group of ladies.
The Raging Grannies are probably already very noticeable in protests because of your age. Why is it also necessary for you to dress so outrageously and to sing protest songs?
I think for the past five years, we've worried that the media is going to get sick of us-been there, seen that. They haven't; we still get very good media attention and that's so important because that multiplies our message. If we're only talking to people or singing to people, you don't reach nearly the number of people that you do than if you get in the media.
We're very non-threatening. We look like nice little old grannies and we've found that we've got into an awful lot of particularly political meetings where we might not have, had we just been wearing street clothes. Also with the singing, there have been several times when they've seen pickets and so forth and they've tried to kick us out and we start singing. People are taken aback and they are forced to listen. You can't tell someone to stop singing.
As a group that consists of members with different interests fighting for multiple issues, how do you choose which causes to support and which protests to go to?
The original Grannies-and we've carried on from their premise-work for peace, justice and the environment. A lot of [the Grannies] came from the environment movement, but if you think about it, war is the most harmful thing you can do to the environment. If you don't have justice, you'll never have peace, which really has to work for justice as well; you can't separate the two. We've really kept it to those three major issues and they're quite large and we don't deviate from those. We've had Grannies who've joined and they wanted to work on abortion and other things and we said no; that's just a personal thing and we have enough to do working on peace and the environment.
Do you think demonstrations and rallies are the best way to get political leaders to listen and make change happen?
We used to think that. Bill Moyer recently had an excellent show on what happened when the American government decided to attack Iraq. Before they decided to do that, there were all kinds of protests; there were thousands of people on the streets. But the media gave the American administration a free ride and they didn't show that kind of the thing. That's part of the problem-if the media does not want to go along and try and at least to be truthful and show two sides of the story, then it's not going to have as much impact as it should.
If you're really concerned about an issue and you're just working by yourself and writing letters-which I think is an excellent way to reach politicians-there's something about being in a group. When that group joins other groups, it's really empowering. It gives you hope because you feel that there are other people who care too.
Do you ever see the Raging Grannies merging with Les Mémées Déchaînées, the French Raging Grannies group?
The Mémées probably work a little more locally than we do; a lot of our issues are global. We do a lot of work together with the Mémées, but we each have our way of doing things and our own issues.
I don't see the two groups merging. Geography would be one thing; quite a few of us are coming from the west end and most of them live more in the east end, so it's not that easy.
Also, we don't want to become too huge as it could become too unwieldy. We'd like to have a few more members than we have at the moment… so we could always get a group out. However, when you get a lot of independently thinking women all together, it can get a little out of hand. There was a time when we were a bigger group that we had to put a feather in the middle of the table and say only the person holding the feather could speak because everyone was speaking at the same time.
-Compiled by Vincci Tsui
2008 Woodie Awards
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