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.