In Her Own Time

A Class Reunion Inspires a Cultural History of Women

Maggie Siggins

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780006386292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443404099
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

It all started with an R.H. King Collegiate class of '61 reunion: 26 women meeting 30 years after their graduation. Siggins was struck by their wide range of fascinating life stories. These, after all, were the women who were born during the war, had come of age in the '60s, and were changed by the women's movement of the '70s. They had all stood at the forefront of one of the greatest revolutions in history -- the emancipation of half the human race.

Inspired by that reunion, Siggins set out to write the life stories of her classmates, using the emerging themes from these intense dramas as a gateway to explore women's lives throughout history. The result is a compelling series of personal journeys linked by nothing less than an absorbing cultural history of women in the Western world, from antiquity to the present.

A book that speaks powerfully to people of all ages -- and especially those of "the cusp generation" -- In Her Own Time is an inspiring, informative and wholly entertaining read.

1. Relationships

Jane

In 1957, my second year of high school, my family moved into the upper duplex of a lovely old house in a neighbourhood called Birch Cliff. It was tree-lined and well lived-in, not unlike the place where I had spent my childhood. It stood on what is known as The Bluffs, those ragged cliffs that dominate a portion of Toronto’s shoreline, arching over Lake Ontario. Birch Cliff was a half-hour streetcar ride from downtown Toronto and had been a comfortable, middle-class enclave for years, part of Scarborough that had been settled as a suburban community as far back as the 1910s.

My family life was in chaos by this time—my mother’s second marriage was finally disintegrating beyond repair—and to live on Kingsbury Crescent in Birch Cliff was to provide me with a much-need patina of respectability.

In September I enrolled in my new school, R. H. King Collegiate, and much to my amazement was told I had been placed in 10A, the “brainers” class where academic excellence was a given. More happiness that day when I found out Jane Sanderson lived nearby.

Everyone liked Jane. Little and small-boned, she had fine, curly blonde hair, lovely eyes the colour of forget-me-nots—she often wore a wool skirt of the most exquisite pale blue that matched them perfectly—and a grin full of mischievous glee. She was gregarious, funny and warm, surrounded always by an army of admiring friends. While I never became part of her inner circle, I was happy simply being on the periphery. To me, she represented the side of our teenage years that was wholesome and safe and fun.

Jane’s father, Ted Sanderson, had grown up in a big, rambling house in Toronto’s Beaches area, not far from The Bluffs. While attending Malvern Collegiate he had met Eleanor Beer, the eldest daughter of a well-known family doctor who practised in the Beaches area.

The lovely Eleanor would not prove an easy catch. For one thing, she was considered better educated, more refined and more of an intellectual than Ted. She attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto, and worked for a short time as a social worker investigating the families of abused children.

There had been a terrible disappointment in Eleanor Beer’s young life. She had been going out with a medical student, the son of a prominent, upper-class doctor—the Beers were dazzled by the family’s pedigree—but he had lost interest. Meanwhile, she, with her broken heart, was approaching 30, nearly on the shelf, and there was Ted Sanderson, still pursuing her, still proclaiming his undying love. They were finally married when both were in their early thirties. By that time, Ted had graduated from law school and set up his own practice in downtown Toronto. An old friend describes him this way: not very literate, not too bright, but sweet, faithful, patient—and he would do anything for his “Nor.”

Through all his married life, Ted Sanderson remained passionately in love with his wife. Jane remembers how, as a young child, she’d excitedly wait for her Dad to come home from work. He’d walk in the door, wouldn’t say hello or even look at her, just demand, “Where is your mother?”

He was a man of contradictions. While he would give Eleanor anything she wanted, wouldn’t hesitate for a moment if she wanted to go to New York to take in the theatre she loved so much, he had very rigid views of a woman’s proper place in life. It was having babies, looking after the house and being gracious to guests. Every afternoon, in honour of Ted’s arrival home from work, Eleanor put on a pretty dress and did up her hair.

Years later, after Women’s Liberation had raucously proclaimed a new era, Jane, who was pregnant with her second child, and her sister Mary were sitting around the dinner table with their father. A discussion ensued about which sex the baby might be.

“You want a girl, you certainly want another girl,” said Ted.

“Why?” Mary and Jane asked in surprised unison.

“Being a boy is so hard. All a girl has to do is be pleasant and good-looking and get married.”

The two sisters looked at each other and thought to themselves, “We’ve been raised by this man?” Yet, Jane adds, a heavy burden was imposed on men in those days. Her father, a man full of optimism and good humour, saw himself as the great provider and protector. He never much challenged his vivacious daughter Jane, never pushed her, and in the end neglected to teach her the skills that would make her existence easier. Always she would be dependent on the men, often lovers, who would shape her life.

From her early thirties, Jane’s mother Eleanor suffered from arthritis that grew progressively worse as time went on. Ted did everything he could to make her comfortable: a cleaning woman came once a week, and the Sandersons were one of the first families in the neighbourhood to purchase an automatic washing machine because Eleanor couldn’t handle the wringer on the old one. Jane never once heard her mother complain about the painful disease that would eventually cripple her. Her condition was a kind of “elephant in the dining room”—nobody ever talked about it.

Jane was closer to her mother than her father. Eleanor was always at home for her girls, and Jane remembers spending hours in the kitchen just yakking to her. Jane feels her mother was probably lonely—she didn’t have a lot of friends—and reading was her refuge.

Jane was such a happy child, so extroverted, inquisitive and smart, that she sailed through elementary and high schools. She did all the right things: she was elected to the Student Administrative Council; she was a girl prefect, that hand-picked elite who made sure students put their lunch trays away; she was on the badminton team. She developed lots of anguished crushes on football players and other hunks, but she never had a steady boyfriend. She was so cute and bubbly, lots of the guys gave her pet names and invited her to their parties, but they were after the femmes fatales, the beauty queens, and Jane was never that. She resented this a little; as she grew older, getting her hands on a boyfriend, a lover, became ever more important.

Unlike many of us who barely managed the torment of Grade 13, Jane easily made the honour roll with 83 percent, languages and math being her two outstanding subjects. University was certainly in the cards for her, and in the yearbook, she brightly told the world she wanted to become a lawyer.

While growing up, Jane would often beg her father to talk about his legal cases. The two would sit after dinner and debate the details of a particular court proceeding until Jane’s sister Mary, who hated arguments of any kind, would quit the kitchen table in disgust. Ted would compliment Jane on her sharp logic, but at the same time he made it very clear: the “law business,” as he called it, was not for her. Ted Sanderson had a habit of ridiculing women lawyers and he made a point of not hiring female articling students for his firm. (Years later, he, like everyone else in the profession, finally relented on this particular prejudice.) What Jane now considers pathetic is that neither she nor her sister, or, for that matter, her mother, challenged him about this. It was supposed to be a joke, but it left an indelible scar on Jane’s psyche. The idea of law school vanished quickly.

Jane was presented with another chance to break from tradition. She was accepted at York University, which had been founded only two years before to accommodate Toronto’s burgeoning population. Jane thought it would be a thrill to be there at the beginning, when the professors would be keen and the atmosphere charged. But in the end, she took her parents’ advice and enrolled in Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where both her mother and her aunt had studied. It was another example, she says, of not searching for her bliss, not striving for the gold ring.

Jane’s high-school marks were high enough for acceptance into an honours program, and she chose English language and literature. By this time she was convinced that becoming a lawyer was impossible, and without a career in mind, she did not enjoy her courses. Though she kept slugging away, she failed her second year and transferred into general arts. The women in this stream, it was said, were after only one thing: their MRS. degree.

Jane’s summers, which she spent in Montreal, were more interesting. The rebellious 1960s were just starting to heat up, and some of the university’s formerly staid institutions were flexing their left-wing muscles. The Student Christian Movement was one of these. Established in 1921 as a reaction to the perceived conservatism of the YWCA and YMCA, it was regarded as the thinkers’ group; there was always some important issue being debated—peace, poverty, politics.

Jane wasn’t involved in the SCM’s activities on campus, but she found the idea of their summer work camps intriguing. Ten to 25 students lived co-operatively during the summer months, often in a church basement or parish hall. They pooled their wages, sharing daily expenses, and at the end of the summer, divvied up the accumulated savings according to each individual’s needs. There were Mental Health Camps, and Industrial Camps, where students supposedly learned all about the proletariat by working in factories. Although the camp program had begun in 1945, by the 1960s there was a definite Marxist flavour to it.

One summer in particular was special because Jane finally became serious about a man—the director of the work camp. David Laurent L’Esperance was 11 years older than she was, dark and bespectacled, not very good-looking but embodying what 1960s idealism was all about. He was brilliant, a Marxist, a trained theologian, a philosopher and musician—he had taught himself flamenco guitar and played wonderfully. He was also married.

This was not Jane’s only involvement with a married man; there were several affairs while she was at university, including a brief, mad encounter with a United Church minister. She loved the excitement, the sneaking around, the drama, the satisfaction of pleasing these men who were sometimes close in age to her father. That the wives could be badly hurt by such deception bothers her now, of course, but it didn’t back then in the passionate, devil-may-care ‘60s. Her romance with David, however, turned out to be anything but a fling.

David’s mother was American, his father French-Canadian, a crackerjack insurance salesman who made lots of money. The family home was located in fashionable Outremont, a suburb of Montreal—Mrs. L’Esperance often had tea with Mrs. Trudeau, the mother of Canada’s future prime minister. Like all the other males in the family, David was supposed to follow in his father’s entrepreneurial footsteps. He dutifully enrolled in business administration at McGill University but quickly realized he loathed it. He failed his year, and began looking around for something else.

The L’Esperances were not a religious family, but in his early twenties, David had embraced the Anglican Church. He was enchanted by its symbols, its liturgy, its pomp and circumstance, and its humanitarianism. In 1958, he joined the worker-priest movement in England.

By the time he returned to Montreal three years later, he had married. His wife enrolled in library science and he in religious studies at Sir George Williams University (which later joined with Loyola College to become Concordia University), a hotbed of student radicalism during the 1960s. Eventually he would earn both his Bachelor of Divinity and STM, Master of Sacred Theology, but he was never ordained a priest. The hierarchical structure of the church did not appeal to him; he was turned off by what he perceived as a lack of intellectual brilliance among the divinity students. Later, though, he would regret his decision.

By the time he met Jane in the early 1960s, he was over 30 and his marriage was in serious trouble. Jane always thought David and his first wife were an odd couple: she was a strong feminist, a professional career woman who did not want children; David’s values were centred in the family.

After her summer in Montreal, Jane returned to university in Toronto, but she and David kept their love affair going. One of them would say, “This is ridiculous” and call it off, but a few months later letters would start flying: “I love you, I miss you.” By the time Jane graduated in 1966, David had obtained a divorce.

Jane and David were married in a small wedding two years later with Jane’s parents happily in attendance. At first they had been shocked at the idea of their daughter being involved with an older married man, but Eleanor, at least, quickly came to adore David. He was sophisticated and cultured and charming to her—all the things her husband wasn’t. When she was dying, it was David who sat talking with her for hours.

Jane was supposed to move to Montreal but, as she says, she wimped out on yet another challenging experience; David came to Toronto instead. Both found jobs with the Ontario government’s correctional services, she as an after-care worker, counselling young girls who had been in training school, he as a probation officer. They considered their work as a kind of joint ministry.

Jane says David was a wonderful husband, so responsible, so loving and appreciative of her, yet looking back, she understands that there was a shadow over the marriage. Because David was so much older than she, and so capable, he took charge of the household, paying the bills, renovating an old home, making the important decisions. And she always deferred to him. He was so knowledgeable and well read, in a conversation or argument, she felt she could never win. She says she did a lot of play-acting and didn’t grow much during her time spent with David.

The year after Jane was married, her mother died of cancer at age 62. Gone was the one person Jane most loved to talk to, and she was devastated. Eleanor suffered from two diseases, arthritis and cancer, which Jane believes often result from emotional repression, from closing doors on life, from seldom saying yes. Jane can still hardly talk about her mother without becoming teary-eyed—she now feels Eleanor’s life was so wasted.

The L’Esperances’ first child, christened Eleanor Ruth but called Norah by everybody, came along four years later. By that time David was moving up the ladder—he was a supervisor of probation officers—and Jane didn’t hesitate to quit work. She gloried in being pregnant, loved the physical experience of childbirth, the breast-feeding. She submerged herself in research, studying all the latest books on motherhood, attending lectures. It was one area, she says, where she didn’t have any competition from David.

Joseph was born three years later. By that time, the L’Esperances were settled into a comfortable, middle-class life, fixing up their house, having other couples in for dinner. Neither had given up on their social activism: David started a program working with people on probation, and he was still involved with the Anglican Church, serving as a warden at nearby St. Aidan’s. Jane was a volunteer teacher at her kids’ school, and joined Zero Population Growth, a movement that believed the world’s numbers were spinning dangerously out of control. To prove her point, she underwent a tubal ligation after Joseph’s birth and scolded anybody who dared to become pregnant with their third child. She now thinks of herself then as being “totally obnoxious.”

When both children were finally in school, Jane, now in her mid-thirties, began thinking about going back to work. She found a law-clerk course that appealed to her, but her father once again dampened her enthusiasm by insisting it wasn’t an interesting enough job for his daughter. She began taking library-science courses, and in the newspaper want ads found a position in a law library working three days a week. It was a flunky’s job, she says, but she loved it, and even considered going back to university to get a library science degree. But in late 1982, all plans came to an abrupt halt. David was diagnosed as having cancer and given six weeks to live.

Jane says he was remarkable during his illness. He held court. All day long people would visit him, often coming away with tears in their eyes. He was so brave and inspiring, talki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Relationships
• 2. The Married State
• 3. The Body
• 4. The Mind
• 5. The Soul
• 6. The Imagination
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• The Reunion
• Copyright
• About the Publisher