Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: The Lady was a Lesbian - and A Feminist Too by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 26, Part Two

   The lady was a lesbian and a feminist too. Part Two.

   Trudy Maunders left McGill University for Carleton University in Ottawa. It was jusr a few hours drive down the road from Montreal but it was a long enough distance to put between herself and her father. At Carleton Trudy studied English and French literature and began to seriously study the French language. She was on her way to becoming fluently bilingual. At Carleton she went out with quite a few men though she realized by now that women could turn her on too.
     One man she really fell for was a francophone man from the Ottawa Valley. Yet he couldn't deal with Trudy's depression of the time. He cruelly discarded her and she felt hurt. Another man came from Saskatchewan and had a family of Ukrainian-Canadian parents. They clicked for a while and then split up.
   After graduating from Carleton with high marks Maunders got a reasonably paid job with the federal government in Ottawa. Then she moved to Vancouver but kept her job. In Vancouver she skiied in the nearby mountains in the winter and danced in the summer in  dance halls. She had fun but once she became pregnant and had to get an abortion. That wasn't fun.
     Yet she kept meeting men. She went out for a while with a Chinese Canadian man. She also met in her office an abusive man who treated her horribly. "I have nothing against Jews," Trudy said  about this man. "But this creep treated me so badly. I don't want to see him ever again. She told this abuser to get lost which he did. By now Maunders was in hr late 20's and she realized that she sought out ethnic males. Yet most of the men she hooked up with, whatever their ethnic origins wanted to remain in control of her. She started to get  tired of men.
     Meanwhile she moved through the federal bureaucracy with ease. She was intelligent, a hard worker and didn't cause any problems in the office where she worked. Yet she was still searching for an answer to some of the questions she had about the world and herself. She started to read feminist  literature like Elaine Morgan's 'The Descent of Women', Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique and the path breaking book by a Boston women's collective called 'Our Bodies, Ourselves'.
     Maunders met other men. She body danced in San Francisco and travelled to Mexico with another man called Bob. He was a tall man in his late 20's who was good looking. Yet the two of them were always arguing.  He wanted them to do things his way and when Trudy objected he got very angry.
 "You're just like my father," Maunders said at one point in their travels. Now she realized what her problem was: It was called 'men'. Maybe it was time to find a woman lover.