Presentation by s. June Menzies at International Women’s Day 2010, at the Manitoba Legislative Building. This year’s theme focused on the 40th anniversary of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. June was had an active and prominent role in the provincial consultations and compiling the written submissions.
Madam chair, Mr. Premier, Members of the Legislative Assembly, Advisory Council Members, and Guests,
It is a privilege for me to share some of my stories, as I have been asked to do, of the making of a young feminist. Each of us has a story to tell. It is through the telling of our stories that we learn to understand each other and work together. At 18 I joined the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1943. The travel, the training, the experience of seeing women in positions of authority and competence within the professions and trades, the bonding between women, and the opportunity to attend university on veteran’s credits, how lucky could a young woman be. But I understood this only in retrospect after I became conscious of the position of women in our culture. After studying the human rights declarations and conventions with a Status of Women study group in Ottawa I realized what equality of rights meant and that it could be mine. It is I who must accept responsibility. “If it’s to be it’s up to me” and I intended it TO BE.
I was born in Saskatchewan in 1925.
Item: at 10 years I expected to be invited by my father to go golfing as my three brothers had been on their 10th birthdays. “When is dad going to invite me to play golf?” I asked my mother. “June, you’ll have to understand that men have a very special relationship with their sons. He’s not going to take you golfing.” I kept my silence but in my mind I said to my father ‘I’ll show you’ and set out to prove myself to him and my brothers.
Item: at 13 years sitting in church one Sunday, I realized God was not talking to me, he was talking to my brothers. In my mind, I said to him “God, you know that girls matter, even if the church does not’ and I set out to give God a hand.
Item: at 17 years I was the only girl in grade 11 physics. The teacher didn’t want me there so he would turn his back to me and talk to the boys. I hung in there because that is what girls had to do.
Item: during the latter years of the Second World War 1939 to 1945 on certain days boys were outside learning to march, run, climb and jump. Girls were kept inside knitting squares. The injustice of it appalled me, I refused to knit so I was
assigned to read to my classmates to keep them entertained while they knit. I was too successful, we laughed too hard so I was fired from that job.
Item: at 21 years I was at the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Centre at Camp Ritchie, Md, translating captured Japanese documents and reading maps. I expected to be sent to Japan with my team when I was told they were not taking women. Why? I asked -- because they didn’t have the proper toilet facilities for women in Japan was the embarrassed reply. The order came from Washington.
Item: About the same time the Department of External Affairs was looking for young veterans to apply for training for the diplomatic service. I met all the qualifications so I enquired and received a letter explaining that the department was looking for young male veterans, but if the girl were to obtain one or two degrees in law, economics, politics, languages and administration (read ‘learn to type’) she might be taken on as a secretary.
Item: Five years later (1951) I was about to graduate with a Masters degree in economics and political science but recruiters who came to the university of Saskatchewan were not interviewing women. It would take 25 years for the practice of rigid sex-stereotyping of jobs to become a public issue and begin to be eliminated. I did find professional employment in Ottawa almost immediately when I was contacted by the National Research Council which then housed Canadian intelligence research.
This is the background I brought with me to Winnipeg when our family moved here in 1962.
It was then I began to put my own experiences into perspective, not the least of which was moving from being a gainfully employed, income earning, economically contributing member of society into being a full-time homemaker and mother. Suddenly I was working harder than I ever had in my life and I was engaged in the most important work I would ever do in my life. But in that situation woman’s reality in law was to be regarded as a dependant with no rights of her own in marriage or the economy. Everything she had, depended on the goodwill and capacity of her husband in the present and in the future. But it was sitting with The Minus Ones, a group of 10 deserted mothers, calling out for help that for me, put a human face on all the injustices of discrimination, neglect, false premises, exclusions and bad legislation combined. When I heard their anger expressed through the telling of stories, each person in her own way, my own work came more sharply into focus and I too understood. Many of these stories are in the Manitoba Volunteer Committee Report which was printed and handed to the Commissioners at the day of their hearings in Winnipeg.
Why am I telling you these stories today? I am hoping you will see in each of the incidents I cite the knowledge, skills and insight that developed in communities of women when the restrictions on women’s lives were lifted temporarily during the war years, and how hard and long the struggle has been to recapture that freedom and hold onto it.
Are you able to relate to my times and my experiences in the fast-paced, totally changed world of today. It is a message of hope for the future --the need for vigilance, creativity, cooperation, honesty, openness, speaking out.
But let me try once more. At Christmas 2009 my niece wrote these words to me while she was reflecting on the passage of the years, to see how we have grown and changed … “Your life has not been easy. Life never is. But you have inspired me and countless others, with your attitude to life. If something is wrong – don’t complain, change it. If there are structural problems – then pursue structural solutions. If you can’t change it – don’t give up, work around it. Be practical.”
I believe that same message is valid today. It doesn’t matter how different the times or the issues. If something is wrong – don’t complain, change it. Working together we can make it happen. We can move into the future with hope.
Presented by:
June Menzies,
International Women’s Day
Monday, March 8, 2010
11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Manitoba Legislative Building, Room
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