Even just learning that I can go away from home all alone and be okay was important for me. I'd never flown before going to Winnipeg for the first workshop and getting on the airplane by myself and getting off in a strange province by myself was quite the trying experience. It was a little better going to the second workshop in Toronto and much better going to the third one in Ottawa.

Being involved in the research also made a difference in my relationship with my husband. It was hard sometimes, but it has helped us a lot. We'd lived together for four years, and when we were on the picket line for eight months, we spent twenty-four hours a day together. We went home together, we got up together, we picketed together. Everything was done together. It was a real strain on our relationship to stop that.

The research project has helped because he's had to see me go away more often. It has really helped me draw a line. I've said: "It's got to be like that. There are going to be things in life that I can do that you can't do with me. And there are going to be things in life that you're going to do without me, and we've got to get used to that."

Connecting with the other women across the country also made a big difference to the women in the literacy course I was running in my workplace. One of the greatest things that helped the women in my course was the knowledge that there are a lot of women out there exactly the same as them. It didn't matter if you were on the other side of Canada, or if you were up north. It really gave them a confidence that they weren't the excluded group. That was the nicest part about this research, the connection with everybody else.

The other major thing I learned from the connection with other women across the country was how violence is a part of all of our programs. The more we talked with everyone else, the more we saw how our problems here are the same as everybody's across the country. Violence and abuse and harassment just kept coming up. It's not only here but in courses all over. To this day that amazes me. I had never put it all together before.

At one time all three of the women that were in my class - three out of three - had been abused. I just thought that was a strange coincidence. When I talked to the other women in the research project and found out the high percentage of women that had been abused it was amazing. It was unreal.

When I came back from Toronto, I told the women that we had discussed this whole issue of violence and abuse and how women just like them in courses across the country are being abused. That was the biggest thing to my students, that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't alone.