08-01 Grandmothers

If the cartoon shows a woman who is strong and independent, then this is how I would describe my two grandmothers.
This does not mean they were not living in a culture in which men had most of the power, but rather how strong women dealt with what might be called a sexist culture.
The first story is about my father’s mother who was brought up in a fundamentalist religious home in which “a wife must be subject to her husband”.
She had had a great love as a young woman, but her father insisted that her young man join Plymouth Brethren if he wanted to marry her. He refused.
So instead her father got together with another powerful and wealthy businessman, called John Bulloch, and they arranged a marriage between their children. My father said he never saw his parents either hug or kiss during his lifetime.
My grandfather, John Bulloch, with the same name as his father inherited wealth but lost it all gambling on the stock market. This amazing grandmother raised seven children and spent the last 15 years of her life looking after her ailing husband.
If you want to describe a woman living in a society marked by unfairness, discrimination and oppression that was my grandmother Bulloch.
My next story is almost unbelievable, and is about my mother’s mother, grandmother Halter.
She was born in Romania, and one of eight children. She did not have a day of schooling. Only her two brothers had schooling. And she wore rags around her feet as a child and was always hungry.
She worked in the family upholstery business, and later became a skilled alteration tailor. She was married at age 17, but her husband died a year later when she was pregnant.
She emigrated to the US with her three sisters and met my grandfather in New York when he was on holidays. He offered to marry her, and she moved to Canada with her baby. While married and working at the T Eaton Company, her baby died of diphtheria.
She had two children one after the other and was left to raise them when my grandfather joined the army in WW1. But she had his army pay and “Eaton’s”, the mega-department store at that time, sent alteration work to her home.
She used this double income to buy a house in downtown Toronto. And then she took in two young girls as boarders to help cover the cost of the mortgage. So, to my grandfather’s surprise when he was discharged in 1917, with his lungs damaged by mustard gas, there was a home waiting for him.
My grandmother Halter had three goals as a young woman. Her children and grandchildren would have shoes, would go to school and never be hungry. Of her eight grandchildren, there was one PhD, a Masters Degree, and five undergraduate degrees. Two grandchildren died of cancer.
There was no real outcry for equality for women during WW1, but it was a time when women where more than equal. So many of them worked doing men’s jobs and raising children at the same time.
That’s the way I see it anyways.