08-03 Wives

My wife Mary and I met in January 1954 and were married in the summer of 1955 when she was a graduate nurse and I was a third-year engineering student. She was paid $210 a month as a starting salary. I thought she was grossly underpaid at the time.
In many ways, we were a lucky generation missing the Great Depression and WW2. On graduating I must have had a hundred job opportunities.
Amongst my closest friends there are six fellow engineers, and they all married professional women who followed careers as wives, mothers and housewives. And they all had the freedom to seek professional careers if they had wanted to.
This role was criticized in the Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedman in the early 1960s. Somehow women as wives and men as breadwinners was promoted as sexist and preventing women from fulfilling themselves in a career of their choosing. The cartoon shows a housewife as the quasi-slave of her husband.
I did not argue with the traditional roles of men and women promoted by feminists, but never felt that it was seen by them as negative or sexist. Six of the seven of us have been married 60 years.
In my life, I could not get over how hard Mary worked raising the children and taking all the household worries off my back as I travelled across Canada building the Canadian Federation of Independent Business or CFIB.
And even the Board of CFIB recognized Mary’s role when they named our building “The John and Mary Bulloch Building”.
Part of the issue, from my experience, is how women see themselves. I was surprised that there was only one women out of six hundred men graduating from engineering in 1956. Today about twenty percent of the graduating classes are women.
And I was equally surprised when I started the CFIB that not one woman answered an ad when I was looking for sales representatives. Today about a third of the reps are women.
I never had any problem with what is called the feminist agenda, which includes things like more child-care facilities, equal pay for equal work and that kind of thing.
What bothered me was the position that in the 1950s and 1960s women went from being housewives to becoming feminists. I just see it as society evolving.
To progress in an internationally integrated economy society just needs all the talent it can muster. Holding back women is just stupid.
That’s the way I see it anyways.