I was born in Bristol, England, in 1946, soon after WWII ended. My name at birth was Susan Fulham. When I was four years old we moved to Bratton Seymour(1), a village in Somerset.
During the war my father had served overseas with the British
Eighth Army and my mother had been a Phys. Ed. teacher. Now, my mother became games mistress at The Hall School(2), a private school for girls, my father was the caretaker, and I was
For seven years we lived in a 14th century cottage which had no telephone or electricity, the nearest shop being about a mile and a half away, downhill. It was a route we travelled many times on our bicycles, with great joy in one direction only. In 1957, when I was ten, I emigrated to Canada with my mother and brother, my father having gone beforehand to his sponsor's home, to make preparations. We left from Liverpool, taking the 7-day voyage across the Atlantic to Montreal, on the Empress of France(3).
For the next forty years I lived in south-western Ontario. I grew up in Woodstock, spending much time at the YWCA, and graduated from high school in 1965(4). It was probably quite an ordinary adolescence, considering that I grew up in the fifties and sixties. This was the time of the Beatles and Elvis, and the celebrated Woodstock festival(5), although when that event happened, in 1969, I was married, living a very traditional life, and expecting my first child.
The children were teenagers when our marriage ended, in 1988, after twenty years. The three of us left the Woodstock area and moved to London, Ontario, my daughter and myself beginning studies at the University of Western Ontario at the same time, my son enrolling at high school. I studied Sociology and women’s studies, and attempted to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
I immersed myself in life on and off campus - working part-time, engaging in volunteer work, feminist and women’s activities, and joining the mature students' association at the university - as a single parent and a newly-single person. Feminism was very strong in Canada at that time, in the late 80s and early 90s, although there was also a strong resistance, at least at Western in London, Ontario, to some of what was going on.
I recall marching in an abortion rally and boycotting pornography at the university bookstore, although the value of participating in these activities (for society) seem questionable to me now. To some extent I suppose I was just testing my newfound power, as a woman. Although over 40 years of age when I went to Western, I was new to this kind of politics and women’s activities. I enjoyed my new social activities and friendships with women, as well exploring these new topics academically (gender and sexuality), through taking women’s studies courses. By the end of this time I had achieved my BA in Sociology(6) from Western, graduating at the same time as my daughter, in 1993.
My son left for university, and I went to Windsor, Ontario, for the next two and a half years doing research and working towards an MA, starting to write my thesis on women and menopause. The coursework for my MA degree was completed and I had just the thesis to finish when I left for England, where I had been accepted into a PhD program. I needed to get out of that environment so left, planning to complete the MA thesis and degree from England. It was several years before I was able to do so, however.
I worked, but only part-time - as a physiotherapy assistant, preparing income tax forms, then later managing the branch library in Beachville, the village where we lived. Much of our life together during holidays was spent on or near water - fishing, boating, waterskiing, camping, and hiking. I also liked to play tennis and swim locally. I enjoyed sewing and made most of my own clothes as well as my children’s. Playing the piano and extended family get-togethers was also part of family life.
In the spring of 2004 I attended the Narrative Matters conference at St Thomas University, New Brunswick, Canada, presenting the paper, Narratives and Wisdom: the lives of women growing older. While in Canada I began interviewing for life stories on the theme Dilemma of Mandatory Retirement for the website Diversity in Retirement (2004). I also came back to England with news items and photos from my mother's scrapbooks, from which I constructed the website Woodstock YWCA 1957 to 1964: seven years remembered (2004). The next year I started the website Trees and Towns (2005), consisting of photos of trees in the towns they inhabited, most of which I took myself.
In 2004-05 I presented three papers for the seminar series Discourses of Difference, held at the University of London and Sunderland University, UK, including excerpts from interviews to illustrate points I was making about work and retirement. At the end of it, I submitted the essay Beyond Workaday Worlds: Ageing, Identity and the Life Cycle for consideration as a chapter in a book to come out of the series. I had hoped to influence the way work was viewed in society; particularly to show how a person’s worth need not always be determined by their career or employment status. It was not accepted; however, Beyond Workaday Worlds is available to read on my website, on the Essays web page(12).
The last website I started was the Montreal Massacre website (2005), starting with the essay Perspectives on the Montreal Massacre: Canada's Outrage Revisited(2005). It was while living in England that I became aware of what Marc Lepine’s life must have been like. His act of retaliation , killing 14 women at the Montreal Massacre in December, 1989, had probably been exacerbated by encounters he had had with feminists and others, as he tried to get them to understand what was happening in society as feminism took hold. I came to see how some women had managed to take their places working and studying alongside men at university, but in the process, some other women and some men were excluded. In May, 2006, I attended the Narrative Matters conference at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, at which I presented a paper, The Hidden Narratives: stories of the many in the Montreal Massacre (2006), in which I presented other sides to the tragedy, of others whose lives suffered in the wider context of the Montreal Massacre, and not simply the story of the 14 women who were killed.
YWCA Float
Victoria Day Parade. Woodstock, Ontario, 1959
Kay, myself, and Michael. 1957. The car - a Ford, either a 1949, '50, or '51 model.
Myself, mother
Kay Fulham, & friend Patricia Watson. 1956
Myself, brother Michael, and father, Dennis, with motorcycle. 1951
Myself, mother Kay, Hall School girls, and
brother Michael. 1952
Graduation, UWO, 1993.
Daughter Christine and me.
In 1996 I moved to England, to Colchester, to do the PhD and hopefully to settle and start a new life. By 1999 I had completed 17 interviews for the research for my PhD dissertation on Intimacy and Sexuality: single-again older women (title updated), but I was not able to continue on with the research or the PhD.
Being a TA at university, in England, was the last job I held during the eleven years I spent in the UK. One of the drawbacks of working only part-time while raising a family was that I did not establish a work history. Nor did I receive references following the divorce. Once my formal education was over, in England, I had no useful history to draw upon, in starting out again on my own in England, only the stigma of a failed marriage and an incomplete PhD. Rarely, if ever, does a person's work stand on its own merit. It takes friends, marriage, family or a community to make that happen. I didn’t have the support I needed within the academic community, or outside of it. My attempt to resolve the matter in court did not meet with success(7). It seemed that all my efforts over the years were in vain, to have my work recognized and get a job in the field I was interested in – doing research on aging.
Ambassador Bridge, Univ of Windsor,
Canada. 1995
Myself with parents,
Woodstock, Ont., 1995
Climbing the wall at the University of Essex,
Colchester, UK. 1997
Christine, self, Steve. Spring Break
- Royal Ontario Museum. 1982
self, Stratford. 1974
self, Steve & Christine (Herd). Woodstock 1973.
In 1967, at age twenty, I had married, and took a job as a cost clerk until we started a family. My husband, Walter, was insistent that I not continue working, so starting a family seemed like a good idea after a couple of years. I hadn’t realized the importance to women of having paid work, and jobs were plentiful and easy to find. Besides that, I wanted to remain at home while my children were small. I had often wished my mother had been at home for me while I was growing up.
self, 1963
WCI Cadets, Woodstock,
ON. 1962
friend Monica, myself, Long Point, 1966
self, Wildwood 1974
For a while I had a cat, left behind when a neighbour moved, that had
climbed through the kitchen window and made himself comfortable in
my microwave. I couldn’t keep it for long, but I fed him and got him
healthy again before letting him go to a new home, via the cat shelter.
In 2006 I turned retirement age in the UK, officially becoming a
pensioner. I had spent several years job-seeking without finding
anything, although the interviews I attended had taken me to parts
of Britain I would not otherwise have been able to see. And I had
job-seekers’ benefits to help me though financially.
Since returning to Canada, two book reviews I had written while in England have been published (13), and the article I wrote about my grandfather, John L. McPherson(14). A version with more images accompanying it is on my website, on the web page J. L. McPherson, Hong Kong YMCA: General Secretary 1905-1935(2006). He had been a missionary in Hong Kong, married to Gertrude Briggs who was also a missionary, as well as an artist, suffragist, writer, and mother of three daughters, one of whom was my mother. I continued to make entries in my blog, Sue's Views on the News (since 2005), also commenting on newspaper articles and blogs online. But mostly, I have simply been trying to survive, on part-time and temporary work, not altogether unrelated to my skills and training, but at a level much lower than I wanted or deserved.
A broken ankle in 2009, from a fall in my home, resulted in
a lengthy period of adaptation, incomplete recovery, and
persistent pain. My father died during this time, too, away
from home in a place near my brother’s home. I didn’t
have the power to prevent that from happening.
I hope to be able to keep writing and doing research, and perhaps
some interviewing for the website Diversity in Retirement. I would
like to find some way of putting my education to good use, since I
have not been able to work for a university or do academic research.
In 2011 I returned to London, Ontario, where I have lived twice
before in my life, and have come to see as my home. The first time,
I was in my late teens, soon to be married. The second time was in
1988, when I moved here from Beachville to attend Western. Now I
am back, but it is a very different place in many ways, and my own
place within that has changed dramatically, returning as I have a
decade older, still 'single-again,' and once again, officially retiring.
The ankle problem has consumed my life, while opening it up to
other interests at the same time. I had taken up swimming again
in Oshawa, which I hadn’t done since leaving Western in 1994.
And in London I also turned to weight-lifting on a small scale, to
help compensate for lower limb muscle weakness caused by
limited mobility. Add to that a newly-acquired bicycle. Unlike
England, where my bicycle was one of my main means of
transportation, here it is for fresh air and exercise.
Aging has always been an interest of mine, even before I took courses
in the subject in Sociology at Western. My research has been in this
area, usually as it intersects with gender and sexuality. While England
had the OFN, the Older Feminists Network, in London, UK, no such
group seems to exist here. I have attended meetings of the Age-Friendly
Task Force here in London, as a senior citizen, but the ways open to me
to contribute to this city-run endeavor appear to be limited. As long as
my health holds up without the benefit of a GP, I hope to be able to keep
writing and researching, in my own way, including for my blog.
I started the S A McPherson website, my first, in 2001(8), placing on it an essay I had written about my grandmother’s life. I renegotiated with the University of Windsor to complete the MA, and in the spring of 2002 I returned to Canada for the oral defence of the MA thesis, Women in Transition: Discourses of Menopause(9), graduating in June, 2002, with an MA in Sociology. It was too late, however, to make a difference in the course of my life. While in Canada I also attended the interment of my mother, Kay Fulham’s remains. She had died earlier that year, on Jan. 6, 2002, age 86, in Woodstock, Ontario.
The next few years I spent interviewing, writing, doing research, attending conferences, and developing my websites. I wrote book reviews and essays, and letters to editors of newspapers, and presented papers at conferences. In Jan. 2003 I presented the paper Menopause and Ageing Femininity(10) at the Menstruation: Blood, Body, Brand conference at the University of Liverpool.
Being in England gave me the opportunity of meeting up with family members I hadn’t seen for many years, in London and in Bristol, my birthplace. I spent my first Christmas in Bedford, with a friend of my mother’s from The Garden School days at High Wycombe, Bucks. I made a point of visiting Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol, overgrown at the time but since then under restoration, where ancestors on my father’s side are buried. In the spring of 2003 I made my way first to Bournemouth, where I had a job interview, then on to Wincanton and Bratton Seymourwhere I had lived as a child and attended school before coming to Canada, even getting to see inside the house we used to live in, now a treasured piece of heritage for Britain.
I continued to develop the original SAMcPherson website and started new websites(11), one being the Empress of France website (2004), which consisted of memorabilia from Lewis Carter of his voyage on the Empress, the same ship my family had taken to Canada.
WW II veteran Dennis Fulham,
resident of Woodstock, Ontario, for more than fifty years, died on May 19, 2009. He was 90 years old. Born in Bristol, England, on 30 July 1918, Dennis was a signalman attached to the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, serving with the British Eighth Army in the Western Desert, including the Battle of El Alamein, and in Italy.
Thank you for taking the time to read my life story.
I hope readers will perceive my website as I intended,
as a place to bring together my writing, research,
and other interests as an independent researcher, for
public viewing, and this story as an effort to explain
about my life and use my life experience in a manner
that might benefit others, as well as further sociological
and feminist knowledge.
Sue McPherson, London, 2011
Cat, 2004.
Colchester, UK.
Ankle, after 1 week
Colchester, UK 1996 - 2007
Ontario, Canada 2007
Eventually, in May 2007, I returned to Canada, to Oshawa, Ontario, where Steve, my son, lived, hoping that I wasn’t the only person who knew of a quotation attributed to Susan Jeffers: "You're not a failure because you didn't make it, you're a success because you tried.” The book 'Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway' had been a motivational force in my life throughout my undergrad years. In retrospect, I don’t think she was altogether right on that idea about success.
Justice, Strand, Queen's Bench Division, Administrative Court. Application refused by Justice Turner. 
