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breakfast for anyone tomorrow.’
An hour later Brian and I left to go to the Convention.
While we were walking to the El station he said to me, `Mo, this is the first time
we had a chance to speak to you privately. I really did not appreciate your failure
to back me up in dealing with another trustee.’
`How?’ I asked (knowing quite well what he meant).
‘I told Mr Briggs that you would be happy to send out his laundry, and then you
flatly refused, contradicting me. My dear, I was humiliated.’
`Briney, I was humiliated when you attempted to reverse me after I had told him to
send out his laundry himself. I simply stuck by my guns.’
`But he had made a mistake, dear; he thought you were a servant. I tried to smooth
it over by saying that of course you were happy to do it as a favour to a guest.’
`Why didn’t you say that you would be happy to send out his laundry?’
`Eh?’ Brian seemed truly puzzled.
`I can tell you why you didn’t offer to do it. Because both you men regard sending
out laundry as women’s work. And it is, when it’s your laundry and I am the woman.
But I’m not Rufus Briggs wife and I will not do servant’s work for him. He’s a
clod.’
`Maureen, sometimes I don’t understand you.’
‘You’re right; sometimes you don’t.’
‘I mean – Take this matter of making beds and washing dishes. When we are at home we
never expect house guests to wash the dishes or to make their own beds.’
‘At home, Briney, I always have two or three big girls to help me… and never a
dozen house guests at a time. And our women guests usually offer to help and if I
need their help, I let them. Nothing like this mob I’m faced with now. They are not
friends; they aren’t relatives; most are total strangers to me and all act as if we
were running a boarding house. But most of them at least say thank-you and please.
Mr Briggs does not. Briney, at bottom you and Mr Briggs have the same attitude
towards women; you both think of women as servants.’
`I don’t see that. I don’t think you are being fair.’
‘So? Then I ask you again: if you wanted to be gracious to a guest, why did you not
offer your own services to take tare of his laundry? You can use a telephone and the
yellow section quite as well as I can, then you can arrange for or do whatever is
necessary. There is nothing about sending out laundry that requires special womanly
skills; you can do it as easily as I. Why did you see fit to volunteer my services
in the face of my stated opposition?’
`I thought it was the gracious thing to do.’
‘Gracious to whom, sir? To your wife? Or to the business associate who was rude to
her?’
`Uh – We’ll say no more about it.’
That incident was not unusual; it was exceptional only in that I refused to accept
the conventional subordinate role under which a woman, any woman, was expected to
wait on men. Repealing laws does not change such attitudes because they are learned
by example from earliest childhood.
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‘These attitudes can’t be repealed like laws because they are usually below the
level of consciousness. Consider, please, who makes the coffee. You are in a mixed
group, business or quasi-business: a company conference, a public interest group, a
PTA meeting. As a lubricant for the exchange of ideas, coffee is a good idea, and
the means to make it is at hand.
Who makes the coffee? It could be a man. But don’t bet on it. Ten to one you would
lose.
Let’s move forward thirty years from the incident of Rufus Briggs the soft-starched
clod, from 1940 to 1970. By 1970 most legal impediments to equality between the
sexes were gone. This incident involved a board meeting of Skyblast Freight, a D. D.