Harriman enterprise. I was a director and this was not my first meeting. I knew all
the directors by sight and they knew me or at least had had opportunity to know me.
However I admit that I was looking younger than the last time they had seen me. I
had had my pendulous baby-chewed breasts reshaped, and at the same Beverly Hills
hospital I had tucks taken up under the hairline to take the slack out of my face,
then I had gone to an Arizona health ranch to get into top condition and lose
fifteen pounds. I had gone next to Vegas and splurged on ultra-chic, very feminine,
new clothes – not the tailored pantsuits most female executives wore. I was smugly
aware that I did not look the eighty-eight years I had lived, nor the fifty-eight I
admitted. I think I looked a smart forty.
I was waiting in the foyer outside the boardroom, intending not to go in until
called – board meetings are dull rituals… but a crisis is sure to come up if you
skip one.
Just as the light outside the boardroom started to blink a man came slamming in from
outside, Mr Phineas Morgan, leader of a large minority bloc. He headed straight for
the blinking light while shrugging off his overcoat. As he passed me, he chucked it
at me. ‘Take care of it!’
I ducked aside, let his coat land on the floor. `Hey! Morgan!’ He checked himself,
looked back. I pointed at the floor. `Your coat.’
He looked surprised, amazed, indignant, angry, and vindictive, all in one second.
`Why, you little bitch! I’ll have you fired for that.’
`Go right ahead.’ I moved past him into the boardroom, found my place card, and sat
down. A few seconds later he sat down opposite me, at which point his face managed
still another expression.
Phineas Morgan had not intentionally tried to use a fellow director as a servant. He
saw a female figure who, in his mind, must be hired staff – secretary, receptionist,
clerk, whatever. He was late and in a hurry and assumed that this subordinate
employee would as a matter of course hang up his coat so that he could go straight
to roll call.
The moral? In 1970 on time line two the legal system assumed that a man is innocent
until proved guilty; in 1970 on time line two, the cultural system assumed that a
female is subordinate until proved otherwise – despite all laws that asserted that
the sexes were equal.
I planned to kick that assumption in the teeth.
5 August 1952 marked the beginning of my bachelorhood because that was the day on
which I resolved that from that time on I would be treated the way a man is treated
with respect to rights and privileges – or I would raise hell about it. I no longer
had a family, I was no longer capable of childbearing, I was not looking for a
husband, I was financially independent (and then some!), and I was firmly resolved
never again `to send out the laundry’ for some man merely because I use the washroom
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intended for setters rather than the one set aside for pointers.
I did not plan to be aggressive about it. If a gentleman held a door for me, I would
accept the courtesy and thank him. Gentlemen enjoy offering little gallantries; and
lady enjoys accepting them graciously, with a smile and a word of thanks.
I mention this because, by the 197=s, there were many females who would snub a man
unmercifully if he offered a gallantry, such as holding a chair for a woman, or
offering to help per in or out of a car. These women (a minority but a ubiquitous,
obnoxious one) treated traditional courtesy as if it w ere an insult. I grew to
think of these females as the lesbian Mafia. I don’t know that all of them were
homosexual (although I’m certain about some of them) but their behaviour caused me
to lump them all together.
If some of them were not lesbians, then where did they find heterosexual mates? What