Friday 17 March 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe: Chapter 26: Part Three - The Lady was a Lesbian - and a Feminist too.

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


       By the time Trudy Maunders turned 30, she had turned away from men. She met an Asian Canadian woman and moved in with her. The two of them stayed together. Yet life wasn't all smooth sailing. In the mid-1990's, the federal government scrapped the department where Trudy worked. In one fell swoop, the government fired 45,000 workers of which Trudy was one.
    Yet Trudy survived. She moved back to Ottawa and found another job with the federal government. It didn't pay as much as the job she'd lost but it didn't leave her or her partner below the poverty level either. Her partner was also able to find a job in Ottawa. So like thousands of other women in the 1970's and after, Trudy Maunders found love in the arms of a woman.
     Some men trashed the feminist movement by saying things like "All feminist are lesbians." This wasn't true though some prominent feminists were lesbians. Yet this kind of criticism didn't disprove the feminists' main point that women lived in a world that was dominated by men. The feminists challenged this set up and were right to do so. Also as far as lesbianism went, some of the leaders of the second wave of feminism like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were straight heterosexuals.
   Other men like Betty Friedan's former husband said about feminists , "They all hate men." Even if this was true, which it wasn't, it still can't justify the domination of women by men. Also some men hate women. Often men who do hate women end up killing them. Women who don't like men, don't usually kill men. They just stay away from them. This is what Trudy Maunders and other women did.
     She was a mainstream Canadian who became a lesbian and a feminist. "She was a switch hitter or a potential one when I knew her back in the 1970's," a man who hung out with Trudy back then said many years later. "She could have gone both ways. Yet finally she chose the right way for her  her it did work out."

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