In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  Rebel Daughter

  WRITER AND ACTIVIST Doris Anderson was on the front lines of all our battles for equal rights.

  The illegitimate daughter of a rooming house keeper and an itinerant tenant, Doris had grown up in her mother’s rooming house in Calgary, where she learned a great deal about taking care of herself: no one else was doing the job.I When she decided she wanted to go to university, her high school teacher told her it would be better if she allowed boys with lower marks to go ahead of her: girls ended up marrying and didn’t need degrees.

  Doris was stubborn. She went to university.

  Eventually she became the editor of Chatelaine, a women’s magazine, during the 1960s and most of the seventies. In addition to the usual women’s magazine content, like cooking, baking, decorating, and perfect housewifing, she ran articles on abortion, rape, women’s choice not to have children, and violence in the home, stories of women juggling family and career and on being “successfully single.” We had come from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Charlie’s Angels. Doris’s editorials on pay equity, child care, custody arrangements, and women’s sexual fulfillment were discussed, disputed, applauded—depending on who you were. I was in the applause section.

  In 1967 Doris served on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. Its 167 recommendations on such matters as equal pay for work of equal value, maternity leave, daycare, birth control, family law, and pensions were hardly revolutionary, though they caused considerable debate both in and out of Parliament. It was not until 1969 that Dr. Henry Morgenthaler opened the first abortion clinic in Canada. His clinic was soon raided by police and he was charged with performing illegal abortions. The Criminal Code prohibited abortions unless the woman could prove to a panel of doctors—usually all male—that the pregnancy would threaten her life or that it was the result of incest or rape. In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada effectively legalized abortion and confirmed a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. Yet abortion remains a contentious issue both here and in the United States, where some states still do their best to prevent access to the procedure.

  Doris had an impressive grasp of a range of ideas, and she always knew she could bring an audience along, even if they disagreed with her at the beginning. She spoke with a wonderful western drawl; she was statuesque, tall, broad-beamed, confident. Her magazine was like herself, outspoken, no nonsense, tell it as it is. Doris knew how to lean in long before Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead became a bestseller.

  We used to have lunch at various Toronto eateries and discuss issues of our time and how our lives were still affected by perceptions of suitable roles for women. The only woman in a senior management role in book publishing in the 1960s was Gladys Neale of Macmillan. She had worked her way up with dogged determination to become one of the best educational publishers in Canada.II

  In addition to running Chatelaine, Maclean Hunter’s most successful magazine, Doris managed a household with three rambunctious boys and a very busy husband, a lawyer with a serious interest in politics. On summer evenings we were often at their Rosedale home, where the boys took turns leaping from the roof into the pool amid great whooping shouts of joy and derring-do. Doris, though she growled her disapproval, was proud of her sons and remained calm in her role as host and mother.

  Under her stewardship, Chatelaine doubled its circulation, yet when Doris applied for the job of publisher, she was denied. The job went to a less-experienced insider—a man with similarities to the character “Laughing Horse” in her novel Rough Layout, which featured a woman not unlike herself running a magazine, not unlike Chatelaine. It was one of the last novels I signed when I was at M&S. Doris used to joke that I chose to resign rather than face a potential lawsuit.

  When she applied to be editor of Maclean’s, she was, again, deemed unworthy by the boys’ club that owned the magazine. One of those men told her that she simply couldn’t represent the company publicly. Maclean’s was losing more than a million dollars a year, yet management wouldn’t trust a woman who had run a profitable magazine with fixing its flagship monthly.

  Doris resigned from Chatelaine in 1977. That was about the same time as her marriage began to unravel. She used to talk to me about weighing her options. What would be more difficult: staying in a broken marriage or becoming a single mother? It took a few months of thinking and debating with herself before she decided to end her marriage. Peter, her oldest, was in high school and stayed with his father, while Doris took a long camper trip with the other two boys in Europe.

  For a while after the trip, she experimented with staying at home and writing, but she had too much energy to remain sedentary. Besides, she was determined to keep fighting for women’s rights, even if she no longer had Chatelaine’s platform. She had championed the need for more women in politics and now, when the opportunity presented itself, she grabbed it.III She ran for the Liberal Party in Eglinton and lost.

  Afterwards, still licking her wounds, she accepted the post of chair for the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Although Doris had been a lifelong Liberal, many of her staunchest supporters turned out to be Tories. Inevitably, she crossed swords with Lloyd Axworthy, an influential Liberal member of parliament. He seemed to be under the impression that Doris could be persuaded to toe the party line. Needless to say, he was wrong. When he pushed the executive, over Doris’s objections, to cancel a national meeting to discover what women wanted from the new Charter of Rights, Doris and a small group of women organized a non-governmental ad hoc conference that drew thirteen hundred women from across the country. None of them was paid. In the end, Section 28 of the Charter stated simply that men and women are equal under the law. That may not seem like such a revolutionary gain by today’s standards, but up until 1982 such recognition had eluded us.

  I was not the only friend who advised Doris not to accept the ungenerous offer of the presidency of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. It didn’t pay. Its members were chosen from two hundred organizations, representing 3.5 million women, with a myriad of issues. At the time its members were battling it out over a range of issues, including whether homemakers should be allowed to join the Canada Pension Plan. They had approached Doris because she had become a celebrity and, as she told me, nobody else would take the job.

  Yet the job was, in some ways, the right choice for Doris. It gave her a close connection with women across the country and, eventually, around the world. She could not have written her 1991 book, The Unfinished Revolution, had she not been with NAC. She could rely on her reputation and connections to reach women around the world and provide a significant overview of the status of women in twelve countries. The book tackles some of the tough issues—daycare, the workforce, safety, violence against women, availability of jobs—and it examines how far women had come in their own countries since their mothers were their age.

  I am ending this chapter the way Doris ended her Rebel Daughter:

  If women had more say in how the world is run, we wouldn’t be worrying about the next quarter’s profit picture, or whether Moody’s is going to award us an A++ rating. Our priorities would be more focused and practical than that: we would be thinking of nothing less than the future of the planet. . . . Isn’t it time women stopped holding up half the sky and began making at least half the decisions right down here on earth?

  * * *

  I. Key Porter published Doris’s aptly named autobiography, Rebel Daughter, in 1996.

  II. Francess Halpenny didn’t become associate director of the University of Toronto Press until 1979.

  III. By 1984 there were six women in the cabinet, including Barbara McDougall, Minister of State for Finance, and Pat Carney, Minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources and later, Minister of International Trade, a post she held when Canada negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Key Porter published her memoir, Trade Secrets, in 2000.
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  In Search of My Father

  IN 1975 I had received an astonishing phone call from a man who claimed he knew my father.

  I must admit that I have understated my efforts to find my father. I wrote him long letters when I was growing up in Budapest and gave them to Vili to post to wherever he thought my father resided. My mother had stopped looking for him after she served her time in jail for attempting to leave the country to join him in Austria. Incarcerated in the Sacred Heart Convent school, I had visions of being rescued by my recalcitrant father, who had, so far, failed to appear. The convent would offer him a grand opportunity to redeem himself, I thought. I wrote heart-rending letters and long heroic poems to him and tried to send them via my aunt Leah, who said she knew where he was. She said she had promised not to tell me.

  My other aunt, Sari, mentioned once that my father had moved to Australia. When I was working two jobs and going to university, I saved up enough to hire a private detective to track him down. I am not sure he tried very hard, though he reported that a Hungarian immigrant called Szigethy had changed his name to Spencer and lived in Perth, Australia. Then he told me that Spencer had left with his family for the United States. He said he had no more information and my money ran out.

  The man who called me at M&S said he had seen an article about me in The Globe and Mail and made the connection. The article had mentioned my pre-Porter name. The caller claimed he knew a man who had used the same name once. Naturally, I was wary.

  “He used to be István Szigethy, but he has changed his name to Steven Spencer and he lives in Winnipeg,” the man informed me. Steven Spencer had married a Hungarian woman with two children, whom he had adopted. He had been a social worker. He was charming and had many friends. He was a patron of the Winnipeg arts scene. He and his wife were passionate bridge players. The man knew this from personal experience. He and his wife had played bridge with the Spencers. He gave me a Winnipeg phone number.

  I think I called at least four times before I found my voice. He denied all knowledge of a daughter, all knowledge of Hungary, my mother, his time in the Gulag. He claimed he was born here, in Canada. He made this claim with a heavy Hungarian accent, not so different from how my grandfather sounded after twenty years of trying to learn English.

  I hung up.

  But I did tell Jack McClelland the story one evening over drinks at the Fort Garry bar. Since we were already in Winnipeg, Jack seized the opportunity and, pretending he was a stringer for Time magazine, phoned Mr. Spencer. Jack said he was writing a story about his daughter, Anna, and wished to interview him.

  My father—because Mr. Spencer really was my father—reluctantly consented. Jack drove me to the apartment building but decided to leave me on my own for the occasion. That was how I met my father for the first time since he ruined my Christmas in 1949 by appearing in a greatcoat at our door in Budapest just as my presents were likely to be opened.

  He seemed quite ordinary, as was his apartment, with the photographs of his wife and two children, the rug, the coffee table, the TV set. Everything was ordinary, except the fact that he now conceded he remembered a small girl who was said to be his daughter.

  He told me a long story about having been too afraid of Vili to stay in touch, too afraid even to send money once he had found a job in Australia. He did not want to talk about his time in the Gulag but told me how he had met his current wife and her children in an Austrian refugee camp in Salzburg. Oddly enough, it was the same refugee camp where my mother and I stayed before we were shipped off to New Zealand.

  I visited him again a few years later when he was already dying of Parkinson’s. His wife had placed a large photograph of me on top of his TV set. “He is very proud of you,” she told me. She encouraged me to take him for a walk in the park across from their apartment. He talked about my mother as I pushed him in his wheelchair and how pretty she had been and how young when they met during the war. He talked about Vili, who had seemed all-powerful to him, as Vili had seemed to me, but for him, my grandfather was a dangerous, threatening presence, not the benevolent storyteller of my childhood.

  When I told my mother that I had met him, she was surprised that he had finally acknowledged me. A few weeks before my phone call, she had found out where he was and phoned him. She said he showed no interest in seeing either of us again. That was the first time she mentioned that she knew he had fathered another child, a boy, in the Gulag. The mother was one of the villagers who lived near the labour camp. Some of them had been kind to the inmates, gave them bits of bread and potatoes, though they didn’t have much themselves. In my father’s case, one of them had given him a bit of love. When we met for the last time, I didn’t ask him about his son. Years later I learned that he had been in Vorkuta Gulag, the labour camp I featured in my novel The Appraisal. One day, maybe, I shall visit Vorkuta and try to find my half-brother.

  I had wanted my father to meet his granddaughter Catherine at least once before he died. In hindsight, I am glad it didn’t work out. She would have retained a memory of an old, dying man who was a complete stranger to both of us.

  * * *

  MY BELOVED GRANDFATHER Vili Racz died on July 18, 1976. We had talked a couple of weeks before his death, when he was trying to decide whether to go into hospital for an operation or stay and wait for death at home. I cried during most of our conversation. He tried to keep my spirits up by saying that he would not allow a little thing like cancer to beat him. In hindsight, of course, I should have flown down to Australia to be with him, but I kept putting it off and then it was too late.

  The night he died, our windows rattled and one of our doors slammed shut in the wind. I wondered whether he had been saying goodbye.

  PART TWO

  No Rose Garden

  Looking for a New Gig

  DURING MY BRIEF but determined attempt at homemaking in 1978, I tried to immerse myself in what I considered domestic tasks, like gourmet cooking, baking, knitting, and decorating. As the only changes we had made to our house since we bought it had been the shiny new wallpaper with cheerfully cavorting blue and pink elephants in the children’s bedroom, there was a great deal of scope for my activities: the living room’s pale-beige flocked wallpaper, for example, the heavy yellow drapes, the plush grey wall-to-wall carpeting. I replaced the two single beds in Suse and Jessica’s bedroom (Julian claimed the originals were from the Salvation Army), and we removed old shelving to build bookcases for our thousands of books. Odd, Julian thought, that neither of us had objected earlier to leftovers from the previous owners. A magazine story about our hosting book launches at home refers to our house as dog-friendly but quite devoid of style.

  The truth is we were both so busy, we hadn’t noticed. Now I was creating merciless havoc in our formerly peaceful spaces. I consulted (briefly) a decorator who suggested a coffee table covered with reptile skin (ignored that advice), had someone dispose of the grey broadloom, stripped the wallpaper, repainted the walls, bought several pieces of furniture and a new dog we called Lilo in honour of my aunt Leah (nicknamed Lilo), who had been the beauty of my family. Journalist Allan Fotheringham wrote later that our home was “decorated by dogs.”

  It was around that time that I first noticed a pink-dressing-gowned, pink-slippered ghost in our dark basement. I had been on the point of dismissing the apparition as a postpartum mental twitch when Sylvia Fraser asked me if we had a tenant downstairs with a separate entrance. Then Catherine complained of a lady in the basement where I had hidden her birthday presents. Ruth Fraser, who stayed with us during a visit to Toronto in the mid-1980s, may have been the last to see her. Then the pink lady vanished with as little notice as had presaged her arrival. She may have been displeased with my redecorating. Or we were all delusional. In any event, I stopped revamping the house.

  Nothing came of my knitting beyond a very long, brown-and-blue-striped scarf, as ugly as the orange sweater I had knitted for my mother when I was at the Sacred Heart Convent in Wanganui. The
nuns believed that the way to deal with girls was to keep them busy, and knitting and crocheting were high on their list of activities. Once I had learned enough English to protest, they were inclined to let me read comic books instead. They were worried about my background as a child revolutionary, and I made sure they would continue to worry by looking very fierce. I have kept a few scary photographs of myself in school uniform.

  At the cottage, I subjected Geraldine Sherman and Bob Fulford to my experiments in cooking. They would arrive with their two young daughters, who became friends with Catherine and Julia. I have a wonderful photograph of Bob and Geraldine sitting in the back of our boat, reading sections of The New York Times. They were both, essentially, city people, but they proved to be amazingly adaptable. Geraldine, who was a feature and short-story writer, book reviewer, and radio producer, was also a dab hand at fishing. Who knew?