- Born in Montreal, 1947
Braid, K. (1979). Invisible women: Women in non-traditional occupations in B.C. [Master’s thesis; Simon Fraser University]. Summit. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/3241
Pender’s Journeywman
https://www.katebraid.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/AQUA-Nov-Dec-2020-Kate-Braid.pdf
- In 1976, Braid was 30 years old and halfway through work on a master of arts degree at Simon Fraser university when she decided she needed a break.
- But how does a woman halfway through her masters degree suddenly veer into construction? “I was running out of money.”
- In 1978 she started her pre-apprentice course and was soon so busy and exhausted every night that her nightly journal entries got shorter and shorter, and that’s when she noticed that those abbrevi-ated entries were getting more and more like poetry.
- She did go back and finish that MA in 1979 and three years later she also finished up the 2,000 hours she needed to complete her fourth year and become a fully qualified journeywoman carpenter — one of the first qualified female carpenters in B.C.
- Braid, who kept journals of the male construction culture and her feelings of isolation, nervousness and even fear that she later turned into poetry, has moved on, but she says she still has a passion for concrete and for framing.
- 1995: She went back to school, this time to do an MFA at UBC ???
- The multi-talented poet, writer and carpenter journeywoman was also an educator, teaching at BCIT, UBC, SFUand eventually Vancouver Island university (previously Malaspina College).
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Hammer & Nail: Notes Of A Journeywoman (2020)
https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/hammer-nail-notes-of-a-journeywoman/9781773860336.html
- I learned from my mother that a woman bares all and bears it in silence. This was the golden rule that good mothers passed on to their daughters in the 1950s, the rule that said it’s always the woman that gives. Who else could it be?
- Women By Louise Bogan https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43693/women-56d2227f3d06fWomen have no wilderness in them,
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread…
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,.
- The only option I could see – and this seemed daring enough- was not to be a wife at all.
- Feminism
- Nurse, secretary, teacher, air stewardess (nurse)
- London – Vancouver –
- I never heard the word sexual harassment until a conference organized by the BC Federation of Labour in 1982.
Events: https://www.katebraid.com/category/events/
The Relationship of Body and Harmony: Rob Taylor interviews Kate Braid The Relationship of Body and Harmony: Rob Taylor interviews Kate Braid
https://www.eventmagazine.ca/2025/08/rob-taylor-interviews-kate-braid/
BC Labour Heritage Centre Oral History Project
https://www.labourheritagecentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kate-Braid-Nov-8-2016-Oral-History-Interview-Summary.pdf
Interview Summary – November 8, 2016
https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/bc-labour/interview-kate-braid
TURNING LEFT TO THE LADIES, Kate Braid (2015)
In 1977 Kate Braid got her first job in construction as a labourer on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. Never in her wildest dreams did she plan to be a construction worker, much less a carpenter, but she was desperate to stay on the island and had run out of money, along with all the options a woman usually has for work — secretary, waitress, receptionist. Turning Left to the Ladies is an autobiographical account of the fifteen years she worked as a labourer, apprentice and journey carpenter, building houses, high rises and bridges. She was the first female member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters and the first full-time woman teaching trades at the BC Institute of Technology. Turning Left to the Ladies is a wry, sometimes humorous, sometimes meditative look at one woman’s relationship to her craft, and the people she met along the way.
Sex trade worker turns poet – and gives back with a frank memoir https://archive.ph/bQO6i#selection-2420.0-2420.1