Elsie Dean was born in 1924 into a poor white family in northern Saskatchewan, where she lived on a subsistence farm with her parents and seven siblings. Her mother was staunchly political and fought without shame for relief payments for her family during the Depression. Elsie moved to Vancouver in 1942 and joined the Communist Party in 1943 (an institution to which all of her siblings belonged at one point or another). Her Party membership over the years was intermittent, and she ultimately moved away from it, but her support for an involvement in social movement activity has been unrelenting.
Material from Dean on the site:
- Transcript excerpt where she talks about some of her activities in the 1940s and 1950s.
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