GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

42. And then in 1968...

THE FOLLOWING YEAR WAS EVEN MORE INTERESTING, in my life and many other places. Just check a 1960-69 timeline to learn how many world-changing shocks we lived through.

What has been dubbed "the second feminist wave" began during that decade. Many women -- including me -- didn't get involved because it was less like Agnes Macphail's rational insistence on legal and fiscal rights for women, and much more like direct attacks on men. I believe that matters have kept getting worse, with "the sides" etching their positions in stone throughout my adult lifetime.   

I've always enjoyed being "a girl", been very glad that men are different from me. How boring the world would be without la difference. We do baffle each other, irritate and amuse each other. Thank God! The fact that our strengths and weaknesses are different works very well when we cooperate for common benefits, when we "love one another" in the thomistic sense -- with whole-hearted generosity of spirit, because we're alive to complement each other.

Almost half of the 18 months my parents spent moving westward from Warsaw to Toronto in 1939-41 were spent in Red Cross-sponsored groups of Polish refugees, their numbers ranging from a handful to more than 60. I grew up listening to anecdotes about individuals and their interactions while days, even months, were spent waiting for bureaucrats somewhere to process paperwork.

Both parents told me how most people they journeyed with maintained their sanity, and why a few apparently did not. For all, the starting point was the same: They had lost every thing, some even lost every person who had provided reasons for living. They all had to create reasons for getting up every morning and using Time. Those who became involved with others in a positive, constructive way maintained mental health; those who chose isolation with their egos and self-centered thoughts did not.

The quarterly Marianopolis Alumnae Review  I published (advised by a five-person board I struck, with authentic Marianopolis alumnae) had no trouble finding thoughtful writings about women's issues. American Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique as a book in 1963 because no magazine would accept an article about her objections to the status of women at that time. By 1968 the debate she triggered was a world-wide phenomenon.

Canada's Prime Minister Lester Pearson had struck a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1967, so we ran long articles about various aspects of it. Our titles included Needed: A new status for the single woman, and Woman: Symbol or Person?  In the latter, Sister Eileen Scott wrote "The militant action which helped woman achieve political and legal status has to a great extent outlived its usefulness. She must now effect a radical change within herself. She must lay aside the stultifying notion of a static 'role' for the more significant exploration of the self as person."

Our article Ladies, your status is showing objected to the unambitious whinging of most presentations to the Royal Commission, concluding bluntly that "'Occupation housewife' is doomed to pass into limbo. And therein lies the feminist hope."

We covered other topics, too, such as Gloria Pierre's account of the May 1968 general strike in France while she and her husband Francois were visiting his family there. Sorbonne students raised a tsunami which rolled through various unions and shut down the country. It reads like news that still keep coming out of France every few years.

Monika Kehoe, our pioneer of applied linguistics, contributed a prescient and witty piece entitled An obit for literacy. It's long and so tightly written that excerpting seems hopeless, but I'll try! Her key point was that students were turning away from writing and visual texts in search of summaries and soundbites.

"The youth of the late 60's [sic] are beginning to be aware of some of the anachronisms of their schooling. They want relevancy as well as involvement. They are impatient with the established teaching methods which demand that they remain passive (the lecture), competitive (the grading system), submissive (the examination). They resist what they consider brain-washing by their elders, while they admire and follow the articulate leadership of their own peer group.