MacNeil soon bid husband and children a tearful goodbye and headed back to Toronto. Langham sold up and moved to Big Pond, but Ms. Beset by depression and ballooning weight, she was becoming increasingly dependent on drink and pills. The women's movement helped her build an audience, and so did the folk-festival circuit.īut the more success she had singing, the more unhappy she seemed. MacNeil's name had shown up in RCMP documents as "the one who composes and sings women's lib songs," she apparently retorted: "The only thing I'm sorry about now is I didn't know I was under surveillance, or I would have got them to drive me home." When it was revealed decades later that Ms. Always a prolific songwriter, she composed Born a Woman in 1972 specifically to protest a Miss Toronto beauty contest.Īs well as raising her own consciousness, she attracted the attention of the RCMP. "It was like a light went on and my whole life was lit up by it," she wrote in her autobiography. MacNeil went, as so many did in that era, to a women's movement meeting in 1972. They married in the early spring of 1967 their son, Wade, was born three years later in Toronto, on April 30, 1970. Langham sounds like the salt of the earth: gentle, loyal, hardworking and reliable. MacNeil's description in her autobiography, On a Personal Note, Mr. By day she worked menial jobs, by night she sang in pubs or any other venue that wanted her.Įventually, she met David Langham, a draftsman from Newcastle upon Tyne. She left the baby with her parents in Big Pond and returned to Toronto. MacNeil never gave up on her dream of a singing career. She quit high school in Grade 12 and moved to Toronto, where she worked as a clerk in customer service at Eaton's and fell in love with a young man with only one thing on his mind, as they used to say in the early 1960s.įinding herself pregnant, she returned to Big Pond, where her daughter, Laura, was born on April 15, 1966, a bundle of joy in all the misery for Ms. Many of the kids in the community bullied her, public-health nurses humiliated her at school in futile attempts to pull and push her teeth into alignment, and a great uncle, who lived across the road, sexually abused her for years. They argued and drank themselves into oblivion, with her father sometimes using his fists to quell his wife's sharp tongue. Her mother Catherine (Rene) came from another branch of the MacNeill clan, which had fought against the French at Louisbourg in 1758.Īlthough her parents shared the same last name, they were not well suited. MacNeill was a descendant of the Barra MacNeills, who had come to Canada from the Highlands of Scotland even before the Clearances in the 1820s.
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