And Then There's Maude

(and then there's Maude...)

Anything but tranquilizin’

Apparently that was Maude’s claim to fame.

Whoa, this woman was scary, at least to an elementary-school kid in the 70s. What was she so angry about?

Her voice was imposing, her husband was cowering and the whole kit and caboodle of the Findlay household, family, friends et al, was strangely foreign to this confused kid living in Toronto.

What was “women’s lib,” anyway?

(Source: YouTube)

Why was Maude so angry?

Perhaps it was the inequality that she felt lurked around each and every corner of her life. Perhaps it was the obvious disregard for women’s rights, their autonomy and basic freedoms that irked her to no end.

Maude was a feminist, after all.

Whatever the heck that meant, I had no idea as a child.

I get it now, decades later. But in the moment, watching her bellow demands and opinions across the living room to Walter - the eternally frightened and cowed hubby of said eponymous television show - she was an e…