It was pretty hard for me not to become interested in Women's
Rights, considering the plight of our beloved mother, and our closeness to her.
Her personality changed drastically from
the divorce, something my younger sister might not have noticed, being so young. Never having known the mother who existed
for so many years before the marital chaos.
Most I remember is how daily her complaints and conversations were about
my father. They rambled on and one and on, and once she began talking, nothing could stop her.
She
easily talked for an hour each day about her marriage problems, her sentences and phrases engrave themselves upon my memory,
and I certainly had compassion for her, and took her side, as did my brother and sister.
My father could have lessened her
obsession and bitterness with greater material generosity to her, but that too was beyond his capabilities, as money was his
own weak point.
She followed the divorce case then in the Canadian news of a farming family called Murdoch, as the wife in the story
insisted that her work was just as a business partner, yet ignored by Canadian law as it then existed.
Mom
mentioned all the work she had done to help my father in his career, including all the Air Canada parties she hosted.
Putting up with friends and acquaintances that hed little time for her she fell out of grace, by becoming the first divorced
woman in our social set.
Yet by moving 3000 miles away from my father, she made a huge tactical
mistake, struck by grief and shock at his repeated infidelities. He was unable to see us much, sparing his girlfriend the
nuisance of noisy and upset young kids.
Still in high school, I noticed books on Women's Rights in our library,
and took to these ideas, like a duck to water.
Two of the most famous books were The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
and The SecondSex by Simone de Beauvoir. Friedan was easy to read, though truthfully, my mother would have probably
liked a marriage that allowed her to decorate and clean an attractive house, as I later would. She would have been happy
later on with some sort of part time job.
Millions of women labouring away in Third World and developing countries
would have loved a chance to mate with our men in developed countries, and also have pretty homes to clean and decorate.
The
myth of the unused Female Mind was what drove the Friedan work, and the yet The Second Sex seemed even more depressing, though
stimulating at first to my young and impressionable mind. I ploughed my way though it, driven by the truth that there
were certainly areas of the Male Female Relationship that needed correcting, and that my mother was the legally more vulnerable
one in her marriage and in the larger society as well.
