Emma Peel's OS blog is The Peel Report 

Do you mind telling me some basics things about yourself--age, sex, where you live, where you grew up, any siblings, any children, nieces and nephews, where you attended school. ? Feel free to say as little or as much as you like.

I am of middle age  -- old enough to do it again and young enough to know better. I am a straight female, and I’ve never dabbled with women sexually. I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in a terrible blizzard. I was about two weeks late and a big baby. My poor petite mother! I spent the first 10 years of my childhood on the prairie, big sky country.  Harsh, unforgiving and beautiful. I agree with Margaret Atwood that landscape shapes us. I’ll always be a prairie girl at heart,and I’ve never liked cram ped landscapes or too many people around me. 

Since then I’ve lived in BC, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories, California, England and Indonesia, and travelled extensively for work and pleasure. I am the oldest of three children. My deceased brother was one year younger, my only sister is eight years younger. I have one niece, that’s it. We are a small family. If my niece doesn’t reproduce, our line dies out. I’d never really thought about this until my niece brought it up a couple of months ago. It’s sobering. I have about 35 cousins on both sides of the family, but I haven’t seen any of them for a long time. I’ve spoken on the phone to a couple of them, however. They both live in Alberta, as do most of the others.  Most of my cousins are conservative and believe in “family values,” whatever the hell they are. 

I went to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and majored in Communications for one year, caught the journalism bug, went to Ryerson U in Toronto to study journalism but dropped out  after one semester (Rye High wasn’t a joke) and moved to Montreal. Ended up getting a BFA in Film Studies and Journalism at Concordia University in Montreal. I finished my Master’s of Liberal Studies in 2007 at SFU. Now I am officially unemployable. 

How much are you involved with kids right now? Do you enjoy being with them?

I never had children so I’m not very involved with them. My husband has two grand-children, both girls, and we see the youngest one every two weeks. The older one lives in Edmonton and we see her about once a year. It’s awkward because his youngest daughter’s partner is an abuser, a pig of a human being, but my husband and her are very committed to maintaining their close relationship. I’m not very good at playing down on the ground level, but I enjoy going to the park, or to a movie with Bella, who is 6. I will probably be more hands on when she is older and we can hang out more. She is girly and outspoken like me, so we’ve already had a few dust ups about her borrowing my jewelry and purses without asking. She is very smart and precocious, but I am not very used to being around small children. 

What were your parents like? How much equality existed in their marriage?

My parents both grew up on farms in Alberta, and we lived on the edge of a small town near where my father grew up. They had a traditional 50s marriage. My mother was a housewife, and my father had a water well drilling business and travelled a lot. He was an alcoholic and my mother was emotionally immature – it wasn’t a happy marriage. My father had wanted to go to university and become a journalist, but there were very few jobs right after the war and he ended up going into business for himself. He was successful. My mother never felt accepted by his family and was resentful and jealous. It wasn’t much fun being a child in that house. My father died when I was 10 and we moved to the city, and kept moving after that. Everything changed. It was terribly traumatic. I don’t think my mother ever really got over his death. I often wonder what our lives might have been like if he hadn’t died. 

Would your mother consider herself a feminist? Have you ever discussed the question with her?

No, she is definitely not a feminist, but she believes that women should be educated and work outside the home in any career they want. She wasn’t very intellectual unlike my dad’s side of the family. She was always bitter that her family didn’t value education and let her quit school in Grade 9. My dad’s three sisters all went to teacher’s college, but the 3 boys didn’t have higher education. My dad’s mom was very traditional but as a former one-room schoolteacher, she felt that women “needed something to fall back on.” She was adamant about that. My mother always wanted to work with sick or disabled children, but after my father died she became a hairdresser and an esthetician. She was good at it, too. 

My mother and I used to argue about feminism and politics quite a bit when I was a very rebellious teenager.  I avoid discussing politics with her now  – she’s become even more right wing in her old age – but I know that she is proud of my sister and me for going to university. When I married my husband at 50, she told me that she knew that I would be “safe” now. She approves of him because he is very responsible and loyal and old-fashioned, but he is a feminist in the true equality sense of the world. He comes from Wales, which is a matriarchal culture, so he is used to strong women. It’s a good thing considering who he married. 

What jobs have you had? Please remember to include all caregiving jobs--e.g, babysitting, parenting, elder care.

I’ve had a lot of different jobs. Everything from working in a glass factory, being a barmaid, a cocktail waitress, a secretary, working for a sex toys’ manufacturer in San Francisco – no, I didn’t test them, a journalist, an editor, a critic, a teacher, a tutor and a life coach. There’s more, but I don’t remember them all. I babysat from the time I was about 11 to 16, and I now have the sole responsibility for my mother who suffers from dementia and lives in a care home. 

What was happening with women when you were a girl?

A lot was going on. I came of age in the late 60s/early 70s. A better question would be what wasn’t happening. It was all quite wild and confusing and ultimately, not very liberating. 

If you identify yourself a feminist, when did you accept that?

I accepted it in my early 20s. I’d always read a lot, but by then I was also experiencing a lot of the thing that happen when you’re single without a strong sense of yourself, or proper boundaries. Let’s just say the sexual freedom of the time wasn’t all that free or kind to women. 

What did you first notice sexism, whether directed at you or anyone else? 

I was first aware of sexism when I was a young child. Aware that my father’s sisters, especially my aunt Anne, weren’t all that happy in their traditional roles. They all ended up being farm wives like their mother. Aware that my paternal grandmother was dutiful to her husband, but discontent.  Aware that land always goes to the sons, even if they don’t want it. That men didn’t help with the housework, and that often women stood while they ate so they could keep serving. Farm life is very hard work, but it was my observation that the women worked hard all through the year, not just some of the year. The roles were/are clearly defined. Women take care of the children. I’ll never forget one of my aunts being shocked that a young bride’s husband actually helped her put in a huge garden. 

One of my cousins wrote her graduate thesis on the life of our paternal great-grandmother who homesteaded in late middle age during the Depression in the Saskatchewan dust bowl. I wrote about it in one of my early posts here. At the end, she noted that not much had changed –- there is still back-breaking work and now most farm women also work outside the home -- and as few as five years ago, her parents refused to sell her part of the land she grew up on and gave it to her two brothers instead.   

Sexism was ingrained in every facet of life. The double standard was still thriving in the 60s and 70s. Free love was mostly to the benefit of men, who felt free to walk away whenever they felt like it, leaving kids etc. behind. Some women were able to get what they wanted, but they paid a price. The whole thing was a giant illusion and women still did the majority of the shit work, and still do. 

Has anyone else accused you of sexism?

Hmm. Does being called a femiNazi for not wanting a stripper to gyrate her crotch in my face at work while I’m trying to interview someone count? I’ve learned not to take it to heart. Consider the source is my motto. I heard it a lot as a film critic when I objected to the horrific sexism in so many 80s and early 90s action movies, not that much has changed in popular culture. Here’s the thing: I review movies with my brain, not my genitalia. And my brain works very well  most of the time.  

Are you an egalitarian rather than a feminist or masculist?

 I don’t know what masculist means. I don’t think it’s actually a word, is it? I am a feminist by necessity, but hope to see the day I can become an egalitarian, which is more my true ideal. 

Do we live in a postfeminist era? 

Some do, I definitely don’t. And women in the vast majority of countries sure don’t. The battle for equality is far from over even if the prevailing culture pretends otherwise. It truly bothers me that so many young western women now consider feminism a dirty word and distance themselves from it. There has been such a pervasive backlash against women’s rights masquerading as “empowerment” for so long that they think it is passé. It saddens me, but there are still women out there smart enough to get it, even if they aren’t the majority. I have hope for the future, but I see an awful lot of women still settling for less than they deserve. My youngest step-daughter is a prime example. 

How much sexism did you perceive in the 2008 primaries and elections?

A massive amount. I literally couldn’t stomach some of the attacks on Hillary, although they’ve been ongoing for years. I despise Sarah Palin and everything she represents, but I thought she took a lot on the chin, too. Politics is a blood sport, but it’s pretty clear that there are no rules at all when it comes to women. It’s always open season. 

Are OS men too nervous to post on sexism and feminism? How could we help?

I don’t know if they’re nervous or not. Some may just not be interested. I don’t have a strong urge to help other than to write what I write and hope that it resonates with someone. I obviously like men or I wouldn’t have married one late in life, but it’s not my job to hold anyone’s hand. That probably sounds harsh, but I am aware that time is going by terribly fast and I need to focus on what is truly important to me. When I teach, I strive to treat everyone equally. I have worked in a lot of male-dominated environments in my life and even where I teach, there are more men than women in my classes. I’ve had a few challenges but one thing that I’ve noticed lately is that I’m getting a lot of very positive evaluations from male students, and that many of the younger men are far more aware of how hard it is to work and keep a home because they watched their mothers do it. That has to be a good sign. And they are receptive to creating life/work balance, even in the gaming industry. 

What books shaped your ideas on women?

Oh, there are so many. The Diary of Anne Frank. The Fountainhead, oddly enough. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush. Gone With the Wind. The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood, although I don’t much like her later work. All the feminist writers such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and even Nora Ephron way back when.  I love Oriana Fallaci, but she has changed somewhat.

 Who is your favorite woman novelist? Do you think she is a feminist (I fervently believe Jane Austen was.)

I don’t have a favourite. I read a lot of genres and I could list pages of authors. There are some I admire more than I appreciate such as Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Naomi Wolf and Doris Lessing. Isak Dinesen is one of my favourites  -- Out of Africa is that rare thing, a perfectly written and felt book. May Sarton, Katharine Mansfield, Katharine Anne Porter, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence are very good. Laurence is so underrated and she wrote about amazing women. Carol Shields has written some perfect novels and she really gets men. Her death hit me very hard. Joan Didion, especially her early stuff. Germaine Greer – I still have my copy of The Female Eunuch where she writes that every man should be fucked up the ass just once to know what it’s like. Jane Austen of course. Persuasion is one of the best books ever written, although I know Emma is supposedly technically better. Just so many…I’m not sure they were all feminists, but they spoke to me. 

I know that I am leaving out some important ones but my mind always goes blank at times like these. I know this is weird, but I want to include Truman Capote. He is one male author who truly understood women and I was watching Infamous while I was writing this. 

Posted by Emma Peel