Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  The following month Reisman fell at the Rideau Club in Ottawa, and then in January he collapsed at his condominium in Fort Lauderdale and had to be airlifted home. He was admitted to the Heart Institute in Ottawa, where he had a pacemaker installed. He seemed to be recovering from the operation — his family reported he was reading newspapers and talking on the telephone — but he slipped into cardiac arrest and died very early on the morning of March 9, 2008. He was eighty-eight.

  Doris Anderson

  Journalist and Political Activist

  November 10, 1921 – March 2, 2007

  DORIS ANDERSON, THE first female editor of Chatelaine magazine, was an early leader of the women’s movement in Canada. She fostered feminist debate about abortion and spousal rights in divorce and custody disputes, and advocated for greater participation by women in public life and elected office — and she did all this before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963.

  Anderson made her own success in the sexist, Mad Men world of magazine publishing in the 1950s and ’60s. As Floyd Chalmers, president of Maclean-Hunter, once said, “What I like about Doris is that she looks like a woman, acts like a lady, and works like a dog.”

  She acquired her feisty feminism in opposition to her belligerent, overbearing father. Originally a lodger in her mother’s boarding house in Calgary, he threw his weight and his opinions around at the dinner table after marrying Anderson’s mother when Doris was nearly eight. The girl’s well-honed fury, nurtured from an early age, probably explains why, as a grown woman, Anderson found it so difficult to choose consensus over confrontation as a management style.

  No matter how successful she became or how much she was celebrated for her tough, fearless stands on behalf of women’s equality, Anderson was actually vulnerable underneath her bristly demeanour. One of her very few regrets in her eighty-five years was her inability to find more effective “tools” to deal with men in authoritative positions.

  “I never learned to be subservient to men,” she cheerfully admitted in an interview weeks before she died of pulmonary fibrosis on March 2, 2007, at the age of eight-five. “What I learned to do was to cope,” she said, looking thin but stalwart, her beautiful hands with their sculpted nails as expressive as ever as she made her way down a corridor in a Toronto rehabilitation facility, using a walker for stability and attached to a portable oxygen tank.

  HILDA DORIS BUCK, the only daughter of Rebecca Laycock Buck and her lover, Thomas McCubbin, was born on November 10, 1921, in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Her mother’s first husband, a swindler named Alvin Buck, had remortgaged the house and skipped out with the funds, leaving his twenty-three-year-old wife with two young sons and a lot of debt. That’s when Buck turned the family home into a boarding house.

  When she became pregnant by her lodger, Thomas McCubbin, Buck did what “fallen” women did in those days: when she was visibly pregnant, she left town to give birth and then made discreet arrangements to place her “illegitimate” infant in a home for unwanted babies. After several months, she had a change of heart and reclaimed her daughter.

  McCubbin, who was prone to drink and larcenous behaviour, married her mother when Anderson was already in grade school. Much to the little girl’s dismay, he thrust himself into what had been, at least from her perspective, an ideal matriarchal world. He was a difficult and domineering man, and she resented his influence over her mother and his loud rebukes about her forward and unladylike behaviour.

  “I fervently wanted my father to be hit by a streetcar,” she wrote in her 1996 memoir, Rebel Daughter, “particularly when we were waiting for dinner and he reeled in late, three sheets to the wind, and sat pontificating at the head of the table.” She softened somewhat towards him late in her life. “He was a rebel, and he had a good mind, read widely and challenged everything,” she said in her final interview, but “I never felt any warmth toward him.”

  By contrast with her father, her mother was “terribly conservative” and wanted her only daughter to be demure, keep her head down, and conform to “respectable” expectations — as she had done in marrying and sticking with the obnoxious McCubbin. Unwilling to accept her mother’s notion of marriage and child-rearing as the only desirable lifestyle for a woman, Anderson went to teacher’s college — not because she wanted to teach but because it was a way to earn money for her real goal: a university education.

  After graduating from the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1945, she moved to Toronto at the age of twenty-three, intent on a career in journalism. From her first job, as an editorial assistant on Star Weekly magazine, she moved to radio as a scriptwriter on the Claire Wallace program. After a miserable six months clashing with her boss, Anderson quit to become an advertising copywriter for the T. Eaton Company department store chain.

  When she had saved some money, she sailed for England in November 1949 to try her luck at writing fiction. In those days few thought it was possible to write fiction in such a cold and humdrum place as Canada. Literature — indeed, life itself — happened elsewhere, so, like Mavis Gallant and Mordecai Richler, Anderson went abroad to exercise her creative muscles.

  She sold a few short stories to Chatelaine and Maclean’s but soon realized it was almost impossible to earn a living as a fiction writer. She returned to Toronto and got a job at Chatelaine as an editorial assistant in the advertising promotion department, an inauspicious start to what would become a monumental career move, not only for her but also for Canadian women.

  Six years after joining the magazine, she had risen through the ranks to become editor, a job she was given only after she had threatened to quit if management appointed another man to the position. Two weeks earlier she had married PEI-born lawyer and Liberal Party backroom organizer David Anderson. She wasn’t desperately in love but she wanted children, and at thirty-five she felt her options were running out.

  Her mother told the groom: “Now Doris has someone to look after her.” But, as Anderson wrote in Rebel Daughter, “what I wanted more than anything was to be able to look after myself and make sure that every other woman in the world could do the same.”

  The Andersons had three sons, Peter (1958), Stephen (1961), and Mitchell (1963). Like most employers of the day, Maclean-Hunter had no maternity leave policy. Traditionally women resigned in their fifth month of pregnancy, then stayed home to raise their children. Anderson torpedoed that custom, but the downside was that she went back to work almost immediately after giving birth. She and Anderson divorced in 1972 after fifteen years of marriage. He died of cancer in 1986.

  As editor of Chatelaine, Anderson gave readers not only what they expected in the way of recipes and beauty and parenting tips, but also something to “shake them up a bit,” with hard-hitting investigative pieces on abortion, birth control, discriminatory divorce laws, and the wage gap. And she hired excellent journalists to write those articles, including June Callwood, Christina McCall (later Newman), Michele Landsberg, Barbara Frum, and Sylvia Fraser.

  One of her first editorials was an appeal for more women in Parliament — there were only two female MPs in 1958 — and another early one called for reform of the draconian abortion laws. She quickly learned that effecting social change meant revisiting issues in editorials and articles, so she devoted lots of space over the years to push for a royal commission on the status of women and to expose horrors such as child battering, racism, and the plight of Canada’s Native peoples. Although some readers felt she was turning “a nice wholesome Canadian magazine into a feminist rag,” circulation had more than quadrupled by the late 1960s to 1.8 million readers.

  She made Maclean-Hunter lots of money but she was never paid anything like the salary given to the editor of rival publication Maclean’s. For example, when she was earning $23,000 annually at Chatelaine, Charles Templeton, editor of a very troubled Maclean’s for only six months in 1969, was making $53,000. After Templeton was forced out,
she campaigned for the job but was rejected in favour of Peter Gzowski. “I would have had that job in a flash if I had been a man,” she said in her final interview. “I was the most successful editor all through that time. Chatelaine was sustaining the magazine division.”

  Anderson quit Maclean-Hunter in 1977, about five years after she had first thought of leaving, because she couldn’t stand working any longer with Bruce Drane, then the publisher of Chatelaine, a job she had coveted. When asked in 2006 how she felt about being passed over for promotion three decades earlier, she replied bluntly, “Angry. Still.” And then she added: “That wouldn’t happen today.”

  A confirmed workaholic, she quickly thrust herself into work of a different sort by agreeing to run as a last-minute Liberal candidate in Toronto in a 1978 federal by-election. She lost (7,602 votes to 19,027) in an anti-Trudeau sweep, to Progressive Conservative Rob Parker, a former broadcast journalist. That one electoral experience convinced her that she did not have the appropriate personality for party politics. “Most successful backbenchers behaved like football players in a scrum — never any dissent or criticism,” she wrote in Rebel Daughter. “If I won a seat, I knew I would chafe under that kind of strict party discipline.”

  In 1979 she accepted a federal appointment as chair of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (CACSW). After Pierre Trudeau was re-elected the following year, he was determined to patriate the British North America Act, with a constitutional amending formula and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Anderson saw the constitutional talks as an opportunity to lobby for strong wording on women’s equality. The advisory council planned a conference, but it was delayed by a translators’ strike. The Charter, meanwhile, was drafted and an equality clause was formulated that prohibited discrimination on a number of grounds, including sex.

  Anderson felt it didn’t go far enough because it “was exactly the same wording as in the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights,” which she argued had “been tested ten times in the courts between 1970 and 1980, and had been found to be useless as a legal tool to help women.” She criticized the wording publicly and sent a detailed critique to Lloyd Axworthy, then the minister responsible for the status of women. She also hired feminist lawyer Mary Eberts, a constitutional expert, to write a brief for a parliamentary committee hearing.

  When the conference on women’s equality and the constitution was peremptorily cancelled, in a move that Anderson felt had been orchestrated by Axworthy in tandem with some female members of her own board, she resigned in protest. The media played the fracas as a story about women fighting not only each other but the male minister in charge of the status of women. “Every time Lloyd Axworthy opens his mouth, a hundred more women become feminists,” an angry Anderson retorted in a widely quoted comment.

  A small group of self-organizing feminists decided to hold a conference anyway. Helped by Progressive Conservative MP Flora MacDonald, who booked a meeting room on Parliament Hill, more than 1,300 women arrived in Ottawa from across the country on February 14, 1981, to hold what became known as the “Ad Hoc Conference.” Eventually a new clause was added to the Charter: Section 28, which states: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”

  The fallout was bitter. Axworthy appointed Lucie Pépin, one of the women on the CACSW board who had voted against holding the conference, as Anderson’s successor. Anderson then became head of the National Action Committee, a coalition of more than seven hundred women’s organizations, serving as president from 1982 to 1984. She also sat on the Ontario Press Council (from 1977 to 1984) and began writing a biweekly column for the Toronto Star, a podium she kept for the next decade. The University of Prince Edward Island appointed her chancellor in 1992 for a four-year term, after which she presided as chair of the Ontario Press Council from 1998 to 2006.

  Besides her autobiography, Anderson published Two Women, Rough Layout, and Affairs of State, three readable but polemical feminist novels, and The Unfinished Revolution, an examination of the feminist movement and its effect on the lives of women in a dozen European and North American countries. Researching The Unfinished Revolution made Anderson realize that Canadian women were very unlikely to achieve electoral power unless the voting system switched from the first-past-the-post method favoured in North America to proportional representation, as practised in many European countries. In the last fifteen years of her life, Anderson supported Equal Voice, a women’s political advocacy organization, and campaigned relentlessly for proportional representation.

  Her health declined drastically in the first decade of this century. She had a heart attack in 2001 and began suffering gastrointestinal and kidney system failures five years later, followed by a second heart attack and ongoing problems with her breathing. A diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative and incurable thickening and scarring of the lungs, was a slow but inevitable death sentence. She confronted the disease with her trademark feistiness while adding a new cause to her activist agenda: campaigning for the right of terminally ill patients, such as herself, to end their lives with dignity at a time of their own choosing. Others have had to take up that battle.

  Jane Rule

  Writer and Lesbian Role Model

  March 28, 1931 – November 27, 2007

  JANE RULE WAS a key player in two huge social and cultural revolutions: the decriminalization of homosexuality and the international ascendancy of Canadian literature. As a writer, teacher, cultural nationalist, and lesbian role model, Rule normalized the idea of women loving women through her writing and her personal life.

  She lived openly with her partner, Helen Sonthoff, for nearly fifty years. That doesn’t sound unusual now, but when Rule immigrated to Vancouver in 1956 from the United States by way of England, consenting adults could be charged under the Criminal Code and imprisoned for five years for engaging in homosexual activity. As for Canadian literature, it barely existed as a subject in schools, a discipline in universities, or a vocation for aspiring writers. If they had any ambition, Canadian novelists and poets lived elsewhere and offered their work to New York or London publishers.

  Tall and lanky, she was a striking figure with her outsize owl-shaped, dark-rimmed glasses and her Louise Brooks bob. She smoked, drank, and partied with an enthusiasm that dwarfed ordinary hackers and tipplers. In her novels, short stories, and essays, Rule explored the conflict between desire and convention and the constriction that fear can bring to bear on intimacy, joyfulness, and freedom. As she grew older, her focus shifted to ageing and the social webs that single women form as an emotional and physical counterpoint to traditional family networks.

  Although not overtly political, Rule believed ferociously in freedom of expression and the innate ability of readers to define their own literary tastes. She loathed censorship and hypocrisy. That’s largely why she was such an active supporter of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the gay liberation magazine Body Politic. She sat on committees for the former and wrote essays and a regular column, “So’s Your Grandmother,” for the latter from 1979 to 1985.

  She also defended Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium in Vancouver during its fifteen-year legal dispute with Canadian customs officials, who took it upon themselves to impound shipments of gay and lesbian books (including some written by Rule) and other materials at the border. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000.

  JANE VANCE RULE was born on March 28, 1931, in Plainfield, New Jersey, the middle child and oldest daughter of Carlotta Jane (née Hink) and Arthur Richards Rule. She was a tomboyish five before she discovered that being a girl had serious drawbacks, six before she realized that being left-handed indicated a behaviour problem in need of modification, and ten before her myopia was corrected with glasses. Gangly and awkward, she had grown to a full six feet by the time she was twelve, and she suffered in school for her husky voice and
dyslexia. As well, she was the perpetual new kid because her parents moved frequently. At fifteen she read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and “suddenly discovered that I was a freak,” as she wrote later in Lesbian Images.

  She earned a bachelor of arts in English in 1952 from Mills College. That fall she followed a female lover to England, where she was an “occasional student” at University College London, reading seventeenth-century writers and working on her first novel. Through lectures and student events she became very close friends with literary critic John Hulcoop, who was doing a doctorate at UC.

  After a year she went back to the United States and enrolled in the writing program at Stanford University, but she quit after a few months because she hated “the competitive, commercial atmosphere of the school, the condescending attitude toward women students.” She “marked time” until the fall of 1954, when she began teaching at Concord Academy, a private girls’ school in Massachusetts.

  At Concord she met and fell in love with Helen Sonthoff, a creative-­writing and literature teacher who was the wife of Herbert Sonthoff, a political dissident who had fled his native Germany in the middle of the Second World War. Rule’s passion for Sonthoff and the uneasy times — the Cold War and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s virulent anticommunist witch hunts of the early 1950s — made all sorts of people suspect, including gays and lesbians. That atmosphere made life at Concord Academy untenable.

  Hulcoop, who had accepted a job in the English department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, offered her a refuge. Rule moved to Vancouver in the fall of 1956 and began sharing a four-room flat with him in the home of a B.C. longshoreman. She spent her days working on fiction at a rolltop oak desk in a room with a view of the sea and the mountains, and supplemented her “otherwise frugal fare” with bounty “from coffee and tea to caviar and rock lobster tails” that her landlord brought home from the docks.