Right, Left and Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. The Woman Who Walked Away. Chapter 35, Part Three.

  The Woman  Who Walked Away; Part Three by Dave Jaffe


        Roberta 'Bobbie' Stern went to hear Betty Friedan speak in Seattle. Yet she left the meeting feeling depressed. Friedan attacked or put down lesbians and warned them that they would not take over the women's movement. While driving north back through the rain to Vancouver, Bobbie realized that even some feminist icons like Friedan were just like anyone else. They too were people with flaws. Yet she also decided that Friedan was a bitch.
      Then there was the New Democratic Party where Bobbie had by now spent a lot of hours. Its endless meetings, personality clashes and big conflict-driven male egos were  now turning her off politics.
     As she got out of her car in the late evening and went inside to her and William's one bedroom apartment in the west side neighbourhood of Kerrisdale,  she wondered what to do with her life. Where could she find a place to park her hopes and her ambitions?
    Then a few months later a church came into her life. It was a liberal Christian place not too far from where she lived.  Bobbie liked the minister and his sermons. She was Jewish but so what? Her parents weren't religious and rarely went to synagogues. She and William got married in this church on a sunny Saturday afternoon in 1977. Her mother Esther showed up but her father Leon stayed away. Her brother and sister sent her presents. And Aunt Frieda sent her a check for $75. Roberta felt happy on that day. She'd come a long way from her depressed adolescent moods.
     20 years later, a somewhat heavier and greying Bobbie was single again. She now had two teenage children named Fern and Tyler. She worked in a government insurance office doing identification checks and other clerical tasks. She also lived in a three bedroom house in Port Moody, an eastern suburb of Vancouver. She no longer went to political meetings or caucused with feminists. Yet she still went to church though now it was a different nearby church that was close to her home.
     "I've learned only one big thing," she told her daughter Fern who was vigorous 16 year-old soccer player. "Don't stay in one place or one job or one relationship if it's hurting you. Just move on and your life will improve. Mine has."  And Roberta 'Bobbie' Stern was right. Her life had improved. She had moved on.