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.
Woodstock, Ontario, Canada.
Ontario.
1970's
&
80's
Graduation, UWO, 1993
self, mother Kay,
Windsor, Ontario. 1995
self, Bratton Seymour, Somerset. View of English country-side, 2003. Photo taken from the front of what once was The Hall School.
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(11).
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. doneI 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 and myself.
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. 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. 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, particularly on aging .
Univ of Windsor,
Canada. 1995
Myself with parents,
Woodstock, Ont., 1995
self, 2006.
Climbing the wall at the University of Essex,
Colchester, UK. 1997
Christine, self, Steve. Spring Break
- Royal Ontario Museum. 1982
self, Stratford. 1974
Steve, myself, Christine. 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 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
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. Eventually, in May 2007, I returned to Canada, 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.
Since returning to Canada, moving to Oshawa, Ontario, two book reviews I had written while in England have been published (12), and more recently, the article I wrote about my grandfather, John L. McPherson(13), was also published. 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 had also been a missionary and artist, suffragist, writer, and mother of three. I have continued to make entries in my blog, in Sue's Views on the News (since 2005).
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.
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.
I started the S A McPherson website, my first, in 2001(7), 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(8), 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(9) at the Menstruation: Blood, Body, Brand conference at the University of Liverpool.
That spring I made my way to Wincanton, Somerset, and to Bratton Seymourwhere I had lived as a child and attended school before coming to Canada. I also visited Bristol on several occasions, renewing memories of the place where I had been born and still had relations. I continued to develop the original SAMcPherson website and started new websites(10), 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 served with the Wiltshire Yeomanry Unit of the British Eighth Army in the Western Desert, including the Battle of El Alamein, and in Italy. He will be missed.
