You and the YWCA

April 25, 2018

When I was studying at the University of Winnipeg, in Manitoba, Canada, and writing for The Uniter, the student newspaper, I wrote many articles, not only about what was going on inside the university’s walls, but also about what was happening the surrounding inner-city area.

One of the reasons I got a lot of satisfaction doing this was particularly when it came to women’s and other social issues, the mainstream press and media was not doing a lot of these types of stories in the late 1970s.

The following is one such piece. It is about the YWCA and its changing focus on women’s issues:

The Uniter

1978?

You and the YWCA

by Tanya Lester

The YWCA was founded a century ago in England as a Christian prayer union. It was a place where a young woman could be prepared for her life’s work — cooking, knitting, and sewing. Today, the YWCA’s main concern is still with women, but it helps modern women deal with their different needs in the 1970’s.

Now, the YWCA offers a wide range of courses which include assertativeness training, contraceptive options, how to start a business, living without marriage, and car repairs. The courses are geared toward the young working woman.

The YWCA women’s resource centre has a good library containing books on subjects particularly concerning women. A person can go to the centre for information on rape, family law, the sufferage movement and other related topics. A non-member can charge out a book with a dollar deposit which is reimbursed when the book is returned.

There are areas, in the centre, where a person can sit and read, do research work, talk, or receive feminist counselling. Speakers talk on women’s problems.

An important new aspect of the women’s resource centre is the social action committee. The committee members include women from varying walks of life so it is able to deal with women’s problems in many areas. The committee members keep in touch with other women’s groups for information and suggestions.

The committee grew from lobbying, the YWCA took part in, to try and prevent the negative change the Lyon government made in family law. The committee is now monitoring the law to make sure judges deal fairly with people tried under the changed law.

They are, also, looking at sexism in education.

“We notice,” said Dyck, “there’re not that many options for boys and girls in junior high other than home economics and shops.”

The committee has sent letters to help persuade the band “Battered Wives” to change their name and attitudes toward women. “Battered Wives” have changed their name for the remainder of their tour but intend to use their original name on any albums they cut. The social actions committee will continue to pressure the group will continue to pressure the group until they discontinue their ‘violence towards women’ gimmick.

For working mothers, the YWCA operates a daycare centre. It becomes especially busy in the summer when most daycare centres are closed. The committee is investigating these summer closures.

Considering the number of YWCA programs offered, Dyck is “surprised more women from the university haven’t discovered the Y.” Dyck is “surprised more women from the university haven’t discovered the Y.” Maybe it’s time they did.

–END–

Tanya Lester does psychic readings and specializes in tea leaf reading, tarot, psychic channelling, mediumship and gypsy readings.  She is also a Reiki master and a fulltime housesitter. For more go to her web: teareading.wordpress.com or her pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Goggle. To book a reading or to arrange a housesit with her,  text/call 250-538-0086 or email: tealeaf.56@gmail.com

Tanya’s books are: Confessions of a Tea Leaf Reader, Friends I Never Knew, Dreams and Tricksters as well as Women Rights/Writes.  The first two titles can be purchased from the author or from amazon.ca  All of the titles are available in some library systems.

To read more of Tanya’s writing on a variety of topics and in several different genres, go to writingsmall.wordpress.com and tealeaf56.wordpresss.com

 

 

 

Frances and Lillian Beynon: Early crusaders for women’s rights

September 20, 2014

“One woman asked a cowboy if he had ever known a lady who would desire the vote. He replied that his mother in California voted, and he had always thought she was a lady.”….

I have always liked finding out about people and reading about them whether they lived in the past or are living right now. How women got the vote particularly fascinated me for quite some time especially because women in the province of Manitoba in Canada, where I was born and raised, were the first in this country to win this right. Many of the women who worked for the vote were newspaper reporters as I have been. Both of these similarities between them and me strengthens my interest in these women.

In this blog, I have previously posted an article about the Beynon sisters role in winning the vote but this is a longer article with some interesting tidbits that were not included in the previous posted article:

Western People
October 1, 1981
Frances and Lillian Beynon: Early crusaders for women’s rights
by Tanya Lester

During the early 1900’s, a woman’s only place on most Western Canadian newspapers’ staff was editing the women’s page. Women editors were instructed to produce pages that would appeal to the papers’ increasing feminine readership.

In Winnipeg, the Beynon sisters were editors of women’s pages and did exactly what their bosses told them to do. They ran articles of interest to women. The pages included recipes, household hints, letters — and stories concerning the suffragist movement. By the time some husbands realized just what their wives were reading in the pages, Prairie women were well on their way to winning the vote.

Frances Marion Beynon edited the women’s page for the Grain Growers Guide, while her sister, Lillian Beynon Thomas, did the same for the Free Press Prairie Farmer. Between the two of them, the Beynons planned farm women’s conventions, founded political equality leagues, and masterminded petition campaigns in support of the vote for women. Flanked by suffragists in the Women’s Press Club and the Political Equality League, the sisters tackled premiers who hesitated to give women the vote, made contacts with men such as J.S. Woodsworth, and rallied grassroots’ support among both men and women for their cause. Their pages served as vehicles of information for their successful crusade which helped win the vote for women on the Prairies.

It was a letter to Lillian’s page which prompted a group of Canadian Women’s Press Club members in Winnipeg to start actively fighting for the women’s vote in Manitoba. Beginning in 1906, Lillian’s “Home Loving Hearts” page in the Prairie Farmer received hundreds of letters from women who discussed the unfairness of laws concerning their sex. They wrote of having no legal claim on their children, their homes, or even the clothes on their backs.

“It was a letter to the ‘Home Loving Hearts’ page from a woman in Alberta, that was the final straw to make women in Manitoba rise up and organize ‘The Political Equality League’, with a determination to change such conditions,” Lillian wrote. The Alberta woman was married to an alcoholic. One day when her husband was away on a “spree”, two men came to see her. They told her they had bought the couple’s farm and everything on it except the family. The men told her to leave the farm immediately. The women, upon checking with her lawyer, found that the men were right. She had no legal claim on the farm she had worked long hours to establish.

“You can’t help me, but you can help others who are in a similar position,” the pathetic woman concluded her letter. Lillian and a group of women who had read the letter, including Frances, E. Cora Hind, and Nellie McClung, held a meeting and formed the Political Equality League. It was 1912, and the women would have a three year battle ahead of them.

Frances and Lillian had moved to Manitoba from Ontario as young girls when their family decided to homestead at Hartney, and were familiar with the hardships women faced on the farms. This gave them reason to crusade for the woman’s right to vote. However, Frances also became a suffragist for a more universal reason.

She believed it was time for mothers to become involved in politics. She thought they could no longer be content at being good mothers to their own children, but must show concern for all children, especially those who were dying from disease and poverty. “I tell you, sisters, this kind of motherhood isn’t good enough for the present day,” Frances wrote. “We want a new kind of motherhood, mothers whose love for their own children teaches them love for all children, mothers who will not boast of their weaknesses but seek for strength to fight the battle for their own and their neighbour’s children.”

With Lillian as its first president, the Political Equality League began organizing meetings to gain grassroots support for the cause. Many mothers were not ready to take up this challenge. An editorial headed “We Don’t Believe in Women” in Frances’s “Country Homemaker” page expressed Frances’ indignation with women who opposed the vote. In the piece, she referred to a woman who had “strayed” into a Political Equality League meeting. “Now, what do you think of that — a woman to say that she does not believe in women!” Frances’ words echoed her disgust. “No wonder some of the men have their doubts about us when members of our own sex are going about inanely declaring that we are no good. I dare say that in her own case the lack of faith is justified — she ought to know — but it was hardly decent to try to drag us down to her level.”

While she was at it, Frances slammed men who felt a woman’s place was in the home. “What I have always hankered to know is who says it is our place,” Frances wrote. “As nearly as I can find out it was by no divine revelation that this conclusion was reached. Some man said so and it was echoed around the world because most men felt so. They decided that woman’s place was the home, because they wanted her to stay there. I never yet knew a man who had any fondness for washing dishes and scrubbing floors, so they think it is the ideal work for a woman. I wouldn’t so much mind them saying we ought to do it, if they wouldn’t insist that we like it.”

One event in which the League’s women took their share of jeers and insults was at a Manitoba stampede where they set up a suffrage booth and handed out information sheets. The macho crowd at the stampede may have seemed the suffragists’ least likely converts. Nonetheless, the women took the bull by the horns, so to speak. In the Grain Growers’ Guide, Frances expressed belief that the suffrage booth at the stampede marked “the changing of woman suffrage from a mere academic question to a live issue in Manitoba.”

The day certainly gave the League a boost. One woman asked a cowboy if he had ever known a lady who would desire the vote. He replied that his mother in California voted, and he had always thought she was a lady.

The next landmark occasion for Manitoba suffragists was the famous Women’s Parliament. The event was staged after a delegation from the League went to see Premier Rodmond Roblin. He told them that he revered women, thought they were superior to men, and queens of the home. If civilization had made it that way for women, he said, then that was the way if should stay…

–END–
tealeaf.56@gmail.com
teareading.wordpress.com
To read the first posts in this blog, go to http://www.writingsmall.wordpress.com
Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. Google.
Confessions of a Tea Leaf Readerby Tanya Lester can be bought from the author or go to the title and author name to read the first few pages and buy it at amazon.com Her other books include Women’s Rights/Writes and Dreams and Tricksters.

Technology Threatens Women’s Future.

September 11, 2014

In some ways, social media has become the great equalizer. On Facebook, there a post from this blog will be just above the latest profound idea that Julian Lennon (or at least ‘his people’) has decided with which to inspire us all. I can interact with women and men from all walks of life and from all over the world and they can with me. Social media is global villaging.

When I wrote the following article, I am sure some of us psychics and others were predicting some of the amazing ups that would happen with new technology but in general we has NOT A CLUE as to how it would encompass our lives.

For many of us, new technology has greatly assisted in our self-employed careers in many ways including providing us with expense free ways to promote ourselves.

Yet what is negative about computer technology still rings very true in this piece: many jobs have been lost due to this technology. A few years ago when I was returning from a trip to Denmark, a person who would have normally processed my airline ticket and sent my luggage on its way instead showed me how to do this myself. In every bank, there are machines nowadays where we can help ourselves to money or paying our bills instead of interacting with a living teller. Secretaries have almost gone the way of the dodo bird.

I remember, in the early 1980s, a critic of new technology predicted that would would end up “sweeping up around the computers”. Just recently I encountered a woman in her 20s who declared her ideal husband would be one who would be fine with her staying at home and not getting a job. The following article addresses this phenomena and I invite you to count the number of other things predicted at the Women and the Changing technology conference that have now come about, spawning high work loss:

HERizons
June 1983
Technology Threatens Women’s Future
by Tanya Lester

More women will be pressured to leave the workforce because of jobs lost to technology than was after World War II. Making this claim to 100 people attending The Effective Women and the Changing Technology conference is Dr. Margaret Benston, a computing science and women’s studies professor at Simon Fraser University.

Benston, the keynote speaker at the University of Winnipeg organized conference, cited mass unemployment as a negative aspect of computer technology if it is “used out of our (women’s) control.”

Most of these jobs will go first in clerical and other ‘job ghetto’ areas which are mostly staffed by women, Benston said. She cited an insurance company, in Vancouver, where the staff was reduced from 60 to 25 because the computer is programmed to bill customers. A data center in her home city, Benston said, is already being operated on total part-time workers as a result of the new technology.

“This is a technology that is far beyond being like any other machine,” she said. The jobs lost will not be replaced, as was first thought, Benston pointed out. There are already computers which can be programmed to write other computer programs, for instance.

She referred to the leaked federal government document which predicts two million unemployed over the next 10 years due to increased computer technology. Economists already accept an eight per cent unemployment rate as total employment.

“For younger women, in particular, if you can’t get a job the temptation to believe that you have chosen to remain in the home will be there,” Benston explained.

Stressing that the new technology is not necessarily a “liberating” experience, Benston pointed out office automation will not change the hierarchy in the workplace.

“Mechanization has served to reinforce the (low) position of women both in the labour force and in the home,” she said.

She explained computer technology will undermine these women’s control or power in their workplaces as it will further specialize their work and isolate them from other workers.

In the conference workshop, Sari Tudiver, a project officer for Women and Development with the Manitoba Council for International Co-operation, indicated that women in middle management will also experience job loss as computers move into supervisory areas.

For other women workers, computer monitoring already means “someone listening in but you don’t know when” or a computer watching the number of key strokes performed, Tudiver said.

Tudiver also pointed our factory workers, who are mostly immigrant women or others in Third World countries, are already having their jobs making computer chips displaced by computers. A robot can replace 50,000 workers, Tudiver said.

Smaller business will be “beaten out” by the big companies with continuing computer technology, Tudiver said. If people shop via home computers, there will be no need for son many women working at shops downtown if no one is going downtown to work. Voice messaging could also eliminate the work of travel agents.

Tudiver said more computer technology does not always mean massive layoffs, but new people may not be hired when others retire, quit or are promoted or transferred. She said a recent Business Week article predicted the computer technology jobs created will be less than half of the two million jobs lost. “People are talking about a minimum of 20 per cent job loss.”

Both women urged women not to regard technology as being beyond their control and urged women to get rid of the idea that management will, or should inevitably make all the decisions for the computer technology entering the workplace. Worker-management committees could be useful in this decision making.

“Think of this whole thing as a sort of lego set that we can put together in any way we want to,” Benston said. If women “put together” computer technology as it should operate, then the result will be a valuable tool for information gathering, reducing boring taks, increasing leisure time and improving other aspects of living.

–END–
tealeaf.56@gmail.com
teareading.wordpress.com
To read the first posts in this blog, please go to http://www.writingsmall.wordpress.com
Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. Google.
Confessions of a Tea Leaf Reader” by Tanya Lester can be purchased from the author or go to the title and author name to read the first few pages and buy it on amazon.com