Anne Roberts

Born in 1944, I was raised in that proverbial “village” of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who farmed in a small rural area west of Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, gender roles were rigidly defined – the women cleaned the house, preserved and cooked the food, and took care of children, the garden and the chickens.  The men did the farming outside the home, in the fields and barns. But, as kids, both boys and girls were expected to contribute whatever they were physically capable of doing.  Until puberty, that is. What a shock to find out I had to hang up my tractor hat and do the women’s chores inside. The 1950s were a conservative time across North America, but the dominance of the Dutch-Calvinist religion made Western Michigan a particularly conservative place to grow up. The Bible was the only book in many neighbours’ houses, friends were not allowed to go to movies or dances, and “godless commies” were felt to be enough of a threat kids volunteered after school to man watch towers, ready to sound the alarm for oncoming Soviet planes.

In dramatic contrast, my parents filled bookcases from the floor to ceiling, encouraged lively debates at the dinner table, and even attended school board meetings, concerned that evolution was not mentioned in my biology class.  Unable to complete university degrees, they prided themselves on being independent thinkers, resisting dogma, particularly of the religious kind. However, my father firmly believed that women were inferior and that a woman’s place was in the home.  As it happened, my mother proved to be an indomitable force who took a job running the local library once her four kids were in school and later worked as editor of a community newspaper.

I attended Michigan State University intent on becoming a veterinarian after a childhood spent caring for three horses and numerous dogs, cats, and white lab rats, until a career counsellor advised me that the college would not waste a four-year investment on a girl who would just get married after graduation.  “You’re just here to get your MRS Degree, aren’t you?”

I settled on Anthropology, where other students challenged my political views of the world and exposed me to a Marxist analysis of colonialism and imperialism, one that stood me in good stead the rest of my life.  It was the beginnings of the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights battles led the news, the birth control pill began to be available outside marriage: a heady and disturbing mix of freedom, rebellion, sex and politics that wasn’t always easy for me to navigate.  Seeking to understand the turmoil, I devoured books such as The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir, and especially Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

After graduation, I moved near Detroit to work as a social worker while my partner, Saghir Ahmad, who had just completed his PhD at MSU, began to teach at nearby Oakland University. I moved to Vancouver in 1968 to attend UBC’s graduate school in Anthropology, but dropped out a year later to join Saghir doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.  There, I got summer work at Canadian Press and by the fall knew I had found my true vocation – journalism.

In the fall of 1969, we both came to Vancouver where Saghir had been hired in SFU’s Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology Department, which went on strike three months later. Unable to find work in the male-dominated media in Vancouver, I spent more and more time on campus to support the strikers’ battle to democratize the university and so met the founders of Women’s Caucus.  I was thrilled by intellectual ferment that rocked the campus, especially the lively discussions in the hallways and in the cafeteria debating why women were oppressed, what could be done about it, and why did women have to wait until after the revolution for full equality?  These weren’t armchair Marxists: By the time I joined, they were already running illegal abortion clinics, organizing workshops on working women, and setting up child care co-ops. It seemed as if the revolution had begun.

While in Women’s Caucus, I helped produce the Pedestal, where members shared writing, editing, layout and distribution skills.  I helped to staff the Caucus office on Carrall Street, to arrange speakers at schools, libraries, and special events, and to organize the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference. I joined the working women’s workshop. The skills I had acquired at Canadian Press were put to use developing news releases for the abortion caravan and, during my second summer stint working at CP in Edmonton, I was able to get advance stories circulated on the CP wire that were picked up by newspapers across the country that the Abortion Caravan was coming.

After Saghir’s untimely death in 1971, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin to attend journalism school. I worked as a newspaper reporter in Chicago and for CBC Radio in Edmonton before returning to Vancouver in 1976, supporting myself as a freelance reporter for CBC and The Globe and Mail.  Never a believer in the reality of “objective journalism,” I continued to support women’s liberation by helping train members of SORWUC to write effective news releases and by writing major stories published in the Globe and other media on the first women’s union in Canada.

Since 1978, I’ve made a home with Peter Boothroyd, a strong feminist and a socialist of sorts.  We have two children – Katie, born in 1980 who works in Quebec to protect the environment, and Gabriel, born in 1983 who is a musician with Five Alarm Funk and is now studying law. A stay-at-home mom until the kids were in school full-time, I started teaching journalism at Langara College in 1989, eventually becoming chair before retiring in 2012.  All the while, motivated by more or less the same socialist values throughout my life, I helped organize in the community where I lived to support an equitable public education system, improve our long-neglected eastside park, encourage local planning and control in our neighbourhood, keep Vancouver a Wal-Mart-free zone, and improve child care.

I was twice elected to public office as a member of the progressive city party called COPE – once as a trustee on the Vancouver School Board (1993 – 1996) and once as a councillor (2002 – 2005) on Vancouver City Council.

Since retirement, I’ve focused on working for peace and justice for the Palestinian people with groups such as the Seriously Free Speech Committee that encourages free and open debate about the real history of the Middle East and fights attempts to falsely label criticism of Israel to be anti-semitic.

By Anne Roberts