Author

A young Alberta woman picks up her suitcase, struggles across a ditch, and flags down a Greyhound bus on Highway 2. She is 19 and off to join the Canadian military. She leaves behind, over a floor vent in her mother’s living room, a hundred chicks in a cardboard enclosure – next winter’s meat. There is nothing for her here. The free trip to Cornwallis, Nova Scotia for boot camp beckons her into a future all her own.

 

Breasts Ma’am! is the true story of Linda Long’s life journey to that pivotal day, her passage through over a decade of military service, her choice to take release and challenge university as a non-matriculated adult, and her successful attainment of a law degree. Follow Linda’s use of her new legal knowledge and advocacy skills, informed by her military experience, to influence gender integration policy and law in the Canadian Forces in the advent of the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A remarkable and inspiring life story of one young woman’s pluck and perseverance, Linda Long details, with humour and poignancy, her journey to the 19-year old with ‘chickens in the living room’, to her service in the Canadian Forces as a “scrappy little private”, to her transition to a lawyer advocating for equality of opportunity, and to her appointment by Canada’s Minister of National Defence as a human rights monitor of military gender integration. Be stirred by her anecdotes and discover why her book is aptly named; how she broke stereotypes climbing a tree in lineman gear and coined the term ‘the culture of harassment’ to describe her experience of barriers to equal treatment and opportunities for women in the Forces.

 

This is the story of the dramatic forces that shaped Linda Long into a woman and into the justice warrior who decided to do something about systemic barriers facing women in the Canadian Forces.