Pat Rosier died
on 12 June. She was many things to many people and won’t be forgotten by any of
them. Her death, from a heart attack at age 72, was unexpected, and it prompted
an outpouring from all those whose lives she touched: both personally and
politically.
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| Pat, left, and Prue; and Pat's son, David with partner, Julia |
And it’s for both personal and political reasons that
her life is important to remember; her death important to record. The personal
is best left to those who knew her intimately, particularly her partner of 17
years, Prue Hyman and her son, David. I contacted Prue, wondering if it was OK
to write something for The Hand Mirror about Pat: “As far as I am concerned,” she replied, “the more
people write and talk about Pat the better.” The first thing you should
probably read is what Prue herself has written, in a tribute titled “Pat Rosier
– Shalom” and which is online at the Kapiti Independent. That piece also includes lots of links, including to
Pat’s own blog and to the video of the 300-strong celebration of Pat’s life, held at Paekakariki where Pat and Prue lived
together.
As Prue writes,
Pat’s early life was relatively conventional. Her dad was a railway clerk, and she
grew up at a time when no one in a working class family, “let alone a girl”,
went to university. She married, had two children and trained as primary
teacher, which was her job from 1973 to 1985. Then, something happened. Pat
found Simone de Beauvoir, the Women’s Liberation Movement, lesbianism – and
reinvented herself.
Pat chronicled
at least part of that reinvention in the 1991 collection, Changing Our Lives:
Women Working in the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970-1990 (eds Christine
Dann & Maud Cahill, Bridget Williams Books). Her entry was a spare but
powerful three pages composed entirely of bullet points. Here’s a selection with ellipses indicating where things are missing (with thanks to
Bridget Williams Books, Prue and Christine Dann for permission):
“In 1970 I was:
• twenty-eight years old
• trying hard to be a good wife and
mother, and succeeding rather better at mother than wife
• sure that men were more
interesting to talk to than women, who were stuck in domestic and kid stuff
(apart from one or two good friends)
…
• bored, bored, bored, but not
recognizing it
…
• back-combing my hair, shaving my
legs, and making my own dresses
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| Pat, left, and Prue |
By 1980 I had:
• discovered Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in a bookshop in Takapuna
and read it with an increasing feeling that, for the first time, something made
sense of my life
…
• bought an automatic
washing-machine and a car
• realised that among women teachers
I was considered opinionated and outspoken
• almost reached the end of my
marriage
…
• noticed that there was something
going on called a women’s movement and wondered how you got into it.
By 1990 I am:
• a radical lesbian feminist with
both socialist and separatist tendencies
• co-editor of Broadsheet, New Zealand’s feminist magazine
• an experienced women’s studies
tutor
…
• cynical about the media, the
government and the state
• totally sick of everything to do
with it being 1990, especially ‘celebrating’ a treaty that’s never been
honoured
• hardly ever bored
…
• angry about phonecards, post
office closures, user-pays education, and all the other exploitations of
rampant capitalism
• more at ease with myself and my
life than at any earlier time
• planning to become more outspoken
and outrageous.”
It was in 1985 that Pat took over
the editorship of Broadsheet magazine,
getting the job after Sandra Coney stepped down, and holding it for the next
six years. (She was also a co-founder of the Women’s Studies Association
journal.)
Anyone wanting
an understanding of the so-called “Second Wave” or “Women’s Liberation
Movement” of the 70s and 80s would be well advised to spend some quality time
with Broadsheet, which published its
last issue in 1997 and is apparently in the queue to be digitised by the National Library. Even
if you don’t have access to the magazine itself, Pat made sure there was
another entry point. Been Around for Quite a While: Twenty Years of Writing
from Broadsheet Magazine, (New Women’s Press, 1992) is a compilation of selected articles
and brief history of the magazine’s first 20 years, edited and introduced by
Pat.
Like the magazine it’s drawn from, the
compilation is both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting for the impressive
range and diversity and power of the writers and topics; depressing for how
many of the issues are still with us. Or, as Pat put it in her introduction:
“Few of the issues raised in Broadsheet have
‘gone away’ or in any way been resolved. New ones appear, and they all move in
and out of the foreground.” Also in the intro, she chronicles some of the discussions, debates and phases, for want of a better word, that both Broadsheet and feminism went through, from abortion in the 70s (and
still!), contraception, marriage
(and alternatives), child-rearing, equal pay,
Māori women’s voices (and challenges to the WLM), lesbians (“with a ‘lesbian
cover’ appearing in June 1973”), violence against women, rape in marriage,
attacks on beneficiaries… and so it goes. In Broadsheet proper, Pat also wrote numerous feature articles,
including in 1986 “Fighting Fat Phobia”, about “how hatred and fear of fat is
used to control women”, and several in-depth pieces on reproductive
technologies.
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| Sharon Alston's illustration of Pat's 1986 article 'Fighting Fat Phobia' |
After leaving Broadsheet and Auckland in the 90s, Pat
continued her activism and writing – turning to fiction, and eventually
publishing four novels. (Details of her nine books are available here at her blog.) According to Prue, more publications are planned: “Her
lesbian writing group is hoping to produce two posthumous volumes – the first
their already planned group volume where they will attempt to use some of her
partly written fifth novel (she and I were both convinced this would be the
best – and the others were good). The second will be a book of her poetry –
including some written for me and never yet published or seen by anyone else.”
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| Pat's 2004 novel |
Those post-Broadsheet years were also marked by
terrible sadness with the death in 1996 of Pat’s daughter Helen, then 32, from
bronchial pneumonia. Prue quotes from something Pat wrote about this, the
“saddest event in her life”:
“The death of a daughter changes my reality;
everything after is different from what was before. The grief and pain are a
blanket of fog for months and I welcome the fog, fear its ending. I grab and
cling to the grief, the loss, the sadness — I cannot bear to lose that gnawing,
grinding, consuming pain, for this is what I have of her; I must keep her
always in my mind, my heart, be overwhelmed, or else she is fully lost to me…
Time does go on. A year and more. The grief is just as intense, but smaller in
size… I have a grief in me. My grief at the death of my daughter will not die,
I will not ‘get over it’, it will not be ‘healed’ by time. She is in me for my
forever, a forever I grasp fiercely, demanding joy.”
I
got to know Pat at a distance when she was editor of Broadsheet in Auckland and I was doing some writing for the
magazine including a fairly short-lived “Our Woman in the House” column I wrote
while working as a journalist in Wellington at the press gallery. I was
insecure, she was supportive. More recently, she was just as supportive and helpful (and I was probably just as
insecure) during the five years I was researching and writing my 2013 book on
the abortion rights struggle, Fighting to
Choose.
Thinking
about Pat these past few weeks also got me thinking about what an important
role she played in the politics and culture of this country, and yet how
invisible it probably is to those outside her circles. In turn, I began to
wonder (yet again) how the WLM years will be remembered – or not remembered –
given that we are starting to lose some of the women, like Pat, who were there.
I hope you will
excuse the segue into a bit of research, but following these thoughts, I’ve
started work on a longer piece about this question, (will, for example, our
WLM/ “second wave” have to be “rediscovered” as the so-called first wave of
feminism had to be?) and I’ve arranged a few interviews with older, middle,
younger feminists. To that end, I would very much welcome any thoughts readers
might have on these questions, just pop them into comments. (You can also email
me directly at alisonmccull[at]gmail[dot]com)
More
importantly, of course, do write about Pat. Reiterating Prue, the more people
write and talk about Pat the better. (And for northern readers, a celebration
of her life is planned for Auckland on Saturday August 30 at 1:30 pm . I will add location details to
this post when they are available. Venue: Auckland Women's Centre, 4 Warnock Street, Grey Lynn.)
Kore rawa atu e wareware.
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| Above and below, flier for Pat's life celebration |
