on chemistry

Last night I accompanied my mother to a dinner party for the women’s peace group she’s been involved with locally since moving here in the seventies. I would always go if I was in town and now I am always in town. The women meet at an old cottage downtown wallpapered in works by the Bobaks, matched in charm by a backyard garden of gaping June tulips and pond koi fish. The make gluten-free dishes, having at one creative moment past thrown the pots they now present them in. They lament the waning productivity of their organization and the soreness of their hips. I got restless.

When Pini and I lived in NDG, somehow, and I forget entirely how, we were sent to Toronto for a meeting of the now-defunct national congress about gender equity and learning. We took the greyhound and stayed at the Yonge/Eglinton apartment of Pini’s mentor, an Amazonian blonde grad from our college about ten years our senior. She wore shiny emerald green blouses and took us clubbing…all I remember is the men in her lawyer friend group couldn’t get in because they wore the wrong shoes.

The meeting was a last ditch and expensive attempt to save a long-beloved and respected federal-level organization that was similarly suffering from waning activism. It was a horrible experience. We were distrusted and accosted, I guess for being new and young and chipper. We weren’t even twenty. The facilitator had explained there would be a “feminist philosophical” approach to conference participation, and we were instructed to move freely between sessions, to choose and change our minds and “explore”. Even in a late-adolescence hour of pre-cynicism, I had my doubts about this “system”. And when we attempted to leave one sour session we met what was nothing short of verbal spanking. We hadn’t had much of any attachment to the group and still we were socially forced to share the feeling of a piercing rip from the nipple as the organization limped into rhetoric and irrelevance.

There aren’t a lot of groups that champion women’s barriers to learning. Just like there aren’t a lot of groups that point to the separate experience of women in war and other contexts of violence. Old-school second wave activism was about womanly chemistry, lentils and candlelight vigils and tongue-twisty protest chants. These groups fall apart from inclusion. What a hoax to bring token youngins like us to Toronto! Can that chemistry ever be inherited? At last night’s dinner table I felt more an anthropologist than a daughter of the gentle, water colour & chintz revolution.

This weekend I am going back to Toronto for a women & law group’s AGM. Report on generational translation to follow…