Pat Noonan saw the mounds of petroleum coke on the shore of the Detroit River and organized a protest.
“Sometimes, in a community,” says Veronika Mogyorody, one of the producers of a new documentary about Noonan, “there is someone who is absolutely essential.”
A former nun, pioneering feminist and widely-known social activist, Noonan has lived quite a life. Now 82, her hair silver, her voice slightly laboured, she’s still frank, bold and hilariously cheeky. But most of all, she has a deep sense of right and wrong and social responsibility.
She’s the subject of a new feature-length film called This Is What A Feminist Sounds Like. An 11-minute trailer premiered at the Capitol Theatre last month. It starts with Noonan recalling her older brothers receiving boxing gloves for Christmas. They put the gloves on her, brought their friends over and told her, “Take them on, Pat.”
“I’d have to swing the mitts a few times and scare the poor boys,” she says, laughing.
Later, when she was a teenager, a boy came up to her and said, “Hi, Pat. Remember me? You beat me up when I was in Grade 2.”
Noonan grew up on Pelissier Street. Her father died when she was a year old, leaving her mother with four kids during the Depression. Noonan thought her Irish Catholic mother was too strict, so she did what she wanted. She skipped school, had boyfriends.
She was so wild that her mother sent her to The Pines in Chatham, a boarding school for girls run by the Ursuline Sisters.
One of the nuns decided Noonan was a leader and urged her to join Young Christian Students, a social action group. Noonan found her calling.
“I found out you can change things,” she said in an interview.
At 17, she entered the convent.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “But at the time, there was no Peace Corps, no movement where you could change things.”
The nuns loved her, though one teacher warned she “was trouble.” She went on to teach elementary and high school, was a principal and eventually landed “the job I always wanted,” heading Young Christian Students.
“I loved being a nun. We were all idealistic. The food was very good,” she laughed.
But Noonan was controversial. She asked why women can’t be priests. She thought abstinence was too difficult. She was asked about abortion in a television interview.
“I said I personally didn’t want one, but I wanted the law changed because I worked with women who couldn’t afford to have kids because of poverty and mental illness, who were going to Detroit for abortions and getting very sick.”
Pat Noonan is shown at her home in Windsor, Ont. on Thursday, March 7, 2013. Noonan is the subject of a new documentary. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Her mother told her, “I wish I had aborted you!”
The church became more progressive under Vatican II in the 1960s. But it wasn’t enough for Noonan. After 20 years, she left.
In 1970, Noonan put an ad in The Windsor Star. “Women’s Liberation meeting,” it stated. The agenda: “The general situation of women and what they are capable of being.”
One woman came to the first meeting. Twenty-five came to the second one. They protested against a statue of a woman in a bikini used to sell tires at a gas station. Noonan was called militant, lesbian and communist. They started a drop-in centre called Women’s Place. Battered wives slept on the floor.
Noonan had been a feminist since realizing her brothers didn’t wash dishes.
“At the same time I was questioning equality, the women’s movement started. It was made for me,” she said.
Ten years later, Noonan saw the play Les Belles Soeurs and decided that was better than meetings. So she helped found Windsor Feminist Theatre, which became the most daring theatre group in the city and now is the longest-running feminist theatre in Canada. She wrote, acted, directed and produced. There’s a priceless picture of her playing Pope Joan in Top Girls, standing on a pedestal, wearing papal robes, her hands raised.
Over the years, Noonan has taught at public high schools and St. Clair College. She worked in a factory putting chrome on bumpers because she felt she was too insulated from ordinary life.
She even married. She and her husband, who was an Environment Canada engineer, are divorced.
Always, she has fought for what she believes in. She has been a member of countless organizations promoting peace, social justice and the environment. She lobbied to get the recommendations from the inquest into nurse Lori Dupont’s murder implemented and helped build a school in Nicaragua (while under attack from the Contras).
Windsor has influenced her, she says. “We’re a working-class town.That seems to give us a sense of being in touch with people’s struggles.”
“You can expand,” she once said. “You can go beyond the present structure. You can dream. You can talk about how society should be.”
“There’s nothing else,” she told me, talking about social action. “Once you see things, you have to make them better. You can’t live with yourself and see the contradictions between what we’re called to do and what we’re doing.”
This Is What A Feminist Sounds Like, directed by University of Windsor documentary filmmaker Kim Nelson and Audra MacIntyre, will be entered in the Windsor International Film Festival this year.
ajarvis@windsorstar.com or 255-5587. Follow me on Twitter @winstarjarvis.
Pat Noonan speaks to people attending a rally at Assumption Park protesting the petroleum coke piles on the American side of the Detroit River, Saturday, March 9, 2013. (DAX MELMER/The Windsor Star)
Pat Noonan is shown at her home in Windsor, Ont. on Thursday, March 7, 2013. Noonan is the subject of a new documentary. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
Pat Noonan is shown at her home in Windsor, Ont. on Thursday, March 7, 2013. Noonan is the subject of a new documentary. (TYLER BROWNBRIDGE/The Windsor Star)
