" Throughout Canada today, both men and women have the rights to paternity and maternity leaves. In 1971, the unemployment insurance program was introduced through which the federal government compensated women sixty-six percent of their total salary for duration of fifteen weeks after giving birth. In 1979, upon vigorous negotiation, Quebec's Common Front established new legislature in which twenty weeks of full paid maternity, ten weeks leave for parents who adopted a child, and five days of paternity leave were granted. Unlike the legislature around maternity leave that exists today in Canada, Anderson and other women with children were not given the same rights and respect. Anderson compares the service that women provide a country when they give birth to a child with the service that men give in war, stating that upon returning from war, men are treated with respect and given assistance and training to return to the work force and get adjusted to a new lifestyle. In comparison, new mothers were penalized by being unjustly stripped of their pay and jobs. Many women were pressured from a young age to get married and have children, while several of them wanted much more than a nuclear family structure in their life, of which included Doris Anderson. In "Rebel Daughter," Anderson states that "what I wanted more than anything was to be able to look after myself and make sure that every other woman in the world could do the same. "Working women were expected to continue in domestic work, take care of a newborn and return to their jobs due to the risk of losing their position, with or without the assistance of their partners. .
Due to the pressure of work, Anderson hired a Scottish woman by the name of Mabel Saunders to take care of Peter. Not many women, especially in the working-class, were able to afford a caregiver during these years, but Anderson's relatively high salary provided her with the additional income to hire external help.