Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. Chapter 26, Part One of "The Lady Was A Lesbian - and A Feminist.'. by Dave Jaffe

   The Lady Was A Lesbian and A Feminist - Part One


         Trudy Maunders grew up in middle class Canada. Her father worked for a large company with its head office in Montreal. her mother lived and died most of her adult life as a satisfied housewife. And her sister Sandi like Trudy never went without the good things of life. Yet Mauders rebelled against her parents or at least her father, but not in a political way. For she had no politics. She joined the N.D.P. for a year in the mid-1970's. But finally she said to the man who joined her up, "Thanks but no thanks. Politics isn't for me."
     Trudy was 16 in the summer of 1970. She saw on television a demonstration in New York City of about 25,000 women. They were demonstrating for equality with men. Suddenly as she watched this demo, Trudy felt a wave of sympathy for these women. "These women are speaking for me," she later told a friend. "They are my sisters." From then on, Trudy called herself, "a feminist" though back then just like to-day, most women were scared of being called feminists.
    Maunders' father, she later realized, made her a feminist. She grew up in a modest three bedroom house in suburban Montreal. From the outside, the house looked picture perfect. It had windows that were nearly always clean, the lawn was always neat, and the Maunders even had a terrier dog, not named Spot but Fido. Yet then there was Trudy's father.
     He was called Ralph and he ruled the house sometimes with an iron hand. "Pick up that paper will you," he used to order Trudy when she let a newspaper slide onto the living room floor from a chair which she sat in. From time to time, this short grey haired man with a neat moustache would barge into her bedroom without knocking. "Why do you have those pictures on your wall?' he use to ask when he saw cutouts from magazines of pop stars like Aretha Franklin and Carole King pinned above her bed. Twice he tried to tear down some of the photos she had put up. "Take them down," he would order her. Trudy refused. The pictures stayed up.
   Trudy's mother Grace was a short red head who stayed in the background. Her husband repeatedly issued her orders demanding for instance that she bring him his meals at the dining room table exactly at six o'clock in the evening. If the meal came just a little late, he would often vent his anger against his wife. Maunders sometimes escaped into neighbour's houses where mealtimes weren't tense and fathers didn't act like petty dictators.
    In her teens Trudy grew into a tall brown haired woman who was intense and intelligent. She won a scholarship to McGill University but left there after her first year. She wanted to put a distance between her and her father.She stsill loved him but from a distance.