Year: 2025
Location: Edmonton
Profile: Lilly Ann Selby came from an agrarian socialist family in Saskatchewan. She began married life on a farm until financial conditions forced the couple to move to Alberta to find waged jobs. She describes the hardships of farming, and remembers the breakthrough when the CCF formed the Saskatchewan government in 1943. After her husband died in 1969, Selby, a single mother, taught and later served as a school counsellor in Jasper Place Composite High School where a robust trades training program offered an alternative to the academic stream. She participated in Edmonton’s 1978 teachers’ strike. She recalls Jasper Place as a successful working-class community with low unemployment and virtually all neighbours having respectable jobs. While in Jasper Place, she hosted an Indigenous student in her home. But the residential school students who were bussed to the school were never integrated into the mainstream of school life. Her final job was as a counsellor in Vancouver before retiring in Edmonton in 2004, where she has been active in the Stephen Lewis Foundation raising money for grandmothers in Africa who are taking care of orphaned children, the Canadian Federation of University Women which helps women attend university, and the New Democratic Party.
Keywords: Canadian Federation of University Women; Edmonton Transit; Farming; Jasper Place; Jasper Place Composite High; New Democratic Party; Single mother; Socialism; Stephen Lewis Foundation; T.C. Douglas.
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See also: Alberta Teachers’ Association; Women and Work in Alberta