I just had to share a favourite couple of anecdotes of mine. It's the juxtaposition ...
I was around in the 60s. As a kid, in the early 60s, I spent my time in the basement watching old movies and reading my mother's Chatelaine magazine. Chatelaine is a huge subject of its own. A venerable Canadian women's magazine -- you know, cooking, sewing ... -- run by the big Canadian magazine-publishing corp. Doris Anderson was given control of it on condition that she make money in two years. Eventually, she turned it into a mainstream feminist publication.
A brief intro:
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/women/002026-295-e.htmlhttp://www.chatelaine.com/english/life/article.jsp?content=20070111_161635_5224(The "Homemakers" magazine editor referred to at the second link was a driving force behind efforts to aid Afghan women for many years:
http://www.w4wafghan.ca/whats_new_monthly/sallys_book_veiled.htm)
Doris made me a feminist, and Doris is one of the reasons we got the Royal Commission on the Status of Women here, and the liberalization of various laws and protections through various others (e.g. family property law), and later the equivalent of your ERA in our 1982 constitution. And I got to go to university and law school and all the rest.
I got to meet her for a few seconds a few years ago at a book signing, and I told her.
Anyhow.
One day back probably in the early 70s, somebody asked Gloria Steinem why Ms. Magazine carried makeup ads and suchlike nonsense. Oh, Gloria said, why, women like to make themselves attractive, burble burble.
Around the same time, someone asked Doris Anderson the same question. Because we need the money, Doris said.
(looks suave there, but she had a voice like a crazy woman ...)
"If ever any editor or publisher in this country earned the epithet “legendary,” it was Doris Anderson, who died yesterday in Toronto at the age of eighty-five. Among the (still too few) women who have broken through glass ceilings to become power-brokers on their own, Anderson was unique. She was obviously propelled by an unshakeable faith in the dignity and competence of women, grounded in her own sense of self-esteem, but she ran as well on just the right level of piss and vinegar to wake up some of the boys in the backrooms and to give heart to a lot of women who hadn’t yet found the kind of courage she had."
http://www.breadnroses.ca/frontpage/?page_id=61Anyhow, I've never actually heard of Bust, so I'll just wander off again now ...