A YOUNG WOMAN at a recent social event asked whether I was a feminist. I could tell from the slight sneer with which she endowed the word where she stood on this subject. Never one to back away from a fight, I told her that I have always considered women to be equal to men in both intellect and ability.
The Communist control of Hungarian society made it vital that women worked. My mother was a surveyor, outdoors all winter and summer, away from home for weeks at a time. Her sister Leah was a truck driver. In New Zealand, women were still expected to be at home, though in the countryside they helped run the family sheep farms. My mother, of course, continued to work, but once she got her qualifications confirmed, she was in an office, practicing town planning.
The late sixties didn’t offer equal opportunities for women. Certain professions and courses of study were off the table, and even in the same jobs, women were paid less than men. I resented being paid less than my male colleagues not only at M&S but also at both Cassell’s and Collier Macmillan. I knew it was unfair but I thought I could live with it, if I was doing something I loved. There were few women in management positions, fewer on corporate boards, and some of us engaged the issues head-on through expressing our ideas openly.
By the seventies, of course, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was part of our history, as was Germaine Greer’s militantly anti-male The Female Eunuch. Most women, unlike Greer, did not feel we had to hate men to be feminists. Margaret Laurence was a feminist. She publicly supported the Canadian Abortion Rights League, believing that women should have the choice whether to carry a child to term. She believed that women were about equal to men in most respects, except when they were superior. Still, she liked and sometimes loved men.
In Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t Told, an anthology of women’s writing edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson, there is an essay by Margaret Atwood that captures the era of “garter belts and panty girdles” when there were things that were not openly discussed. “Abortion. Incest. Lesbians. Masturbation. Female orgasm. Menopause. Impotence. Anger . . .” We’ve come a long way since then. “I remember a grand fermentation of ideas,” she wrote. “Language was being changed. Territory was being claimed. The unsaid was being said.” She taught a new course at York University called Canadian Women Writers.
In her essay “Writing the Male Character,” delivered as the 1982 Hagey lecture at the University of Waterloo, Atwood spoke of what civilization might be without the contributions of men: “No electric floor polishers, no neutron bomb, no Freudian psychology . . .” In her usual ironic tone, she went on to say that “they’re fun to play Scrabble with and handy for eating leftovers.” For the novelist, whose work features male characters, there is the challenge of writing about some men who are “good” but not “weak,” men who are not “rapists and murderers, child molesters, warmongers, sadists, power-hungry, callous, domineering, pompous, foolish or immoral, though I am sure we will all agree that such men do exist.”
On This Country in the Morning, Marjorie Harris carved out a women’s segment of at least twenty minutes each week to talk about equal pay, equal rights, and even daycare. All my friends were feminists. Marjorie, Sylvia Fraser, Geraldine Sherman, Barbara Frum (though she protested once that the women’s movement was primarily middle-class, for women who could afford the luxury of self-discovery), Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel, Doris Anderson, Isabel Bassett, Yvonne Worthington, and of course, the extraordinary June Callwood.
June was the most polished, least pretentious writer ever to have been hired by Maclean’s. Even Peter Gzowski, who was a tough competitor, admitted that he never lost his admiration for June’s brilliant way with words. She was witty, irreverent, sharp but forgiving. She dressed in pastels. She seemed to have a year-round tan; long, thin legs, usually in slingbacks; blond, flighty hair; and a big smile. She was a seventies feminist, a social activist determined to reach the consciences of people too involved with their own lives to care about others. She dealt with homelessness, drug addiction, AIDS, women, children, and the law. She wrote thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, twenty books, and ghosted a host more, for Barbara Walters, Dr. Charles Mayo, and Otto Preminger among others. She was also a devilishly daring glider pilot—a skill she learned in her late sixties and continued to perfect till she was in her eighties.
We were friends for more than thirty years. We talked a lot, laughed a lot, and tried to make sense of each other’s passionate engagements. June’s were usually more exhausting and often less rewarding than mine.
* * *
BOB FULFORD WAS right in his Saturday Night article in that by the mid-seventies feminism was no longer a fringe movement. There were more women in senior management. We had gained new rights. Some companies wanted to appear progressive by hiring women to serve on corporate boards. But it was slow progress. It was not until the late seventies that I had my first invitations to join corporate boards. In seemingly quick succession, I served on the boards of M&S, M&S-Bantam, Imperial Life, Maritime Life, Peoples’ Jewellers, Doubleday, Alliance Communications, TVO, Ryerson, York University, the Empire Company, Hollinger, and a bunch of charitable foundation boards where at last I wasn’t the only woman. I was appointed to boards because the time was right and, to all appearances, I was a business executive. I had a ringside seat for the takeover of some companies, the struggles for succession in others, the family feuds, and one bankruptcy.
A lot has happened for women since the seventies. Did we, as some women today argue, adopt patriarchal goals? Did we emulate men in our power suits, striving to sit at boardroom tables and in parliamentary offices? We probably did. Certainly the shoulder pads of my blue and yellow suits were a far cry from my old miniskirt outfits, but it was a step that gave women choices. (One photo of me on the cover of a business magazine wearing a yellow suit with seriously padded shoulders made me look like a stuffed canary.) Did white women own the feminism of the sixties and seventies? It seemed that way, but then white men owned the political and business power. We did not, intentionally, exclude women of colour. Doris and June, Sylvia and Margaret did invite them in and some of the time we were successful. But only some of the time. It’s so rewarding today to see a multiplicity of women of all backgrounds finding their own voices and telling their own stories.
That I became president of a wonderful publishing company—Key Porter Books—in the early 1980s was in large part due to the changes other women had fought for. So, in answer to the young woman’s question about whether I am a feminist, hell, yes, I have always been a feminist and it is time to celebrate our own. But that assessment itself brands me as a second wave feminist. The third wave, as its many advocates declare, is upon us now, and it assumes that previous waves were defeatist, that we bought in to the male mystique. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women argues that we are still emotionally and physically tortured by our need to look beautiful. The assumption is that our achievements have been “manipulated by those hostile to feminist causes.” She is right, of course, but myths are tough to get rid of and this one has been around for so long, we barely notice the ads and commercials that feed on our insecurities and perpetuate its existence. Still, I am hopeful. We have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go. Each generation of women must find its own way, and my daughters’ generation, and the generation that was born after theirs, is, I am happy to see, redefining feminism and its central issues. It will be up to them to decide where the #MeToo movement will take us. The time is right for naming and shaming perpetrators of sexual aggression, though I fear that some men have been publicly lynched without due process and I resist the push to seeing women as hapless victims. We are much better and stronger than that.