Elizabeth Renzetti - Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls

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Also by the Author

Based on a True Story

SHREWED

A WRY AND CLOSELY
OBSERVED LOOK AT THE LIVES
OF WOMENAND GIRLS

ESSAYS

ELIZABETH RENZETTI

Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Renzetti

Published in Canada and the USA in 2018 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the authors rights.

Table from The Stonecutters Hand , trans. Richard Tillinghast reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright 1995.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace ownership of copyright materials. The publisher will gladly rectify any inadvertent errors or omissions in credits in future editions.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Renzetti, Elizabeth, author
Shrewed : a wry and closely observed look at the lives of women
and girls / Elizabeth Renzetti.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0304-3 (softcover). ISBN 978-1-4870-0305-0 ( EPUB ).
ISBN 978-1-4870-0306-7 (Kindle)

1. WomenSocial conditions. 2. Womens rights. 3. Feminism.
I. Title.

HQ1155.R45 2018 305.4 C2017-904729-9
C2017-904730-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947362

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk
Cover image: Studioloco/shutterstock.com

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For my mother, the light at one end of the tunnel, and my children, the light at the other

CONTENTS

Introduction: Tales for Young Witches

The Voice in Your Head Is an Asshole

The Way of the Harasser

Fearlessness

Weddings Are Satans Playground: A Letter to My Daughter

Ambition: Three Life Lessons

Youll Pay for Those Breasts, or The Cost of Being a Lady

Never Enough: Women, Politics, and the Uphill Battle

If the World Were Made of Lego: A Letter to My Son

Unbalanced

The Story of My Mother

Four Lions

A View from the Outside: A Letter to My Younger Self

The Long Crawl to Defeat, The Slow March to Victory

Killer Robots, Amazon Planets, and the Fight for the Future

Size Matters: A Commencement Address

Notes

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION:
TALES FOR YOUNG WITCHES

MY PATH TO LIBERATION began with one profane word written on a fat pink eraser. I was probably alone, as I often was in those days, sitting in the school library, where all young heretics learn their first and best lessons.

How old would I have been? Perhaps nine or ten, grade three or four. I loved the library; it was a sanctuary and a theme park, a cocoon and a spaceship. I was sitting on the carpeted steps, staring at the bookshelves the way a drunk stares at the rows of bottles in a liquor store. Which one would I read next? Perhaps it was time for a mystery featuring Alfred Hitchcocks Three Investigators. Or a new Beverly Cleary. Id already read every one of Walter Farleys Black Stallion books.

Idly, I sat on the steps with one of the librarys erasers in my hand. I have always been a doodler, and I began to write on its soft pink surface, so lovely and yielding. It needed to be clearly marked as library property, or someone might steal it. I scanned the library shelves as my pen moved, and after a few minutes I looked down at what Id written on the eraser. My breath stopped in shock.

In thick blue letters Id written LIB .

I clapped my hand over the eraser and looked around the library in panic, frightened that someone had seen the terrible word. Fortunately, I was alone. It was the mid-seventies: the librarian a young woman with long hair and a plaid miniskirt had probably stepped out for a smoke. Smoking and ignoring children were two of the great pastimes lost with that decade.

I looked down at the eraser. Id meant to include the whole word library, but the eraser was too small. And LIB was awful. Id heard adults talk about womens lib with scorn and contempt in their voices. My father dismissed any females he disliked, flatly, as womens libbers. I wasnt sure what lib meant, but it must be very terrible indeed. Quickly, I drew a box over the word and began filling it in, ferociously scribbling till you couldnt see the word at all. There. Id erased it. Id erased us.

How did I get from there to here? From being terrified of a word because it was associated with female emancipation to becoming a feminist newspaper columnist? I grew up in a family that had very little money, in which the words womens lib were profane. My father was in many ways an unorthodox thinker, yet he carried his familys Old World values like an identification card: He taught his sons to play chess, but not his daughters. He gave us different curfews. He made my sister and I get rid of our one-piece Speedos, which were as provocative as burlap sacks, because he felt they were too revealing.

And yet and yet. My sister became a lawyer. I became a journalist. I worked my way into the middle class, and words that were once blasphemous became my gospel. Along the way, Ive been harassed and groped and shushed, but Ive also been encouraged and mentored and promoted.

I have no creed in this world no religion, no ideology except feminism. It is an essential part of my being.

As a journalist, I have spent nearly thirty years reporting on other womens stories and listening to their challenges, failures, triumphs. Ive written about how the world fails women, systemically, even now, when the playing field is supposed to be level. Ive interviewed astronauts and midwives, scientists and soldiers, survivors, politicians, painters, novelists each one a hero of her own story. These women forged paths, gained wisdom, learned which bridges harboured trolls, which berries were safe to eat and which would send them into a hundred-year sleep.

Centuries after our struggle for emancipation began, womens ambitions continue to inspire fear. Our requests to share power are rebuffed. Yet we consolidate wisdom, we find strength in sisterhood, and for this progress we are viewed, like the witches of old, with a mixture of fascination and dread. To the chagrin of the witch-baiters, we persist. Every young witch explores a different road. Im going to follow some of them in this book. First, Ill start with mine.

In university I earned a nickname. One day in politics class, our professor a South African exiled for his political beliefs, on whom I nurtured an intellectual crush broached the topic of abortion rights. At the time, the Supreme Court of Canada had not yet struck down the countrys restrictive abortion laws, and reproductive-rights campaigns were active and vocal.

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