by Steven Macpherson

Created on: November 25, 2008

As a white male, I assumed for many years that racism was a far greater evil than sexism. Like many other men who came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, I was a strong advocate of civil rights. I was enthralled with the powerful rhetoric of Martin Luther King, emotionally broken by the piercing indictment of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and morally outraged by the ongoing existence of such racist institutions as apartheid in South Africa. I fully supported every equal opportunity initiative that was devised and worked hard at removing any evidence of racial profiling or stereotyping that still lingered in the recesses of my mind.

I was aware of the burgeoning feminist movement and even read with considerable interest Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" in the early 1970s. I considered myself to be an enlightened male, who was sensitive to women's issues and in no way demeaning in my attitudes towards them. I did not, however, take the feminist movement seriously. I felt that it sprang more from a collective neurosis than from oppression or segregation. I believed, at least in theory, that women were equal to men and ought to have equal access to the professions and trades. I did not feel that women needed to make such a clamour about it and that there were far more important items on the civil rights agenda than social and cultural equality between men and women. The abortion issue further alienated me from taking an actively supportive stance on women's issues and in many ways became a morally obtuse camouflage that hid the depth of the sexism issue from me.

It was really not until I read writers like Zorah Neal Hurston and Alice Walker that I began to see that sexism in many ways is even more insidious and de-habilitating than racism. Through them and discussions concerning their writings, I came to see that women were often more profoundly wronged by stereotype and prejudice within their ethnic communities than they were by racial issues. It is amazing how when a window of perception is opened we begin to vividly see what was invisible or shrouded from us before.

During the early 1980s while I was a seminary student, I had a student charge of a small African Baptist Church in Nova Scotia. There were not enough black pastors or seminary students to meet the needs of all the African Baptist churches who needed pastors. A short distance up the same road from the church I pastored was another small Baptist Church. It still had the balcony where African Canadians

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