An hour later Brian and I left to go to the Convention.

While we were walking to the El station he said to me, ‘Mo, this is the first time we had a chance to speak to you privately. I really did not appreciate your failure to back me up in dealing with another trustee.'

‘How?' I asked (knowing quite well what he meant).

‘I told Mr Briggs that you would be happy to send out his laundry, and then you flatly refused, contradicting me. My dear, I was humiliated.'

‘Briney, I was humiliated when you attempted to reverse me after I had told him to send out his laundry himself. I simply stuck by my guns.'

‘But he had made a mistake, dear; he thought you were a servant. I tried to smooth it over by saying that of course you were happy to do it as a favour to a guest.'

‘Why didn't you say that you would be happy to send out his laundry?'

‘Eh?' Brian seemed truly puzzled.

‘I can tell you why you didn't offer to do it. Because both you men regard sending out laundry as women's work. And it is, when it's your laundry and I am the woman. But I'm not Rufus Briggs wife and I will not do servant's work for him. He's a clod.'

‘Maureen, sometimes I don't understand you.'

‘You're right; sometimes you don't.'

‘I mean - Take this matter of making beds and washing dishes. When we are at home we never expect house guests to wash the dishes or to make their own beds.'

‘At home, Briney, I always have two or three big girls to help me... and never a dozen house guests at a time. And our women guests usually offer to help and if I need their help, I let them. Nothing like this mob I'm faced with now. They are not friends; they aren't relatives; most are total strangers to me and all act as if we were running a boarding house. But most of them at least say thank-you and please. Mr Briggs does not. Briney, at bottom you and Mr Briggs have the same attitude towards women; you both think of women as servants.'

‘I don't see that. I don't think you are being fair.'

‘So? Then I ask you again: if you wanted to be gracious to a guest, why did you not offer your own services to take tare of his laundry? You can use a telephone and the yellow section quite as well as I can, then you can arrange for or do whatever is necessary. There is nothing about sending out laundry that requires special womanly skills; you can do it as easily as I. Why did you see fit to volunteer my services in the face of my stated opposition?'

‘I thought it was the gracious thing to do.'

‘Gracious to whom, sir? To your wife? Or to the business associate who was rude to her?'

‘Uh - We'll say no more about it.'

That incident was not unusual; it was exceptional only in that I refused to accept the conventional subordinate role under which a woman, any woman, was expected to wait on men. Repealing laws does not change such attitudes because they are learned by example from earliest childhood.

‘These attitudes can't be repealed like laws because they are usually below the level of consciousness. Consider, please, who makes the coffee. You are in a mixed group, business or quasi-business: a company conference, a public interest group, a PTA meeting. As a lubricant for the exchange of ideas, coffee is a good idea, and the means to make it is at hand.

Who makes the coffee? It could be a man. But don't bet on it. Ten to one you would lose.

Let's move forward thirty years from the incident of Rufus Briggs the soft-starched clod, from 1940 to 1970. By 1970 most legal impediments to equality between the sexes were gone. This incident involved a board meeting of Skyblast Freight, a D. D. Harriman enterprise. I was a director and this was not my first meeting. I knew all the directors by sight and they knew me or at least had had opportunity to know me.

However I admit that I was looking younger than the last time they had seen me. I had had my pendulous baby-chewed breasts reshaped, and at the same Beverly Hills hospital I had tucks taken up under the hairline to take the slack out of my face, then I had gone to an Arizona health ranch to get into top condition and lose fifteen pounds. I had gone next to Vegas and splurged on ultra-chic, very feminine, new clothes - not the tailored pantsuits most female executives wore. I was smugly aware that I did not look the eighty-eight years I had lived, nor the fifty-eight I admitted. I think I looked a smart forty.

I was waiting in the foyer outside the boardroom, intending not to go in until called - board meetings are dull rituals... but a crisis is sure to come up if you skip one.

Just as the light outside the boardroom started to blink a man came slamming in from outside, Mr Phineas Morgan, leader of a large minority bloc. He headed straight for the blinking light while shrugging off his overcoat. As he passed me, he chucked it at me. ‘Take care of it!'

I ducked aside, let his coat land on the floor. ‘Hey! Morgan!' He checked himself, looked back. I pointed at the floor. ‘Your coat.'

He looked surprised, amazed, indignant, angry, and vindictive, all in one second. ‘Why, you little bitch! I'll have you fired for that.'

‘Go right ahead.' I moved past him into the boardroom, found my place card, and sat down. A few seconds later he sat down opposite me, at which point his face managed still another expression.

Phineas Morgan had not intentionally tried to use a fellow director as a servant. He saw a female figure who, in his mind, must be hired staff - secretary, receptionist, clerk, whatever. He was late and in a hurry and assumed that this subordinate employee would as a matter of course hang up his coat so that he could go straight to roll call.

The moral? In 1970 on time line two the legal system assumed that a man is innocent until proved guilty; in 1970 on time line two, the cultural system assumed that a female is subordinate until proved otherwise - despite all laws that asserted that the sexes were equal.

I planned to kick that assumption in the teeth.

5 August 1952 marked the beginning of my bachelorhood because that was the day on which I resolved that from that time on I would be treated the way a man is treated with respect to rights and privileges - or I would raise hell about it. I no longer had a family, I was no longer capable of childbearing, I was not looking for a husband, I was financially independent (and then some!), and I was firmly resolved never again ‘to send out the laundry' for some man merely because I use the washroom intended for setters rather than the one set aside for pointers.

I did not plan to be aggressive about it. If a gentleman held a door for me, I would accept the courtesy and thank him. Gentlemen enjoy offering little gallantries; and lady enjoys accepting them graciously, with a smile and a word of thanks.

I mention this because, by the 197=s, there were many females who would snub a man unmercifully if he offered a gallantry, such as holding a chair for a woman, or offering to help per in or out of a car. These women (a minority but a ubiquitous, obnoxious one) treated traditional courtesy as if it w ere an insult. I grew to think of these females as the lesbian Mafia. I don't know that all of them were homosexual (although I'm certain about some of them) but their behaviour caused me to lump them all together.

If some of them were not lesbians, then where did they find heterosexual mates? What sort of wimp would put up with this sort of rudeness in women? I am sorry to say that by 1970 there were plenty of wimps of every sort. The wimps were taking over. Manly men, gallant gentlemen, the sort who do not wait to be drafted, were growing scarce.

The principal problem in closing the house lay in the books; what to store, what to give away, what to take with me. The furniture and the small stuff, from pots and pans to sheets, would mostly be given to Good Will. We had been in that house twenty-three years, 1929 to 1952; most of the furniture was that old, or nearly so, and, after being worked over by a swarm of active children all those years, the market value of these chattels was too low to justify placing them in storage - since I had no intention of setting up a proper household in the foreseeable future.