Her journalism career came more or less by accident. "I'd been doing supply gym teaching and was hugely pregnant with our third child when the wife of one of my husband's business colleagues invited me for tea one summer afternoon. As the little kids ran around playing, she told me about a new magazine another friend was starting. She asked whether I would be interested in coming on board to write about fitness for women and similar topics. 'Well, why not?' I thought."

The magazine became Canadian Living, an extremely successful publication that is still going strong. Armstrong worked as an editor there for 13 years, although she was on staff part time until her youngest was in school.

By then, Armstrong was branching out. An example is her reporting on the 1982 Canadian expedition to Mount Everest. "During five months of the team's preparation, Canadian Living followed them as part of a series of articles on 'How to Face the Everests in Your Life,'" she says. "Once they started their climb, we continued to be in touch through notes and relayed messages, and when they made it to the summit, no other Canadian media had such good background or such good contacts."

Armstrong's story about the climb made the front page of The Globe and Mail. It was, she says modestly, "a good way to break into newspaper reporting."

Then in 1988 she took over the top job at Homemaker's, a small-format, giveaway women's magazine. It had always had more edge than other Canadian and American magazines with the same audience, but Armstrong and her team decided to take it further. "We didn't do much formal market research," she says, "but we were sure that, given the way television was bringing the world into everyone's home, women wanted more meat on the bones of the news."

	PHOTO: Susan King

This meant articles about divorce, women's rights, pay equity, abortion, and in 1991 a view from the inside of Kingston's Prison for Women, as well as a report from the first women members of the Canadian Forces in combat during the war in the Persian Gulf.

Armstrong wrote both stories. The latter was her first assignment as a war correspondent, although she adds that "while I love the phrase, probably a better term is reporting from zones of conflict."

Since then she has reported from a string of the world's hot spots, including 14 trips to Bosnia, plus missions to Somalia and Rwanda. She's also investigated the lives of child prostitutes in India and Toronto, street kids in Colombia, "honour killings" in some Middle Eastern countries (where male family members kill sisters, daughters or nieces for such transgressions as engaging in pre-marital sex or refusing to agree to an arranged marriage), and female circumcision in Africa. She's produced several documentary films growing out of her research for these stories. Both her reporting and her activism have won her seats as director of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies and the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre, organizations which provide information on security and peacekeeping issues through seminars, publications and educational programs, as well as honours including the Order of Canada and the Amnesty International Media Award. Then there's her work with groups like Willow, the Ontario-based Breast Cancer Resource and Support Centre and LEAF (Legal Education and Action Fund) Foundation, which raises money for court battles in support of women's rights. Not to mention a Master of Science degree earned last spring from the University of Toronto with a thesis on women, health and human rights.

To those who know her, this ever-widening circle of concern and action is typical of Armstrong. She's a woman who'd stand out in any crowd, not only because she's tall -- six feet -- well dressed and handsome, but because, as friends and acquaintances repeat again and again, she has "boundless energy."

"She's been a feminist since she was a young woman and cares a lot about women's rights," says Mary McIver, who worked with Armstrong for more than 10 years. "That sort of shaded into concern about children's rights, too, and then about women and children in the Third World."

"She's always encouraging women," adds Cheryl Embrett, Homemaker's current associate editor. "She has great respect for what women can do. She's good at giving you the belief that you can do more than you thought you could."

Embrett goes on: "I asked her once how she avoided being nervous when she gave a speech, and she told me that of course she's nervous. But you have to push yourself to do things, she said; you can't let yourself be limited by fear."

Armstrong's first report from Afghanistan, a Homemaker's article also called "Veiled Threat," was published in the summer of 1997, less than a year after the Taliban had, as she wrote, "thundered" into Kabul and "catapulted" women and girls "back into the dark ages." The article prompted 9,000 letters from Homemaker's readers, and played a major role in raising awareness among women on what was going on there. The letters were eventually delivered by Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

"I think the women of the world should applaud each other for what they did to expose the plight of Afghan women and children," she says now. "The rest of the world looked away, but an international network of women was formed which tried to find solutions, slogging away at midnight on the Internet to keep things going.

"How could the Afghans expect women to give birth and raise the next generation when they didn't have medical care, enough to eat, or education," she adds in exasperation.