With Elizabeth Renzetti, journalist and author. Her most recent book is the national bestseller What She Said: Conversations About Equality. In 2020 she won the Landsberg Prize, presented by Canadian Journalism Foundation and Canadian Women’s Foundation, for her reporting on gender equality. She is co-author, with Kate Hilton, of the Quill & Packet series of mystery novels. She lives in Toronto with her family and two very bad cats.
Transcript
00:00:01 Andrea
Hello and welcome to Alright, Now What? I’m your host, Andrea Gunraj from the Canadian Women’s Foundation.
Gender equality and justice where we live, work, learn, and play is the goal. And it makes life better for everyone. This podcast is our chance to connect with insightful people and explore what it’ll take to get there in Canada.
The work of the Canadian Women’s Foundation and our partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land. However, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.
00:00:47 Andrea
In this episode, I’m interviewing journalist and author Elizabeth Renzetti. Her most recent book is the national bestseller, ‘What She Said: Conversations About Equality.’
In 2020, she won The Landsberg Award, presented by the Canadian Journalism Foundation and the Canadian Women’s Foundation, for her reporting on gender equality. She is co-author with Kate Hilton of the Quill & Packet series of mystery novels.
She lives in Toronto with her family and two very bad cats. I start by asking Elizabeth to do the Gender Equality Changemaker quiz we launched earlier this year as part of our new Count Me In initiative for a gender-equal Canada. Please check it out yourself at yescountmein.ca.
00:01:33 Elizabeth
It turns out I’m a Challenger! Ha. It kind of does feel like, yeah, of course, because I’ve made my living, you know, as an opinion columnist. And, um, I remember in grade 10, I challenged my geography teacher on something, and he told me I was going to hell in a handbasket, which I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. But I have spent my life kind of poking the bear, let’s just say that, so it didn’t actually surprise me very much.
00:02:00 Andrea
Take a step back. I know you get asked a lot of questions about your writing, your journalism, your incredible award-winning work.
I want to ask you about life lessons that you bring to your work in building this intersectional gender equality today. You’ve gone through a lot, you’ve learned a lot — share some core life lessons about this and tell us a bit about yourself in this as a challenger and a truth teller.
00:02:24 Elizabeth
Well, I’ll tell you where it kind of all started, which is when I was in probably Grade 3, let’s say? At my school, I was in the library, which was my safe place, and there was a big pink eraser there. And because it belonged to the library, I thought I would write “library” on it, but I could only fit the words “LIB” on it because it was a small eraser.
And then I stared at it, and I was filled with horror and shock because I thought I wrote the word “lib,” and lib was a bad word. Lib was a swear word. Like, in my house where patriarchal rules were very well established, women’s lib was seen — that was something that was, you know, debasing and wrong and outside kind of polite society. And I thought I’d done a terrible thing. I thought I’d written a swear word.
So that’s kind of where, like, baby feminist Liz was born. And, um, then, you know, I was a women’s issues reporter at my school newspaper at TMU. It was then called Ryerson Journalism School.
And I was always a feminist. I was going to marches and things, protests and things like that.
And I was a young journalist, I was an editor at The Globe and Mail, when, in 1993, when the paper decided to launch what was called the “men’s column” (as if the entire newspaper was not already run, edited, photographed, sourced by men), and I became enraged and I wrote a column in response to this. I wrote a rebuttal column, and people liked it; and then that ended up being a column that I wrote on and off for many years, and mainly I wrote about gender equality issues.
And as I write in my new book, ‘What She Said,’ what’s astonishing to me is that for 30 years, I’ve been writing essentially the same column. It’s like the world’s most annoying Groundhog Day that — we have made progress. I’m not going to say we haven’t, especially as we want to talk about in terms of intersectionality, I think we have in terms of our awareness of the problems of white feminism. But I still can’t believe that we are in some ways no further to parity than we were, and in some ways we are farther away.
00:04:49 Andrea
You’re right that we seem to be in a bit of a Groundhog Day, and in some ways worse. So that’s why I’m excited about your book. I’m excited about any feminist book that comes out, but certainly when you have something to say, I will read it. I will listen to it. And I know a lot of people will.
So, share a bit. Tell us what this book is about, ‘What She Said,’ and why you felt moved and passionate to write this now.
00:05:13 Elizabeth
It is a book about how we are not as close to gender equality as we thought we were, and in many ways around the world, women’s rights are being rolled back. And the women who are disproportionately affected in a negative way are women from traditionally marginalized communities — whether we’re talking about racialized women or queer women or disabled women, women from lower socioeconomic statuses — they suffer even more under kind of the different realms that I look at.
I use my reporting and my personal stories as a way to examine sort of different areas where we see the impact of this. So in healthcare, in wealth accumulation and pay in the care economy, in the arts, in politics, and in the area of how violence affects women and children in particularly harmful and ongoing ways. And I try to do it — it sounds funny, but I try to do it with humor and with heart and with hope.
00:06:26 Andrea
I mean, I think you’re famously known for humor, heart, and truth. And that’s what I appreciate about your frame.
I am fascinated by your inclusion of the arts. Tell us a little bit more about that. I hear a lot about pay gaps; I hear a lot about gender-based violence. You know, those types of issues are critical and huge, but the arts is underspoken.
00:06:48 Elizabeth
You know, I could have looked at a bunch of different places in the arts. I chose to look at filmmaking because I love movies, and I grew up loving movies and I still love movies.
And what I do is I look at how women filmmakers were actually — at the dawn of filmmaking, there were a lot of women filmmakers, and there were a lot of women in different areas of film production. So they were producers, and they were editors, and they were story writers, and they were directors.
And then, as we realized that there was money to be made in Hollywood, as in many other industries — computers is another one — women got pushed to the side as the industry became financialized.
And so then for close to 100 years, it was very hard to find any women directors at all. The Directors Guild of America had one director, Ida Lupino, in the sort of 1940s and 1950s. And they would begin their meetings by saying “hello, gentlemen and madam.”
And then we cut forward to — in this chapter that I write — women filmmakers now. So for example, Sarah Polley and Greta Gerwig — everyone thought that with ‘Barbie’ everything was going to change, and it didn’t. That’s the fascinating thing. We keep thinking, “oh, this is the moment when everything is going to change. We’re going to have more women filmmakers out there,” and yet Hollywood continues to not employ women filmmakers. Especially racialized women and women from other backgrounds are negligible, when you look at the number of films that are made by those women.
So this is something I really wanted to look at because who tells stories is so important to us, whose stories we listen to, whose stories we pay money to see. And so I wanted to examine that area.
But that also gives me hope because, you know, for Sarah Polley and Greta Gerwig and other filmmakers like them, [they] have a different way of making movies that isn’t kind of chaotic and wild and destructive as we’ve valorized from male filmmakers in the past. It’s much more sort of collaborative and inclusive, and I find that very heartening.
00:08:59 Andrea
You’re a movie buff, so I am going to ask you: is there a recommended movie that you would suggest to our listeners right now that you just feel encapsulates something that relates to your book, something that you would say, you know, is a must-see for those of us who care about gender equality?
00:09:16 Elizabeth
Actually, yes! My favorite movie of all time from 1979 is called ‘My Brilliant Career.’ And it’s an Australian movie made by a woman, Gillian Armstrong, starring the inimitable Judy Davis, and it’s about a young woman in the Outback of Australia at the turn of the 20th century who has to decide whether she wants to be a wife or she wants to be a writer.
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but the challenges that she faces are so fresh today, especially as we live in this era of, like, tradwives and kind of rolling back of gender norms. It’s a beautiful, lovely, romantic, uplifting and sad, bittersweet movie.
00:10:00 Andrea
Let me ask you this: what got you into writing? You were a kid who found a safe place in libraries. Why do you do writing and what kind of writing would you like to do next?
00:10:11 Elizabeth
Well, I do writing ‘cause I’m bad at everything else. It’s the only skill I have, unfortunately — or fortunately. Um, and I do like fiction writing. So I’m now a mystery author; I co-write mysteries with my friend Kate Hilton, and I love that. And they’re very feminist mysteries. They’re very funny mysteries. They’re set in a small town in Ontario. And the second one is coming out next year; it’s called Widows and Orphans. So more fiction is what I want to do, yes.
00:10:41 Andrea
And it goes right back to your insight that the stories that we pay for, the stories that we value — because we value what we pay for and we pay for what we value, fortunately or unfortunately — tells you a lot about where we are. I really appreciate the hope that you’ve, you know, taken on at the same time that there’s a lot of things to be concerned about and work on.
Riddle me this: give me a powerful takeaway that you would share to our listeners — how they can become better equality changemakers. It just occurs to me, you saying that you don’t feel you’re good at anything else so you use what you’ve got for gender equality, truth telling, and changemaking. Can you give our listeners something that they can take away from this lesson here?
00:11:24 Elizabeth
Well, I think “use what you’ve got” is an exceptionally good lesson. And think about yourself. Are you a talker? Are you a doer? Are you a listener? Are you a collaborator? Think about those things, and then apply those to your life.
If you’re a collaborator, go out and be in a protest if you want, or join a volunteer organization. If you’re a talker, call up your MPP about something that is important to you. There’s so many ways that you can be involved in the betterment of the world, and they don’t take money. They don’t even take much time.
The main one I would say, is to speak up. I still am kind of shocked and saddened at how we as women and girls repress ourselves and try to take up as little space as possible and are afraid of our voices and are afraid of our opinions.
And conversations are the way, you know, we build teams. They’re the way we build relationships, the way we do, you know, the good trouble that civil rights activists told us about. And it doesn’t cost you anything. And it’s actually like, really liberating and really fun when you start to speak up, and you won’t go to hell in a handbasket like my geography teacher told me.
00:12:50 Andrea
Liz, I have one last question, I promise you.
When you say that, you know, sometimes I hear people saying, “I do believe these things,” and I find it something like, “I get nervous. I don’t know how to push through.” It occurs to me that you’re somebody who has a long history of pushing through maybe the fear and the hesitation. Can you give any tips about, in the moment when you want to speak up, how can you push through?
00:13:15 Elizabeth
I think maybe you picture yourself in, like, an hour’s time or a day’s time, or a week’s time, and you’re proud of yourself. Like, oh, think of future me; I am so proud that I said that thing and nothing happened. There weren’t any consequences. The roof didn’t fall in. I didn’t lose my job. My partner still loves me, my kids don’t hate me. So project yourself into the future where you’re happy that you did a brave thing.
00:13:44 Andrea
Alright, Now What?
If you want to make sure no woman, girl, Two Spirit, trans, or nonbinary person feels out of options, out of sight, out of time, or out of mind, visit yescountmein.ca today. When you count yourself in, you’ll join over 82,000 people in the Canadian Women’s Foundation’s generous and active community. You’ll get tools and opportunities to advance gender equality. This movement needs you. Visit yescountmein.ca and count yourself in today.
Please listen, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. If you appreciate this content, please consider becoming a monthly donor to the Canadian Women’s Foundation. People like you will make the goal of gender justice a reality. Visit canadianwomen.org to give today and thank you for your tireless support.
