The Abortion Caravan by Karin Wells

Author:Karin Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Second Story Press
Published: 2020-03-23T17:28:12+00:00

I had no experience sitting around with a group of people and having the kind of conversation that we had later when we analyzed why things were the way they were. Politics, you didn’t talk politics openly in the army, you stayed away from those discussions. I remember specifically a group of traveling players, and they came to a Protestant church on the base and they had an anti-war theme, which did not sit well with audience, and I was interested in what they were saying, and after, in the church basement, we had a tea, and people just ignored them. I felt sorry for them. And something about what they said started me thinking.3

In her newly married days on the base, people not only didn’t talk about politics, women didn’t talk about sex or periods or pregnancy. There was a lot that was off-limits. Then, after ten years of marriage, her young, fit husband suddenly died, and Joan Baril returned to Thunder Bay, a young army widow with children, and began to redefine her life and to think a little more. She went back to school, found new people to talk to and new books to read. In a relatively isolated city like Thunder Bay strong-minded feminists were thin on the ground, but there were books. For Baril it was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; for her friend Laura Atkinson, it was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. While the Simon Fraser women and the Regina women were reading Marcuse and other icons of the New Left, these women gravitated to the feminist classics.

As they waited for the Caravan, Atkinson and Baril and the women with them were full of anticipation. The Abortion Caravan’s stops across the country put the local women’s groups front and center. It was the local group who called the meeting, staged the event, pulled in the audience. The Abortion Caravan with its decorated cars and loud music, was the icing on the cake. It was as if the circus had come to town; a blaze of color, a good show, some serious talk, and gone the next morning. With the coffin on top of the Volkswagen van, the convertible with the big black “On to Ottawa” taped on the hood, and the giant loudspeakers on Charlotte Bedard’s truck, they were a curiosity. Their different license plates—three from BC, another Saskatchewan plate, and now one from Manitoba, added a pan-Canadian touch. They had picked up a fifth car, with two more women, in Winnipeg.

Joan Baril and Laura Atkinson had built up their own liberation group of about a dozen women in Thunder Bay. That afternoon, they were all there in the basement of the church, waiting and putting out chairs—a hundred at first. The group, the Thunder Bay Women’s Liberation group, had grown out of what turned out to be the final national meeting of the Canadian Union of Students. CUS was in its death throes. It had become increasingly left-wing and had overplayed its hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.