Different rules

While the rest of us were scrambling around a hodgepodge of patchwork daycare solutions -- our mothers, relatives, neighbours and finally (in my case) a "wife" in the form of a live-in nanny -- to find daycare for our newborns so we could get back to work and keep our jobs, I found it a bit much that Sheila Copps and Mila Mulroney were lauded as "feminists" for bringing their babies to the office.  Remember that?  No one else was permitted to cart the kid to the office and stash him/her under the desk, or in a drawer.

Now we have the latest example in a Liberal MP and Minister parading her baby around the halls of Parliament.  Presumably, she'll be taking the kid to work regularly -- something we in the vanguard of feminism were forbidden to do.  In fact, even talking about domestic issues and child care was verboten.  You were pregnant, then you went away for a couple of months, and then you came back not pregnant.  And no one wanted to know how you were managing.  Just pick up where you had left off. 

Back then, we didn't get paid maternity leave for a year and then back to the jobs we had left.  No.  We got unemployment insurance -- much less than our salaries -- and we returned to the office and got "a" job back.  Yep, you had to move out of your office and do something else, while you watched someone else take over your job -- the one you had helped build.  There were big penalties for having the biological function of bearing children. 

That's the way it was, folks.  So here she is, in all her "feminist" glory, back at work and mobbed by the press as if she'd just invented the wheel.  She can actually thank women like me and my cohort for her good fortune because we went to the barricades and paved the way.