Chapter 10 Emily #2
Her mother nodded. “Yes. I could have easily gotten a job alongside her, but she wanted better for me. So she got me the job at Princess Pat through a woman in Rosedale whose laundry she took in on the side, for extra money. The woman’s husband owned the place.
He was a decent man, and he kept an eye on me.
It didn’t pay as much as the Royal York, which was why my mother stayed there all those years.
It was the most money she could make with so few skills, and no education.
Aside from, well…” Her nostrils flared. “The point is, she didn’t want me coming home with burns, or to be harassed by the laundry supervisor, who was a lecher.
With the things he said to her, and did to other laundresses…
” She shook her head. “They should have poisoned his tea with bleach, that’s all I’ll say. ”
“Mom!” Emily gaped. She hadn’t known her nana had put up with all that at her job.
“What I am trying to say,” Bess pressed on, “is that she wanted better for me than she’d ever had.
She didn’t want my life to be as difficult as hers had been.
And when I met your father that day at the cinema, well…
we loved each other, he made a good wage, and I thought, ‘Excellent, I can stop working and give my own children a more stable childhood than I ever had. And if I have girls, they won’t have to work.
They can have an education if they wish, stay in school longer than I did, maybe even attend university’ ”—she nodded at Emily, her spine straightening with pride.
“Then they can marry well, and be taken care of.”
Emily sighed. She understood better now why Bess had been pushing her so hard toward Jem, and marriage. The campaign had deeper roots, was more well-intentioned than she’d given her mother credit for. “Mom—”
“I wanted your and Eleanor’s lives to be easier than mine, better than mine,” Bess said emphatically.
“It’s what every good mother wants, really, if she’s worth her salt.
No one wants their child to suffer. So when I hear about you willingly walking into a prison, to be hurt, or shamed, or…
” She trailed off, eyes shining. “But your father reminded me that we gave you greater opportunities than I or your grandmother had so that you could have choices. Because it’s always a lack of options that hangs women, in the end.
But in making these choices: to delay marriage, and work in the man’s world where things are still so limited for us…
I can’t help but feel as though you’re deliberately taking the difficult road when you don’t have to.
” She searched Emily’s blue eyes as though looking for an answer.
“But you are who you are, my dear, and I love you still. Lord knows I may not always understand you, but I love you, and I don’t want you to get hurt. ”
Emily tried to see things from her mother’s perspective. Her concerns were all reasonable, really. The most daring thing Emily had ever done before now was enrolling as the only woman in her year in journalism school.
Emily had expected that upon graduation, she would be lucky to scrape a part-time junior position at one of the big newspapers or men’s magazines, knowing she would have to work twice as hard as her male classmates to succeed in the industry.
She was luckier than she’d even realized when she landed the job at Chatelaine: to be working at a publication that was by women, for women, and in a woman-dominated office, made Emily feel like she’d won a prize.
There were no other professional offices headed by a woman.
That only happened in underpaid service work, where women drudged like her grandmother had in hotel laundries, starching businessmen’s shirts and boiling their soiled sheets clean—or, she thought with an uncomfortable start, in brothels like June Jones’s, where women laboured in ghastly conditions night and day, solely for the pleasure of men.
There were no woman-led law firms, banks, radio stations.
They simply didn’t exist. Chatelaine was it.
“Thanks, Mom. But I need to do this, and it won’t be for long. And then”—she smiled—“my options will expand. Maybe I’ll get a promotion and a raise, things that will open even more doors.”
Her mother observed her, looking strained. “And what about poor Jeremy? Does he truly not factor in at all?”
Emily kept her gaze, though she felt a flush rise, unbidden.
“It’s not that he doesn’t factor in,” she said with a shrug.
“It’s nothing to do with him, really. I like Jem very much.
But it’s any man, it’s marriage. I’m just not ready.
” She swallowed hard, but pressed on, finally voicing the thing she’d been too afraid to tell her mother for five years.
“I don’t want it. At least, not yet—but maybe never.
I don’t know.” She paused. “I have an opportunity here, and I need to take it. For my own sake, and for yours, I think, and Nana’s, too.
I’m the first university-educated woman in our family.
I think I can be the first professional one, too.
The first published one. Don’t you think that opportunity is worth the risk? ”
As Emily took in the soft lines around her mother’s eyes, she saw both concern and understanding. She wondered what her mother was seeing as she scanned her face. Her own nervousness was reflected, certainly.
Bess exhaled in a sigh weighed down with the relentless conflict of motherhood. “I suppose it is,” she said. “And I have to trust that you know what you’re doing.”
Emily nodded. “I do.”