Betty Peterson: Full-time worker for peace and justice

Betty Peterson, 77, is an activist for peace and social justice. During the Persian Gulf War, she kept a peace vigil for 88 days in front of the Halifax Public Library. In 1993, she was an organizer of a weekly demonstration of Women In Black to express solidarity with the raped women of the former Yugoslavia.

She and her husband Gunnar emigrated to Nova Scotia from the United States in 1975. Gunnar died after they had been here one year.

This story, which first appeared in The Women's Almanac in 1994, is in Betty's own words.

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We lived in Chicago for 23 years where we both became very much involved in the civil rights movement – in community work, community development, teaching people to read and write. I was active in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, League of Women Voters, War Resisters' League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

When I would pick people up at the airport, I would make it a point to drive them through the ghettoes and my kids would say, why do we always have to drive here? Why don't we drive down one of the beautiful streets?

Well, I wanted people to see how terrible it could be. I think I probably overdid that.

I had been a music teacher when I first graduated; then I was married, then the war came and the kids came and then you stayed at home. Oh gosh, I was very unhappy in the middle-class bedroom community in the south of Chicago – coffee klatches, bridge parties. Those bedroom communities are terrible.

Gunnar always had very exciting, demanding jobs – organizing people, helping people – and I just sat at home, talking baby talk. I had to get out.

So I got involved again. I was holding two almost full-time jobs – one with blacks, heading up a literacy centre, recruiting teachers. Then I worked at teaching English. There were Vietnamese brides coming back, people from Europe still coming over and no one to teach them, so I took the old idea of Frank Laubach, one of my heroes, with the worldwide literacy program – each one, teach one – and began working up my own materials.

Looking back now, I realize how I would call home and tell Gunnar that I wouldn't be able to make it for dinner and he'd have to take over. He was always wonderful but I felt guilty. It was years before I realized that this was the beginning of the women's movement and I didn't even recognize it.

I don't know how things went so wrong in American cities. We brought about a revolution but it didn't go far enough; there weren't enough people committed and we didn't come up with the support services to help people implement change. I don't even want to visit the States any more and that's my native land.

We had such hopes that the ghettoes were going to break down and those great apartment complexes were going to save the world. They did just the opposite.

Well, we fought for civil rights, fought against the Vietnam war and then the Watergate story broke. The system was so corrupt, right through. We wanted out of it.

So we came to Canada and bought a little place in Cape Breton – we used to come up in the summers. After Gunnar died, I decided I was going to live up there and make it on my own. But after a few years, I realized I'm a people person and I had to get active again in the world. So after a series of events and meeting good friends and social activists, I came to Halifax.

My exposure to Voice of Women, to the women's movement and to people who believed in the same things I do just opened everything up to me.

Betty with long-time friend, ally, fellow Quaker, fellow Voice of Women member, Muriel Duckworth.

I also became very active again in the Quakers. Back during the Second World War, I became exposed to the Quakers. They suited me. I got tired of standing up and sitting down, singing hymns, reading scripture and all that. I wanted something that was more challenging and robust and interior too – more meditative. Quakerism fit me like a glove.

Among other things, Quakers are against war and for anti-violence. The main thing is the belief that there's not much point in faith without work. You put into practice what you believe – you don't just go to church on Sunday. So I began working with Canadian Friends Service Committee and then I was asked to serve on a National Native Committee. I'd never worked with Natives. As I got heavily involved, I travelled to other parts of the country and I began to realize that the time for Natives had come – just as the time had come in the States for the civil rights movement.

My first heavy duty involvement was with the Innu. I was asked to go – as a Quaker – to a Native assembly in Sheshatshit, Labrador. And here was the ghetto all over again – people forced to live away from their usual style of life in unbelievably awful conditions. I had never been to the ghettos in the south so this was really my first experience with terribly deprived conditions in a rural setting.

I had never seen real Third World conditions but this was it. Since then, I've been to Labrador six times, always working for the Innu. When I realized for the first time the Innu elders and chiefs were getting together to tell their stories to each other, in their own language, of their experience with low-flying aircraft, it grabbed me and when they said go back and tell people what's going on here, I took that message literally.

People have come to realize that there are no single issues, that they're all connected – peace, social justice, the environment, women's issues – and we realized that there is a different way of going about things. The way Natives go about things is so similar to the way women have come to see things. And the way Natives worship is so close to my interpretation of Quakerism.

Native spirituality came to mean a great deal to me. My first introduction to it was going into Native prisons when, because of my being known as working with Natives, I was invited to go to the native brotherhood meeting in Dorchester Penitentiary. When I saw some of the Native women and men working with prisoners at Dorchester and Renous and Springhill, that was eye-opening for me.

I'm very much interested in how people are working for alternatives to violence. I'm encouraged by Native people talking about taking back their own justice system. The jails are filled with Native people, many of whom can't relate to our system. They don't even have a word for lawyer or for offender. So turning it back to the community and giving them the power is a wonderful thing.

I sometimes joke in a bitter way and say that all my life I've believed in the coming revolution. I remember back in the early '40s hearing Norman Thomas, the great socialist, speak. He said, don't think this war is going to be the end – which we all did. We thought we were going to have a better world when the war was over. He predicted that we would live to see the Third World War – between blacks and whites, or between the poor and the rich. Oh, the shudders and gasps that went through that audience. Well, I'm afraid it's going to come true if we don't continue to work for change.

What can we do, what can we do about it? We have to face the fact that people who have worked so hard for non-violence and peace and love and understanding, we have to admit that we're stymied right now. How do you stop the carnage around the world? It's absolutely overwhelming.

I think we just have to be as loving and caring and supportive to other people around us as we can. I think we have to work at building community – sounds old hat, everybody says it, but I've come to believe that's what we have to do, until we get through this period.

Sexual harassment: it wasn't discovered yesterday

I wrote this column almost 30 years ago for The Daily News in Halifax. It seems to suggest that although sexual harassment was widespread, it wasn't yet talked about openly by women, even with one another. I've written here that I was surprised at the widespread incidence of the problem. I had examples in my own work life and knew what my friends had told me but clearly, I didn't yet know everything there was to know.

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June, 1990

Last winter, I wrote about the many instances of sexual harassment that seem to be taking place in the universities – most of them having been reported to me firsthand, many of them by women looking for suggestions about what could be done about it.

I confess, I was surprised at the apparent widespread incidence of this frustrating problem and I had no definitive answers or suggestions. I don't today either, although I've concluded that sexual harassment in the workplace is probably just as endemic as it is in the schools.

Sexual harassment is the only legal term defined by women. It was allegedly first used by women working on a case in Ithaca, N.Y. in 1974. Since then, it's become a term that many women who work outside their homes understand very well; many men still have a problem understanding what falls into the category of sexual harassment. They respond to it in different ways.

“It was just a little harmless flirting,” one defence might be. “If they want equality, they better be prepared for life in the real world,” goes another one. “All she needs is a good you-know-what,” is an old favourite. And that old standby, “C'mon, lighten up. Can't you take a joke?”

But even men who take a pro-feminist stance have a hard time dealing with the feelings aroused by sexual harassment. “Unwanted sexual attention” is not a concept that they can easily relate to. That's part of the reason why women who lay complaints about sexual harassment get so little support.

Another reason is that many women have never had any work experience that doesn't involve this kind of atmosphere – as Gloria Steinem once said (approximately), “For many women, what we call sexual harassment is what they call life.”

Still other women have been socialized to believe that sexual banter aimed at them is flattering – and for that reason, they've been willing to ally themselves with the bantering men against those women who are unwilling to tolerate such behavior. The complainers can't attract men themselves, the line goes, and they resent the fact that other women are getting all the sexual attention.

So what can be done, other than quitting school or quitting your job?

One of the important things to remember is that sexual harassment occurs in situations where the balance of power is uneven. It's rare that a woman in a senior position would be harassed by a male assistant. (Of course, it's also rare that you would have a woman in a senior position and a male assistant, isn't it?)

Very often too, the man in the more powerful position has control over the woman's immediate future – whether he is a professor who can withhold marks or a supervisor who can withhold promotions, pay raises, or could jeopardize job security. This makes it risky for women to raise the issue.

And it happens in hallowed university halls and in federal government offices; therefore, it obviously happens everywhere because those are the two locations where it should be least likely.

But without definitive answers, if you were to ask me what to do about sexual harassment, I would tell you to approach the guilty person and tell him how you feel about it. That usually doesn't help so then I would suggest that you determine how much support you have in your classroom/office/plant. Life becomes a lot harder if you find you're fighting this battle all alone.

Do you belong to a union? Does your union have a sexual harassment policy? Would it work on one if the idea were introduced? If you're not unionized, does your workplace have any guidelines of any sort? Is there someone in the organization (in universities, you can go to a sexual harassment counsellor) whose responsibility it is to deal with such cases? Can you recruit the people who seem to support you and hold regular discussions on topics like “dignity in the workplace”?

No matter how you answer these questions, it's important to keep a written record – times, dates, incidents – of the harassment; do it openly, let the guilty party know it's being done.

And read. Get material (through the Advisory Councils on the Status of Women, for example) that will help you understand that this is not an issue of your lack of sense of humour, will help you see the seriousness of this behaviour and how debilitating it can be to all aspects of your life.

And when you do solve it, share your experiences with other women – one at a time or in groups or through relevant publications. When I'm asked, that's my last piece of advice: just keep chipping away.