File f26 - Gaston, Anne-Marie, nee Groves

File consists of a recording of Anne-Marie Gaston. Topics of the conversation include women's timidity faced with a man's world; married women's titles, surnames. Mother's concern that subject should be self-supporting. Subject's interest in dance; Phys. Ed. training at Queen's; application to CUSO. With CUSO to India via far east: war, heat, culture shock. Western culture as it now affects women's safety in India. Silly assignment to village camp; finding own work in lieu of help from Delhi. Discovery of India through travel, self through isolation. Learning Indian dance: early rising, absence of dating custom leaving loneliness, plenty of time for dancing. Subject's dance background. Benefits of social abstention; effect of separation on male-female relationships; change as' cure. Subject's zoologist husband. Convenience of being a couple in India; women as the more interesting, watchable sex. Husband's choice of doctoral work to coincide with subject's location. Indian belief that you choose an activity to benefit yourself: delicious incomprehension of CUSO volunteer-worker's martyred stance. Appreciation of Oxford libraries; Oxford University degree-work on Indian art. Subject's performances in Canada; Canada Council research grant to return to India. Financial independence through dance: drumming up business; wide variety of people interested. Dance as a door to many aspects of Indian culture. Eastern culture boom (subject's involvement pre­dating hippie influx). Subject as intuitive learner; observation that in classical art, unlike folk art, understanding is manifested by a grasp of rules.//lndia as a place where you experience humanity clearly, in the raw; subject's appreciation of Hindu philosophy. Place of female in Hindu religion, society. Dependence, restriction, of North Indian women; relative freedom in south. Strange experience of going veiled. Female emancipation in upper classes; women's role in government. Expectation in India that women will do something; western expectation that women should remain subservient, unrecognized. Credit institution vice of requiring male credentials for loans, etc. Male-female stereotype reversals. Moral, amorous pressures on women to sacrifice themselves. Subject's peer group as a sample study in women's lots: women marrying early or late, rarely in between. Possible limiting effects of youthful marriage. Subject's belief in the carrying force of true ambition: if you want to do something, you do it. Subject's life at Queen's during sixties. Small group learning at Oxford. Different patterns of attending university; privilege of learning in a protective environment at a crucial life-stage. Failure of women to apply education. Destructive social pressures exerted on husband of successful wife. Male-female aspects of Indian dance; male chauvinism in stories portrayed. Subject's opinion that everyone should dance: value of informal movement and of discipline. Relation of discipline to liberation (by extension, to Women's Lib).