Dropped Threads 3 (13 page)

I stopped being active in campus politics. I excused it by embracing existentialism, which I understood to provide a philosophical framework for living life for the experience alone. And with Roger I was having plenty of experiences. My friends were worried about the
type
of experiences and when my father met Roger by accident, he threatened to disown me if I continued seeing him. That sealed my fate for months to come. If my staying with Roger made my father that angry, it must be a good thing. Ultimately though, Roger’s drinking became unbearable, and I realized that my life would be entirely consumed by his if I didn’t leave. That’s when I moved to Toronto.

I didn’t last long in Hogtown, a.k.a. Toronto the Good. I was looking for adventure, and it was a pretty sleepy place in 1967. Not wanting to risk going back to Montreal and falling in with Roger again, I moved to New York City where I had family. As usual I rebelled against restrictions: walking alone at night and refusing to be a prisoner in my apartment in fear of what might happen to me in the (then crime-ridden) city. I was accosted more than once by flashers and by men trying to pick me up, some of whom I had to fight to escape. To protect myself, I stopped wearing makeup, learned how to walk aggressively and make a scene at the slightest provocation. After that hardly anyone bothered me.

I tried just about everything that was going in those crazy days of 1968. Having experienced the open sexuality of
Roger and friends, I gladly participated in the major pickup scene in the Village. I was extremely street-savvy and in one year had five different boyfriends, which I saw as a positive sign of my liberated, independent status.

When the woman upstairs was murdered by her boyfriend and I heard every sound, every word—the shot and the scream still resonate in my head—I woke up to another reality. I didn’t have a framework for understanding violence against women in those days. I thought it was just part of life on the streets in New York. Most women stayed off the streets in their own little worlds, but I didn’t want to restrict myself like that, so I accepted the risk. The murder made me realize that I was playing with fire. Rather than retreat into a closed world, I decided to leave and move back to boring old Toronto.

That didn’t last long. After a month or two I decided to hit the road again. “Girls can’t travel alone,” they said. Well, I ignored them. I had survived in the Big Apple alone, how much worse could it be in Europe and the Middle East?

Discovering an answer to that question occupied me for the next year, 1969, as I made my way overland from Turkey to India. There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. That was when I crossed it. Travelling on buses from Istanbul to Delhi and then beyond was an insane risk: it damaged my mental and physical health and nearly cost me my life. On the other hand, having had those experiences and survived them put me on the path I would follow for the rest of my life.

The threats were terrifying. In eastern Turkey the bus I was on was surrounded by men who tried to get me off by rocking the bus back and forth, back and forth, while I desperately tried to convince the driver not to make an overnight stop in that town. In Mashad, Iran, where my
train stopped for a religious holiday, I was stoned by a crowd. I ran for safety to my hotel and several hours later answered the door to find the instigator of the stoning, beaten black and blue and dropped on my doorstep by way of an apology.

When I arrived in India, a much safer country for women, I developed dysentery and was desperately ill—to the point I thought I might die. In that crisis, I decided that if I survived I would dedicate my life to changing the conditions of terrible poverty that I saw around me. In those days, we didn’t have much information about the poverty in the developing world. I knew the rhetoric of American imperialism because of the war in Vietnam, but it wasn’t until that trip that I understood the depth of the West’s exploitation and oppression of the Third World. At that moment, alone with a high fever in a hotel room, it was more of an epiphany than an understanding. I didn’t believe in a god, so it wasn’t a prayer but a promise to myself. A promise that I’ve kept for the rest of my life.

On another level, I also began to understand that my personal rebellion against the restrictions on me as a woman was not going to work. I had foolishly risked my life in order to act out my defiance of those restrictions, and I was paying a big price. In that moment of realization, I had moved from rebellion to resistance.

•    •    •

In her famous book,
Truth or Dare
, the American feminist Starhawk discusses rebellion: “We rebel to save our lives. Rebellion is the desperate assertion of our value in face of all that attacks it, the cry of refusal in the face of control.” She goes on to explain, “When we rebel without challenging the
framework of reality the system has constructed, we remain trapped. Our choices are predetermined for us.”

Until my mid-twenties, my life was all about rebellion. Whatever the cost to me, I was going to do whatever my father or other authority figures told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t do. That was the nature of my feminism in those days. It was how I made my decisions. I rebelled against all the restrictions of the life set out for a middle-class Jewish girl. In my experimentation with sex and drugs, and in my risk-taking in travelling, I developed a courage that stood me in good stead in my life to come. But I also developed a single-mindedness that narrowed my vision and my choices. And I took too many risks, some of which cost me dearly.

It has been a long journey to where I am now. I don’t accept convention any more than I did then; although I understand much better the price of defying it and measure the risk before taking it. I still rail against injustice, but the rage that filled my heart in my youth is mostly gone now. I get angry at injustice and oppression but the anger doesn’t take over my life. It no longer stops me from feeling love and joy and appreciation for the lovely things that happen every day, when one is open to them.

Matt Galloway, from CBC radio, asked me, on air, why I was still active well into middle age when so many people gave up activism in their youth. I wasn’t sure how to respond then, but I now think the answer is in my passage from rebellion to resistance. If activism comes only from rebellion, only from fighting against what is, it won’t last as we age. Resistance is deeper. It is about challenging injustice not just to protest against it, but to end it. You can rebel alone, but resistance ultimately requires collective action. The women’s movement was the frame that allowed many of us to move from individual rebellion to collective resistance for social change.

Another thing I had to learn that rebellion couldn’t teach me was that each of us, however we despise the culture in which we live, however it oppresses us, have learned a lot of our behaviours from it. In my case, I took on a lot of the behaviours of men, above all my father, who were restricting me. I wanted to be powerful in the world and in my youth the people with power were all men. In my family, although I fought constantly with my father, I saw that he had the power. I constructed myself to be the opposite of my mother. I became aggressive, domineering, single-minded, totally sure of myself and put all of my energy into politics and work and not very much into personal relationships. I almost completely repressed my female side. To this day I’m not much at doing anything domestic. I don’t feel that as a loss, but the inability to develop and maintain relationships of trust until I was well into my forties cost me dearly. It wasn’t until I got active in the women’s movement and realized that through my behaviours I was oppressing other women that I began to change—and it was as if my life went from black and white to Technicolor.

Rebelling against social control is what youth does. The greater the restrictions, whether societal or parental or both, the fiercer the rebellion. Almost my entire generation rebelled against the straitjacket of 1950s middle-class morality. Rebellion is an important step on the road to social change, especially for women. Today the restrictions are different. Due in no small measure to the work of feminists, our choices are much greater. We are permitted and encouraged to do any job that strikes our interest. We are permitted choices in whether to marry and whether to reproduce, and whom to love, whatever their gender, race or religion.

But there are still restrictions: the way we are supposed to look, the expectation that we will be the primary caregiver of
children and elders, the assumption that we will do whatever it takes to maintain the home and still give our all in the workplace—and, of course, the fear of male violence.

Resistance is what is required here. Instead of all the individual solutions that young women come up with to make their lives bearable, they could work toward collective solutions to the problems we all share. For example, they could organize women and supportive men at their workplaces to demand job-sharing, care leave and other measures to value caring work in the family and the community. They could join local daycare advocacy groups to work for a national childcare program or for infant childcare in their local areas. They could set up women’s groups in their neighbourhoods or workplaces to discuss the issues they face with other women. We have been hoodwinked into believing that we are on our own in solving our problems, but most of the problems we face are social problems and we can solve them better with others.

I return to the wisdom of Starhawk:

Rebellion is of necessity an individual act against the rules or mores holding each of us back as individuals. Those of us who have some privilege in our society have a responsibility to go beyond our individual rebellion, to stand up for others, to reject the belief that some people are more valuable than others and act accordingly.

The women’s movement in many ways did refuse those distinctions and in so doing opened a rip in the repressive fabric of society that allowed the power of women to come through. My generation and those after have benefited; however, unless young women continue to open up those spaces through resistance to the restrictions placed on all women, those rips could close. While the optimism of my generation is gone, new generations of women have a confidence in themselves, and abilities and access to power that we never had.

Rebelling against the superwoman mythology not by retreating but by organizing with other women and supportive men to create a world in which all work and all people are valued equally—that’s where I think rebellion can move to resistance today.

Starhawk,
Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery
. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

“Who
is that lady?” I asked my mother. Our prairie town was tiny, with a population of just over a thousand, but I had never seen this beautiful creature before, not at the curling rink, in the grocery store or at church—the places where adults spent their spare time. Her auburn hair was wound into a French twist and her milky skin was the perfect canvas for pencilled-in brows, green eye shadow, rouge and vibrant lipstick, the same candy-apple red as her long, manicured nails. It was a look I found fetching at fifteen; indeed, I still do at almost sixty.

“That’s Mrs. McTavish. She drinks,” my mother said, then added, “Poor Ed.” I knew by the tone of my mother’s voice what the woman drank—liquor. I wondered why her husband, “Poor Ed,” found it necessary to keep her hidden away. Was she violent? Did she shriek and tear her hair, strip off her clothes, run naked through the house? I couldn’t believe my eyes. Morris, Manitoba, had a mystery woman of its very own. Just like the mad heiress in
Jane Eyre
, she was kept in a tower, out of sight, a shameful secret. I didn’t ask any more questions, sensing that it would be pointless to do so. I never saw Mrs. McTavish again.

Liquor, which everyone called it when I was growing up, was not a forbidden fruit in our household. The minister never preached against it from the pulpit of the United
Church. My schoolteachers didn’t warn us of the evils of drink. Although my parents didn’t keep a stock in our house, that was more out of parsimony than morality. Once a year, on December 23—his birthday—my father went on a bender. He left the house early in the morning with a case of full bottles. He paid a visit to all his closest friends, pouring them drinks to celebrate his birthday. My older brother was the designated driver whose instructions were to bring father home in time to play Santa Claus at the Silver Plains School Christmas concert. Ours was a very merry Santa. People laughed with him, not at him, and father’s carousing was over for another year. My maternal grandfather, who lived with us, apparently had a drink of straight Scotch every morning before breakfast, but this was behind his closed bedroom door and no one ever mentioned it. In fact, I only learned about this unusual habit last year when my older brother was reminiscing.