From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maureen Anne McTeer (born February 27, 1952) is an author and a lawyer, and the wife of Joe Clark, the 16th Prime Minister of Canada.

McTeer was born in Cumberland, Ontario and raised in Ottawa, and worked as a staffer in Clark's office before marrying him in 1974. When Clark became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, McTeer became controversial — feminism still being a relatively new social phenomenon at that time — for keeping her own surname and maintaining her own career. She created further controversy by not accompanying Clark during his campaigns and she did not undertake the hosting duties that other Prime Minister's wives have traditionally done.

In the 1988 federal election, McTeer ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in Carleton—Gloucester, hoping to get elected alongside her husband. Despite the party's re-election victory, McTeer was not elected in her riding. As of 2006, however, she remains the only spouse of a former Canadian Prime Minister to have run for political office herself.

McTeer is a specialist in medical law, and for a while was a member of the Royal Commission on Reproductive and Genetic Technologies (1989–1993).

McTeer and Clark have one daughter, Catherine, who became a public figure in her own right when Clark returned to the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives in 1998.

McTeer championed Deafening by Frances Itani, in Canada Reads 2006. She championed its French-language translation, Une coquille de silence, in Le combat des livres 2006.

• Residences: Homes of Canada's Leaders (1982)
• Tangled Womb: The Politics of Human Reproduction (1992)
• Parliament (1995) — translated into French as Le petit guide du système parlementaire canadien
• Tough Choices: Living and Dying in the 21st Century (1999) — translated into French as Vivre et mourir au 21e siècle: choix et enjeux
• In My Own Name: A Memoir (2003)