Rise Up: Becoming Feminists

VOICE OVER:  The Women Unite project was started in April 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. We realised that recording in person wasn’t going to be possible and so we decided to use Zoom. At the very start of our project, we resolved to do a “test” interview amongst ourselves to practice. The interview revealed some interesting stories in the awakening of feminist consciousness and the beginning of activism in some of the members of the Rise Up Collective and so we determined that it deserved a place with the other interviews in the project.

Franca Iacovetta: Alright, so this is our test case interview and I want to say that today is also the 80^th anniversary of Emma Goldman’s death in Toronto. And our symposium in her honour was shuttered like everything else under this pandemic, but it makes a nice day for doing this interview. 

So, with an hour we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m not going to ask a lot about detailed biographical information. But I think it would be useful for people just to say very briefly something about when and where you were born and how you got Toronto, whether you started out in Toronto or you got to Toronto, you know. And from there we’ll kind of go on to some of the early moments of politicization and activism. So, shall we start with you Sue? Will you say something about when and where you were born and how you got to Toronto?

Sue Colley: Yes, hello, I’m Sue and I came from the UK in 1969. I hadn’t been very political except for going to the anti-war demonstrations in London, which were pretty big at the time and so on and so forth. But I arrived in Canada and I thought I was actually not going to stay in Canada. My idea was I was going to travel across the U.S. and go down to ride a horse across the Andes.

And anyway, I arrived in Montreal and I spent about nine months there I guess it was. And then in May 1970 I went west. I hitchhiked west with a friend of mine and we arrived in Vancouver in about May – the week of May 6^th anyway. And immediately there was just so much going on. There was this organization that I immediately got involved with called the Vancouver Liberation Front. 

And we decided that, because the Americans had invaded Cambodia for 30 days and only 23 miles, that we should invade the United States for 30 days and only 23 miles. And so, this was my first really big political event because what we did was we stormed over the border and took the town of Blaine. 

And anyway, that was a really kind of exciting opener. And after that I just did a lot of anti-war work. But in the course of this, the Vancouver Liberation Front was getting very antsy about the role the men were playing in this organization. And so, the women that were involved decided to have daily consciousness-raising sessions on the English Bay Beach. And this was with Ellen Woodsworth, Judy Darcy, Peggy Morton, all these wonderful women. We all sat around on the beach and basically examined our roots and where we were coming from. Prior to that I hadn’t been a feminist at all.

Franca Iacovetta: OK, that’s great. Thank you. I’m going to move on to Amy. Do you want to say something about when and where you came from and how you got here?

Amy Gottlieb: I grew up in New York on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My parents were both members of the communist party and I grew up in an environment with a lot of demonstrations and political meetings. 

You know, I have images in my head of being on my father’s shoulders in Union Square as a young, young child and then going on lots of demonstrations with them, particularly as part of the antiwar movement, the large New York but mostly, largely the demonstrations in Washington, D.C. And in addition, in 1969/’70 around Angela Davis and actually working with my parents on that. 

So, both in terms of support for the Black Civil Rights movement as well as the antiwar movement. I was an activist from the time I – in my own right, in my own organizations from the time I was in junior high school and formed my first organization, the Students’ Crusade Against War and stole one of the sheets, bed sheets, and made a banner for us to march in a demonstration that said Students’ Crusade Against War.

Then in 1972, after a couple of years doing some university as a fine arts student as well as back in New York living with my parents, I came up to Peterborough and started going to Trent University. And met a whole bunch of people who were activists of one sort or another, many of whom were taking sociology, were part of the – enmeshed in the sociology department of which there were many professors who were Marxists. And so, and thus ensued a lot of my sort of – some of my education that helped me to break from my sort of Stalinist upbringing.

And it was also there that I got involved with the beginnings of the foundation of the Peterborough Women’s Centre. We had an Opportunities for Youth grant one summer to set it up. And I would say that that was probably the sort of, you know, most formal and official kind of way in which my coming to feminism was manifested at that point in time.

In Peterborough I also came out as a lesbian. So, not only did I sort of – I became a Trotskyist and I also came out as a lesbian. And I always thought it was kind of funny that my mother, when I sort of talked to her about both of those things, she said, “Well, it’s fine that you love women and are a lesbian, but just don’t tell your father about the Trotskyist part”. 

So, once I moved to Toronto I got involved – my first job was at Interval House, a shelter for women who were abused and who had suffered violence at the hands of their partners, the majority of them being male. And that for me was, as well, a real – an eye opener and made me aware of things that I really hadn’t up until that point been involved in in a conscious way. 

Franca Iacovetta: OK great, thanks. Meg, how about you, something about you from …?

Meg Luxton: Yeah, well I was born in England and as far as I know I was actually conceived on VE Day. My father was a Canadian overseas with the Canadian YMCA and Army. My mother was a British working-class woman who became a secretary. They got married, had me and came to Canada in ’46 when I was an infant and when I was about four, I think, moved to Toronto. 

And I had a bit of a growing up in England, growing up in Canada, back and forth. And one of the things that was pretty formative was a bunch of stuff that happened in my teens, including both my parents’ death made me very hostile to the world we lived in. So, that sort of led me into studying anthropology and being open to the left. 

And I went the U of T in ’65 so was an undergrad from ’65 to ’68 I guess, and things were happening all over U of T. in particular, she and I became friends and we would go for drives and she would tell me the history of communism and history of the Russian Revolution and etcetera, etcetera, which all made perfect sense to me and really fit with what I was feeling and living with.

And then, so, the women’s movement was happening. We got involved in the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement Group, all 12 of us I think. And then, I was for two years living in northern Manitoba doing my Ph.D. research, and there was a left caucus there. And what became absolutely clear is, for us to do any work in that community, we wanted and needed the ties that we had informally with people we knew in other parts of the country who were in the RMG. And so, when I came back to Toronto, I joined the RMG and was in that organization until ’78 or 9, somewhere in there. 

And so, I was, you know I was privileged to be in an environment where all kinds of things were happening. It was U of T, there was all kinds of things going on, and I was predisposed to welcome it, and so, women’s liberation and the left at the same time. And then I was involved in teaching women’s studies at U of T and that was amazing. So, that’s the start.

Franca Iacovetta: OK, thank you. You’ve anticipated so many of my other questions so we can just keep moving along. I had wanted to ask about what role university played in your life. I wanted to ask about the kind of just moments of politicization that really matter to you and you’ve already started to say some of that. But maybe we could go back to that a little bit. 

Sue, you talk as though you were kind of randomly wandering around and then you end up in Vancouver and you get very involved. But I gather these weren’t just random movements as you hitchhiked across the country. And I’m wondering what was, you know, what was kind of motivating you? Was it really just about exploring? Did you already have some notion that you wanted to be liberated from your background or what have you? 

Sue Colley: Well, I was really a hippie and an adventurer, right. I’d already hitchhiked halfway around the world to India and Sri Lanka and I got right through the Middle East and right across north Africa actually, to Algeria and Morocco and so on. And I hadn’t been to university – I left school at 15 – so all of my understandings and my intellectual appreciation was very experiential. So all I knew was I really needed to see what this U.S. was all about, which I’d come to hate while I was in India and travelling.

So no, apart from being generally political, which people are in the UK, I didn’t come from any kind of left background. My father was the son of a left-handed riveter in the shipyards in Sunderland. My mother was a penny bourgeois daughter of a bootmaker. And they’d got together and it had been a really interesting liaison which was quite successful. 

But it wasn’t very political except that everybody in their youth in England, especially in the ‘60s, had a smattering of politics. And I don’t know if you found this, Meg, but a lot of people were sort of concerned about the war and about … I went to a few meetings of Black Dwarf  for example, just because I was around that kind of crowd. I was … anyway. So, oh yes, and I’d met up with people in ’68 who had actually had escaped Czechoslovakia. 

And it was just a sort of big political community so I was familiar with that kind of environment when I came to Canada. And even the guy I travelled across Canada with was a friend and also quite political, but not terribly political. So, I think it really was the antiwar stuff that hit me the hardest. And as I say, those moments of activism out west were particularly strong.

Now, I then came to Toronto in the summer, at the end of the summer of ’70, and I got involved with an organization that at the time I think was called Red Morning. Red Morning was really involved with Comrades from Quebec and very [she means FLQ allied] anti-FLQ. And so I was actually also one of the people that got arrested in English Canada under the War Measures Act. So, all these things happened to me that were incredibly – there were political moments that were very, you know, were very amazing actually. 

But in fact, I had been working on a [Local Initiatives Program] LIP grant to run a free food program on  Baldwin Street for unemployed youths. And we had a legal clinic and we had various other dance classes and food and all that sort of stuff and we met people, transient youth coming across the country. l

So another big political moment was getting involved in grassroots in Toronto. And we of course were the people that tried to get a camp for unemployed youth and had battles with the police at various points in Toronto. It was called Wacheea and we eventually won the Old Mercer football ground to set up our camp for unemployed youth, so that was another one.

So, there were all these events unfolding that I had a role in. And it wasn’t really until I got involved in the RMG that I began to put it all together intellectually and it all made sense to me. But I hadn’t been brought up with it or hadn’t had a university education. It was very experiential.

Franca Iacovetta: I wanted to ask about what role university played in some of your in terms of your development of a feminist and a left consciousness. So, Sue has already told us that she didn’t go to university which created a really interesting trajectory. You’ve already talked about Trent, the context being important, though I still want to ask – and maybe people will still want to know – how does a New Yorker end up at Trent? And did there continue to be important kind of cross-border networks and connections for you while you were at Trent?

Amy Gottlieb: Yes, although I have to say that when I first arrived at Trent I felt like – I just felt like I was in this really bizarre place. First of all, it was so white. And I couldn’t figure out, like you know, I said, “Where’s the liquor store?” and they showed me the Liquor Control Board. I was like, I couldn’t even see any of the, you know, beer or wine or any … Anyway, the whole Ontario thing just really freaked me out at first coming from where I came.

But all that cultural kind of stuff aside, it felt, yeah, very, there was a sort of monoculture that – seemingly monoculture which, once you dug down below that, you know, you actually did find something more. But I just felt quite – I felt quite different. I felt different because I was Jewish. I felt different because I’d grown up in a very mixed kind of neighbourhood. I felt different because I, you know, my hands went everywhere when I was talking or, you know, that … I just felt different. 

But yeah, I mean the university was, for me, not … I mean I learned a lot and I read, I mean I basically took like only sociology courses with those professors that I knew were Marxists or, you know, certainly sympathetic. Oh, and then I also took one literature course every year so that I could actually read some fiction aside from all these heavy tones, in addition to all the heavy tones.

But it was about community really. I felt like the, you know, there was a lot of socializing that took place and a lot of political organizing that took place where students and professors were involved together. And we formed a study group called the Zolotny  Group which was named after a Polish cigar worker who formed a union and his name was Zolotny. 

And this was a kind of a pro – it was a pre-Revolutionary Marxist Group. Like we were basically, we were like in training. We were like a red circle. And it was all people who were at Trent in Peterborough and we just went through a lot of reading, mostly Trotsky but not only. And through that I became – it sort of all started to come together. 

The summer before I went to Trent I actually travelled to the Soviet Union. And so that was a big moment for me which was my moment of … I think the first time I voiced my differences with my parents, and particularly differences with my father around his attachment to the Soviet Union and at all costs, you know, it always did everything right, was around the invasion of Czechoslovakia. So, that’s 1968. But going to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1972 confirmed for me … I helped to organize an American Soviet youth conference. This was the era of détente and so those kinds of things were being encouraged. 

And so we got there and it was clear to me what some of the ways that I was already critical of the Soviet Union around the fact that, you know, trade unions weren’t independent, around the role of women in Soviet society, around freedom of expression, around, you know, the right to politically organize and dissent and all of those things just were confirmed for me when I was there that summer. 

And so, coming to Trent and then finding all these people who were reading Trotsky and who were, you know, democratic socialists for lack of a better – I’ll use that as the umbrella term – and whatever their particular analysis. And people had their differences over what they called the Soviet Union and how they would analyze it. But that was also really important to me was finding that group and finding that solidarity. And I just remember, you know, just doing lots of reading and just sitting around at all hours just talking, talking, talking. 

Prior to that I had been very involved in the antiwar movement at the first university that I was part of. And I think for me, the strange thing about being at my first university in New Paltz, it was the State University of New York and it was partly I didn’t have like, I didn’t have as high marks as some of my friends did who went to way fancier schools. But also, my parents didn’t have much money and it was a state university and they could afford it and so I went there. 

And there was nobody on campus I could to get to organize around Angela Davis and try to get her freed. I put up posters all around the university. The Black Students’ Union was in the midst of a project of trying to build a residence that was for black students, and trying to build the sort of accessibility of the university services to black students and all that and so they were not interested. Probably some of them also didn’t want to be associated because of, you know, Angela Davis’s politics. But you know, I don’t know the full story.

Anyway, I did finally get involved with the Student Christian Movement, which was the only group that I could find that was really, really active around the bombing of Cambodia. And so, I actually had one of those –many of them were quakers. That was probably one of my first moments of like really consciously acknowledging that I was working with people that I really had never had any expectation that I would work with. So, it was kind of like a dry run for how to build alliances with people when you have an agreement around something in particular but you may have other things around which you’re quite different and have very different points of view. 

So, that was an interesting, you know, example of a moment that taught me a lot.  And in fact, they were quite a motley crew of wonderful people and I really enjoyed the time that we had. And it was the first time that I came to Toronto, we actually hitchhiked from New Paltz up to Toronto for the meeting of North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese and Laotian women that was at the Friend’s house in 1970, I think ’70, in the fall of 1970. And we had a great time sort of hitchhiking up here and met with the Berrigans in Syracuse and all these other people who were involved in this antiwar movement that was so broad. Anyway, that, you know, those are a few things, a few of my moments.

Franca Iacovetta: If you want to share some particular moments or particular events, developments, debates or something that you might want to share across the three of you? Because you’ve all, right, you’ve all been involved – you all were involved with far-left groups.

Amy Gottlieb: I would say that my experience in the Revolutionary Marxist Group was one of extreme contrasts. On the one hand, I found the style of debate, the style of meetings to favour a particular kind of masculine way of operating that was extremely difficult and extremely alienating. And that there was a way in which many of the men in the organization dominated those debates and the different groupings within the organization. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, there were a group of very powerful, very articulate, very passionate women who were leaders in the organization and who encouraged other people – most particularly women but not just – to have more of a voice within the organization. 

But it was a very difficult situation within which to take your place. I never found it easy at all. I remember being at meetings, large meetings, you know, of the branch down on Queen Street in our building, and you know, just like when I was wanting to speak, sort of feeling like my whole body was like shaking before, you know, like thinking about what it was that I was going to say and how people were going to respond and whether they were going to understand me. And just the whole like was I going to say it the right way, you know? And I had never really felt that in a political context prior to that. It was just so pressured, so stressful, so difficult. 

And so for me, when we formed our sort of Tendency Z, which is what we called it which was a sort of feminist, you know, queer caucus tendency within the organization. That felt a lot easier for me, partly because it was smaller but also because I think a lot of us had very similar kind of criticisms of the internal life of the organization which was so difficult for us.

Sue Colley: Yeah. And we were never able to make those criticisms stick. I don’t even know whether we were actually able to surface them, frankly, because it was so intimidating. I hated it. And I remember that the place where I felt comfortable and the most productive and useful etcetera was the Women’s Committee. And I go to your question about do I feel more rooted in the women’s movement than in other movements like the left groups; absolutely the women’s movement. For me, absolutely no question. 

And in fact, being in the Women’s Committee and being surrounded by other passionate, really intelligent, insightful women, not just in the leadership but in the Women’s Committee, was for me incredibly invigorating. And I think that’s why I stayed as long as I did was because of that.

And then of course I’d also had this horrible experience in Winnipeg which was made up of high-school boys, mainly, with one woman. And Gord and I came out from Toronto and any mention of women’s liberation at all was just heresy, and it was treated as heresy. And I actually had a really interesting time meeting with left women in Winnipeg and doing actions with them because I couldn’t relate to the branch at all. 

So, I actually don’t think I really ever enjoyed my left group experiences, even [unintelligible 00:29:49]. I mean I went through Black Dwarf, Vancouver liberation, women’s liberation, I mean Vancouver Liberation Front, Red Morning – Rising Up Angry, Red Morning, the RMG and Women’s Liberation Movement and Women’s Caucus in Toronto and in Vancouver. 

Meg Luxton: And then RWL. [Revolutionary Workers League]

Sue Colley: Well yeah, but I wasn’t in the RWL very long; I mean maybe six months. That’s when I’d had it. I’d had it by then.

Meg Luxton: I had really similar reactions but along slightly different lines. So, my impulse to join the RMG came from working in northern Manitoba and trying do the left caucus work there, and how much we needed a bigger network of information and resources and support and people to help us think things through. And so, when I came back to Toronto I did join for the RMG for that reason, but it was so hostile to the people we were supposed to be mobilizing to make the revolution. I mean, there was no – it was a very alien culture. It wasn’t a working-class culture that was comfortable.

And then the point at which I dropped out was when I was told that it was unrevolutionary to have a second kid [laughter] by the branch organizer who said, “It’s one thing for a revolutionary to have a kid; anybody can make one mistake. But to adopt a kid is to do it deliberately.”

Franca Iacovetta: Wow.

Sue Colley: Good grief.

Meg Luxton: So that, OK, we’re a revolutionary working-glass group, organization, supposed to making a socialist world, but we can’t have kids, thanks. But I loved the learning. I loved the sense of solidarity. I loved that I could do women’s stuff and learn about what was going on in Mozambique or in South Africa or somewhere and have a sense that I trusted the analysis that I was learning, which is something I’m desperate for now. It’s really hard to trust the information that’s around. And I don’t have the same kind of network of people to help me think these things through. I miss it. So, that was a good thing for me in those years.

Amy Gottlieb: Yeah, I agree. It was an incredible learning experience. And just the sense of being able to connect with all these other struggles. And to be able to, you know, read and hear an analysis of what was going on in many parts of the world as well as across Canada was incredible. But the cost was just way too great. I left in 1980 and Gary and Natalie – Gary Kinsman and Natalie La Roche and I wrote a letter, a resignation letter how to … We gave it a title. It’s called We May Not Be Witches but We Sure Have Been Burned. And we were …

Franca Iacovetta: Oooh.

Amy Gottlieb: Like it was kind of our final kind of like we’re out of here. Because at that point the industrial turn was in full swing and we felt completely I would say belittled, sidelined, erased, dispossessed of our radical identities. And it was just no longer possible to stick around.