Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, Second Edition [2 ed.] 9781442625938

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE Race, Crime, and Justice
Introduction
A New Biography of the African Diaspora: The Life and Death of Marie-Joseph Angélique, Black Portuguese Slave Women in New France, 1725–1
Unpacking the Discursive Irish Woman Immigrant in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland
The Tale of Lin Tee: Madness, Family Violence, and Lindsay’s Anti-Chinese Riot of 1919
PART TWO The Making of White Settler Societies
Turning Strangers into Sisters? Missionaries and Colonization in Upper Canada
Whose Sisters and What Eyes? White Women, Race, and Immigration to British Columbia, 1849–1871
Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Making of Canada as a White Settler Nation
PART THREE Letters and Tales of Settlement and Longing
Introduction
Letters “Home” from Canada: British Female Emigrants and the Imperial Family of Women
The Interplay of Ethnicity and Gender: Swedish Women in Southeastern Saskatchewan
From Montreal and Venice with Love: Migrant Letters and Romantic Intimacy in Italian Migration to Postwar Canada
PART FOUR Labouring Domestics and Canadian Constraints
In Search of Comfort and Independence: Irish Immigrant Domestic Servants Encounter the Courts, Jails, and Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ontario
Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s
I Care for You, Who Cares for Me? Transitional Services of Filipino Live-in Caregivers in Canada
PART FIVE Constructing Symbols and Bodies
Fashioning Conflicts: Gender, Power, and Icelandic Immigrant Hair and Clothing in North America, 1874–1933
A Larger Frame: “Redressing” the Image of Doukhobor Canadian Women in the Twentieth Century
Propaganda and Identity Construction: Media Representation in Canada of Finnish and Finnish Canadian Women during the Winter War of 1939–1940
PART SIX Activists and Political Subjects
Introduction
Canadian Citizens or Dangerous Foreign Women? Canada’s Radical Consumer Movement, 1947–1950
Haitian Feminist Diasporic Lakou: Haitian Women’s Community Organizing in Montreal, 1960–1980
“An Unlikely Collection of Union Militants”: Portuguese Immigrant Cleaning Women Become Political Subjects in Postwar Toronto
PART SEVEN Food, Family, and Culture
The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women
Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food
Consuming Food and Constructing Identities among Arabic and South Asian Immigrant Women
PART EIGHT History, Identity, and Belonging PART EIGHT History, Identity, and Belonging
“Slotting” Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947–1967
Experience and Identity: Black Immigrant Nurses to Canada, 1950–1980
The Mother of God Wears a Maple Leaf: History, Gender, and Ethnic Identity in Sacred Space
PART NINE Trauma, Violence, and Memory
Surviving Their Survival: Women, Memory, and the Holocaust
“Days You Remember”: Japanese Canadian Women and the Violence of Internment
Feminist Oral History and Assessing the Duelling Narratives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora
Contributors
Credits

Citation preview

SISTERS OR STRANGERS? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History Second Edition

Spanning more than two hundred years of history, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, Sisters or Strangers? explores the complex lives of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in Canada. Among the themes examined in this new edition are the intersection of race, crime, and justice, the creation of white settler societies, letters and oral histories, domestic labour, the body, political activism, food studies, gender and ethnic identity, and trauma, violence, and memory. The second edition of this influential essay collection expands its chronological and conceptual scope with fifteen new essays that reflect the latest cutting-edge research in Canadian women’s history. Introductions to each thematic section include discussion questions and suggestions for further reading, making the book an even more valuable classroom resource than before. (Studies in Gender and History) marlene epp is a professor in the Departments of History and Peace and Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo. franca iacovetta is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Studies in Gender and History General Editors: Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky

Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History Second Edition

Edited by MARLENE EPP AND FRANCA IACOVETTA

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. First edition published in 2004 ISBN 978-1-4426-3110-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4426-2913-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sisters or strangers Sisters or strangers? : immigrant, ethnic and racialized women in Canadian history/edited by Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta. − Second edition. (Studies in gender and history ; 44) Revision of: Sisters or strangers. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-3110-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-2913-4 (paper) 1. Women immigrants – Canada − History. 2. Minority women – Canada − History. 3. Women – Canada − History. 4. Race discrimination – Canada − History. 5. Sex discrimination against women – Canada − History. I. Epp, Marlene, 1958−, editor II. Iacovetta, Franca, 1957−, editor III. Title. IV. Series: Studies in gender and history; 44 HQ1453.S58 2016

305.40971

C2016-902261-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 MARLENE EPP AND FRANCA IACOVETTA Part One: Race, Crime, and Justice A New Biography of the African Diaspora: The Odyssey of Marie-Joseph Angélique, Black Portuguese Slave Woman in New France, 1725–1734 23 AFUA COOPER Unpacking the Discursive Irish Woman Immigrant in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland 44 WILLEEN G. KEOUGH The Tale of Lin Tee: Madness, Family Violence, and Lindsay’s Anti-Chinese Riot of 1919 64 LISA R. MAR Part Two: The Making of White Settler Societies Turning Strangers into Sisters? Missionaries and Colonization in Upper Canada 89 CECILIA MORGAN

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Contents

Whose Sisters and What Eyes? White Women, Race, and Immigration to British Columbia, 1849–1871 108 ADELE PERRY Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Making of Canada as a White Settler Nation 126 ENAKSHI DUA Part Three: Letters and Tales of Settlement and Longing Letters “Home” from Canada: British Female Emigrants and the Imperial Family of Women 153 LISA CHILTON The Interplay of Ethnicity and Gender: Swedish Women in Southeastern Saskatchewan 172 LESLEY ERICKSON From Montreal and Venice with Love: Migrant Letters and Romantic Intimacy in Italian Migration to Postwar Canada 191 SONIA CANCIAN Part Four: Labouring Domestics and Canadian Constraints In Search of Comfort and Independence: Irish Immigrant Domestic Servants Encounter the Courts, Jails, and Asylums in NineteenthCentury Ontario 209 LORNA R. M C LEAN AND MARILYN BARBER Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s 231 NOULA MINA I Care for You, Who Cares for Me? Transitional Services for Filipino Live-in Caregivers in Canada 252 GLENDA TIBE BONIFACIO

$POUFOUT

vii

Part Five: Constructing Symbols and Bodies Fashioning Conflicts: Gender, Power, and Icelandic Immigrant Hair and Clothing in North America, 1874–1933 275 LAURIE K. BERTRAM A Larger Frame: “Redressing” the Image of Doukhobor Canadian Women in the Twentieth Century 298 ASHLEIGH ANDROSOFF Propaganda and Identity Construction: Media Representation in Canada of Finnish and Finnish Canadian Women during the Winter War of 1939–1940 317 VARPU LINDSTRŐM Part Six: Activists and Political Subjects Canadian Citizens or Dangerous Foreign Women? Canada’s Radical Consumer Movement, 1947–1950 351 JULIE GUARD Haitian Feminist Diasporic Lakou: Haitian Women’s Community Organizing in Montreal, 1960-1980 372 GRACE L. SANDERS JOHNSON An Unlikely Collection of Union Militants? Portuguese Cleaning Women Become Political Subjects in Postwar Toronto 393 SUSANA MIRANDA Part Seven: Food, Family, and Culture The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women 413 MARLENE EPP Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food 432 FRANCA IACOVETTA AND VALERIE J. KORINEK

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Contents

Consuming Food and Constructing Identities among Arabic and South Asian Immigrant Women 455 HELEN VALLIANATOS AND KIM RAINE Part Eight: History, Identity, and Belonging “Slotting” Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947–1967 LAURA MADOKORO

479

Experience and Identity: Black Immigrant Nurses to Canada, 1950–1980 500 KAREN FLYNN The Mother of God Wears a Maple Leaf: History, Gender, and Ethnic Identity in Sacred Space 521 FRANCES SWYRIPA Part Nine: Trauma, Violence, and Memory Surviving Their Survival: Women, Memory, and the Holocaust PAULA J. DRAPER “Days You Remember”: Japanese Canadian Women and the Violations of Internment 566 PAMELA SUGIMAN Feminist Oral History and Assessing the Duelling Narratives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora 584 NADIA JONES-GAILANI Contributors 603 Credits

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Acknowledgments

Just over a decade after its initial publication in 2004, we are pleased to present a new edition of Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History. The 27 chapters in this collection represent a mix of original essays, reprints of important articles published in the field after (and in one case before) our volume first appeared, and some entirely new or recent contributions penned by writers belonging to a new generation of migration scholars in Canada. This new edition of feminist essays aims at centring the lives of previously edged-out or marginalized female subjects and their experiences, aspirations, memories, families, allies, detractors, and communities in Canadian history. Given its aim to rewrite a once comfortable national narrative through a transnational frame that is also acutely sensitive to the differences as well as similarities in women’s lives, this volume required a collaborative effort among a diverse group of scholars. Without the enthusiasm and commitment of all the contributing authors, this new edition would have taken much longer to produce, especially given our own extremely busy professional lives. As editors, we are thus delighted to thank, first and foremost, our contributors for their continuing or new involvement with this on-going project in feminist history. We thank the original authors of this volume whose chapters we have reproduced here in condensed form for their gracious acceptance of our revisions or for carrying out the revisions themselves. We welcome and thank the established and emerging scholars among our new authors for supporting our efforts to reprint their article, in most cases in abbreviated form. The appearance here of very recent publications, or of original contributions, has allowed us to capture the current scholarship of the field’s most recent practitioners. We thank these

x Acknowledgments

authors for sharing critical research material from their dissertationbased book manuscripts and for accepting with grace our sometimes “ruthless” edits. Without our authors’ willingness to abide by our strict guidelines, whether this meant a reduction in the length of a previously published chapter in this volume or their own book or journal article or specific requests for an original contribution, we could not have met our goal of producing a new edition that is similar in length to the original volume but provides considerably more coverage of the many different groups of immigrant women as well as historical eras. We would also like to thank Len Husband, senior editor at University of Toronto Press, for his role in making this new edition possible. For its commitment to publishing this new edition, we also enthusiastically acknowledge the support of University of Toronto Press. At a time when the sea change in publishing is challenging scholarly publishing as we have known it, we are grateful for the confidence the Press has shown in us and in a volume that is both scholarly and educational in intent. Financial and institutional support was provided by other sources as well. Marlene Epp thanks Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo for its contribution to the cost of reprints, editing, and reproduction. Franca Iacovetta gratefully acknowledges the support of University of Toronto Scarborough, which awarded her the Principal’s Research Award in 2011 and Research Impact Award in 2015. A portion of those funds helped to cover the cost of reproduction. Thanks goes to Aileen Friesen, postdoctoral fellow in history, for assistance with manuscript preparation. Marlene and Franca also thank their respective partners, Paul Born and Ian Radforth, for their continuing love, respect and support, and for cooking the meals during one particularly busy summer push on the book at the Iacovetta-Radforth cottage in Muskoka. A list of previously published articles appears separately, but here we wish to thank the various publishers for granting the permission to reprint abbreviated versions of these articles. We also thank UTP for allowing us to reprint revised versions of the original chapters and for expediting the review process for the original contributions to this new edition.

SISTERS OR STRANGERS? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History

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Introduction M A RLEN E EPP AN D F RAN CA IACOV E T T A

In 1734 Montreal, Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved domestic, was convicted and executed for starting a fire that burned the colonial city to the ground. A powerful symbol of female resistance to slavery, Angélique was also a transnational subject; her complex identity undoubtedly reflected her origins as the descendant of African migrants who had built free diasporic communities in Portugal, as well as her forced migration to North America. A century later, in 1830, Methodist missionary Philander Smith reported on the First Nations converts to Methodism on Grape Island in the Bay of Quinte (Ontario) to her church newspaper, the Christian Guardian. With much enthusiasm for the middle-class domestic ideal imbedded in this British imperialist venture, but little regard for how interactions with the Indigenous women may have altered her, she wrote of the once “unruly” widow Peggy Mekigk and her sister who now tended to the sick at hospital. Smith also declared that those still stuck in “Weg-ka-wam” (wigwam) ways would join their Christianized sisters and thus, like them, take to running “clean” and “furnished” homes fit for a family patriarch. Another half-century later, in 1920s Manitoba, Icelandic women living in the bloc settlement along Lake Winnipeg established in the 1870s, had seriously altered the nationalist ethnic dress their grandmothers and mothers had earlier adopted and modified. They had also provocatively inserted androgynous hairstyles into the costume of Fjallkona, an Icelandic nationalist pageant queen long imbued with feminine traits that appealed to the men, thereby using hair and fibre to challenge the authority of the community’s male leaders within the public venue of an annually mounted commemorative spectacle.

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Moving forward to a more recent time period, the recorded narratives of young Iraqi refugee women recently arrived in twenty-first century Toronto are personal testaments to their experiences of trauma, loss, and migration. Like the recorded memories of Holocaust survivors who entered Canada decades earlier as refugees of the Second World War but who consented to be interviewed only as older women, the narratives reveal the complex processes by which immigrant women remember and retell their past. The observation applies as well to the former Japanese Canadian internees who were interviewed years after surviving their wartime ordeal. The interplay between the past and present is a theme central to the other oral histories in this volume, including those of French-speaking Haitian women in Quebec who in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s developed transnational radical feminist identities, and the Filipino women who since the 1990s have toiled in Canada under the restrictive Live-in Caregiver Program. Indeed, the interrelationship between past and present is a dynamic informing all historical projects, including this one. These glimpses into the lives of immigrant women over nearly three hundred years not only contribute to historical understanding, but also enable us to contextualize the present so as to better understand the experiences of immigrant women arriving in Canada today and even tomorrow. The stories, struggles, and triumphs of a diverse array of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in Canada, and how we research, assess, and even imagine their lives, or enable them to tell their stories to a scholarly or wider public, are the subjects of this book. This new, updated, and expanded edition of Sisters and Strangers, like the original volume, is first and foremost a contribution to women’s history. The essays explore the multifaceted ways in which enslaved or indentured, immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women have interacted with each other, their own menfolk and families, and their ethnic, religious, or diasporic communities. They also examine the myriad ways in which immigrant women have interacted with other Canadian women, and the various members or agents of the more dominant or powerful groups and institutions of authority and regulation they encountered in Canadian society. We find here immigrant mothers, wives, daughters, and women who did not marry; workers of all kinds and from disparate social classes; political exiles and militants; refugees and survivors of violence and trauma; community-builders and religious believers. In many respects, the contents of this second edition of Sisters or Strangers reflect the national and international debates, shifts in focus

Introduction

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or analysis, and evolution of historical writing about immigrant women in Canada over the past three decades. That writing began in earnest in the late 1970s and especially the 1980s as part of a collective feminist project to “recover” the histories of neglected and marginalized immigrant women. The publication in 1986 of the first major scholarly book devoted exclusively to immigrant women, Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’s History, edited by sociologist Jean Burnet, was described as a “pioneering enterprise” in the field of Canadian women’s history. This collection of thirteen essays in Canadian immigrant women’s history followed a stimulating conference organized by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) which included scholars, community historians, and students of women’s history. This award-winning volume marked an important milestone in the early efforts to chronicle the life stories of immigrant women and position them as important actors in Canadian history. It was part of an emerging trend to “rewrite” the Canadian past from a social history perspective, what immigration historian Robert F. Harney, who initiated the project, described as the 1960s-inspired “concern in history writing for all the people.”1 The book was widely used, particularly in university and college courses in women’s history, immigration history, and women’s studies. As contributors to that original project – we were then graduate students, as were many of the authors – we agreed with the sentiment expressed on the book’s back cover, that this project of historical recovery was an important “beginning” and that “much remains to be done.” A central aim of Looking into My Sister’s Eyes was recovering the voices of women, whether by reading archival documents against the grain (such as interpreting historical documents in ways not intended by their original authors) or oral interviews. Another key aim was telling the stories of individual women and groups of women marginalized even in Canadian women’s history. The book also emphasized women’s contributions to their families and ethnic communities in a Canadian, specifically Ontario, setting. Hence, the repeated references to “contributing to ethnic cohesion,” “creating and sustaining an ethnocultural heritage,” and helping to form “community consciousness.” This “contributive” approach was evident in the many chapters that shed light on women in ethnic communities, such as those dealing with women’s charitable and religious work within the Jewish and Armenian communities, and women’s activity in Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Greek, and Mennonite ethnic organizations.

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Some of the essays pointed to the labouring identities of immigrant women, including Finnish and British domestics, a Chinese restaurant and laundry owner, and Italian factory workers. Many of the essays also explored female immigrant roles and experiences within patriarchal family structures. The project represented a coming together of a vibrant and enthusiastic scholarship in women’s history with an optimistic national ethnic revivalism, or “multiculturalism,” a term that, following the critiques of anti-racism scholars, we use advisedly.2 The essays reflected, as well, the personal identities of their authors who chose to write about the communities to which they themselves belonged or with which they identified themselves. Hence, the “recuperative” act of historical research and writing was both political and personal. Indeed, many of the authors referred in some way to the “insider-outsider” dilemma (or opportunity) – the relative merits and pitfalls of researching and writing from within or outside of a group or culture – although they were not explicitly self-reflective about the tensions, creative or otherwise, about it.3 Also, while the authors may have shared an “insider” relationship with their subject matter, they did not necessarily have a common political or intellectual mandate beyond that of writing once silenced or neglected immigrant women into community, political, labour, or national histories. Although there was a certain “sisterly” feeling that participants in the project were embarking on something new, important, and even path-breaking in the study of Canadian history, the image and reality of sisterhood as a construct for thinking about the history of immigrant women was limited. Many of the essays in Looking into My Sister’s Eyes addressed differences or tensions, particularly those related to class, but the diverse groups of women examined were viewed largely as “sisters” – if not in relation to each other, then certainly with respect to the emphasis that the contributors placed on the commonalities they shared, especially with regard to their marginal positions vis-à-vis the anglophone or francophone majority. Also present, and equally unarticulated, was the notion that they were “sisters” by virtue of their shared sex and socially prescribed gender roles, whose combined impact cut across any differences arising from ethnicity or race. The most glaring omission was the absence of racialized subjects; the one exception was an essay on Chinese women that also offered a corrective to the portrait of the male-only character of early twentieth-century Chinese migration to Canada. The 1986 volume was rightly chastised for

Introduction

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its Eurocentrism and overwhelming whiteness in authorship and topic, but it took at least another decade to broadly apply theories of race, or simply to think more in critical race ways, about the implications of a white women’s immigrant project in Canadian history. Even as Looking into My Sister’s Eyes was being celebrated, then, the feminist cohesion and bonding implied in the title was being questioned. The questioning coalesced around a workshop and the edited collection of essays that resulted in the first edition of Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, published by University of Toronto Press in 2004. In many ways, both the 1999 workshop and subsequent book were framed as a response to the earlier text. In the years in between, the topic of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women had attracted significant attention, discussion, and debate, and in the process, the boundaries of the field had been widened and in some respects redefined. Most scholars of immigrant and refugee women, including left feminist scholars like ourselves and others who participated in the workshop, remained committed to writing about still neglected female subjects and to “mainstreaming” the history of such women into both women’s and gender history, and Canadian history more broadly. Consequently, the book’s chapters represented a greater number and diversity of ethnic groups within which the specificity of gendered experience was being recovered and analysed. The scholarship that went into the 2004 project was also representative of the growth and legitimation during the 1990s (even despite a conservative backlash4) of new social histories that recognized regionalism, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as important categories of analysis and identity variables in shaping the Canadian experience. In this regard, the various streams of social history were mutually influential and in conversation with each other, so that immigration histories became informed by questions asked by women’s labour history, family and childhood history, and the history of sexuality, for example. Vibrant scholarship emerged that illuminated historical actors with multiple identities – as workers, as wives and mothers, as physical bodies, as religious believers, as political activists, for instance. While the possibility of writing “a” Canadian history became increasingly unfeasible, greater complexity made for a richer and deeper collection of histories. In our view, the evolution of a national story – if such indeed exists – revolves around the interaction between and negotiations over privilege and power among people with varied backgrounds, histories, and experiences based on group identification.

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Stressing the multiple intersectional identities of immigrant and racialized women, feminist anti-racist historians increasingly called for a Canadian history that analysed people and events within complex frameworks in which women act with multidimensional interests. During the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, scholars working within other subject areas of social history, and in related social science sister disciplines, including critical race studies and postcolonial studies, carried this questioning even further. They investigated the history of racialized women from a range of vantage points. They also pushed and pulled at the boundaries defining the field, introduced new theoretical insights and paradigms, and rearticulated often taken-for-granted categories such as nation, nation-building, and borders.5 For instance, within the fields of women’s studies and feminist anthropology, greater attention was being paid to issues of transnationalism and exile in the lives, writings, and identities of female migrants, as well as their experiences of gendered violence in the war-torn or colonized states from which they originated.6 At the same time, studies of women and citizenship raised questions regarding how immigrant and refugee women develop national identities and begin to function as citizens in their adopted country, often against a tide of racism or hostility.7 Also enriching the study of immigrant women was the critical work being done by political scientists, sociologists, and historians who were exploring the relationship between Canada’s status as a white settler nation and its imagined self-identity as a liberal “nation of immigrants,” combined with its disreputable history as a colonizer of Indigenous peoples. In the process, hitherto separate areas of investigation, such as immigration and Indigenous histories, were being brought together.8 The then burgeoning field of postcolonial theory also presented new frameworks for re-evaluating the subjectivities of white women colonizers and their complicit roles as oppressors of Indigenous and other not-white women.9 The application of these theoretical questions to historical research was accompanied by close scrutiny of official policies and practices of multiculturalism. The policies were critiqued for masking racism and an ethnic “vertical mosaic” that perpetuated exclusionary attitudes and behaviour towards individuals and groups who exist outside an essentialist image of a Canadian as not only white but also of English or French background. Leading feminist anti-racist critics such as Himani Bannerji did not accept the idea that a multicultural policy meant to show some accommodation for white ethnic groups could even begin

Introduction

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to accommodate people of colour, including migrant women, and those from not-white or so-called Third World countries.10 All of these fresh insights, perspectives, and commentaries required some significant rethinking especially with respect to the creation of racialized and hierarchical relationships between immigrant women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Hence, the main question informing the Sisters or Strangers project – prompting the question mark in the title – was whether notions of sisterhood could justifiably be applied between women whose dominant racial or class experiences are antithetical? Were immigrant women, or women who were othered by virtue of race, ethnicity, and minority status, truly sisters? Or did their historical experience make them feel more like strangers – with each other, within the nation, within their immigrant and ethnic communities, and sometimes even within their own homes? As the growing body of anti-racist and anti-colonialist thought argued, women barred from genuine power and resources by virtue of racial or ethnic identity are indeed “strangers” in a country where privilege and opportunity fall according to racist and sexist criteria. As two of the editors of the 2004 collection, we made much of the question mark in Sisters or Strangers, arguing that by posing the question, we were recognizing that historical experience is so often characterized by dichotomies – that cohesion could be offset by alienation, that common gender can exist alongside oppression, that women could be simultaneously attracted and repelled by their ethnicity, that women’s contributions might be undermined by their exclusion or marginalization, and that victimization and agency are never mutually exclusive. One woman’s experience of becoming Canadian might be very different from another’s, and as such, questions of difference are as important to understanding immigrant women’s lives as are questions of commonality. We also recognized, however, that neither life experiences nor scholarly analyses can be fully comprehended by reference to neatly defined dichotomies or opposing dualisms; the situation at hand is usually more complex, and the answers less clearly a matter of this or that, of right or wrong. Thus, our carefully placed question mark was meant to signify not only that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether immigrant women are insiders or outsiders – sisters or strangers – vis-à-vis the host society women, but also that the relationship itself can change and differ depending on context. That title and question mark, we added, also revealed our agreement with feminist critiques of a women’s history that stressed the commonalities that women shared while

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disregarding or downplaying the divisions among them. Finally, an underlying aim of all of the chapters of Sisters or Strangers was to analyse the encounter between immigrant women and the nation in which they settled. To do so, the authors adopted theoretical frameworks – including feminist anti-racist and postcolonial thinking – and used the methods and sources popularized by women’s and social historians. Just over ten years after the publication of Sisters or Strangers, it was time to again offer an update in the field of Canadian immigrant women’s history. A proliferation of new studies by senior and established as well as new and emerging scholars has widened the topics, methods, and approaches even further, allowing for a near-abundance of work to include in a second edition. Consequently, this edition maintains the title, but endeavours to fill gaps and further the field of study. It also attempts to reflect the evolving realities of immigrant Canada today. In the midst of what some proposed was an increasingly racialized and restricted immigration policy on the part of an almost decade-long Conservative federal government (2006–2015), the diversity in ethnicity and country of origin for immigrants to Canada increased significantly over the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, so that a “nation of immigrants” – if by that we mean a diverse population – is more and more Canada’s reality. The first edition of Sisters or Strangers included research on Japanese, Chinese, black, African, Aboriginal, Irish, Finnish, Ukrainian, Italian, Jewish, Mennonite, Armenian, and South Asian Hindu women. This new edition covers an even greater cross-section of the many peoples who have made Canada a nation of immigrants; it includes new chapters on Arabic, Greek, Haitian, Portuguese, Doukhobor, Swedish, Filipino, Icelandic, and Iraqi women. We still do not claim to be comprehensive in subject, group, or period covered; nor do we think one can achieve greater diversity by simply increasing the number of different groups covered. We did, however, want this new edition to resemble something closer to the classic Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History, currently in its fourth edition – a huge volume with thirty-six articles covering a wide range of topics, spanning several hundred years, and embracing numerous categories of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in US history. Far more than just size, however, we wanted to emulate the efforts of Unequal Sisters to “incorporate the lessons of an intersectional feminism, in which identity incorporates multiple dimensions so that one is not merely gendered or raced or classed or abled but all of these factors combine and refract upon each other in a mezcla (mixture) of self and society.”11

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If not as “inclusive” as the US reader, this new edition of Sisters or Strangers does capture an even greater cross-section of the women and female groups who migrated to Canada across a longer historical period – nearly three hundred years. It does so by moving back in time, to early eighteenth-century New France and Afua Cooper’s study of the enslaved Angélique as well as moving forward to the very recent migration of Iraqi refugee women studied by Nadia Jones-Gailani. This edition also offers better regional and rural coverage. Furthermore, the inclusion of new works on “British” immigrants well demonstrates how historians using “newer” (to them) sources and approaches to reexamine what was earlier critiqued as prioritizing white women migrants are producing new and fresh insights. Once again, migration and settlement are part of each chapter’s story, but immigration or migration or transnational migration is conceptualized from a number of different angles. In some cases, female immigrants are the active subjects; in others, they are the targets of external social, political, or legal agendas. In some of the essays, immigration is a recent personal experience; in others, migration, whether forced, voluntary, or assisted, is a phenomenon felt in the lives of second- and third-generation Canadians. This edition, then, like the first, offers important insights into the differences between voluntary immigrants and involuntary refugees, slaves, or political exiles, between Indigenous Canadians and recent newcomers, and between ethnic or racial identities that individuals and groups willingly adopt and those that are imposed on them. The essays show immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women interacting in one way or another with Canadian (or pre-Canadian) society. These interactions take the form of encounters with state institutions, such as the courts, and government immigration and settlement officials. They also involve interactions with employers, charitable and religious organizations, neighbourhoods, and resident Canadians. In addition, the essays show women acting within the context and priorities of their own particular ethnic or racial groups, as members of communities and families that are self-defined and inward-looking and who often maintain ties with “their people” outside Canada, or as members who protest, in different ways, the injustices of society, in some cases acting with defiant communities or springing into action because of great disagreement with imposed inequalities. The implications are great for how we as historians, and we as Canadians, understand the role of ethnicity and race in our history and society. This project continues to invite ways of rewriting Canadian history or questioning the national metanarrative through the lens of some of

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its most marginalized or silenced figures, but also some of those most transnational in outlook. In that regard, the essays here reflect as well the “transnational turn” in history, though one fully cognizant of the power nation-states can yield over peoples and the limitations that borders can impose on those eager or desperate to move. Alongside of and complementing migration histories that stress the differentiated experiences of immigrants based on their class, race, and ethnicity in the context of a privileged settler society, twenty-first century studies are increasingly theorized around concepts of transnationalism and diaspora. Immigration historians like us recognize migrants as transnational people, and national borders and boundaries as fluid. This may be especially true for women who, in the past and present, are frequently left out of, or disadvantaged by, the “nation-building” agenda of the state. Scholars of international migration and gendered nationalism suggest that nationalism is often a male construct imposed on women who may well prioritize other loyalties over the nation-state.12 For international migrants, dual identities that physically and/or mentally situate individuals in both their pre- and post-migration settings significantly distort national allegiances. Also, globalization – seen in initiatives like the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement – blurs the significance of national borders, and thus identities; some persons can move freely across national boundaries, while others, such as temporary migrant workers, are closely monitored and controlled. The notion that migration was not just a linear uprooting and transplantation is not new. In their histories of various groups of migrants to the United States or Canada, authors like American immigration historian Donna Gabaccia often followed the migrants from their sending villages and towns, usually in Europe, to their locales of sojourning and/or settlement in the “new world,” thereby “signal[ing] a dawning view of migration as a lived connection between two geographical places rather than as an element in the national history of a single nation.”13 These historians sought to capture the immigrants’ experience of being connected to, and even moving back and forth between, places over the course of a single lifetime. The concept of transnationalism prompted historians to ask about immigrant women’s ongoing emotional attachments (or not) to their homeland, and noted their articulations of what were often hybrid identities. Yet, to avoid essentializing female identities, we need to distinguish between the different kinds of relationships that women might have to their homeland and/or to their experience of multiple border-crossings. For example, some of

Introduction

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the new chapters examine the transnational political activism of women whose sense of identity was influenced by both their homeland and host-land contexts. Other chapters probe the intense loyalty or hatred that certain women maintain towards the politics of their homelands. In addition to the chapters in the first edition of Sisters or Strangers that situated their individual subjects in multiple territories, with subjects that crossed borders mentally and/or physically, essays in the second edition reflect the “transnational turn” in a more intentional manner. A consideration of the transnational social practices and networks that typically linked individuals to many different foreign places also takes us to the terms “diaspora” and “diasporic identities.” Some scholars have expressed concern that today the idea of a diaspora – the scattering of a people from one homeland to many locales whether by force (as in African slavery, Jewish escape from pogroms, or the deportation of the Acadians) or choice – is being used too loosely. Some criticize the use of diaspora to refer “to just about any population which is considered ‘deterritorialised’ or ‘transnational’ – that is, which has originated in a land other than which it currently resides, and whose social, economic and political networks cross the borders of nation-states or, indeed, span the globe.”14 Nevertheless, for contemporary refugees, movement across multiple borders and temporary settlement in multiple nation-states is increasingly common, making their diasporic identities ever more complex. For female immigrants, diaspora, like notions of nationalism, may have particular gendered implications. Feminist scholars have suggested that the idea and reality of diaspora for many female immigrants may fit the notion of a “third space” that is both and neither the original geographical homeland nor the settled destination but instead exists on a symbolic plane situated outside of the binaries of home and away.15 In this sense, diaspora is an emotional and psychological state of existence as much as it is indicative of physical movement. A diasporic identity might reflect the dual or multiple sites on which one’s migration experiences occurred as well as one’s ties to kin, compatriots, or political allies located elsewhere in that diaspora. Many of the new chapters in this edition address these ideas. The growth in other interdisciplinary fields of study has also influenced recent studies of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women. The intersection of food studies – now a lively area of inquiry in many disciplines – within women’s studies and migration studies has prompted historians of female immigrants to focus on food in a variety of ways, and this is reflected in a separate section in this edition. The use of

14

Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta

material history methods based on the analysis of artefacts and the growth in the history of “the body” also inform new work on immigrant women. As well, the increasing use of oral history as a method and theoretical debates surrounding the use and interpretation of such narratives, as well as other autobiographical sources, is evident in many of the case studies here. The introductions to each section of this volume say more about these and related themes. As does the original publication of Sisters or Strangers, this new edition represents a contribution to feminist gender history, in this case meaning that a focus on women also reveals much about gender relations between men and women, and the unequal gender power dynamics of the family, workplace, and other institutions and organizations. The volume is in dialogue with critical race and postcolonial perspectives more so than with a postmodernist stance that denies the narrative, material, or experiential, and it also acknowledges a relational but never tension-free relationship between women’s and gender history.16 In venturing beyond the female experience itself, certain authors analyse how expectations and limitations based on gender were part of that experience and how new gender identities might be forged in different contexts, both local and transnational. Other scholars address men’s as well as women’s experiences, or use men’s recollections to illuminate myths or understandings of female figures. Furthermore, all of the authors recognize that gender is a relational category and that the definitions of women’s roles inevitably also say something about the gendered attributes of men. A few comments about the structure of this second edition are in order. To include as many new chapters (original contributions and – often shortened – reprinted publications) as possible, we shortened most of the chapters retained from the first edition. The deletions in text are indicated with ellipses. To enhance the educational value of this text as a teaching and learning tool in undergraduate courses and to encourage informed debate and further research at the graduate level, we begin each of the nine thematic sections with a short introduction that places the readings in historical and historiographical contexts and that provides questions for discussion and additional suggested readings. We have designed the volume with several different types of courses in mind: as a core text in seminars in Canadian or comparative immigrant women’s history and/or women’s or immigration history courses more generally; and as a supplementary source of readings for courses in Canadian survey, women’s, social, and gender history courses, or for

Introduction

15

multidisciplinary courses in women’s and gender studies. Instructors may well rearrange the articles according to their own thematic categories. Finally, even while we offer this second edition of Sisters or Strangers as more broadly inclusive than the first, we acknowledge that gaps exist – in geographical region, in time period, in ethnic group, in source country, in immigrant category, in other identity markers – and hope that the studies collected in this volume will serve to inspire another generation of historians keen to explore and analyse the histories of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in Canada and beyond.

NOTES 1 Robert F. Harney, “Preface” to Jean Burnet, ed., Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’s History (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986), x. 2 Examples include May Chazen et al., eds., For Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2011); Augie Fleras, Racisms in Multicultural Canada: Paradoxes, Politics, and Resistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, rev. ed. (Toronto: Penguin, 2002). 3 This issue is discussed by American historian of Irish and Jewish women Hasia R. Diner in her “Insights and Blind Spots: Writing History from Inside and Outside,” in Diane Zimmerman Umble et al., eds., Strangers at Home: Amish and Mennonite Women in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 21–38. See also Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Stacey Zembrzycki, According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). 4 Here we are referring to the debates prompted by Michael Bliss’s and Jack Granatstein’s claims that women’s and social historians were preoccupied with local and/or insufficiently significant subjects at the expense of addressing more important national themes. See J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998); Michael Bliss, “Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (Winter 1991–2): 5–17; and, for the critical responses, Veronica Strong-Boag, “Contested Space:

16

5

6

7

8

Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta The Politics of Canadian Memory,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (1994): 3–18; A.B. McKillop, “Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches,” Canadian Historical Review 80, 2 (1999): 269–99; and Franca Iacovetta, “Post-Modern Ethnography, Historical Materialism, and Decentring the (Male) Authorial Voice: A Feminist Conversation,” Histoire sociale/Social History 33 (2000): 275–93. See, for example, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997); Cynthia Cockburn, The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998); Rick Wilford and Robert L. Miller, eds., Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition (London: Routledge, 1998); Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London: Routledge, 2000); and the special issues of Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, “Immigrant and Refugee Women,” 19, 3 (Fall 1999), and “National Identity and Gender Politics,” 20, 2 (Summer 2000). See, for instance, the special issue of Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, “Women in Conflict Zones,” 19, 4 (Winter 2000); and subsequent book, Wenona Giles et al., eds., Feminists under Fire: Exchanges across War Zones (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003). See, for instance, Himani Bannerji, Returning the Gaze: Essays in Racism, Feminism and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993); Peggy Bristow et al., eds., “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up”: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Vijay Agnew, Resisting Discrimination: Women from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and the Women’s Movement in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Sherene Razack, Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson, Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1999); Agnes Calliste and George J. Sefa Dei, Anti-Racist Feminism: Critical Race and Gender Studies (Halifax: Fernwood, 2000). See, for example, Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Corey Snelgrove, Rita Dhamoon, and Jeff Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, 2 (2014): 211–47; and the following debate: Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, 4 (2005): 120–43, and

Introduction

9

10

11

12

17

response, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, 3 (2008–09): 120–38. Examples include Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See, for example, Himani Bannerji, ed., Returning the Gaze; her The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000); Vic Satzewich, ed., Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in 90s Canada (Halifax: Fernwood, 1992); Veronica Strong-Boag et al., eds., Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998). That this critique remains important is suggested by Eve Haque, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), and Sheyfali Saujani, “Empathy and Authority in Oral Testimony: Feminist Debates, Multicultural Mandates, and Reassessing the Interviewer and her ‘Disagreeable’ Subjects,” Histoire sociale/Social History 45, 90 (November 2012): 361–91, but it also bears noting that Bannerji has since written a reconsidered reflection of the topic. While still attuned to its limitations, Bannerji suggests that multiculturalism, fully implemented, can potentially enable racialized women and people (“the multicultural others”) to mount genuine democratic struggles aimed at attaining greater equity, respect, and dignity for everyone. See Himani Bannerji, “Multiple Multiculturalisms and Charles Taylor’s Politics of Recognition,” in Barbara Saunders and David Haljan Leuven, eds., Whither Multiculturalism? A Politics of Dissensus (Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2003), 35–45. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). On the shifting character of the US literature on immigrant women, see, for example, Donna R. Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, & Immigrant Life in the U.S. 1820–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Donna R. Gabaccia and Vicky Ruiz, eds., American Dreaming, Global Realities: Rethinking U.S. Immigration History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006). See Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives. Also Franca Iacovetta, “Gendering Trans/National Histories: Feminists

18

13 14 15

16

Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta Rewriting Canadian History,” Journal of Women’s History 19, 1 (Spring 2007): 206–13. Donna R. Gabaccia, “Juggling Jargons: Transnationalism,” Traverse 1 (2005): 51. Steven Vertovec, “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’ Exemplified among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora 7, 2 (1999): 277–99. Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (London: Routledge, 2001) referenced in Moya Kneafsey and Rosie Cox, “Food, Gender and Irishness: How Irish Women in Coventry Make Home,” Irish Geography 35, 1 (2002): 7. On the concept of a third space, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); on feminist use of a “third space” as “a safe space” in oral interview contexts, see Nadia Jones-Gailani’s chapter in this book. Although many assume gender history is necessarily written from a postmodern perspective, historians working within different paradigms, including a material feminist one, have developed gendered approaches. See, for example, Iacovetta, “Gendering Trans/National Historiographies.”

PART ONE Race, Crime, and Justice

For far too long, immigrant women in Canada (as elsewhere) were neglected or portrayed as “women in the shadows” rather than historical actors in their own right. Especially since the 1980s, however, feminist historians and scholars have shown how a consideration of immigrant women’s aspirations, struggles, losses, and triumphs (however modest) offers a critical lens through which to address major themes and debates in Canadian history and, moreover, to reassess conventional understandings of Canada as a nation-state and as a “nation of immigrants.” In an effort to shed light on much-maligned immigrant women of humble origins who migrated in earlier eras, and who did not leave behind a written record, historians have turned to a variety of sources, including the records of civil and criminal courts which were more likely to capture the law’s intervention in the lives of the lower orders than those of the middling stratum or elites. These and other sources have also enabled feminist historians of “ordinary” or “marginalized” women to consider how the interlocking power nexus of gender, race, and class constrained or oppressed migrant women, and how they tried to mediate or alleviate its impact. They have also been used to consider the multiple roles such women performed and the formation of their subjective identities. A central theme linking the chapters in this section, which together span three centuries from early eighteenth-century New France and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland under British rule, to early twentieth-century Ontario is that of race, crime, and justice. In 1734, Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman in New France was arrested, tortured (according to French legal custom), convicted, and hanged for setting a fire that destroyed the home of her mistress

20

Part One

and much of Montreal. During the period from the 1750s to the 1880s, Irish Catholic immigrant women in Newfoundland, many of whom arrived as domestic servants and who became indispensable to their family-run fishery and household, appeared on various charges before the Anglo-Protestant–run courts. And in the mainly white community of Lindsay, Ontario, a Chinese immigrant woman’s attempt in 1919 to escape from what many believed was an abusive marriage triggered a race riot. This same woman, Lin Tee, also faced an insanity trial, thus further complicating how we might understand her life, and whether we think she, or the husband who claimed she was mentally ill, received fair justice. Together, the chapters shed light on different types of migration: Angélique, who was born a free woman in Portugal, became part of a forced migration that produced a scattering of African and Africandescended peoples across the Atlantic world, while the Irish and Chinese subjects were part of much larger migration waves of volunteer economic immigrants who came to Canada to improve their standing. All the women featured here were racialized by, and also deemed to be inferior to, the more powerful authorities and dominant groups of the “host society.” At the same time, these women tried to resist or defy that authority and to assert some autonomy over their own lives and those of loved ones. The essays also make clear that a fuller understanding of these women must take into account their pre-migration lives and the links they enjoyed, or lost, to family, kin, and others at home or elsewhere in the diaspora. The chapters also underscore important differences. All the authors use legal sources in conjunction with other sources, but they differ in approach and theoretical perspective. Drawing on the multidisciplinary scholarship on diaspora – a term that, historically, has been used to discuss forced migrations like slavery – and more specifically the African diaspora, Afua Cooper suggests that Angélique embodied “double or triple diasporic” identities – to Africa through ancestry, to Portugal and Europe, where she lived for years as a free woman, and to the Americas, to which she migrated and lived as an enslaved woman. As an African Canadian historian of women, Cooper draws on leading cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy and his important book on the Black Atlantic, and also responds critically to his theorization of a Black Atlantic world that left out Canada. In her treatment of Irish Catholic women in colonial Newfoundland, Willeen Keough juxtaposes the negative discourses surrounding these women that derived from the British authorities

Race, Crime, and Justice

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with the negative discourses produced by the Catholic Church, and, finally, with the very different discourses captured in the oral traditions of Irish Catholic Newfoundlanders. It is through attention to the recorded folk oral traditions that Keough demonstrates how women developed their own identities in between the imposed discourses and the lived realities of their lives. In her treatment of Lin Tee, Lisa Mar also focuses less on female “experience” than on analysing the “discourse” surrounding the events in question. Mar’s chapter points to the conflicts that immigrant women experienced inside their families – a theme that earlier authors in the field avoided partly because of an antipathy to unfair stereotypes of “foreigners.” Feminist critiques of the family are evident in the arguments made about immigrant families being not just cohesive bulwarks against “Canadian” society but also sites for marital discord and generational conflict. A greater willingness to make public topics formerly too private for exposure is well demonstrated in Mar’s chapter. What do historians mean when they say race is socially constructed? How does an intersectional mode of analysis that takes into account the categories of gender, race, class – and sometimes sexuality, too – help us to better understand immigrant women? How does an approach that seeks to retrieve social “experience” differ from one that highlights the “discursive” representation of women?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Bristow, Peggy, et al., eds. “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up”: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Canning, Kathleen. “Feminist History and the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, 2 (1994): 368–404. Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006. Erickson, Lesley. Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Keough, Willeen. The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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Nipp, Dora. “But Women Did Come: Working Chinese Women in the Interwar Years.” In Jean Burnet, ed., Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’s History. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986. Scott, Joan Wallach. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, 5 (1986): 1053–75. Walker, Barrington. Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

A New Biography of the African Diaspora: The Life and Death of Marie-Joseph Angélique, Black Portuguese Slave Women in New France, 1725–1734 A f ua C ooper

Introduction Studies of the African diaspora have traditionally focused on groups and communities of people as opposed to individuals. But this essay looks at the life of one black enslaved woman whose life had diasporic resonance and implications. Marie-Joseph Angélique was a slave woman who was hanged for allegedly setting fire to Montreal in 1734 … She was born in Portugal, crossed the Atlantic to New England where she was owned by a Flemish or Dutch master, and later was bought by François Poulin de Francheville, a Montreal merchant. Angélique lived the last nine years of her life in Francheville’s household in Montreal. New World African diaspora studies have … focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact. Diasporic communities and experiences are created due to migrations, forced or otherwise. The construction of these experiences “is an organic process involving movement from an ancestral land, settlement in new lands, and … [sometimes] renewed settlement and movement elsewhere.”1 Angélique embodied “double or triple diasporic” identities, which resulted from her origins and migratory experiences of enslavement. Her forebears migrated from Africa to Portugal where they formed diasporic communities. Later, she left Portugal and Europe to migrate and resettle in the Americas.

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version, from Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Global Conversations: New Scholarship on the History of Black Peoples (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 46–73.

24 Afua Cooper

Because Canada has been rarely theorized as part of the African diaspora, black people in [this] country, slave and free, have been missing from discussions about this diaspora. For example, Paul Gilroy in his celebrated book The Black Atlantic failed to engage Canada as part of an extended black world … That slavery existed in Canada for over two hundred years is not a well-known … fact. That over seventy-five slave ships used in the British slave trade were built in Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Newfoundland is known only by a few. Canada might not have been a slave society like the West Indies or the United States, but it was a society with slaves … Angélique’s story [is] a chronicle of slavery, of blacks in the African diaspora, and also a Canadian story … Given her many and varied transnational identities and experiences, using the diaspora as concept and method in writing her story is useful because such a framework brings together many critical strands of narrative that otherwise could not be contained by a national history paradigm.2 In addition, Angélique’s story brings together the disparate branches of Atlantic slavery: Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English … The story provides a unique opportunity to place at the centre of a historical investigation an analysis of the “interlocking system” of oppression – gender, race, and class – as embodied in one slave woman in eighteenth-century Canada (called New France before the 1760 British conquest). Angélique was an obscure slave woman who rose to prominence and gained notoriety because of the spectacular Montreal fire that she was accused of setting. Her trial, sentencing, and hanging speak volumes about the nature of early Canadian slavery and of crime and punishment in the colony. On 10 April 1734, a fire blazed through the house of Thérèse de Couagne de Francheville, a Montreal bourgeois. Madame Francheville, a widow, lived in her house on rue St Paul with her servants and one slave woman, Marie-Joseph Angélique. The fire spread and destroyed much of the town. Accused of setting the fire, Angélique was arrested, charged, and thrown in jail. For the next six weeks she endured a gruelling trial. Found guilty, she was hanged on 21 June. Though the fire and the hanging were both spectacular events, very little has been written about them in traditional Canadian or women’s history3 [or in] the history of the black or African diaspora. Angélique’s story allows us to take a critical look at the African diaspora.

A New Biography of the African Diaspora

25

Kim Butler and others have identified five dimensions of diasporic research: (1) reasons for, and conditions of, the dispersal; (2) relationship with homeland; (3) relationship with host society; (4) interrelationships within diaspora groups; and (5) comparative studies of different diasporas. These five dimensions, especially the first three, are well suited for the study of Angélique’s experience …4 The Atlantic Slave Trade, the African Diaspora, and Slavery in New France The Atlantic trade in African captives is ultimately responsible for the arrival of Marie-Joseph Angélique in the New World. The trade in African captives to the Americas and Europe began in earnest along the western coast of Africa from the middle of the fifteenth century to 1865. Holland, France, Britain, and Portugal dominated the slave trade, with Britain, by the middle of the eighteenth century, taking the lion’s share. Estimates of the number of Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic ranged from a low of ten million to a high of fifty million. A median range is fifteen million.5 The greatest numbers of captives were taken to Brazil, Haiti, and the Caribbean, though the United States also received a significant number. As the decades and then centuries rolled by, the number of forced migrants increased dramatically, and peaked in the last half of the eighteenth century. The forced migration of Africans to the Americas occurred in direct response to the unceasing labour demands of white-owned mines, farms, plantations, and households in the Americas.6 But there was a European preamble to the transatlantic trade … At least 200,000 people were taken to Iberia in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.7 Portugal was the first European country to initiate the African slave trade. Around 1440 some of her seamen kidnapped unsuspecting Senegalese people who were working on a beach.8 The sailors took these captives to Lisbon and sold them in the slave market there. The trade grew, with the bulk of the victims taken and sold within Europe (Portugal and Spain in particular) and in Mediterranean countries. The import of African human merchandise to Portugal led to the spectacular growth of the black population in that country. By 1650, roughly one-third of the population of Lisbon (10,000) was black.9 For most of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth, the majority of African captives were taken to Lisbon, the capital of the

26 Afua Cooper

country and centre of its maritime trading activities. Many remained in the capital and were sold to residents there, but others were transported to different parts of the country … Enslaved Africans worked in a variety of occupations and for a variety of employers. A. Saunders … informs us that “except for beggars, people of all classes, from laborers to kings, owned black slaves.”10 Even Muslim and Jewish Portuguese … people who normally faced various proscriptions, owned black slaves along with their Christian neighbours. In the rural areas, the bulk of the enslaved population worked in agriculture or in households. Though primarily the province of women, both sexes laboured as house servants, cooks, and cleaners. Men and women also worked in hospitals as nurses, servants, and maids – in fact, during periods of infections and plagues, they were placed at the front line. Men especially worked as retainers in the entourages of the nobility, and both sexes served various capacities at court. Queens and princesses had slave women as ladies-in-waiting; these women apparently had a good life. Enslaved men also worked as shepherds and guarded vineyards and olive fields. Bonded labourers monopolized these occupations as free men found them distasteful … Black male slaves too worked as sailors and stevedores, but as salaried labourers. Their owners took their pay, usually giving them just a percentage of their salaries. Throughout the sixteenth century, the government sought to restrict slave men from working in the nautical professions because many enslaved mariners used … the rivers and seas to effect their escape. Male slaves also worked as carpenters, masons, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, silversmiths, and … other craft occupations. Black women, both enslaved and free, had a monopoly on certain occupations, especially in the urban areas, [such as] the distasteful work of removing garbage and excrement from the homes of whites … The women carried the excrement in tall wicker baskets … to rivers to dispose of. Women also monopolized the regateiras or street vending occupation. Black women, free and enslaved, sold stewed plums, cooked beans and pasta, cooked seafood, olive oil, fruits and vegetables. Enslaved women needed their owners’ permission to engage in vending, and had to turn over their earnings to them.11 But the good citizens often complained … that these street vendors were “unreasonable” and “insulted” ladies of rank … Apparently, it was not so much that … [as] … they did not appear docile and subservient to their betters.12

A New Biography of the African Diaspora

27

Slavery was not the only defining feature of Portuguese life … The free and enslaved … often were related by blood or marriage. Free African Portuguese founded various fraternal organizations to press for improvements in their lives and those of their enslaved brethren … These fraternities also buried their members, assisted with marriages and baptisms, and functioned as a general race upliftment society. They held dances, rallies, religious marches, and participated in carnivals. Moreover, members gave shelter to runaway slaves and assisted in their escape … [L]egislation was enacted to restrict their activities.13 The Case of Marie-Joseph Angélique Marie-Joseph Angélique was born in Portugal around 1705, very likely into slavery [… and probably …] lived in one of the main centres of black life and habitation – Lisbon, Évora, and the Algarve. Black descendants of the Moors, called Moriscos, and recently imported Africans and their descendants were the chief black population of these regions. They would have spoken diverse African languages, Portuguese, and Portuguese-creole based on African linguistic structures. If Angélique originated from one of these places, she would have been part of a vibrant Afro-Portuguese culture and … cosmopolitan environment.14 In the year of her birth and for many decades after, black slavery was still a fact of life in Portugal.15 … In her trial transcript, Angélique names New England as a place where she lived after her Atlantic crossing – but in 1725 [she] arrived in Montreal, New France. Her journey to Montreal was an odyssey. According to her trial transcript, “She was born in Portugal then sold to ‘a Flemish man’ who then sold her to Sieur Francheville.”16 We do not know whether the Fleming owned her while she was in Portugal or if he became her owner in New England. [We can assume she was sold to him in Portugal [from] the transcripts …] What we do know is that while she was living in New England her Flemish owner sold her to Francheville. According to Angélique, the Fleming sent her … to Montreal in 1725. We have to be wary of the term “New England” in mid-eighteenthcentury Canadian colonial practice. French officials often refer in a generic way to any of the northern English colonies as “New England” …17 Therefore, when the French authorities stated that the bondswoman lived in New England before she came to Montreal, they could …

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have meant that she came from the colony of New York – the Hudson Valley in particular. That her previous owner was a Fleming (a Dutchspeaking man) makes it all the more likely. … We can understand Angélique’s North American wanderings by looking at the colonial fur trade between the French, Dutch, and English … The Montreal merchants had the best furs because they controlled a vast fur-bearing hinterland west of Montreal known as Les Pays en haut (the Upper Country). This region extended west to present-day Wisconsin, and north to Lake Superior … Montreal merchants developed a lucrative trade with Dutch-speaking merchants of Albany and the Hudson Valley … The main trading route between Montreal and New York was the Richelieu/Lake Champlain road … Canadian merchants or their agents brought furs to the Albany merchants in exchange for English manufactures and luxury goods … The French kept most of the [latter] but used rum and manufactures in exchange for furs obtained from the First Nations of the Upper Country.18 … French and Dutch merchants used the Native people, the Iroquois or Five Nations in particular, as their agents and go-betweens … As “natives of the land,” the Five Nations knew of and often traversed secret routes to Albany, in addition to the more public ones … without fear or restrictions. Further, many Five Nations had removed themselves to one of the several Christian missions close to Montreal, making them well-situated, as Christians and Iroquois, to play an important role in the fur trade – legally or illegally – to Albany.19 … Slaves also trekked through the Hudson Valley to Montreal and other parts of the St Lawrence Valley. Because the New York merchants had better access to enslaved labour, they sometimes furnished slaves to the French in the St Lawrence. … Slaves also changed hands through the violent process of war … Even in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Canadians obtained slaves, through legal or aggressive means, from the Dutch and English. Coureurs de bois (French Canadian trappers), notorious for their illegal trade with Albany, soldiers, diplomats, and merchants were the principal people who obtained slaves from the English colonies.20 Slavery existed in Canada from the beginning of its colonial history … Colonists had to procure slaves … through war and trade with the English colonies, the First Nations, and by buying enslaved Africans directly from the West Indies and Louisiana … Slaves were also born in the colony.21 “Slavery was given its legal foundation in New France

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between 1689 and 1709,” as the colonial and imperial government sought to regulate the institution.22 Sections of the Code noir of 1685, the legal code that regulated slavery in the French plantation empire, were used in New France to manage black slavery.23 However, given the nature of the colony’s economy, slavery did not evolve into a large-scale enterprise. The colony existed solely to produce furs (not a labour-intensive venture) … In New France … twothirds of all slaves lived in the three urban centres of Montreal, Quebec, and Trois-Rivières … Merchants, the government, and the church held the largest number of enslaved people, but colonists from every echelon of society owned slaves …24 Enslaved persons tended to live in the same household as their owners, at least during the winter … “[T]hey became servants, gardeners, bakers, tavern keepers, stone masons, musicians, laundry workers, soldiers, sailors, fishermen, hospital workers, ferry men, executioners, and nursemaids.” Many, especially male Panis (Aboriginal slaves) were used as boatmen in the fur trade.25 … Most did not live beyond twenty years.26 … [T]he census of 1731 showed 241 slaves (both Panis and Africans) living in Montreal …27 During the decades of the 1720s and 1730s when Angélique lived in Montreal, most of the leading families living in town and in the suburbs were slaveholders.28 Under the ancien régime, enslaved Panis in New France were more numerous than enslaved blacks. This trend reversed itself after the Conquest of 1760 …29 Montreal … became the centre of the Canadian fur trade long before Angélique’s arrival in 1725 … However, by the time of the fire of 1734 … agriculture was emerging as an important economic activity.30 About three thousand people lived in Montreal at the time of the fire. It was a hierarchical community. Members of the nobility, church, and the military dominated society. … The bourgeois class, composed of important merchant families, formed a second significant echelon. The merchant elites often intermarried with the upper class, and both classes … “ruled” the community. Artisans and small merchants occupied the third level, with indentured labourers or engagés forming the fourth level. And below them were the slaves …31 Angélique’s owners, François Poulin de Francheville and his wife Thérèse de Couagne were part of Montreal’s mercantile elite. Sieur Francheville was one of [Montreal’s] principal fur traders [… and] a seigneur […who] subdivided his [St Maurice] estate into numerous plots that he rented or sold to settler-tenants … [A]t St Maurice, Francheville

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discovered iron ore and went on to build … an iron forge that eventually produced utensils and other iron goods for the domestic market and the fur trade … Francheville also owned a farm in St Michel, a village in the Montreal suburbs.32 The Franchevilles also … were well connected to other important families from both the business elite and nobility … The couple had one child who did not survive infancy.33 Francheville acquired Angélique in 1725 … A domestic in the Franchevilles’ household, and also a labourer on the St Michel farm, Angélique performed an unrelenting round of duties. She cooked, fetched firewood, cleaned, laundered, sewed, wove, ran errands, and performed other household chores … Though her work schedule was restrictive she still had a measure of freedom. She found time to take walks along the banks of the St Lawrence, visited the sick in the hospital, and participated in carnival. Her “frenchification” appeared complete when, on 28 June 1730, her owners baptized her in the Roman Catholic faith. The second article of the Code noir declared that all slaves in the colonies “were to be baptized … in the Catholic religion” … within a week of purchase.34 Yet it was five years […before] Francheville attended to that duty. She was named at her baptism “Marie-Joseph Angélique” – Marie-Joseph, in honour of her godmother, Marie-Joseph de Couagne, sister of Madame Francheville. Angélique … functioned somewhat as a surname. Her godfather was … her master. The priest was the Sulpician Father Dulescoat.35 … Angélique lost a name in her renaming in Montreal. Her Montreal owners, in their naming of her, manifested the power they held over her. The renaming of slaves by owners was a “major feature of enslavement,” states sociologist Orlando Patterson: “The changing of her name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity …”36 The bondswoman’s Montreal baptism raises several questions … Being born in Portugal, she should already have been baptized a Catholic … If [Portuguese slave] owners reneged on their duties, they faced the courts.37 Therefore, if Angélique was not baptized in Portugal, it could be that she was (secretly?) raised in a Protestant, or more likely, Jewish household … Or that once in the English colonies, she was indoctrinated into Protestantism, the Dutch Reform faith. [Or] her previous owners … raised her a “pagan.”

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… The long interval between Angélique’s arrival in Canada and … her baptism suggests that some owners did not always baptize their slaves out of Christian conviction, but rather for pragmatic reasons. Slaves in New France were also baptized on their death beds.38 [Or] Angélique herself resisted baptism. Her trial transcripts reveal that she was proud, feisty, and determined … Baptism did not translate into a more humane treatment for slaves, nor did … they … partake in communion … It appeared that in order for slaves to receive communion they had to prove their Christian worthiness.39 Angélique was pregnant when she was baptized … and that could be the reason for her baptism. In January 1731, she gave birth to a son named Eustache [who] lived for only one month. Angélique also named Jacques-César, a fellow black slave, as father. [He] belonged to Ignace Gamelin, Jr, a prosperous merchant and close friend and business associate of Francheville. When a slave woman had children, the children belonged to her owner, irrespective of the father’s status. Slave women … had no legal rights over [their] children. By 1710, law and custom in New World slavery determined the children born to slave women inherited their mother’s status. This was also the case in New France.40 Angélique proved a fertile slave. In May 1732, she gave birth again, this time to twins, Louis and Marie-Françoise … but … they also died soon after birth …41 Further, Angélique lived in a separate household from Jacques-César. The slaveholders of Montreal baptized their slaves, but they rarely encouraged them to marry and create lasting families … [T]he breaking apart of families through sale militated against the enslaved creating families … Two other major changes occurred … Sieur Francheville, her master, died in November 1733, and she began an affair with Claude Thibault, a French contract worker in Francheville’s employ … Immediately after Sieur Francheville’s demise, Angélique asked her mistress, Madame Francheville, for leave or congé (vacation or permission to go elsewhere to work). Angélique’s request was audacious because congé was permitted to free labourers, not enslaved persons. Her mistress refused. Why … make the request? She discovered that Madame Franchville had sold her, and insisted that her mistress release her from slavery. It could be that Sieur Franchville had promised Angélique her freedon, but died before granting it. Or … the sale was underway even before Francheville’s death. Angélique begged her

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mistress not to sell her. But Madame Francheville would not relent, telling Angélique … she was rude, disobedient, and incorrigible. Angélique fired back, “If you sell me, I will ‘burn’ you.” [She] had moral and “tactical” support in the form of her lover and fellow worker, Claude Thibault. He too challenged his employer’s authority, and spoke “insolently” to her.42 Fear-filled, Madame Francheville took Angélique’s threat seriously. In the second week of February … she arranged for Angélique and Thibault to live with her relative Sieur Monière. [She] would work for Monière while Thibault was contracted out to … one Sieur de Berey. Angélique would remain in Monière’s household until spring when the ice broke … and the fishing fleet was ready to head to the Gulf of the St Lawrence. Angélique would travel on one of the boats to Sieur Cugnet in Quebec. Her mistress had sold her to Cugnet for six hundred pounds of gunpowder. François-Étienne Cugnet was a French-born lawyer [who] became a senior judge in the Superior Court [and] an elite merchant … This man, firmly ensconced in the judiciary, administration, and maritime trade, was one of the richest and most important men in the colony.43 Angélique knew the reason for her removal to Monière’s, and while she was there, a servant informed her that she was to be shipped to Quebec and from there to the West Indies. Unwilling to remain a defenceless target, Angélique, upon arriving at Monière’s, fled in the company of Thibault, intent on making it to New England or another English colony [… and then] board a ship for Portugal. Thibault himself planned on returning to France … As a white male, it was easier for him to escape his servile condition than could a black slave.44 … They conspired. Thibault’s and Angélique’s flight represented a collaboration between two sets of servile workers. Flight from bondage between these two groups was a common feature of early colonial history … [They] often worked in partnership to undermine their employers and the system …45 To some degree, slaves and servants had more in common as bonded persons than a white indentured servant had with his white owners or employers. Whites in power feared this bond … and tried to break it by diverse means, including legislation.46 For Angélique and Thibault, rank and status prevailed over considerations of race … They were lovers … [and] they supported each other’s goal – to flee from Canada. Angélique wanted to return to Portugal

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and Thibault to France, more specifically, to his native province of Franche-Comté. And yet, the court record reveals that they planned to live together in Europe … Angélique seems to have thought … she would stop in Franche-Comté on her way to Portugal. It made sense for Angélique … to travel in the company of a white person, especially a white male … As a white male, Thibault could pose as her owner.47 Angélique remained a fugitive for two weeks in the snowy woods of Chambly, about eight kilometres from Montreal. Chambly sits on the Richelieu River, which flows into Lake Champlain [from which] the couple could reach a port … From a New England or New York port, Angélique hoped to board a ship for Portugal. Meanwhile, in Montreal, the authorities broadcasted the flight of Angélique and Thibault and organized a hunt for their capture. Officers of the constabulary searched the countryside, and after two weeks caught the fugitives in Chambly and returned them to Montreal. Thibault was lodged in prison and surprisingly, Angélique was sent back to her mistress. Angélique’s flight and death threat to her owner illustrate the tensions building in the Francheville household between slave and owner.48 Thérèse Francheville was Angélique’s owner, but clearly she was not her master.49 Matters only worsened … The bondswoman begged her mistress not to sell her … [and] promised to be “good …” Madame Francheville refused to budge … telling Angélique … that she behaved like a “mongrel.” Furious … Angélique “lost” it and began a reign of terror in the house. Again, she told her mistress that she would “grill and barbeque” her, and … that the French were “dogs and not worth anything.” Thérèse Francheville could only bide her time and wait for the river to thaw … With the sale to Cugnet complete, Madame Francheville made arrangements for her bondswoman to be removed to Quebec on 11 April. But this was not to be. The two women had a furious quarrel on the morning of 10 April … Anxious and agitated, Madame Francheville left the house for a walk. During Angélique’s trial, Marie-Manon, a Panise of the neighbouring de Bereys’ household, told the court that … Angélique had come over to the … house on an errand and stopped to speak with the Panise. The two slave women noticed Mesdames Desrivieres [a neighbour] and Francheville chatting and laughing. Marie-Manon related that Angélique then said to her that Madame Francheville would not sleep

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in her home that night … [and] that she was going to “burn Madame Francheville in her own house.” The Panise also said that Angélique called Madame Francheville “a bitch.”50 The Fire and Trial … Around seven o’clock that evening, someone saw smoke curling from the roof of the Franchevilles’ house and raised the alarm. Madame Francheville had gone to the evening mass, leaving Angélique in the house babysitting ten-year-old Marguerite de Couagne, Madame Francheville’s niece, and her two playmates. By the time the residents of the lower town organized themselves to fight the fire, the Francheville house was in flames. The fire spread with appalling speed, driving the frightened residents of the neighbouring houses into the streets. It blazed through the lower portion of the town, where most of the merchant families lived destroying forty-six houses … and a portion of the convent hospital L’Hôtel-Dieu.51 People … took what they saved to the hospital’s courtyard where most of those who lost their homes spent the night. Even before the embers cooled, suspicion fell on Angélique. Louis Bellefueille, the gardener of L’Hôtel-Dieu, told Angélique (who had joined the others in the courtyard) that “everyone was saying she set the fire.” Angélique replied she did not. Others present said that Angélique had publicly threatened her mistress with burning. Claude Thibault, who was among the homeless, said nothing. The night grew late, and the nuns … walked among the refugees distributing blankets. The priests of the Sulpician seminary and the Recollet fathers arrived with warm food … After eating, those who could found shelter among the hospital’s ruins and slept for the night. Angélique made her way to the chapel of the Virgin Mary which miraculously had escaped the blaze. She wrapped herself with the blanket … and tried to sleep … Early on the morning of 11April, the authorities … determined that Angélique and Thibault were the prime suspects. Officers of the constabulary quickly organized a search. At dawn, they found Angélique huddled in the small chapel, and promptly arrested her. But they could not find Claude Thibault – he had disappeared.52 They brought the bondswoman to the prison and lodged her there.53 Her trial began the morning of the next day, 12 April. In the English criminal justice system, the suspect was presumed innocent until proven guilty. In the French system, the reverse was true;

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the suspect was presumed guilty and was treated in the most hostile fashion by the prosecution. Further, the accused did not have the assistance of a lawyer. (Louis XIV had banned lawyers in the colony.54) In French criminal cases, the accused had to undergo a series of “interrogations” or questions that she was bound to answer, a process known as “question ordinaire.”55 These interrogations were usually very aggressive – sometimes torture was used “to help the accused remember.” Next, the prosecution called on witnesses who made their depositions without the accused being present. Later, the accused was confronted with the witnesses, and would deny or confirm their allegations.56 François Foucher, the king’s attorney … began summoning witnesses and taking depositions. Jacques-Cyprien, a scribe or court recorder, wrote down all of the information. Angélique’s trial began with the interrogations – a series of questions posed by Raimbault [the king’s judge and lieutenant-general in charge of civil and criminal matters]. Porlier recorded the exchange …: … We had brought before us the negresse of demoiselle de Francheville … The aforementioned, after pronouncing an oath to tell the truth, was interrogated by us as follows: asked about her name, her age, her qualities and her residence. She stated that her name was Marie-Joseph, her age twentynine, that she had been born in Portugal, and that she had been sold to a Flemish man who sold her to the late Seigneur de Francheville about nine years ago, where she remained ever since.57

It is this … narrative … that highlights in no uncertain terms Angélique’s multiple diasporic and transnational consciousness and identities: black, Portuguese, European, multilingual, multicultural, New World, and thoroughly Atlantic. But she was an enslaved woman, sharing the status of the vast majority of her fellow blacks in the Western Hemisphere. In his interrogation, Raimbault often repeated the same questions, hoping to hear a confession. But Angélique denied setting the fire. She also firmly answered “non” when asked whether Thibault was her accomplice.58 But Raimbault pressed on. If the slave woman would not tell him what he wanted to hear, he would get the information from the witnesses. With Foucher’s help, he called nearly two dozen witnesses who gave their testimonies without the accused present. Madame Francheville was the first, testifying that Angélique had cursed her and threatened to “burn” her if she did not grant the enslaved woman freedom. She said her fear of Angélique led her to sell

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her slave. Other witnesses followed. The Panise, Marie-Manon, told Raimbault that Angélique said she would burn down the house of her mistress, and called Thérèse Francheville a “bitch and a whore.” MarieLouise Poirier, who once worked as a house servant for Madame Francheville, said that she quit her job eight days before the fire because Angélique had also threatened her. She had reprimanded Angélique for drinking brandy and leaving the house without permission. Angélique responded, saying that if she ever returned to Portugal and found any French people there, she would “burn them all like dogs.” Five-year-old Amable Monière … also testified, saying that … she saw Angélique carry live coals up to the attic. (The fire started in the attic.) A neighbour, Sieur Radisson, related that when the alarm was raised, he went over to the Franchevilles’ house to help put out the fire. But Angélique told him there was no ladder … and refused to help him carry the buckets of water to throw on the blaze. Another witness claimed to have seen Angélique on the street just before the alarm was raised, fixing her gaze … at the precise spot on the roof where the fire broke out. This same witness also said that Angélique tried to prevent Marguerite de Couagne and her playmates from running to warn Madame Francheville. … Angélique’s reactions ranged from denial to defiance and manipulation. To Madame Francheville, she said, “Madame, however nasty I might be, I’m not wretched enough to commit an act of that sort.” … And to Amable Monière, “Little Amable, someone told you to tell a lie on me; come let me give you some candy so you may speak the truth.”59 After hearing from the witnesses, the court continued haranguing Angélique, sometimes on a daily basis. Convinced that she was the culprit, the king’s representative wanted her to confess to the crime. But she did not. Having called all its witnesses and done its research, the court then weighed the evidence. On the morning of 4 June, the Montreal tribunal presided over by Raimbault handed down a terrible judgment … She was found guilty of arson and given the death penalty … “She was sentenced to make honorable amends, to have her hands cut off, and be burnt alive.”60 Her ashes would then be thrown to the four winds.61 The sentence was part of the grisly French medieval punishment practices. Bodily mutilations, burning at the stake, and the casting of the ashes … were usually reserved for witches, heretics, arsonists, and those accused of other grave crimes … This punishment meant that one’s soul would be forever damned to roam the earth in agony, with

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no hope of entering Purgatory, where it would have had a chance to repent and then possibly enter Paradise. In New France, all those sentenced to die had the right to appeal. And so did Angélique. Foucher, the king’s attorney, launched her appeal to the … Conseil Supérieur housed in Quebec, the capital of the colony.62 Angélique travelled to Quebec by boat to make her appeal.63 On 12 June, the court handed down its decision upholding the death sentence, but modifying aspects of the gruesome punishment. There would be no bodily mutilation or live burning. Instead, the slave woman would still make honourable amends and then be hanged. Later, her dead body would be burnt and the ashes cast away.64 Cugnet, Angélique’s intended new owner, was one of the Conseil’s judges. He seemed not to have found [this] a conflict of interest … Twenty-first June 1734 was set as the day of the execution. At six o’clock in the morning, Raimbault, four of his assistants, the doctor from the L’Hôtel-Dieu, the royal executioner, and the scribe met Angélique in the sale de chambre (interrogation room or court room) of the prison … Raimbault once more harangued her, and not getting the confession he desired, subjected her to la question extraordinaire – interrogation under torture. Authorities in New France used this method … [when] the accused … “proved reluctant to talk.” The court was still convinced that she had set the fire, and also that she had not acted alone. The tribunal hoped that la question extraordinaire would force her to confess to [both].65 She was tortured with the brodequins,66 a popular instrument used by the authorities in France and New France and consisting of planks that were bound to the defendant’s shins forming a wooden “boot” to fit the leg and foot. Wedges were then inserted between the planks and struck with a heavy hammer to crush the bones of the reluctant confessor. The interrogator sat in front of the accused ready to fire his questions. A scribe was also on hand to record … And the torturer waited ready with his hammer. After each question, if the interrogator was not satisfied with the answer, the torturer would smash the hammer onto the defendant’s limbs.67 The “master of the means of torture” (king’s executioner) placed Angélique on the “seat of torture” and fit the brodequins around her legs. This torturer was Mathieu Leveille, an enslaved African from the island of Martinique.68 Raimbault began questioning her once more. Did she set the fire, and who was her accomplice? Angélique’s response: “No one helped me set the fire because I did not do it.” Raimbault gave the signal and the torturer smashed the hammer on the wedges of the

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brodequins. She screamed, “It’s me and no one else. I want to die!” Raimbault asked about her accomplice. She denied having any. Again, the smashing, accompanied by screams … Raimbault wanted her to say Thibault was her partner in crime … One round of the brodequins consisted of four smashings. The first round passed and still Angélique did not name an accomplice [… She] was in a weakened state. Her knees and legs were battered and bruised and she was in extreme agony. Feverish, trembling, and crying out in pain, Angélique was unable to sit upright any longer. Leveile laid her out on a mat and the doctor gave her “reviving” medicines. When Raimbault determined that [she] had sufficiently revived, he ordered another round of smashings. This was unnecessary. Angélique was in extreme pain and her body, if not her will, was broken. The last time the torturer smashed the heavy iron onto Angélique’s knee, she screamed in agony and once more confessed to the crime: “I did it, it was me monsieur, me and no one else. A bad thought came to me. I did it with a small stove. I have no accomplice.” Raimbault, frustrated that Angélique would bend no further, stopped the questioning and the smashings. Angélique at first denied having set the first, but later “confessed” under torture … If indeed she was guilty, she probably also confessed because now she felt she had nothing to lose … Still, even under torture, Angélique would not budge on one point. She insisted that Claude Thibault was not her accomplice … Did she refuse to implicate Thibault because she loved him? And is she to be believed …? Angélique was protective of Thibault, though he did not deserve her consideration. [He] had disappeared from Montreal the night of the fire and was never seen again. The authorities named him as Angélique’s accomplice and for two years had a warrant out for his arrest. But he was never caught. Angélique would face the gallows alone. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the prison clerk came to her cell and ritualistically read the death sentence to her. Father Navetier, the Sulpician priest accompanied him. Navetier heard Angélique’s confession and gave her final rites. Leveille, the royal hangman … [held] the rubbish cart to take her to the gallows. Angélique was readied for her role. She wore a long white chemise with the word “arsonist” embroidered at the front … She had a flaming torch. The cart took her on a “tour” of the area devastated by the fire and stopped in front of the parish church of Notre Dame. Here she carried out the ritual of making

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honourable amends. On the steps of the church, on bended knee, she cried in a loud voice, “I beg pardon of God, the king and Justice, for the crime I committed!” She repeated this three times. Angélique was then taken to the gallows and hanged. Her body was later burnt and the ashes cast to the four winds. Conclusion Even though Marie-Joseph Angélique, under torture, admitted to setting the fire, we will never know for sure if she did it. Was she a vengeful slave or a scapegoat? She had at least two motives … her desire for freedom … [and] vengeance. Angélique was upset and angry when she discovered that her owner had sold her and vowed to get even. Arson was also a chief mode of resistance used by New World enslaved Africans in their struggle against enslavement. [They] burnt their owners’ plantations, homes, cities, and settlements in their struggle against slavery. On the other hand, she could have been scapegoated. From all accounts, Angélique was not a docile slave …69 She was defiant, feisty, foul-mouthed, and bad-tempered. She talked of burning her mistress and all French people. Her attitude and behaviour endeared her to no one … The bondswoman’s desperate desire to return to Portugal reveals the centrality of Portugal in her mind. Even if she was enslaved in Portugal, she likely had relatives there and would have been part of a larger black community. In New France, she was isolated and alienated from society … But perhaps she had not been a slave in Portugal but was tricked, sold, or kidnapped into slavery? … Often upon arriving in the New World, Africans yearned to return to “Guinea” or Africa. But not Angélique – her “Guinea” was Portugal. The discovery and recovery of Angélique’s story provides us with knowledge, information, and insight into an understudied area of the black diaspora – Canada. It also provides further understanding of New World slavery. Most [such] studies … explore the field and plantation variant … Researching Canadian slavery offers a wonderful opportunity to examine another type of domestic slavery. Angélique’s life connects different areas of the black diaspora and the Atlantic. Her story offers a global perspective into the lives of African-descended people in the Americas.

40 Afua Cooper

NOTES 1 Colin Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African Diaspora,” Perspectives 36, 6 (September 1998), 22. 2 Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” paper presented at the 113th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, 1999, 7. 3 Jan Noel has white French women as her unit of analysis. She mentions black and Aboriginal women as slaves but not as gendered persons. Women in New France (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1998). 4 Butler, “Defining Diaspora,” 8. 5 Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 6 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997). 7 A.C. de C.M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 95–114; David Eltis, The Atlantic Slave Trade, a CD ROM Database (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8 Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winus, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 76–88; Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston: Little Brown, 1980), 53–9. 9 Linda M. Heywood, “The Angolan-Afro-Brazilian Cultural Connections,” in Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 9–23; Saunders, Social History, 54, 55, 59; Edward Scobie, “The Black in Western Europe,” in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., African Presence in Early Europe (Edison, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 193. 10 Saunders, Social History, 62–3. 11 Ibid., 63–88. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 78. 14 Ibid., 89–107. 15 Slavery would not be abolished in Portugal until 1773. Ibid., 178. 16 Angélique’s Trial Transcript, 11 April to 21 June 1734, Registre Criminel, IV: 24–6; Proécdures Judiciaires, Matieres Criminelles, IV: 237, Archives Nationales de Québec, at M and Q branches (ANQM and ANQQ). 17 Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 9 (Albany, 1856–87), 1019–20.

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18 Thomas Elliot Norton, The Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1686–1776 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 123–51. 19 Jean Lunn, “The Illegal Fur Trade Out of New France, 1713–1760,” Canadian Historical Association Report (1939): 61–76. 20 Thomas E. Burke, Jr, Mohawk Frontier: The Dutch Community of Schenectady, 1661–1710 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 68–108. 21 Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada Francais: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Quebec: Presses Universitaires Laval, 1960). 22 Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 3. 23 William Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” Journal of Negro History 10, 3 (1925): 321–9. 24 Trudel, L’esclavage, 126–59. 25 Kenneth Donovan, “Slaves and Their Owners,” 4; Trudel, L’esclavage, 168–70. 26 Trudel, L’esclavage, 168–86. 27 Louise Dechêne, “The Growth of Montreal in the 18th Century,” in J.M. Bumstead, ed., Canadian History before Confederation (Georgetown, ON: Irwin-Dorsey, 1979), 165. 28 In the colonial towns of North America, town and country were very close to each other. 29 Trudel, L’esclavage, 87–98; James Walker, A History of Blacks in Canada (Hull, QC: Ministry of Supplies and Services, 1980), 19. 30 W.T. Easterbrook and Hugh G.J. Aitken, Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988 reprint) chapters 4, 5, 6. 31 André Lachance, La Vie urbaine en Nouvelle France (Montreal: Boreal Press, 1987), 66; Dechêne, “Growth of Montreal,” 165. 32 Cameron Nish, “François Poulin de Francheville,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 529–30; letter from Beauharnois et Hocquart, 25 October 1729 to Le Comte Maurepas, Minister of Marine; Poulin de Francheville to Maurepas, National Archives of Canada, C11 A, vol. 51, 99–100, 101–3. 33 Trudel, Dictionnaire, 400–1. 34 Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” 322. 35 Trudel, Dictionnaire, 113. 36 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 54–5. 37 Saunders, Social History, 40–1. 38 Donovan, “Slaves and Their Owners,” 7. 39 Trudel, Dictionnaire, 103.

42 Afua Cooper 40 Riddell, “Le Code Noir,” 323; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 43. 41 Trudel, Dictionnaire, 113. 42 Angélique’s trial transcripts. 43 Cameron Nish, François-Étienne Cugnet: Entrepreneur et entreprises en Nouvelle-France (Montreal: Fides, 1975). 44 Thibault’s white skin enabled him to take advantage of escape opportunities. 45 Rulings of the Conseil Supérieur, May 1725; “Jean-Baptiste-Thomas, Negre,” Archives des Colonies, Serie C11A, vol. 64, ANQQ. 46 Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Robert Middlekauf, Bacon’s Rebellion (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966). 47 William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (New York: Arno, 1969, reprint). 48 Trial transcripts, 12 April 1734: Dossier du Conseil Supérieur, Matieres Criminelles, IV, 237. 49 The term “mistress” fails to convey the meaning of … domination that the word “master” implies. 50 From the trial transcripts. 51 A series of fires destroyed Montreal, or sections of it, during its colonial history. 52 André Vachon, Taking Root: Canada from 1700–1760 (Ottawa: Minister of Supplies and Services, 1985), 111. 53 She was put in prison instead of under the “care” of the nuns of the Hospital General, where female offenders were typically placed. Perhaps Raimbault felt Angélique was too “dangerous.” 54 Marcel Trudel, Introduction to New France (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 218. 55 New France adopted its legal code from the Coutume de Paris, or French legal code. 56 Trudel, New France, 218. 57 Trial Transcripts, 12 April 1734, translated from French by Jonas Stefan and Afua Cooper. 58 Trial Transcripts, 21 June 1734. 59 “Confrontations” translated by Adrienne Shadd and Afua Cooper. 60 André Vachon, “Marie-Joseph Angélique,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 2 457–8. See also Trial Records, 4 June 1734. Raymond Boyer, Les Crimes et les châtiments au Canada Français du XVII au XX siècle (Montreal: Le Cercle du Livre de France, 1966) 183–6.

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61 Trudel, L’esclavage, 227. 62 The Conseil Superieur was composed of the governor general, the intendant, the bishop, twelve counsellors, and the lieutenant-general of the jurisdiction in question. Vachon, Taking Root, 104. 63 The four notaries whom Raimbault employed to assist him with the trial prepared her appeal. 64 Trial Records, 12 June 1734; Vachon, “Marie Joseph Angélique.” 65 Boyer, Le Crimes et les châtiments, 240–68. 66 Pierre Raimbault, “Procedure Criminelle de Marie Josephe Angélique – Incendiere,” 21 June 1734, APQ; Trudel, L’esclavage, 227. “Tout Sur la Torture,” Le Magazine Maclean (December 1966): 36–42. 67 R. Douglas Francis, Origins: Canadian History to Confederation (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1992), 92. 68 Leveille became Angélique’s executioner. Trudel, Dictionnaire, 175–6. 69 Thomas J. Davis made the same observation about Caesar, the slave implicated in the “plot” to burn down New York City in 1741. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985), 2.

Unpacking the Discursive Irish Woman Immigrant in Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland W ill een G . K eough

Introduction This chapter will explore constructions of Irish Newfoundland womanhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by unwinding three contemporary discursive threads articulated by local British authorities, the Catholic Church, and the oral tradition … [that] appeared to position Irish Newfoundland women at the margins of immigration and settlement experiences … Yet systems of power such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class were in flux in this New World context, and Irish Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within that discursive terrain – especially those who were more removed from civil and religious authorities in the capital of St John’s and were able to carve out their own territory in the fishing economy. This chapter will trace the tensions among and even within these discourses and attempt to understand how Irish women immigrants created a sense of identity amidst the contradictions between rhetoric and the day-to-day exigencies and social relations of migration and early settlement. The discussion will engage with debates that have been ongoing in gender studies since the early 1990s about the interrelationship of experience and discourse. In 1991, Joan Scott launched a challenge to colleagues who prioritized the authenticity of experience over the discursive, arguing “experience is a linguistic event” in that it cannot

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version from Irish Studies Review 21, 1 (2013): 55–70.

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occur “outside established meanings.” While those meanings can be multiple and contradictory, she argued, subjects are constituted discursively and cannot know or interpret experience without reference to those meanings.1 Scott’s arguments unleashed a storm of protest from a number of feminist scholars who claimed that she was denying the capacity of subjects, especially marginalized subjects, to offer any insight into their lives that was outside of official knowledge production. Experience was shaped by material forces and social relations, they argued, although attention should indeed be paid to how experience was discursively mediated.2 Some particularly compelling observations were offered by historian Laura Downs. Building on insights from Jurgen Habermas, Jessica Benjamin, and Carolyn Steedman, Downs revisited the concept of language as social practice in a “life-world,” creating knowledge that can be different from that produced by the Foucauldian power/knowledge axis and outside the gaze of the metaphorical Panopticon. By looking at these “intersubjective encounters,” she argues, we might find the constitution of identity “in spaces that allow subjects to reflect critically on the (often glaring) disjuncture between their own experiences and the categories of power/knowledge available to them.”3 It is in the interstices in which language as social practice occurs that I hope to begin to unpack the discursive Irish woman immigrant in the life-world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland. I will also consider whether the historical subject can create identity outside of the knowledge created by power, or whether it can only articulate resistance to that knowledge. The Hanging of Eleanor Power Let us start in St John’s with an episode featuring Eleanor Power, an Irish domestic servant working in the early 1750s for William Keen, a New England merchant with family roots in West Teignmouth, Exeter. Keen had risen through the ranks of naval governance in Newfoundland and by 1750 had become the first commissioner of oyer and terminer [authorized by the Crown to hear serious criminal charges] in the island. He was thus quite wealthy and powerful, although also highly unpopular because of some suspicious business dealings and his over-reliance on the whipping post. In the summer of 1754, Eleanor noticed that Keen was making regular visits to a locked trunk in the bedroom of his summer home in nearby Quidi Vidi village. She encouraged her husband, Robert, and several other men to help her steal what must surely be a

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treasure of great value. After several failed attempts, Eleanor (dressed in men’s clothing), Robert, and eight co-conspirators succeeded in taking the chest, but upon opening it, they found only Keen’s secret stash of alcohol. Disappointed, Eleanor and one of the men left the property, but the other eight remained to see whether they might find other items of value to steal. Robert and another accomplice kept watch outside, while the others re-entered the house. Keen awoke in the midst of the commotion, and two of the intruders beat him severely with a scythe and the butt of a musket. He died of his injuries several weeks later. One of the accomplices turned king’s witness, and the others were soon rounded up. Local authorities were anxious to make a swift and firm example of the accused and tried them in the recently established court of oyer and terminer [a court for the trial of felony cases]. The two men who had actually killed Keen were hanged and gibbeted [the public display of executed criminals so as to deter others] on 10 October 1754; the following day, Eleanor and her husband were hanged together – simultaneously and back-to-back – and buried at the foot of the gallows. The remaining men were imprisoned and ultimately deported to England.4 In many ways, the disposition of the matter was not unusual in terms of eighteenth-century British penal practices, and the public hanging and gibbeting of bodies as spectacle was a common strategy of discipline and control.5 But why were Eleanor and Robert executed, when they had not actually been involved in killing Keen and, indeed, had expressed no intent to carry out or assist in the murder? Why had they not simply been transported as well? While this case has garnered attention from legal and public historians who are intrigued by the uneven reception of English law in eighteenth-century Newfoundland, and while Eleanor’s status as the first non-Aboriginal woman to be hanged in the territory now known as Canada has been noted, there is a particularly gendered reading of this episode that has been overlooked. In the eyes of British authorities in St John’s, Eleanor – who had initially instigated the robbery, planned several attempts with various male accomplices, and participated in the theft in the guise of a man – was far beyond the pale of proper womanhood and masculine control. Robert, himself, was a failed patriarch who could not keep his wife in line. In accordance with the current law, a woman’s body could not be gibbeted. But the positioning of Eleanor’s and Robert’s bodies – back-to-back – at the moment of punishment was reminiscent of the identical placement of quarrelsome couples on ducking stools [a form of punishment by which the strapped parties were dunked into the water in early

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modern England and colonial America] – a display meant to punish them for aberrant marital relations in which the wife was clearly challenging her husband’s authority … This episode must be contextualized within the frame of a growing wave of Irish Catholic migration to this British fishing station, and hence a shift in the ethnic balance of European inhabitants on the island. Irish migrants had begun to journey to the island in the seventeenth century to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative West Country–Newfoundland cod fishery. Operating out of the West of England, fishing vessels stopped in southern ports of Ireland for cheap labour and provisions. Irish traders also began to bring out servants (fishery workers) and provisions in the spring, returning in the fall with fish and oil for markets. Predominantly male and transient in earlier years, these Irish migrants became increasingly settled as more and more Irish women joined the migration stream in the second half of the eighteenth century. British Discourse: “Treacherous” Men and “Scandalous” Women Given the strained relations between Irish Catholics and British authorities in the home countries, local authorities in Newfoundland were concerned about the influx of Irish to the island and the threat they might pose to British authority. Added to that tension was the presence of Ireland’s Catholic ally, France, on the island. The English and the French had both operated fisheries and established settlements there in the seventeenth century, and even though France lost its settlement rights in 1713, a French Shore fishery continued on the island until 1904. The French made several successful military incursions into the English Shore – in 1696–97, 1702, 1762–64, and 1796 – and also threatened to invade during the American Revolution. It seemed that whenever the home countries were at war with each other – a frequent phenomenon during the eighteenth century – French forces thundered into the English Shore, intent on wreaking havoc and unsettling Britain’s claim to the island. And right there to join them, as far as local British authorities were concerned, was a growing number of Irish Catholics … [who were] “notoriously disaffected to the government, all of them refusing to take the oath of allegiance when tendered to them.”6 By the time that Eleanor Power and her conspirators were robbing William Keen, England was on the brink of yet another war with France – the Seven Years’ War – and British authorities in Newfoundland were

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frantic because British troops had been removed from the island with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 … The Irish were occupying three-quarters of the fishing premises, [Captain Griffith] Williams estimated [at war’s end], and had welcomed the French “with open Arms.” Indeed, he reported, they had inflicted “more Cruelties” on loyal Protestant inhabitants than the French enemy.7 The year after Eleanor’s hanging, Governor Richard Dorrill unleashed a flurry of court actions against the Irish in Conception Bay, enforcing to the letter the penal laws that restricted Catholic religious practice and denied them the right to hold property. Fishing premises were torn down, mass houses were burned to the ground, and various Irish residents were fined and/or deported. All fishing masters who had brought over Irish Catholic fishing servants were ordered to transport them home after the fishing season to prevent them from overwintering without wages and committing “many Robberys and Felonys … to the great Loss and Terror of His Majesty’s Liege Subjects in this Island.”8 When the Seven Years’ War ended, Governor Hugh Palliser tried to revive the fortunes of the West Country migratory fishery and resurrected Dorrill’s regulations to limit the numbers of Irish Catholics in Newfoundland, explaining that “they are perfectly Idle, abandon’d to every sort of Debauchery and Wickedness …” They would never become industrious fishermen or seamen, he continued, and would always pose a security risk.9 Still, there was a tension in official attitudes towards Irish servants, for although they were seen as undesirables, they were becoming increasingly essential to the operation of the fishery on the island. Fewer and fewer English servants were attracted to the trade, for in this century marked by unremitting European conflict, they were increasingly being targeted by naval press gangs in English port cities. So the Newfoundland fishery, in both its migratory and growing resident sectors, desperately needed Irish workers – a situation that West Country merchants and local planters (fishing employers) acknowledged. Yet throughout official discourse ran a construction of Irishness as inherently idle, intemperate, and treacherous; the Irish were a problem group that required constant regulation and surveillance. In the 1810s to the early 1830s there was one last major influx of Irish to Newfoundland. And while earlier passenger vessels had been bringing the Irish out “on order” for fishing employers and tended to ensure that their human cargo arrived in reasonable condition, the trade declined in the postwar depression and many vessels started to

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carry as many servants as they could stow, with insufficient provisions and water. The spectre of sick and starving passengers staggering from the holds of passenger vessels horrified local residents, especially in St John’s, where most ships initially landed. Local medical officers warned of the flux, bilious and putrid fevers, and cholera that would lie hidden for some days after landing, only to break out again “with violence” amidst the “poverty,” “filth,” and excessive drinking of the Irish lower orders.10 Thus a new dimension was added to the construction of Irishness in Newfoundland: the image of contagion and disease. Part of this official discourse focused particularly on an image of the Irish woman immigrant as vagrant and deviant. British authorities had generally discouraged the presence of women in Newfoundland up to the 1800s because they had not wanted a settled population that would compete with the West Country migratory fishery. Without the stabilizing presence of women, they reasoned, male fishing servants would go home at the end of the fishing season. As naval officer Captain Francis Wheler reported in 1684, “Soe longe as there comes noe women they are not fixed.”11 But local authorities found occasion to remark particularly about the undesirability of Irish women in the population.12 … Single Irish women in the early 1700s, regardless of their productivity in the fishery, were seen to be “debauching ignorant mariners,” especially those “scandalous & prostitute Women” who remained after the fishing season.13 In 1764, Governor Palliser linked Irish women servants with poverty and unrest when he issued a notice requiring all vessel masters to give security for Irish women passengers, who would otherwise “become distress’d and a Charge to the Inhabitants, and likewise Occasion much disorder and Disturbance against the Peace of our Sovereign Lord the King.”14 Although Palliser, as we have seen, was generally wary of the Irish, it was significant that with this – the very first of his anti–Irish Catholic proclamations – the governor homed in on the perceived threat of the unattached Irish woman immigrant. Two years later, Palliser heard a civil suit by an English fishing servant against his master for wages withheld because the servant had been having sexual relations with his master’s Irish female servant. The governor’s formal judgment was undergirded by his perception of a racialized, unruly female sexuality that required control. The male servant recovered his wages “without any Deduction on acct. of his Intercourse with [the] Woman Servant,” but Palliser ordered that “the Woman who occasion’d this disturbance” be transported back to Ireland by the same vessel master who had brought her to St John’s.15

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The discursive construction of Irish women servants as immoral, unproductive, and conniving was reiterated in Governor Montagu’s proclamation of 1777. Many of these dissolute women became pregnant outside of wedlock, he claimed, either in the home country or on board vessels bringing them to Newfoundland, where they entrapped unwary employers by contracting their services without revealing their condition. Ultimately (and here, the oft-repeated theme), they would become a charge on the more respectable inhabitants of the island. Montagu’s order banned vessel masters from bringing Irish women servants to Newfoundland altogether, under forfeit of ten pounds per violation.16 … Into the nineteenth century, British governors in Newfoundland continued to represent the Irish women immigrant as a particular problem for local authorities, calling for special regulation of her own.17 In particular, the single Irish female servant required monitoring, for her social and economic independence from a patriarchal family context and her potential sexual agency contravened hegemonic feminine ideals that embodied domesticity, dependence, fragility, and sexual passivity … And yet, despite extensive discouragement from British officials, Irish women and men continued to come to the island up to the 1830s, attracted by the potential to create a good livelihood in the fishery. By the late eighteenth century, they were the ethnic majority in St John’s; by the early nineteenth, they had established Irish planter societies along the southern Avalon (to the south of the capital) and in Conception Bay (northwest of St John’s). In order to do so, they had to push outside the categories of identity that had been so clearly mapped out in the discourse of British naval authorities on the island. Catholic Church Discourse: “Occasions of Sin” and the “Little Irish Mother” In contrast to those authorities, the Catholic Church welcomed the migration of Irish women to British colonies for they would help the Church in its mission to establish a strong Catholic presence in the broader British Empire. The Church thus constructed Irish womanhood somewhat differently, but in ways that were still quite marginalizing and restrictive. The Catholic Church could not legally operate in Newfoundland until 1784, although a few rogue priests travelled around the outports in the earlier 1700s, saying masses in homes and performing sacraments

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without authority from their bishops back in Ireland.18 When Catholic missions were established in the late eighteenth century, the Church discovered that Irish Newfoundland women had been keeping Catholic  spiritual traditions alive. They had been performing sacraments, such as baptisms and marriages, and midwives had been waiving fasts for pregnant women. Female figures – the Virgin Mary, St Brigid, and St Anne – were powerfully ensconced in the Irish Newfoundland hagiography. Women had also been maintaining an alternative preChristian religious system that operated alongside of, and sometimes overlapped, formal Catholic practice. This system afforded women special spiritual authority and acknowledged the power of female figures such as the bibe, whose mournful cry foretold death in a household, and the old hag, who disabled her victims as they slept, leaving them in a state of semi-paralysis until roused by a special invocation. But the Church viewed women’s spiritual roles as competitive, not complementary, in negotiating between the natural and supernatural realms. The clergy would work to diminish the power of the alternative system and to constrain women’s spirituality within the more respectable, gendered devotional practices of Catholicism.19 Early priests in Newfoundland also found that Irish Catholic women were not readily channelled into formal marriage – a key site within English common law and Christian religious practice for subordinating women’s personhood and for safely constraining woman’s sexuality into the roles of respectable wife and mother. Some Irish Catholic couples had been married by magistrates, ships’ captains, or laypeople, including women. But a number simply cohabited, in both long- and short-term arrangements. In 1789, Father Thomas Ewer, the Catholic priest stationed at the new Catholic mission in Ferryland on the southern Avalon, complained of the irregularity of marital arrangements in his parish [… noting that] “there are women living here with their 4th husband each man alive & form different familys in repute …”20 What Ewer was observing was a significant occurrence of common law relationships and informal marriages, separations, and divorces in the area – part of a marital regime that kept fairly loose reins on female sexuality and, in effect, freed a number of women from the repercussions of coverture [the law by which women, upon marriage, lost control over real and personal property to their husbands].21 But Ewer feared that this subversion of proper gender relations would destabilize the foothold that the Catholic Church had made on the island. His

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superior in Newfoundland, Prefect Apostolic James O’Donel, was equally determined to “untie such bonds that yet remain[ed] to be separated from adultery.”22 With the priests, then, came a concerted effort to bring women into formalized marriages within the precepts of the Catholic Church. The clergy deployed the dichotomized construction of woman as temptress Eve or respectable wife and mother that was already part of Catholic discourse. Eve was the nadir of fallen womanhood, embodying the deviance of female sexuality that provoked and awakened male lust. Yet even respectable women were seen to have inherited from their foremother the capacity to tempt man, so all women – but especially those in their sexual prime – were constructed as “occasions of sin.” Thus, with the Catholic missions came the practice of churching women after childbirth – a perfunctory ritual, usually a few prayers offered by a priest at his back door over a woman who had to be purified for the sin of conceiving a child. With the priests also came more systematic shaming of adulterous wives and unwed mothers, reflecting a sexual double standard that laid the sin of pre- and extramarital sexual relationships overwhelmingly at the feet of women but not their male partners. All these discursive strategies fashioned an image of the Irish Catholic woman as problematic by her very nature – situating her far from the realm of the rational and thus from any claim to Church leadership. Yet the Church did have a designated space for Catholic women, and this was articulated in its rhetoric of female respectability – a construct that inserted itself increasingly in Church discourse after Bishop Michael Fleming became Vicar Apostolic in the 1830s. In 1835, for example, he appealed to male leaders of a collective action against a St Mary’s merchant and magistrate to surrender quietly to authorities. “Contemplate the establishment of a military Section among your wives and daughters,” he urged, “[when the fishing season] will require the abandonment of your families, of your homes and firesides to the unbridled licentiousness of soldiers without the presence of a single magistrate, a single local tribunal to restrain them.”23 Here was a subtext of genteel passivity and domesticity, of female virtue in need of protection. (In reality, wives and daughters had been full participants in the incident, armed with pitchforks, stones, and axes, tearing up the merchant’s fish flake [an elevated wooden structure] along with the men in the community and menacing the magistrate, deputy sheriffs, and sailors on a ship of war who had been sent to subdue the rioting.24)

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The monitoring of female sexuality and the cultivation of domestic virtues were also primary motivations in Fleming’s decision to bring the Presentation and Mercy nuns to Newfoundland in the 1830s and 1840s. He was appalled, he wrote, by the way in which “the children of both sexes should be moved together pell-mell” in the island’s schools, declaring coeducation to be “dangerous” and “impeding any improvement of morals.” Catholic girls were losing “much of that delicacy of feeling and refinement of sentiment which form the ornament and grace of their sex.” In separate schools, the nuns could prepare young Catholic women for motherhood and domesticity, and lead them to their destiny as moral guardians of their families. A curriculum that included knitting, netting, and needlework would ease the transition from outdoor work to more domestic, womanly pursuits, creating “little Irish mothers” who were firmly situated at the fireside. And “solidly instructed in the Divine precepts of the Gospel,” they would abandon older customary practices that were an alternative source of female power.25 The discourse of Catholic orthodoxy urged women to deny their sexuality, embrace selfless motherhood, and transform their homes into spiritual havens, removed from the outside world. These pressures would intensify in the latter nineteenth century as the impact of the devotional revolution in the Irish Catholic Church reached the island, and they were particularly effective among the growing Irish middle class, especially in St John’s. Still, Church constructions of femininity met with resistance from working people, especially the Irish fishing populations in the myriad outharbours along the southern Avalon and in Conception Bay. Some inroads were made in controlling female sexuality through shaming and denial of sacraments, yet the lives of fishing women were far less circumscribed than those living in St John’s. To glean some understanding of the processes in play, let us explore a third discursive stream: the oral tradition within Irish Newfoundland fishing communities.26 Oral Tradition: In the Interstices At first blush, the oral tradition seems unhelpful … [T]he standard family history narrative about two or three brothers who came out from Ireland is male-centred, telling of generations of men who forged a living from dangerous seas and rocky soil in the seeming absence of women. But if you disrupt that narrative shape and ask, “Didn’t women come out, too?” responses from both men and women position these Irish women immigrants very much in the centre of the frame: “Oh my

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god, yes, sure the women did it all,” they will tell you, and “They’d be dead without the women.” So it is in the deconstruction of the standard narrative form that we can see how many Irish Newfoundland women renegotiated gender relations on the ground. And it is here that we can discern the presence of Downs’ “intersubjective spaces” as Irish Newfoundland women created their own knowledge about their lives, an understanding that was immersed in multiple discourses, yet never “simply reducible to that language.”27 These oral narratives also provide cues for reading more traditional historical sources across the grain, encouraging a dialogic exploration of the cracks and crevices between power/knowledge and historical subject in the life-world. The collective historical memory, liberated from the confines of a male-focused storyline, tells us that women’s contributions within the work cycle were fundamental to community formation – especially as they took over key processing work in the resident fishery. In the early planter fishery based on waged work, a few women operated independent fishing premises while others were hired as fishing servants or domestic servants in fishing households. Far more women managed fishing plantations with husbands or cohabiting partners – boarding fishing servants in addition to their other responsibilities. By the latter eighteenth century, the migratory fishery was dying and the resident fishery had begun to turn to household production, as women took over the work of hired, transient, primarily male shore crews. More traditional historical sources such as governors’ annual returns and census materials reveal that this transition was gradual at first, but accelerated in the depression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, when the fishery could no longer afford highly inflated wages in the face of plunging fish prices in markets.28 At this stage, the fishery based on waged labour was nearing collapse. We can infer, then, that without women’s ability to adapt their work routines and replace male fishing servants in processing saltfish, the resident fishery … would likely not have survived long after 1815. Women worked on shore – splitting, washing, and salting the fish, carrying it over rocky shorelines, spreading and re-spreading the fish on flakes, and supervising the drying process. Women’s skill and judgment were essential throughout, for if the fish was damaged or did not contain the right amount of salt or moisture for its intended market, if it became sunburned or maggoty from fly-blows, then the quality was ruined. It was arduous, physical work that had to be juggled with child care, housework, and other outdoor work during the fishing season.

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Yet these women “loved to be at it,” and many fishing families hired female servants to free their mistresses from child care and housework in order to process fish. Women saw themselves as full participants in a family enterprise in which they held an equal stake, and they took pride in their skill and productivity. Furthermore, the larger community acknowledged the value and respectability of their shore work and perceived them to be essential, skilled workers in the fishery. The oral tradition also recognizes women’s essential roles in the subsistence agriculture that was so important to the survival of the family work unit. Women carried out various labour-intensive tasks – clearing land, planting, gathering kelp and fertilizing, weeding, trenching, haymaking, harvesting, and caring for livestock. They also performed physically demanding outdoor work in relation to housewifery: cutting turf for fuel; shouldering windfall branches home from the woods on wooden frames or in brin bags [sacks made of burlap], so that “you could just see their legs coming down the road”; or carrying gallons of water from wells often far away from the house. As opportunity presented itself, they combed the beaches after shipwrecks to find foodstuffs, furnishings, and building materials to help family ends meet. Those who were “too sickly” or “too grand” to go down to the flakes, onto the beaches, or into the fields or woods were to be pitied or scorned. Middle-class discourses of female domesticity and economic idleness had little traction among Newfoundland fishing families. Far from being economically dependent, these women were actively engaged in a variety of economic activities: not just in household production but also in paid work as fishing and agricultural servants, as washerwomen and seamstresses for single fishermen and middle-class clients, in the hospitality trade, and in community healing. Women raised pigs and fowl for barter or sale; they sold eggs, cream, and butter to local customers and merchants. Indeed, surviving merchant account books confirm a robust participation of women in the economic lives of their communities, running independent economic activities for cash, credit, or exchange, and having separate accounts with their merchant, regardless of marital status.29 The working careers of Irish women within fishing communities, then, embraced a range of economic coping strategies. Commensurate with their significant contributions to the fishing economy, Irish Newfoundland women held considerable status and power within their families and communities. The oral tradition remembers them as household managers, responsible for looking after any

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small amounts of cash the family might have earned and stretching resources to get their families through the “long and hungry month of March,” before the merchants advanced “spring diets” on credit. They were seen as partners, rather than helpmates, in marriages, and men and women discussed household concerns and made major decisions together. Men also consulted with their wives before airing opinions on community matters and settling accounts with merchants. “She made the cannonballs, and he fired them,” according to the oral tradition – recognition of the joint authority within fishing households that challenged hegemonic discourses of masculine dominance.30 Irish Newfoundland women in fishing communities also exercised informal power in the public sphere of conflict resolution, either through physical and verbal wrangling in individual assaults or by participation in collective actions. Evidence of this assertiveness is provided by both the collective historical memory and court records … Several examples from the southern Avalon and Conception Bay will serve to illustrate. The women of the Berrigan family, for example, were a vital force in their family’s struggle to maintain possession of their fishing “room” (premises) in Renews harbour in the 1830s and 1840s. In May 1835, local merchant and justice of the peace John William Saunders initiated an action of ejectment against Thomas Berrigan, Sr, in order to remove the Berrigans from their fishing room on the south side of the harbour. Saunders was unsuccessful in this instance, but he pursued his claim and met with robust and ongoing resistance from the Berrigan family. In September 1838, a deputy sheriff laid charges against Anastatia (the wife of Thomas, Sr), Edward, Alice, and Bridget Berrigan and Walter Barron for “violently” assaulting him at Renews on 16 August as he tried to execute a writ of possession in relation to the property. On 31  December 1842, Anastatia, Bridget, and Alice Berrigan were again before the court, along with William Berrigan, to face charges of obstructing and assaulting yet another deputy sheriff as he attempted to execute a writ of possession on the fishing premises. The final trace of the matter in the court records appeared in the proceedings of 13 and 14 June 1843, when Saunders swore a complaint that he, himself, had been personally threatened, assaulted, and prevented from taking possession of the fishing room by various Berrigan men – Thomas, Sr, Thomas, Jr, Edward – and the ever-present Anastatia. Saunders claimed that by this time he felt that his life was in danger from the frequent threats and assaults of the Berrigan faction and asked for the protection of the law.31 The records are not complete, and we are left to speculate

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about the outcome. But the presence of the Berrigan women in the midst of the struggle is very telling. There were various combinations of Berrigan family members involved in each case; but Bridget and Alice were involved in two of the three incidents, while the family matriarch, Anastatia, was present every time. The oral tradition helps us to appreciate that their involvement was not unusual within the historical context. The fishing room was the family’s primary means of livelihood, and the Berrigan women were an essential part of the household production unit that worked on the premises. They rose in defence of a family enterprise in which they felt they had a joint stake, deploying verbal attack and physical force to protect their source of livelihood in the face of perceived injustice at the hands of their supplying merchant and the formal legal system. Conception Bay provides a further illustration, with a literal turf war that unfolded in the summer of 1865. On 2 July, Mary Dwyer and Mary Hicky were grubbing turf [cutting bricks of peat from the surface for fuel] in an unfenced bog near Riverhead, just outside Harbour Grace. Mary Connors arrived on the scene and began to take the turf that Mary Dwyer was digging, shouting that the other two women “should go to the devil to the river head to [their] own bogs” and threatening them with her mattock [round-pointed shovel]. Dwyer said that she would complain to the magistrate, but Connors declared that “she did not care for Mary Dwyer or the Magistrate or the devil.” According to witness Mary Hicky, Connors raised her mattock over Dwyer’s head and said she would “cleave” her. She then pushed the handle of the mattock against Dwyer’s face, threatened to drive it down her throat, and attempted to choke the other woman with her bare hands. Dwyer made good her threat to complain to the magistrate, and Connors was bound over to keep the peace, with two securities in the amount of 10 pounds each. Once again, these women were exercising influence based on their own interpretation of their entitlement, regardless of middle-class ideologies and formal statutes. Riverhead, unlike most communities along the English Shore, actually had reasonable agricultural land, so residents could farm beyond a subsistence level and produce foodstuffs for the nearby town of Harbour Grace. As many men in the area actually left their communities to participate in the Labrador fishery and sealing, women’s landward responsibilities were intensified in their absence. Mary Dwyer and Mary Connors were performing vital, arduous agricultural work in this incident, but they were also claiming rights to a contested portion of bogland. When they were swinging

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their mattocks on 2 July 1865, there was more at stake than just a few bricks of turf.32… Indeed, women appeared frequently in the court system, as both complainants and defendants, in a wide range of actions ranging from debt collection and employment disputes to property matters and criminal cases. Many moved between their own informal methods and formal justice as they inscribed their presence in this New World setting. Local magistrates treated fishing men and women equitably in terms of access to formal justice and in sentences and dispositions. Unlike authorities in St John’s or patriarchs of the Catholic Church, they did not pressure women to transition quietly into the respectability of the domestic hearth. For local magistrates were often merchants or members of merchant families that made their livelihoods supplying fishing households in exchange for saltfish and oil. Those household production units needed women working in public spaces, such as stage heads [ends of fishing wharves where fish were landed and cleaned], flakes, shorelines, and woods, and the magistrates disposed of court matters with a strong appreciation that they, too, were dependent on women’s work in the fishing economy.33 Conclusion The actual voices of Irish Newfoundland women seem to be mostly missing from this discussion, although they occasionally flash out from oral anecdotes, court proceedings, and petitions. But women’s diaries, journals, and correspondence have not survived from this period and perhaps did not exist at all for many working women, who would not have had the luxuries of time or literacy to attend to them. Sadly, we cannot interview them; they are long gone. Yet I would argue that the historical collective memory, especially strong in Newfoundland fishing communities, was constructed over time by multiple voices – women’s and men’s – and provides us with perhaps our best opportunity to witness and understand the intersubjective exchanges by which these women understood their own identities. Most negotiated their subjectivities within a social, economic, and cultural context that valued them highly for their combined productive and reproductive contributions. This perception was very different in content and tone from official British discourse, which saw Irish women as common bawds and vagrants. Irish women living in proximity to the official gaze found less manoeuvring room to negotiate identity. Those who remained in St  John’s were

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pressured to achieve feminine respectability in middle-class terms or remain marginalized as vulgar, coarse, and unproductive womanhood. Further from the capital, where women were essential workers in the fishery, the rumblings of naval governors intruded very little in everyday lives and therefore had little, if any, effect on women’s sense of gender identity. The gendered discourse of the Catholic Church became much more a part of the life-world of all Irish Catholic women, as parishes increased throughout the nineteenth century and a growing number of priests and nuns cajoled and harangued women from pulpits, confessionals, and schoolhouses about proper womanly behaviour. Yet Irish Newfoundland women continued to maintain the alternative belief system – in some areas even into the 1960s – and also claimed spiritual influence within the Church’s new devotional practices. “There’d be no religion without the women,” oral informants often told me. And in fishing communities, the image of the little Irish mother ensconced within the home did not mesh with the realities of women’s working lives. So there were still spaces in which these women could negotiate subjectivity outside of hegemonic categories. It was not until after confederation with Canada in 1949, when a confluence of powerful social, economic, and political pressures came together in modernizing the fishery, setting up women and men in competition for fewer jobs and relegating women to an “unskilled,” lowpaid workforce in fish plants, that women in fishing communities lost their footing and started to feel “ashamed of who we were.” But before then, they continued to inhabit public sites of production and saw themselves as self-assured, physically hardy, essential workers and community members, despite official and Church discourses that attempted to position them otherwise. Those who lived in small, remote fishing villages in the early days of migration and settlement were operating, to a large extent, beyond the effective range of hegemonic discourse and were thus creating identities that were not so much resistant to as outside of the parameters set by the power/knowledge axis.

NOTES 1 Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, 4 (1991): 773. 2 See, for example, Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001);

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3 4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11

Willeen G. Keough Joan Sangster, “Invoking Experience as Evidence,” Canadian Historical Review 92, 1 (2011): 135–61; and Shari Stone-Mediatore, “Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of ‘Experience,’” Hypatia 13, 2 (1988): 116–33. Laura Downs, “Reply to Joan Scott,” Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 2 (1993): 449. Proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, St John’s, 8 October 1754, with related orders, 170–84, vol. 2, GN 2/1/A, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador (PANL); and fols. 424–5, vol. 3, CO 194, Public Records Office, London (PRO). See also Murray Greenwood and Beverley Boissery, “The Eleanor Power Story,” in Uncertain Justice: Canadian Women and Capital Punishment, 1754–1953 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2000), 23–38; Keith Matthews, “Keen, William,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, vol. 3 (Toronto; Montreal: University of Toronto; Université Laval, 2000); M.J. McCarthy, “The Irish in Early Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly 83 (1980): 43–8; and Paul O’Neill, “Jezebels and the Just,” Newfoundland Quarterly 12 (1980): 25–30. Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society, 2003). Governor Francis Drake, “Answers to the Queries Contained in His Majesty’s Instructions,” 22 November 1751, fol. 110, vol. 25, CO 194, PRO. Williams, “An Account of the Island of Newfoundland, with the Nature of its Trade, and Method of carrying on the Fishery. With Reasons for the great Decrease of that most Valuable Branch of Trade” (London, 1765), 8–10. Governor Richard Dorrill, proclamation, 22 September 1755, 2/236/1755, GN 2/1/A, PANL. Governor Hugh Palliser, order, 31 October 1764, 3/272–3/1764, GN 2/1/A, PANL; and Palliser, Annual Return, 1765, fol. 188, vol. 16, CO 194, PRO. See, for example, Governor Richard Keats to Colonial Office, 1 October 1815, fols. 63–70, vol. 56, CO 194, PRO; Thomas Coote, Chief Magistrate at St John’s, to Governor Pickmore, 28 April 1817, 27/408–10/1817, GN 2/1/A, PANL; reports of various medical officers to the magistrates of St John’s, 1–3 August 1827, 2/256–76/1827, GN 2/2, PANL; various correspondence and reports, August and September 1831, 38/163–4, 174, 177–8, and 196/1831, GN 2/1/A, PANL; Customs Officer, St John’s, to Colonial Secretary, 25 April 1833, 13/199–202/1833, GN 2/2, PANL. Wheler, quoted in W. Gordon Handcock, “Soe longe as there comes noe women”: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (St John’s: Breakwater Books, 1989), 32 (citing fol. 241, vol. 55, CO 1, PRO).

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12 Captain James Story, “An account of what fishing ships, Sack Ships, Planters & boat keepers from Trepasse to Bonavist & from thence to faire Island the Northward part of Newfoundland,” 1 September 1681, 16-D-1006, Keith Matthews Collection, Maritime History Archive, Memorial University (MHA), citing fols. 113–21, vol. 47, CO 1, PRO. 13 “Request to ye. Commodore Leake,” 20 September1702, fols. 215–17, Letterbook of Captain Michael Richards, Commander at Fort William, 1700–1703, MF-105, MHA. 14 Palliser, order, 2 July 1764, 3/232/1764, GN 2/1/A, PANL. 15 Palliser, order in the matter of Thomas Pendergrass v. Jonathan Blakener, 2 October 1766, 4/23/1766, GN 2/1/A, PANL. 16 Montagu, order, 10 October 1777, 7/35–6/1777, GN 2/1/A, PANL. 17 Governor Erasmus Gower to the Magistrates of St John’s, 18 September 1805, 18/307–8/1805, GN 2/1/A, PANL; and Governor John Holloway to the Magistrates of St John’s, 29 August 1808, 20/47/1808, GN 2/1/A, PANL. 18 As in Ireland and Britain, Catholics in Newfoundland did not achieve full emancipation until 1829. 19 References to Irish Newfoundland women’s spiritual activities appear in both early missionaries’ correspondence and the oral tradition. For a more extensive discussion, see Willeen Keough, “The ‘Old Hag’ Revisits St Brigid: Irish-Newfoundland Women and the Spiritual Life of Southern Avalon Communities,” in Linda Cullum, Carmelita McGrath, and Marilyn Porter, eds., Weather’s Edge: A Compendium of Women’s Lives in Newfoundland and Labrador (St John’s: Killick Press, 2006), 11–22. 20 Ewer to Archbishop Troy, Dublin, 30 November 1789, in Cyril J. Byrne, ed., Gentlemen-Bishops and Faction Fighters: The Letters of Bishops O’Donel, Lambert, Scallan, and Other Irish Missionaries (St John’s: Jesperson, 1984), 77–9. 21 It is difficult to calibrate the extent of such relationships, given the lack of recording in this early period. However, the 1800 nominal census of 166 family groupings in Ferryland district suggests the existence of up to thirtythree such relationships (20% of the total), either at the time of the census or in the recent past, and references to informal arrangements also appeared in court hearings and governors’ correspondence. See Robert Carter, “Register of Families,” Ferryland district, August 1800, Papers of Governor Charles Morice Pole, MG 205, PANL. See also the discussion in Willeen Keough, The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), chapter 8 and Appendix D.

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22 O’Donel to Leonardo Antonelli, Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda Fide, c. December 1875, in Byrne, Gentlemen-Bishops, 55. 23 Fleming, Pastoral Letter, 10 May 1835, cited in M.J. McCarthy, The Irish in Newfoundland, 1600–1900: Their Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs (St John’s: Creative, 1999), 157–8. 24 For more on this episode, see various correspondence, vols. 1–24, vol. 94, CO 194, PRO; Slade, Elson & Company v. Rev. James Duffy et al., 29 October and 3 November 1835, fols. 80–1, box 1, GN 5/4/C/1, Ferryland, PANL; and Bishop Michael Fleming, reports and letters cited in Rev. Michael F. Howley, Ecclesiastical History of Newfoundland (Boston: Doyle & Whittle, 1888; reprint, Belleville, Ont.: Mika, 1971), 323–8. 25 Fleming, “Letter on the State of Religion in Newfoundland,” 11 January 1844, addressed to the Very Revd. Dr A. O’Connell in Dublin (James Duffy, 1844), 18. 26 Information from the oral tradition comes from oral interviews in the period from 1999 to 2005 with forty-two residents or former residents, men and women, of the southern Avalon Peninsula and Conception Bay. Unless otherwise signified, all quotations in this section come from oral informants. 27 Downs, “Reply to Joan Scott,” 449. 28 See, for example, Governors’ Annual Returns of the Fisheries and Inhabitants at Newfoundland, 1735–1825, CO 194, PRO; Newfoundland Population Returns, 1836, 1845, and 1857; and numerous bankruptcy cases in the court records of the period, GN 5, PANL. 29 See, for example, Allan Goodridge and Son Collection, 1839 and 1841 ledgers, MG 473, PANL; Alan Goodridge and Sons Limited fonds, 1840 ledger, MHA; and Sweetman Collection, 1756–1848, boxes 2 and 3, MG 49, PANL. 30 In some of the towns of Conception Bay, the economy diversified and working men became increasingly involved in the waged labour of lumber mills, railways, mines, and municipal services. As the workplace separated from the home and became increasingly masculinized, women became more economically dependent on men’s wages, and there was a shift in gender relations that reflected this change. However, in families or communities for whom the inshore fishery remained the main or a significant source of livelihood, more equitable gender relations remained. 31 J.W. Saunders Esqr v. Thomas Berrigan, issued 25 September for return 1 November 1836, action in ejectment, writ no. 8, GN 5/2/C/4, PANL; John W. Saunders v. Thomas Berrigan, 3 and 5 November 1836, 62 and 64–5, 1835–47 journal, GN 5/2/C/3, PANL; John W. Saunders v. Thomas Berrigan,

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3 and 5 November 1836, 74 and 76–7, GN 5/2/C/8, PANL; Regina v. Anastatia Berrigan et al., 3 and 20 September 1838, box 1, GN 5/4/C/1, Ferryland, PANL; Regina v. William Berrigan, Anastatia Berrigan, Bridget Berrigan, and Alice Berrigan, 31 December 1842, and 31 January and 23 February 1843, box 2, GN 5/4/C/1, Ferryland, PANL; Regina v. James Gearing Sr, Benjamin Wilcox, Edward Berrigan, Anastatia Berrigan, Thomas Berrigan Sr, and Thomas Berrigan, Jr, 13, 14, 20, and 27 June 1843, box 2, GN 5/4/C/1, Ferryland, PANL; and Regina v. Thomas Berrigan Jr, 5 February 1844, box 2, GN 5/4/C/1, Ferryland, PANL. 32 Mary Dwyer v. Mary Connors, 4 July 1865, file 23, box 7, GN 5/3/B/19, Magistrates’ Court, Harbour Grace, PANL. 33 For more extensive discussions, see Willeen Keough, “‘Now You Vagabond [W]hore I Have You’: Plebeian Women, Assault Cases, and Gender and Class Relations on the Southern Avalon, 1750–1860,” in Christopher English, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 237–71; and Keough, The Slender Thread, chapters 5 and 8.

The Tale of Lin Tee: Madness, Family Violence, and Lindsay’s Anti-Chinese Riot of 1919 Lisa R . Mar

Introduction On 31 January 1919, Lin Tee’s attempts to escape an abusive marriage so divided the town of Lindsay, Ontario, that residents took justice into their own hands in a violent night of racial terror. A lynch mob of five hundred white men and boys targeted Lin’s husband, Lee Ten Yun, a Chinese immigrant laundry worker. The rioters knew Lee confined his wife at home. They often had heard her screams and many believed that Lee prostituted his insane wife out to other Chinese men against her will. That morning a neighbour claimed to have seen her standing on a bed wielding a stick to fend off advances of her husband and two other Chinese men. Shortly afterward, Lin attempted to escape by leaping through the front window of the Lee living quarters in the Chuong Sun Laundry. An earlier escape attempt had resulted in Lin’s imprisonment by her husband at home. For months prior to the riot, townspeople, hearing Lin’s screams and concerned for her well-being, had urged authorities and politicians to intervene in the family’s apparent problems. On the night of the 31st, long-simmering tensions came to a raging boil as citizens decided that if the police would not act, then the people would.1 Around 7 p.m., small crowds of men collected on corners, huddled in nearby doorways, and paraded in front of the Chuong Sun Laundry, protesting Lee’s cruelty and demanding that the police act.

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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The demonstrators’ bad mood created a nerve-wracking evening for the Lee family. At 9:30 p.m., Police Chief John Short arrived and arrested Lin Tee for insanity. Protesters angrily shouted to Short that he should instead arrest all Chinese men. Short replied that no one had given him enough evidence to lay a charge.2 At 11 p.m., a tide of several hundred Lindsay hockey fans, rejoicing in victory over the rival Peterborough team, bolstered the angry crowd. Shouting racial taunts, five hundred men and boys shattered the windows of the Chuong Sun Laundry with a barrage of bricks, stones, and ice. They demanded that Lee come out so the crowd could rough him up. Meanwhile, a fearful Lee hid in the apartment above the laundry. Soon afterward, the rioters charged the Chuong Sun Laundry with “catcalls and yells” and wrecked it with a fury, sending a “shower of laundry” out the window. When the rioters heard that Lee had escaped, about four hundred went home, satisfied that their message was heard. The remaining seventy-five to one hundred rioters avenged their loss by attacking two other Chinese businesses, starting with a café where Lee’s co-workers from the laundry had taken refuge. The rioters smashed fixtures, looted, and threw Chinese personal possessions into the street. At daybreak Lindsay newspapers evoked images of war-torn Belgium to describe property damage.3 … Though a single case study, Lin’s tale helps chart how isolated immigrant women negotiated minefields of race, gender, and class tensions in ways that significantly differed from immigrant men … Many whites did not consider racial minority households as consisting of normal families or homes, a situation that justified drastic intervention by the state. In Ontario, provincial and municipal policies targeted Chinese men on moral grounds. For example, regulations prohibited Chinese from employing white women, and banned Chinese from living, eating, or sleeping in the business areas of their laundries and cafés. They also enabled frequent surprise inspections of Chinese residences. From Chinese viewpoints, privacy protections applied to Anglo-Celtic residents’ homes frequently did not seem to apply to Chinese immigrants’ predominantly male households.4 Given the race relations backdrop of the time, one would expect Lindsay authorities to side with Lin against her abusive husband. Why did they not believe her when single Chinese men were so readily suspect? Lin’s trail has long gone cold, so we will sift meanings of Lin’s family power struggle through the testimony of others.

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Lin’s Sanity on Trial On 8 February 1919, one week after the riot, Lin Tee went on trial for criminal insanity.5 At the trial, Police Court Magistrate Jesse Bradford considered the charge that Lin was a dangerous “lunatic” who should be confined under warrant in an asylum without her or her family’s consent. The process of judgment necessarily involved contextual criteria. The law required that the Crown attorney prove two facts: first, that the accused was dangerous to herself or others; second, that the accused behaved in a manner contrary to the ordinary custom of the community in which she lived. In short, could Lin’s behaviour be understood as normal under the circumstances? A third factor commonly influenced police court judgments about female insanity: If Lin was insane, could her family properly care for her?6 Popular opinion already prior to the trial, backed by the judge, Crown attorney, police, and other leading citizens, held that Lin was not sane. Thus, the main question posed to the court was whether to send Lin back to her husband or to an insane asylum?7 What makes this case remarkable is the detailed testimony of neighbours, friends, and experts. Their responses to the family chronicled the integration of a Chinese immigrant couple in a relatively welcoming, small-town community. They also delineated sharp divisions in perceptions that shaped clashing gender claims about Lin’s case. From morning until midnight, witnesses testified about their views of her case, while spectators crowded Lindsay’s police court and heard many versions of her tale. Like many trials, hers involved competing narratives about truth and culpability.8 Though witnesses often disagreed with each other, a story of Lin’s initiative did emerge. At the trial that would decide her fate, she was apparently a silent object of judgment, but in her own view, she had tried to protect herself and her daughter from circumstances she felt she had reason to fear.9 A Family in Distress … Lee, in his mid-forties, and Lin, much younger in her mid-twenties, had moved to Lindsay in 1914. They established themselves as handlaundry workers in a small shop and Lee also worked at the nearby Chuong Sun Laundry. Lee, also called “Willie” Lee, had lived in Canada for fifteen years, whereas Lin had immigrated more recently …

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The Lee family settlement coincided with the migration of several thousand Chinese from British Columbia to Ontario. According to the 1921 census, the number of Chinese in Ontario was 5,625, less than 1 per cent of the total provincial population. Like Lee, Chinese workers in Ontario were concentrated in service industries. The 1921 census recorded that Chinese immigrant men comprised 40 per cent of laundry and restaurant operators in the province. Many Lindsay residents viewed households of Chinese men as foreign “colonies” in their midst, unrestrained by the civilizing bonds of familial domesticity.10 Canadian newspapers often portrayed Chinese men as criminals, drug addicts, and devious “white slavers” intent on capturing white women to sell into prostitution.11 When eighteen-year-old Lin arrived in Lindsay in 1914, local AngloCeltic women befriended her. She attended the nearby St Paul’s Anglican Church, and friends often visited her at home. At Lin’s trial, Mrs George Mills stated, “I visited this woman and at first found her to be a smart woman. I learned her to sew, knit, etc.” Similarly, Mrs Charles Hughes testified, “I visited her four years ago, last August, for the first time and quite frequently since. I just opened the door and went in. The woman lived in a poor condition but what she was used to.” Though Lin was an immigrant, Hughes found communication was possible. “She could understand me fairly well.” In the spring of 1918, Lin Tee found an enthusiastic and devoted friend in Dr Olive Ray. Ray had just returned from China and set up a medical practice in the neighbouring village of Cambray. Lin was the only other woman in the Lindsay area who spoke Chinese, so Ray frequently travelled the twenty-kilometre distance from Cambray to Lindsay by horse and buggy. At first, “[Lin] did not receive me friendly nor did the men,” said Ray. She persisted, helping Lin with English and teaching her sewing. Eventually, Lin “grew to love my friendship,” Ray said. To her pleasure, Ray discovered Lin to be “quite clear, bright and intelligent.”12 According to Ray, in August 1918, Lin turned to her friend for help with family problems: “She cried and used shocking English words and suggested some ill treatment to the child or herself.” As the court weighed Lee’s fitness to care for his wife, Ray also claimed Lin had confided in English that “this man had a wife and two children in China.” Her husband’s polygamy, Ray suggested, made him only a “so-called” husband, erasing his legal control over his wife. Ray also intimated that Lee’s abuse may have contributed to Lin’s mental distress because “she was quite clear mentally then.”13

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Soon after Lin confided in Ray, the Lees’ outwardly peaceful family life in Lindsay fell apart. Friends claimed to have found Lin in bed crying, and on Sundays she seemed extremely distressed in church. They visited more often to try to help. Hughes, who was Lin’s friend for four years, reported that “last August she would take bad crying fits, tell me that Lee was no good and that she wanted the baby to be an angel. I saw no evidence, but she told me Lee beat the baby girl.” Neighbours testified that they could hear Lin continually screaming, crying, and yelling; the sound set them on edge. Her visible and audible distress inspired many townspeople to help the family, if only to quell the noise. Based on court testimony, we can only speculate about Lin’s situation, although both spousal abuse and depression seem likely possibilities. Given the widely shared belief that Lin was demented, her friends found it difficult to assess her accusations against her husband without “proof.” Neighbours also had difficulty evaluating Lee’s care of his wife until his efforts to cope clearly crossed the line of acceptable behaviour. Like many cases of alleged abuse within the family, issues of determining what was happening devolved to ambiguous questions of one person’s word against another’s.14 Lee evidently responded to the increasing pressures of his wife’s mental distress by cutting her off from her friends and community and becoming very controlling, in a pattern suggestive of an abusive husband. He also seemed at his wits’ end as Lin’s mental distress likely put him under great strain. Besides attending to his wife, Lee had to work exhausting days in the laundry and care for three young children, including the baby Suey Lan. Without Lin’s labour, the family finances probably worsened rapidly. Lee responded to increased public scrutiny of his home with explanations that his wife was “insane.” To the horror of his neighbours, he boarded up the windows of his house so that Lin could not escape. Her prison was a twelve-by-fourteen-foot room with door locks on the outside. Neighbours could hear Lin screaming, crying, and yelling.15 Lee felt that he had few alternatives, since he could not work, watch his children, and monitor his distressed wife as well. In locking up his wife, Lee was following a practice from his home village in China: lock up the insane at home. In September 1918, Lee felt overwhelmed and needed help caring for the baby. The family doctor, Dr Fabian Blanchard, contacted Mrs E.E. (Eleanor Earle) Sharpe, secretary of the Children’s Aid Society. Sharpe visited the home to make arrangements to take the child, with Dr Olive Ray coming along as an interpreter.16 Lin’s distraught

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and dishevelled condition shocked Ray and Sharpe. The two women asked if they could take Lin out for a drive, but Lee refused because “she will get away from us.” Meanwhile, without her baby daughter, Lin became melancholy and so Blanchard treated her with sedatives. Lee had also apparently tried to medicate Lin with opium, and she had developed an addiction to the drug. Ray and Sharpe then began a campaign to place Lin in an insane asylum, where they believed she would be better cared for than by her husband. By taking this initiative, these wellmeaning women soon became embroiled in conflicts over the Lee family that divided the town.17 Attempts at Rescue At the trial, Ray and Sharpe made their case that Lin should be removed from her husband’s care. They had instigated her arrest for insanity, so they took the stand first. With the help of an attorney, Mr L.R. Knight, they also defended themselves from accusations that their meddling had caused the riot.18 Knight hammered home the point that Lee had not properly cared for his wife. Lin’s accusations of abuse and her expressed desire to escape confinement prompted Ray’s and Sharpe’s efforts to intervene on her behalf. Nevertheless, their attempts to remove Lin from her home by committing her to an asylum without asking her consent showed a paternalism common among middle-class social reformers … Even at the height of early Canadian feminists’ influence in the 1920s, critics saw feminists’ racial agenda as their ideological Achilles heel. In the Lindsay Police Court, both town authorities and Chinese men alleged that the women had been motivated by racial prejudice. Indeed, Ray’s and Sharpe’s profile matches family-oriented reformers of their age. Ray was a Christian missionary, while Sharpe was a local feminist crusader for the vote, an ardent imperialist member of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), and an avid social reformer. As a local Children’s Aid Society worker, Sharpe advocated that the state should intervene within the family to protect children from abuse. Lin’s case would extend the argument to include women. Sharpe was a controversial, albeit respected figure in Lindsay, a place, like the rest of Canada, which had not yet fully accepted the retreat from patriarchal privilege that child protection laws implied.19 Historians have termed women like Ray and Sharpe “maternal feminists” because they saw distinctive roles for women in public life, owing to their mothering

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characteristics. In Canada, maternal feminists often devoted special political attention to issues involving women, children, and the family. In the 1920s, their agenda included related reproductive issues facing the “white race” in Canada, such as preventing miscegenation by regulating contact between Chinese men and white women.20 Consequently, in Lindsay, a rhetoric of racial tolerance could support a backlash against feminist gender politics. In response, the women’s attorney L.R. Knight defended the feminists’ actions as civic-minded. They should not be blamed for the riot because “the action of the ladies was exactly what any right-thinking person would do.” If Lin had been sent to an asylum, or if police had acted on complaints of abuse, then the riot would have been avoided. Ultimately, he blamed Lee: “A whole lot of responsibility rests with the husband and he is not a fit and proper person to take her to Toronto or China.” Throughout the fall of 1918, Ray and Sharpe pressed for Lin to be committed to an insane asylum. The committal required consent of two male physicians and Lin’s family.21 With Lee opposed and other male doctors in disagreement, the committal process went nowhere. Blanchard, the family doctor, testified that he had made fifty visits to the house. “I only saw her cry once,” he reported, “There was not the faintest evidence of ill-treatment.” He diagnosed Lin as “suffering from nervous excitement.” Accusations of abuse had no substance because, he said, “Relationships between husband and wife were very normal and happy.”22 In late September 1918, Lin broke the stalemate by running away. At two in the morning, she knocked on Ray’s door, her baby in her arms. Standing in the doorway, Lin said that Lee was “no good” and that she would not go back. Ray invited Lin and the baby to stay for a while. Ray testified that Lin seemed cheerful the next morning, but by the following day she became depressed, and started to sing abnormally. While Lin stayed with Ray, Lee visited every day and, according to Ray, “he seemed attentive.” Meanwhile, Lin’s mental state deteriorated. Ray testified that Lin “imagined she saw people in the air” and “gradually passed into a state of moping and depression.” After a few weeks, Lin returned to her husband.23 Events worsened, however, when baby Suey Lan fell ill and died in the global influenza epidemic in October. Ray said Lin appeared to be in a “wild” state on the day of the funeral. As Lin’s distress deepened, the sound of her screams gave credence to community beliefs that horrific abuse was occurring. Then, late in the fall, Lee decided to move his family into the Chuong Sun Laundry, where his employers and relatives lived, so he could

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more easily care for Lin while he worked. They were all Chinese men at the laundry, a fact that would have significance for Lindsay residents concerned about abuse. After the move, Lee kept his wife Lin locked up in her quarters behind the laundry and did not permit her to go out. His perceived abuse aroused community ire: boys pounded on the windows and door of the laundry until they broke the glass. In December, Ray and Sharpe resolved that Lin would be better off in an insane asylum, with or without her husband’s consent. They went to the police and swore out a deposition that Lin Tee was insane. Police Chief John Short then accompanied them to arrest Lin Tee so that doctors could investigate her mental condition. Ray testified that when they arrived, Lin was sitting in a chair with her hair tidy and in a condition of sanity. When Ray informed her that she would leave her husband’s home, she went willingly, suggesting that she welcomed what she perceived as her friend’s efforts to gain her freedom.24 Ray and Short took Lin to Police Magistrate Jesse Bradford’s office at the Lindsay Police Court. Terrified of the legal process that she neither wished for, nor understood, Lin became very agitated. Using a Chinese boy as interpreter, Bradford asked her whether there had been any cruelty? Lin replied no, that other men did not use her, and that her husband was not cruel to her, but her problem was her baby. Given that the reputation of Chinese men in Lindsay was at stake, it is possible that the boy’s translation was not accurate and thus, the question whether abuse occurred remains unclear. Lin may have feared the consequences of admitting the abuse to authorities. According to literature about familial abuse, a reluctance to involve the police and courts is characteristic of many abused women because they fear their husband’s retaliation. The white community’s suspicions may have also scared her into silence for the sake of her family.25 Medical opinions of Lin’s mental condition, including that of her family doctor, did not favour removing her from the home. When Lee refused again to commit his wife to an asylum, Bradford jailed Lin for one day, then returned her to the custody of her husband.26 Once again, Ray and Sharpe found criminal insanity law an awkward tool for rescue. Both the police and the courts applied criminal insanity charges within social contexts that were highly influenced by understandings of gender. Early twentieth-century authorities usually deferred decisions about care of insane women to male relatives. Their actions conformed to normative views of gender in marriage, in which allegedly less rational, more emotional women followed the direction

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of allegedly more rational, stable men. If the family could control their insane member and the community’s peace was not unduly disturbed, husbands’ authority in the home remained intact. As long as Lin did not pose a danger to herself and there was no irrefutable proof of abuse in the home, the police and magistrate saw no justification to interfere in the couple’s domestic quarrels … At home, Lee again made Lin a prisoner … During her six weeks of imprisonment at home, Lin’s mental state deteriorated and her desperate screams disturbed the neighbours more frequently. Once again they turned to local officials and immigration authorities for help.27 The Police, Officials, and “a Good Family Man” Lindsay police had investigated charges of cruelty against Lee, but because no one came forward with corroborating evidence, Police Chief John Short felt the privacy of Lee’s home had to be respected. From Short’s standpoint, an insane woman’s attempt to escape from her husband could not necessarily be interpreted as evidence of abuse. Likewise, the sound of Lin’s screams did not outweigh the family’s right to privacy. Town authorities claimed that a man’s home could simply not be entered without specific evidence of a crime. To do otherwise would set a precedent allowing police to breech the privacy of the home. Crown attorney T.H. Stinson explained, “It is our claim in this country that our liberty is not highly interfered with and our property is protected.” To make an exception for a Chinese family would constitute illegal discrimination because in this case, “The law pertaining to foreigners applies to the average citizen.”28 Yet in response to rumours and public pressure, in early September 1918, Short investigated allegations of abuse. He described his cursory inquiry and his resulting conclusions to the Police Court: I investigated, and saw the China man, I saw him nursing one of the children in the hallway. His wife was on the inside, I told him the complaints and he denied them. I was satisfied there was nothing to the rumours. I went back again twice and found conditions the same. I saw the woman on both occasions. She did not look like a person who was abused. I learned from inquiries that Lee was not a man like that. I could find nothing to warrant interference. No one came to me with a specific charge. All that was brought to me were rumours. I was satisfied there was nothing in the ill treatment charge to justify police acting.

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The basis of Short’s good impression of Lee was his identification with him as a fellow family man.29 … By the end of January 1919, Lin Tee’s attempts to escape became more desperate. Hughes testified that “she screamed in her efforts to get away and smashed windows to get out.” According to witness John McCrae, neighbour William Warrian “couldn’t put up with the noise.” McCrae stated that Warrian burst into the laundry where he saw “two Chinamen on the floor and the woman standing in bed with a stick.” In court, Warrian denied the story, claiming all he saw was Lee, another Chinese man, and two boys. Yet Warrian’s original story of abuse had spread like wildfire throughout the day of the riot, especially after Lin’s dramatic front-window escape appeared to support his tale.30 Minutes after Lin’s escape attempt, according to the Watchman-Warder, a number of citizens urged that “the parties guilty of the cruelties inflicted on the Chinese woman who had been attacked from time to time, should be put out of business and advocated strong arm methods if necessary.” Regardless of whether Lee prostituted his wife to other Chinese men, as many Lindsay residents believed, or whether he cruelly imprisoned his insane wife, his actions violated community standards. Until the morning of the riot, community leaders had upheld Lee’s patriarchal privilege to protect and care for his wife, but new proof of abuse seemed to appear. One faction of elite men, frustrated with police inaction, called for the men of the town to take matters into their own hands.31 On the evening of 31 January, protestors demonstrated in front of the Chuong Sun Laundry. Meanwhile, Ray and Sharpe again swore out a deposition that Lin was insane and Short arrived and arrested Lin for insanity. Recalling her previous arrest, she refused to dress herself and had to be forcibly taken to jail.32 That night, medical assessments agreed that Lin was insane: she was reportedly hysterical, “wandering, singing, crying and laughing.” Lin was later moved to the Children’s Shelter, where, in despair, she tried to kill herself by putting a nail through her arm and tying a towel around her neck.33 During Lin’s arrest, the crowd of men outside the laundry became outraged that Short had arrested a helpless woman instead of the man they believed had abused her. Short claimed that no one had provided him with enough evidence to lay a charge. The dark temper of the men in the mob turned stormy. If the police would not act, then the people would. In the name of maintaining community standards, a night of terror ensued.34 Gender concerns catalysed the first part of the riot, which newspapers claimed was led by established community leaders.

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Five hundred men defended community standards, but they did not breech law and order beyond destroying the property of their targets, though they clamoured for violence against “John Chinaman” (Lee), so they could run him out of town. For this group, racial hatred was a terror tactic. The crowd targeted only those Chinese men whom they believed were complicit in Lin’s abuse – Lee and his co-workers at Chuong Sun Laundry. The crowd did not harm Lindsay’s two-man police force, nor were neighbouring premises disturbed. Once the Chuong Sun Laundry had been reduced to ruins, the majority of rioters peacefully dispersed.35 The second part of the riot involved uncontrolled looting, indignation, and opportunistic racial violence. Seventy-five to one hundred rioters pursued Lee’s co-workers to Charlie Ling’s Dominion Café where the latter had taken refuge. There the rioters again demanded that “John Chinaman” (Lee) be given to the crowd, but all Chinese had fled or hid before the mob arrived. These rioters were mainly younger men and boys, “thirsting for excitement and revenge on some person.” Police were unable to restrain the unruly mob, which included the Peterborough hockey team and fans as well as Lindsay residents. A flying brick hit Police Chief Short, knocking him unconscious. Police Constable Parkes, the remainder of Lindsay’s two-man police force, fled to seek help. At the third target, the Lee Chong Brothers Laundry, the mob stole laundry parcelled for delivery that belonged to their neighbours.36 Summing up the evening, the Peterboro Review commented, “Hockey success evidently drove Lindsay wild.”37 After the riot, many Lindsay residents disavowed racial prejudice. They claimed that competing gender claims led to the riot because the authorities had not addressed Lee’s wife abuse. Most of the rioters focused their anger only on Lee and his workplace, expressing racial hatred to punish him for public abuse of his wife. While wife abuse did occur in both Chinese and European Canadian communities, as long as it did not unduly disturb the neighbours or create a public horror, private conduct could deviate from public postures of masculinity as chivalrous protection of women.38 … Because a minority of the mob had looted the property of innocent Chinese victims, newspapers called the event “an anti-Chinese riot,” though they claimed conflicts over the Lee family had caused the violence. To redeem the town’s good name, the Lindsay Post encouraged city organizations to pass “strong resolutions denouncing the incident.”39 An editorial on 7 February 1919 criticized vigilantism as unworthy of British liberty and manhood: “To resort to terrorism is to

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deny the existence of a liberty which has been at stake in the great struggle overseas for which many thousands of Canadians have laid down their lives.” A local newspaper also editorialized that it was unfortunate that Chinese were treated so wrongly, when Canada spent thousands of dollars each year to send missionaries to China.40 To disavow the “disgraceful incident,” Lindsay’s Crown attorney T.H. Stinson called for charges to be laid against riot organizers. But in response, townspeople closed ranks. Police inquiries led nowhere, and although five hundred people had participated, no one could be identified, no one was ever arrested, and no one was ever charged.41 Perhaps people regretted the riot, but they did not view it as serious enough to merit turning in a neighbour. The Lindsay press joined the conspiracy of silence, identifying only members of the losing Peterborough hockey team as rioters. Eventually, the event slipped from public memory into historical oblivion. When I visited Lindsay in 1995, no one had heard about the event. We Are All Family: Defending Chinese Men in Lindsay … After Lee fled to Toronto, he contacted the Lee Association to assist with his defence. Prominent Toronto Chinese leader Reverend Ma T.K. Wou (Ma Jinghu) immediately travelled to Lindsay to investigate allegations that Lee prostituted his wife to other Chinese men. Accompanied by a female cousin of Lin, Ma interviewed Lin and declared that rumours of abuse were false. Like the English community, the Chinese immigrant community tolerated a degree of private domestic abuse, so Ma’s findings do not erase the validity of Lin’s earlier accusations. Nevertheless, the charges that inflamed the riot were most likely false. While Chinese immigrant men condoned affairs and recourse to prostitution because laws hindered them from bringing their wives, they expected husbands to cherish their wives’ sexual virtue. If other Chinese discovered that Lee prostituted his wife out to other Chinese men, they would brand him as cruel and immoral, which would bring him great shame. When working-class Chinese men broke moral obligations, other Chinese immigrants blacklisted them, denying them access to Chinese networks that provided necessary credit, employment, mutual aid, accommodations, and supplies. Even Lee’s employers depended on the goodwill of Chinese laundry suppliers. In general, Chinese immigrants tried to avoid behaviour that would add to racial prejudice. When a

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Chinese immigrant became mentally ill and disruptive to white society, fellow Chinese usually pressured the person to return to China. Family members and mutual aid organizations provided funds when needed because the collective image of Chinese immigrants was at stake.42 The audience at Lin’s trial reflected Chinese immigrants’ anxiety over the case. Ma, a Presbyterian minister and secretary of the Chinese department of the YMCA, observed as an official representative of the Chinese consul. Lindsay and Toronto Chinese also came out in force. Lee had fled to Toronto, so twenty-four-year-old Lee Ling, a Toronto police court interpreter, joined with Lindsay attorney L.V. O’Connor to organize Lee’s defence. In the end, Lee Ling and O’Connor mounted an impressive defence that successfully refuted rumours of immorality. With the help of many witnesses, they suggested Ray’s and Sharpe’s unwanted interference had been guided by prejudice. Borrowing a page from racist ideology, Lee’s defence team argued that Lin would be better off among other Chinese than in an asylum. They claimed her innate racial difference trumped any gender claims Lin might make about the merits of escaping alleged abuse. The team’s strategy complemented town authorities’ preference to preserve the privacy of the family home, while deflecting accusations of spousal abuse as potentially prejudiced. Systematically, witnesses for Lee defended his marriage, cast the Chuong Sun Laundry community as a family, and portrayed the women as misguided meddlers.43 Lee Ling started Lee’s defence by dramatically discrediting Ray’s assertion that Lin and Lee’s marriage was not a true marriage worthy of the authorities’ respect. Lee Ling explained that the couple were married in China by Confucian rites, and then remarried in Victoria, BC, by a Methodist clergyman in accordance with Canadian law. Furthermore, he refuted Ray’s charges related to Chinese practices of polygamy and the sale of women. Most significantly, Lee Ling also reframed the court spectators’ understandings of gender and family relationships among Chinese immigrants. He argued that the people living at the Chuong Sun Laundry – Lee, his wife, his children, his nephew, and others – constituted a family. “The Lees are all cousins and belong to the Lee clan,” he said. Lee Chuong, proprietor of the laundry, added that the family had separate quarters from the Chinese men. No immorality occurred, because according to Lee Chuong, “Lee treated his wife and children the very best.” He described Lee as a caring husband, stating, “My uncle did not do any work for [the] past six weeks, but attended to his

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wife.”44 Moreover, Lee Ling emphasized that in Lindsay Chinese immigrants’ behaviour conformed to standard Anglo-Celtic morals, according to which deviant sexual practices were unthinkable. Lee Ling said, “I investigated the rumours current about town and the local Chinamen denied them.” Reverend Robert Brown, pastor of the Chinese Church in Toronto, added his support to Lee Ling’s assertions that Ray and Sharpe did not understand Chinese immigrants. Brown had started a mission to Chinese in Toronto in 1893. Since he was familiar with Chinese immigrant men’s struggles against discrimination, he sympathized with Lee. He informed the court that Lee and his clan had wealthy cousins in Vancouver. Brown’s claim of respectable class connections distanced Lee from the poverty associated with laundry work, subtly attacking the race and class prejudices that informed rumours of immorality. Further, Brown defended Lee’s patriarchal imperative, then asserted his own paternalism over Lin. He stated that he could better arrange to care for Lin in Toronto than in Mimico Asylum. He also harshly criticized Ray and Sharpe for harming Lin through their unwanted interference and for spreading rumours. He claimed that Lin’s innate weakness as a Chinese woman made her exceptionally vulnerable: “Chinese women are sensitive and hysterical. I have had funerals where we have had to carry a Chinese woman into the church and to the grave. This woman has been persecuted, I could see today,” he said. In his closing statement, O’Connor continued Brown’s argument and accused the women and the rioters of racial prejudice. Referring to claims that Lee prostituted out his insane wife, O’Connor said, “I heard the rumours and I could not believe them.” Sadly, those rumours “made an impression on the women” Ray and Sharpe. Like the women, O’Connor wanted the best for Lin, but he hoped that Chinese men in Lindsay would be cleared from scurrilous accusations: “You can come to no other finding, your Worship, than the Chinese residents are nothing but the best, and that the family life of the Lee family was above reproach. I hope you will free these Chinese citizens from the odium cast upon them.” Making Judgments At midnight on the day of the trial, Police Court Magistrate Jesse Bradford announced that he found Lin insane and dangerous to herself. Bradford then attempted to reconcile divisions over competing gender

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claims to define and enforce community standards with a compromise. He recognized the legitimacy of the women’s authority to intervene, while downplaying the possibility of spousal abuse. He had judged that Lee could no longer manage his insane wife, but he found no evidence to support charges of abuse. His finding upheld male authority in the home, and it cleared town officials from responsibility to intervene more forcefully earlier in the crisis. The police chief “could not enter the Chinese home any more than he could enter your home unless a crime had actually been committed and he was armed with a warrant, and a suspicion reasonably well-founded. The Magistrate, too, would be open to prosecution. No blame is attached to the Police or the C.A.S. [Children’s Aid Society],” he said. “It is possible that a mistake has been made in this case, but I am convinced that the women acted in the best interests of humanity. I do not hold the women responsible. They are to be commended.” The official conclusions of the trial, embraced by the press and the court, refuted popular white beliefs about Chinese men’s race and gender behaviour. In one blow, they celebrated the town’s victory over racial prejudice and they defended the Christian family from future scrutiny. … The judgment of the court nevertheless turned a blind eye to Lin’s wishes. She did not wish to return to China, her inevitable fate as a Chinese immigrant mental patient. She was not present at the trial, nor did she have a lawyer to represent her interests. At twenty-two, she was separated from her children and committed to an insane asylum where her culture and language would further isolate her. The women who interested themselves in her case undoubtedly had the best intentions, but the results for Lin were tragic.45 … Conclusion … The intimate scale of Lindsay’s dozen-member Chinese community in an overall population of 6,352 encouraged daily interactions with their European Canadian friends and neighbours.46 When Lin Tee became distressed, many community members became involved in the family’s problems. These reactions to spousal abuse inherently involved community “politics” because individual family members’ actions in power struggles at home contributed to broader community patterns of gender and

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race relations. Similarly, definitions of “madness” hinged to a degree upon historical definitions of acceptable social behaviour. In Lindsay, enforcing community standards was as much an issue as definition. During the conflicts leading to the riot, Lin’s female advocates asserted their moral “right” to bring public resources of the state into the family, which maternal feminists considered their realm. These women challenged exclusively male assumptions of privilege that supported a range of paternalistic male ideologies. These male ideologies upheld a wide range of male behaviour that included protection of the vulnerable, the necessity of female dependence, and a paternalistic vision of male privilege that could at times support an abusive husband’s “right” to protect “his” woman and manage “his” family without public interference. As Lin’s escape attempts became more desperate, paternalistic assumptions of masculinity clashed with each other and with the women’s attempts to protect Lin from abuse. As such, conflicting beliefs about gender played as large a role as race in the Lindsay riot. What this particular case reveals overall is the complex manner in which gender and racial constructions interacted in community reaction and response to Lee and Lin as individuals.

NOTES 1 “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands in Dealing with Chinese Residents Said to Have Abused One of Their Women,” Watchman-Warder, 6 February 1919; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night: Chinese Business Places Were Wrecked,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “Excitement in Chinese Colony: Demented Woman Gives Trouble,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane,” Lindsay Post, 10 February 1919. The figure of 500 rioters and “if the police would not act then the people would” is from the Archives of Ontario, RG 23, Series E-83, File 1.3, “Anti-Chinese Riots,” John Miller to Joseph Rogers, 11 March 1919, and John Miller, Report, “Re Riots at Lindsay Victoria County,” Toronto, 25 March 1919. 2 “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 3 “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night,” 919; “Lindsay’s Chinatown Wrecked by Mob,” Evening Examiner (Peterborough, ON), 1 February 1919. 4 Lisa Mar, “The Politics of Yellow Peril: Images of Chinese Men with White Women in Toronto, 1900-1928” (unpublished paper, 1994).

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5 The Victorian police court criminal insanity trial was a predecessor of Canada’s contemporary legislation allowing involuntary confinement of the mentally ill. 6 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane”; “Crown Attorney Acting in Connection with Recent Riot,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919. The Ontario Lunacy Act outlined the criteria for confining dangerous lunatics in an asylum under warrant and the procedure by which a judge called experts and witnesses to testify about the accused’s sanity in court. C.E.T. Fitzgerald, A.H. O’Brien, J.T. Harris, and F. Flynn, eds., Canadian Consolidated Ten Year Law Digest: 1911–1920, vol. 1 (Toronto: Canada Law Book, 1920), 2339–42. 7 “Special Meeting of the Town Council: Citizens Blamed for Inciting the Riots,” Watchman-Warder, 6 February 1919; “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 8 Timothy Brook, “The Tokyo Judgement and the Rape of Nanking,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, 3 (August 2001): 675. 9 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 10 Harry Con et al., eds, From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 301; Census of Canada (Ottawa: F.A. Acland), 1921, vol. 4, 752–3. On Anglo perceptions of foreign men, see Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angela Napolitano, 1911–1972,” Canadian Historical Review 72, 4 (1991): 505–31; Mar, “The Politics of Yellow Peril.” 11 See examples such as the Lindsay Post’s serialized story by popular British anti-Asian writer Sax Rohmer, “The Yellow Claw,” 8, 15, 22 March 1919; “Orillia Celestial Heavily Fined,” Lindsay Post, 28 February 1919; “Alarming Increase in Drug Traffic,” Lindsay Post, 24 January 1919; “Was Epidemic Brought by Chinese Coolies?” Lindsay Post, 1 November 1918; “Inspectors Raid Chinese Club,” Lindsay Post, 25 October 1918. 12 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 13 “Excitement in Chinese Colony.” 14 Regarding opinions of Lin Tee, see ibid. and “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” For literature on perceptions of family abuse, see Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penguin, 1988); Franca Iacovetta, “Making ‘New Canadians’: Social Workers, Women, and the Reshaping of Immigrant Families,” in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 261–303. 15 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 16 Ibid.

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17 Ibid.; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night”; “Excitement in Chinese Colony.” 18 This and all subsequent trial coverage is from “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 19 Interview with Mrs Grace Bright, 1 March 1995. The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in Lindsay was founded in 1895 after the inauguration of a provincial policy for aiding and protecting neglected and dependent children. It gradually expanded the scope of its activities to include providing social services to the family. Thus, CAS intervention in family power struggles was a relatively new phenomenon. Reg A. Cozens, ed., Lindsay and Victoria Old Home Week 1–10 July, 1948 Souvenir Booklet (Lindsay, ON: Old Home Week Committee, 1948). Linda Gordon examines how child protection advocates became drawn into wife-beating cases in this era in Heroes of Their Own Lives. 20 These issues also included eugenics, juvenile delinquency, and immigration restriction. See Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), and Michael Scott Kerwin, “Re/producing a ‘White British Columbia: The Meanings of the Janet Smith Bill” (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1996). 21 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 22 Ibid.; “Excitement in Chinese Colony.” 23 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 24 Ibid.; “Excitement in Chinese Colony”; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night.” 25 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” According to Gordon, abused women felt reluctant to involve the courts, because many viewed a degree of male violence as inevitable and they and their children needed their husbands’ wages to survive (Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, 255–6, 271–5). 26 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 27 Ibid.; “Excitement in Chinese Colony”; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night.” 28 “County Crown Attorney Issues Statement Relating to Friday Night’s Disgraceful Incident,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 29 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 30 Ibid.; “Excitement in Chinese Colony.” 31 “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night.” 32 Ibid.

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33 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 34 Ibid.; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night”; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; Miller, Report, “Re Riots at Lindsay Victoria County.” 35 “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night”; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Lindsay’s Chinatown Wrecked by Mob.” 36 The Watchman-Warder described looting as partly an attempt to make up for clothing lost earlier in the evening. It described the looting at the Lee Chong Brothers Laundry as a clothing free-for-all: “Some of the young fellows walked in an endeavour to pick out their own laundry and failing to get their own took some other person’s to make up for their own loss, at least that was the plan.” See “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night”; “Lindsay’s Chinatown Wrecked by Mob.” 37 “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night”; “Citizens Take Law into Their Own Hands”; “The Lindsay Riots,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “No Trouble at Peterboro,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919. 38 For a discussion of chivalry, see Carolyn Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” in Iacovetta and Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts, 149–88. 39 “Regret Expressed by Public Over Friday Night’s Incident,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919. 40 “Law or Lawlessness,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “The Alien within Our Gates,” Lindsay Post, 14 February 1919, also noted that Chinese immigrants’ property rights had to be respected because of treaty obligations for China and Canada to respect each other’s visiting nationals. “County Crown Attorney Issues Statement Relating to Friday Night’s Disgraceful Incident,” Lindsay Post, 7 February 1919; “Special Meeting of Town Council: Citizens Blamed for Inciting Riots,” Watchman-Warder, 6 February 1919; “Mob Rule Prevailed Friday Night.” 41 As a consequence, Lindsay newspapers did not report that the police charged anyone. A subsequent Ontario Provincial Police investigation found that no one was willing to talk, so no charges could be laid. Archives of Ontario, “Anti-Chinese Riot”; John Miller to J.E. Rogers, 14 March 1919; “County Crown Attorney Issues Statement.” 42 “Sending Report to Chinese Consul-General”; “Chinese Woman Was Remanded.” Lisa R. Mar, recollections of family lore about Chinese immigrants, 27 August 1999; “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 43 “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.” 44 Trial coverage for the rest of this chapter is from “Mrs Lee Ten Was Adjudged Insane.”

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45 Ibid.; “Mrs Lee Removed to Asylum,” Watchman-Warder, 13 February 1919. According to the Chinese Times (Da Han Gong Bao), Canadian immigration law required insane Chinese to be deported. UBC Library Archives and Special Collections, Chinese Canadian Research Collection, Box 4, File “Chinese Times Index 1918” states that on 23 March 1918, the Chinese Times published an article stating that Chinese mental patients in Canada would be deported. 46 Population of Lindsay in 1918 from Cozens, ed., Lindsay and Victoria County Old Home Week, 55.

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PART TWO The Making of White Settler Societies

Nation-building involves processes of exclusion and inclusion. It is a gendered and racialized project informed by the efforts of dominant groups to promote their version of “proper families” while regulating both the sexuality of “others” and procreation across racial divides. Historians of “immigrant nations” like Canada have long recognized the key role played in such processes by policies which admit, restrict, and/or exclude populations in alignment with domestic priorities. They have also long understood the need to understand the migrants’ homelands, the reasons for migrating, and the values they brought with them. Still, Canadian immigration historians, like other historians of Canada (and of other nations), have tended to adopt a nation-bound frame, treating immigrants, including women, mainly as an element in the history of one nation rather than as part of a wider (and perhaps ongoing) transnational phenomenon. White immigrants have received disproportionate attention partly because a historically “white Canada” policy favoured white British, American, and certain European groups, but this has also reinforced a liberal interpretation of Canada that downplayed the ways in which its history (and present) as a white settler colony and nation was deeply intertwined with dominant, and exclusionary, notions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Since at least the early 1990s, various developments have challenged this nation-bound framework and placed analyses of race, gender, and sexuality at the centre of scholarly studies of female migration. Scholars working in the newer fields of critical race studies and postcolonial studies focused attention on the history of racialized women in Canada, offered multidimensional portraits of women, and rearticulated such often taken-for-granted categories as nation and nation-building.  Rich

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social histories highlighting people’s multiple identities increasingly challenged the possibility of writing “a” Canadian history. The burgeoning field of postcolonial theory, especially its application by feminist scholars, offered new ways of re-evaluating the subjectivities of white women colonizers and their complicit roles as oppressors of Indigenous and other non-white women. Also gaining traction was a contact zones frame that, as Mary Pratt notes, treated the subjects in a site of encounter not in terms of their separateness but rather “in terms of interlocking understandings and practises, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” New studies of colonialism, past and ongoing, also sought to recouple the intertwined but too-long separated histories of Indigenous and immigrant policies and peoples in Canada. These chapters illustrate how feminist scholars using critical race and postcolonial approaches challenged the idea that immigrant women are somehow “sisters” by virtue of a shared marginal status through an emphasis on the differences between them. They also interrogate the concept of “whiteness” in the work of colonizer-immigrants. Cecilia Morgan’s examination of the discourse of colonial missionaries working among Aboriginal women and men in Upper Canada during the period 1820s–1850s shows how the efforts to Christianize First Nations women included making them into “good housewives” and “fit mothers” modelled on the gender, race, and class identities of British white women. Building on the feminist scholarship that revealed the patriarchal character of Christian conversion, she suggests that the colonization project involved a transformation of gender identities among Indigenous people and a reinforcement of those identities among the colonizers themselves. Also bringing together immigration and Aboriginal histories – also part of a postcolonial gaze – Adele Perry’s chapter on the immigration of white women to mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia shows how the women’s arrival confirmed and challenged the racial mission of reinforcing “whiteness” in colonial BC. Perry highlights the centrality of immigration to an imperialist agenda that was racialized and gendered, and how white women served particular nation-building interests. Using a similar approach applied to women from China, Japan, and India between 1867 and 1920, Enakshi Dua analyses a seeming paradox: on the one hand, racialized notions of who deserved Canadian citizenship, and which families should procreate, developed as a way of excluding certain groups of potential immigrants, namely, Asian male workers whose role as the cheaply paid “foot soldiers” building the infrastructure necessary for capitalist development and nation-making

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was expected to be temporary, and the wives they wished to sponsor. On the other hand, sexual stereotypes of “foreign” men as threats to white women, fears of miscegenation, and the supposed need to “civilize” the “bachelors” of these heavily male Asian communities led some Canadians to support admitting Asian women. As Dua notes, these debates also point to the gendered and racialized manner in which the ethnic communities in question developed. The Canadian administrators, religious people, and women who supported admitting women they considered racially inferior on the grounds that they could civilize their men also enabled the creation of separate ethnic communities with households headed by family patriarchs. What role did race play in the lives of white and racialized women? Was colonization and nation-building a gendered project for men as well as women? What roles did white women play in the histories of white settler colonies? In what ways were women of different races and classes viewed as “civilizers?” How did race benefit or disadvantage different groups of women? Did the lobby in favour of admitting Asian women represent “refined practices of exclusion?”

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Anderson, Kay. Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. “National Identity and Gender Politics.” Special issue of Canadian Woman Studies 20, 2 (Summer 2000). Dua, Enakshi. “Racialising Imperial Canada: Indian Women and the Making of Ethnic Communities.” In Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge, 1999, 119–33. Carter, Sarah, and Lesley Erickson, eds. Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social Justice 32, 4 (2005): 120–43; and response by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, 3 (2008–09): 120–38. Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

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Pierson, Ruth Roach, and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds. Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds. Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class. London: Sage, 1995. Strong-Boag, Veronica, et al., eds. Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.

Turning Strangers into Sisters? Missionaries and Colonization in Upper Canada Cecilia Mor gan

Introduction “Having witnessed the degraded and filthy conditions of the Indians when they lived in their Weg-ke-wams,” wrote Methodist missionary Philander Smith, “I felt a desire to examine their domestic economy in their houses; accompanied by Mrs Hurlbut we visited most of the females.” Smith, who was staying at the Indigenous community of Methodist converts on Grape Island in the Bay of Quinte, was writing to the denominational newspaper, the Christian Guardian, in the fall of 1830. On visiting their homes, Smith and Mrs Hurlbut viewed Indigenous peoples engaged in a variety of activities, such as moccasin- and clothesmaking and wood-working, with clean homes, neatly – if sparely – furnished … Smith then was taken to the Grape Island hospital, run by the widows Peggy Mekigk and her sister, once notorious for their bad behaviour but now reformed characters. The Mekigks’ “manners a few years since were well known about Bath and Hay Bay. Their virtuous deportment, and industrious habits now command them to the care of the sick. There was a decency about the house, that no white woman need be ashamed of.”1 Smith was not exceptional in his attention to the domestic trappings of Indigenous converts to Christianity. During the 1820s and 1830s, in the pages of the Christian Guardian, in other Upper Canadian newspapers, and in missionary reports, journals, and diaries the comfortable, clean, and tidy homes of Indigenous families were celebrated as the measure of

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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their acceptance of Christianity and civilization. And in these homes would be installed the reformed figures of the Indigenous mother and father and their children, all engaged in learning the lessons of Christian marriage, parenthood, and family life as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and brothers and sisters. Such concerns over these gendered markers of “progress” and “enlightenment” were, of course, not limited to the borders of Upper Canada.2 Reforming and reshaping – or disrupting and disturbing – gender relations in colonized societies was a project often dear to the hearts of imperial authorities and their supporters.3 Work on the “white settler” colony of Upper Canada, though, has yet to share in the conceptual frameworks of international work on colonization and imperialism.4 To date we have only a rudimentary understanding of British and Anglo-American immigrants’ dependence on Aboriginal peoples for legitimization and justification … For many historians of the colony, the two groups are best treated separately … we know little of how, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, members of these communities might have met in “contact zones,” spatially and temporally linked, how they might have been “constituted in and by their relations to each other” that must be seen “in terms of copresence, interaction … often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”5 It may not, of course, be possible to understand all these dimensions of colonial encounters … The problem of insufficient sources, particularly for Indigenous women, is especially challenging and there are significant theoretical difficulties in simply trying to “uncover” subaltern women’s “voices” and their subjectivities, particularly through the medium of missionary reports and writings.6 … My intent here is to consider why the forging of new gendered identities for Indigenous peoples was part of the work of colonization, and why it was so important for so many observers of Indigenous communities that Indigenous women and men perform the rituals of bourgeois domesticity. As Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, and as Adele Perry’s chapter in this volume also suggests, colonialism was not only about the importation of middleclass sensibilities to the colonies, but also about the making of them within colonial contexts: colonialism was not a secure bourgeois project.7 … We also need to understand why and how these relationships were deployed in specific historical contexts and locations: why missionary work took a particular shape and had particular preoccupations in this colony.8 Through their appearances in papers such as the Christian Guardian, images of the “pious Indian woman” and the sober Indigenous

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male breadwinner were held up to Upper Canadian white audiences as examples for their consumption, edification, and education. It was not just Aboriginal peoples’ lands that were appropriated in the process of Anglo-American and British immigration and settlement. Missionary Work, Indigenous Peoples, and Upper Canada Missionary work with Aboriginal peoples in Upper Canada was not new to the 1820s and 1830s. The arrival of already-Christianized groups, such as the Mohawks and the Delawares, in the wake of the American Revolution brought both Anglican and Moravian missionaries to the colony. However, evangelical revivals – gatherings aimed at religious renewal and conversion – in England and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were responsible for the proliferation of missionary societies. These societies set about raising funds in Britain, the United States, and in Europe for the protection and salvation of Aboriginal peoples making contact with Europeans. Historians of Upper Canadian missionary work consider the 1822 arrival of the Methodist Episcopal Church from New York State marks the beginning of large-scale conversions and sustained Protestant missionary work, particularly among the Mississaugas, a branch of the Ojibwa nation who had settled along the Credit River by the 1820s. During the 1820s the Methodists staged a number of revivals across the province, from Grand River, to Belleville and the Bay of Quinte, to Holland Landing on the shores of Lake Simcoe. By 1829 the church had established mission communities at the Credit River, Grape Island in the Bay of Quinte, Rice Lake (east of Peterborough), and at Holland Landing. These showcases of Christian conversion and civilization included chapels and schools. Along with the English language, religious lessons, and reading and writing, Indigenous men and boys learned agriculture and trades such as shoemaking and cabinetry, and Indigenous women and girls learned knitting, sewing, and other household skills. Missionary work among the Ojibwa was also marked by the participation of prominent Indigenous preachers, such as Peter Jones of the Mississaugas and George Copway, an Ojibwa from Rice Lake, who worked at Saugeen.9 Of course, the Methodists were not the only denomination involved in missionary work during these decades.10 … As John Webster Grant commented, “In Upper Canada most Indians were offered a choice of at least two Christian denominations, and some were actively wooed by three or more.”11 That the majority of Indigenous peoples in southern

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Ontario did choose Christianity during this period – or at least some form of it – seems indisputable.12 Explanations for these conversions range from the material benefits offered by Christian communities (education, medical care, new skills), the desperate conditions of groups such as the Mississaugas, who had lost much of their land and had been demoralized by disease and alcohol, and Indigenous peoples’ needs for a new set of spiritual beliefs to help guide them through the changes brought by increased white settlement in Upper Canada.13 … Rather than engaging in the problematic exercise of assessing which church was successful at garnering the most souls, I seek to contribute to an analysis of the meaning of encounters between Indigenous and “newcomers” by examining the missionaries’ representation of the process of converting and garnering souls and subjectivities. The Methodists were not the only missionaries to produce sources related to this subject, of course, but they expressed their concerns clearly and trumpeted their successes in the pages of the regularly published Christian Guardian and missionary reports. In Methodist histories, the conversion of “heathens” was an important chapter in the church’s narrative of progress and enlightenment. As well, the evangelical nature of Methodism meant that Aboriginal conversions, and the reformation of gender relations that accompanied them, were particularly significant events and processes. For the Methodists, conversion was an emotionally charged leap of faith that required a rupture with one’s past and the sinful practices that accompanied it … It was a cataclysmic event preceded by simultaneously experienced agonies of pain, fear of being “hardened of heart” to Christ, and yearning and hope for Christ’s love; it was then marked by an invasion, a sense of transportation outside one’s self-control, which in turn was followed by great joy and happiness (with, however, the ever-present fear of backsliding). All this was often recorded in minute detail, as a means of witnessing the process and providing a road map to guide potential converts.14 Methodist attentiveness to the conversion process itself meant that detailed descriptions of those of Indigenous peoples received more attention than, for example, in the pages of the Anglican Church’s press.15 And, given the Methodist belief that “civilization” accompanied Christianization, narratives of Indigenous men’s and women’s acceptance of Christ were also narratives of their acceptance of bourgeois domestic decency.16 Running through all these writings were the Methodist missionaries’ own emotions of pleasure and delight in the work of colonization – as well as their insistence that Indigenous peoples were

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experiencing contact with Christ not as coercion, but as a voluntary and joyous transformation. The missionaries’ aims and goals were not always synonymous with those of the colonial state. Missionaries sometimes supported Aboriginal peoples in their opposition to white encroachment on their lands or worked with them in the negotiation of treaties.17 … This sympathy, particularly for the Ojibwa, and the humanitarian principles guiding them does not mean we can overlook the power relations at work when missionaries felt entitled to act as speaking subjects, both for themselves and for and about Indigenous peoples to other colonists … Turning Hunters into Christian Farmers: Indigenous Men Like many of their contemporaries, Methodist missionaries in Upper Canada saw the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to a settled life of agricultural production as central to the redemption of Indigenous people.18 In religious discourse, transformed gender relations were perceived to be essential to this shift. Of course, turning men from hunters into farmers involved reshaping the meanings of men’s work and manliness in general in Ojibwa society. Fatherhood, for example, was no longer synonymous with teaching children (particularly sons) the skills of hunting or trapping but instead came to be associated with areas such as agricultural cultivation (formerly the province of women).19 … As well, persuading Indigenous men to swear off alcohol was an important means of reshaping Indigenous manhood.20 … Many of the reasons given were similar to those used when “white” communities were urged to embrace temperance yet their arguments were also based on suppositions concerning the “nature” of Indigenous society which, when it encountered “the white man,” made it susceptible to the worst effects of alcohol. It was argued that alcohol made Indigenous men particularly vulnerable to the worst aspects of their own culture … While strong drink also had the same effects on whites, Indigenous culture was supposedly susceptible to such behaviour: the result could be neglect and physical brutality at the hands of fathers, brothers, and (most reprehensibly) sons.21 … Christianity would transform Indigenous men’s subjectivities and help them be better husbands, fathers, and sons. … Moreover, missionaries – like other whites – made much of the “stoicism” of Indigenous people: their supposed ability to endure pain and suffering without expressing fear, their so-called disdain for tears

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and other expressions of emotion, and their seeming impassive countenances might even be read as dignified, commanding respect and admiration for their self-control. However, for missionaries this demeanour made it impossible to tell if they had really embraced Christ. For evangelicals, religious beliefs were expressed through emotional sensibilities written on men’s and women’s bodies. Honest acceptance of Christ was expressed through tears, sighs, trembling, lamentations, and the occasional fainting fit – a “true feeling,” manifested as an expression of conversion and to serve as the conduit whereby Christ could enter the unbeliever’s spirit.22 While emotional expression was eagerly sought from non-Indigenous converts and at the deathbed scenes of professing Christians, it was even more highly prized when displayed by Indigenous peoples. And it was Indigenous men who were stereotyped as undemonstrative, possibly because they were perceived as hunters and warriors who lacked a vocabulary for expressing emotion.23 … For the missionaries, demonstrating to Indigenous men that they were permitted to express emotions, that it was acceptable – even desirable – to shed tears and feel empathy for other human beings, was a critical first step on the evolutionary path to Christian manhood, and to becoming loving husbands, fathers, and sons, members of both earthly and spiritual families in Christ. Indigenous men would now pity those over whom they wielded power, and understand the need for kindness and humane treatment of women and children.24 … Uplifting the “Degraded Indian Woman” But what of those Indigenous wives and mothers who were so threatened by their culture’s violence and brutality? If there was one theme that connected the Indigenous women of Upper Canada to their white counterparts in the missionaries’ language, it was that of the elevated position of women under Christianity. For many Christians their religion was supposed to uplift women from the enslavement, degradation, and oppression of their “heathen” sisters.25 Explicitly or implicitly, this argument ran through the religious discourse on women and gender relations.26 … Some of this material was drawn from the ever-increasing body of writing on missionary work in “faraway lands.” Articles such as “Heathen Females – Licentiousness” and “Missions – Paganism” and descriptions of cannibalism, polygamy, suttee, infanticide, and female slavery (perceived as more than economic bondage) can be seen as an

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international literary genre: straddling the border between fact and fiction, these writings were seen as crucial in garnering public support for missionary enterprises.27 They also had many meanings and purposes. For one, they reminded readers that Upper Canadian religious teachings were part of an international context of (benevolent) imperial expansion.28 They also attempted to make the category of sex transcend that of race for Christian womanhood, although the attempt itself revealed the racially bound nature of this image and the contradictions embedded in it. One such report in the Christian Guardian proclaimed, “These scenes of oppression and cruelty and death ought to excite the pity and sympathy of all Christian women and elicit their assistance.”29 These tales also made the discourse of imperial expansion multifaceted and gave it a social face that might soften and humanize the implications of political and economic conquest: “British” or “white” culture brought emancipation from “barbarism” and “savagery” for women, a group that in eighteenth-century British culture had come to symbolize those most in need of and likely to benefit from the humanitarian impulse embodied in Methodism.30 In Upper Canada, the language of Christian uplift brought these issues very close to home. Although much was made of the effect of Christianity on Indigenous men, it was the symbol of the enslaved Indigenous woman that was used to represent the triumph of moral regeneration.31 … In making the connection between themselves and Indigenous women the primary bond, and in attempting to downplay the racial differences that separated them and that also might make the meanings of womanhood quite different for Indigenous women, missionaries contributed to the development of the category of “Christian womanhood.” Although the sources consulted do not permit a full exploration of this issue, such statements hint that white Methodist women in Upper Canada may well have deployed representations of Indigenous women in shaping their own racially charged and gendered subjectivities.32 The category of “the Christian woman” also permitted generalizations about the essential nature of familial – especially maternal – ties, while simultaneously exposing the socially and culturally constructed nature of these bonds. Such an approach was exemplified in the 1833 report of the Cramahe Female Missionary Society, which highlighted the need for missions in Upper Canada by relating the tale of a mother whose son won a prize from the missionaries. With great pathos, the mother expressed the wish that they had arrived sooner, for their coming would have prevented her from murdering her other

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son.33 These tales of the transformation to some degree resembled accounts of domestic happiness in white families after accepting Christ’s love, but made it clear that the journey from degradation to uplift was one of crossing the borders of both religion and race. Not only were irreligious activities and beliefs denied – Indigenous society and culture (or what the missionaries believed them to be), were also expected to be renounced. Indigenous women, like white women, might be encouraged to speak out against the brutality of Indigenous men, but – unlike white women – in doing so they were also expected to shoulder the cultural, social, and economic customs and values of a colonial power. … Indeed, it was on the figure of the Indigenous woman that many of the missionaries’ hopes for an entire transformation of gender relations within the community were pinned.34 When Indigenous men became industrious and sober with Christianity they would be capable of supporting their wives and children as the heads of stable households,35 but it was up to their wives and mothers to provide the inspiration, by their dutiful and industrious management of the home. Their hopes for the progress of Christianity and civilization did not acknowledge – and, generally, could not recognize – the ways in which patriarchal family relationships would undermine Indigenous women’s social, economic, and political status within their own societies and subject them to the dominance of white society and that of their own husbands and fathers.36 … The triumph of civilization and Christian morality was to be seen not only by the abolition of infanticide and matricide but also by the presence of household furniture, tea kettles, cleanliness, and, if possible, European-style clothes … It was up to Indigenous women to remove the filth so closely associated with pagan homes from their families’ bodies and surroundings, thus helping them to embrace Christianity. Francis Hall, visiting the Credit community in August 1828, happily reported that Indigenous women were busy scrubbing the chapel floor and that “we found every house perfectly clean and neat, and the persons of grown people and children a pattern for any peoples.”37 Cleansed and clothed Indigenous families, along with their furniture and dishes, were then placed within the four walls of a warm and sheltering home, a Western-style building that had replaced “weg-ka-wams.”38 … Furthermore, Christianity would also reach the next generation of Indigenous women, as a display of converted Indigenous girls at a packed York Methodist chapel in 1828 demonstrated …The girls compared life prior to and after conversion, noting that “in the dark wood

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and forest wild, My father roved, rude Nature’s child” hunting bear and red deer with bow and tomahawk and “my brother, in his bark canoe, Across the waves so gaily flew” in order to shoot wild duck or catch fish while “My mother in the wigwam stay’d … to braid, or pound the samp, or dress the skin, or sew my father’s moccasin.” Although such a description might sound suspiciously like household work, there could be no doubt about the deleterious effects on young Indigenous girls: “And I, a little Indian maid, with acorn cups, and wild flowers play’d, or by my mother sat all day, to weave the splinted basket gay. I could not read, I could not sew, My Saviour’s name I did not know; My parents oft I disobey’d, And to the Lord I never pray’d.” However, the arrival of the “white man” brought churches and schoolhouses and the “Indians” learned Jesus’ name: “And holy hymns the dark wood cheer’d, I now can read, I now can sew, My Saviour’s name I’m taught to know; And now my saviours, I implore, to bless the white man, evermore.” This exhibition of Indigenous Christianity also included the girls’ recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, as well as a display of their writings, sewing, and knitting.39 The concern with homes and household objects should not be mistaken for support of consumerism. In the missionaries’ understanding of contact between whites and Indigenous peoples, the lure of cheap finery and trinkets had led to alcoholism and moral degradation.40 … By stripping themselves of such symbols of luxury, Indigenous women were also supposed to have renounced the trappings of “paganism,” with its superstitious fetishizing of material objects that had no moral value. Here, the “love of finery,” which Victorian middle-class social commentators often suggested was at the root of working-class women’s moral degradation, could be viewed as a point of intersection for both racial and class distinctions, a place where the two supposedly separate sets of relations converged in the early nineteenth century.41 Indigenous people’s acquisition of private property was an important objective for the missionaries, but it was to be limited to those essentials obtained through industry, thrift, and labour. The beds and cupboards they had made signified their assumption of Christian manliness and their acceptance of the Western model of gender relations. For men, this labour was represented much more concretely than for women, whose conversion to Christian womanhood was signified by the order of their homes … This representation of emotional connections in material objects becomes even more intriguing when we consider such images appeared

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alongside homilies on femininity and womanhood that highlighted and praised non-Indigenous mothers’ and wives’ contributions to proper gender relations as emotional, not physical, “housekeeping.” The religious discourse on gender relations in Methodism did not single out neat-and-tidy cupboards as the primary signifier of women’s contribution to morality within the home, but rather spoke in abstract terms of female “influence” as exercised by wives and mothers and of the delights of female piety. Evidently representing a stage in the evolution of Christian civilization, Indigenous women could never aspire to the status of (white) “ladies,” but perhaps in the future they would reach the point where social relations could become more abstract and would take precedence over the material apparatus of Christian morality. Converted Indigenous women were “pious Indian women,” a designation that mingled both class and racial status.42 … By linking progress to the symbol of the domesticated Indigenous woman, religious discourse underscored the supposedly natural, inevitable, and desirable position of white women within Christian society. Furthermore, the images of gender and family relations that ran through the rest of religious discourse – images that were understood to apply to white women and men – provided an important subtext for any discussions of gender relations in Upper Canadian Indigenous society. In the sources consulted, Indigenous women’s “voices” are produced and controlled by missionary discourse. The narrative devices and tropes used by the missionaries, the discursive strategies (such as the uplifted Christian Indigenous mother) that constructed Indigenous women for a predominantly white audience, make it impossible to consider how these women discussed the meaning of Christianity in their own lives.43 However, the letters and reports of those Indigenous men who worked as missionaries and missionaries’ helpers hint at a more complex perspective on religious matters. Men such as John Sunday, chief of the Mississaugas at the Bay of Quinte and a Methodist preacher, focused on the spiritual importance of religion to his people. While considering the benefits of moral discipline as important, he did not tie morality to domestic relations but rather linked it to the abolition of alcohol and its attendant vices.44 In contrast, Peter Jones evidently shared his non-Indigenous counterparts’ concerns with the reshaping of gender relations under Christianity, but also stressed the need for spiritual regeneration.45 The Ojibwa chief and Methodist preacher George Copway, while noting the importance of his family in conversions, identified his people’s need for religion as a spiritual

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matter and a means of giving purpose to lives that had been violently disrupted by white contact.46 … Indigenous Peoples, Gender Relations, and White Settler Identities What did it matter if Indigenous men and women and their children were seen to be performing European rituals of domesticity? In this particular settler society, the creation of either an Aboriginal workforce or a middle class that would mediate between a colonial government and an Indigenous peasantry do not seem to have been important goals.47 To be sure, missionaries believed that the Ojibwa’s future lay in agriculture; however, there were precedents for Indigenous agricultural communities in which gender relations looked rather different than Philander Smith’s “white woman’s decency.”48 Furthermore, given that distinct communities for Indigenous peoples had been created during these decades – the Delaware settlement at Moraviantown and the Six Nations along the Grand River – could it not have been possible to simply leave the Ojibwa to carve out their own, separate existence and expend time, efforts, and money elsewhere? Why such an interest and concern about the gendered division of labour, and new gendered identities, in Indigenous communities? An obvious answer is the evangelical “spirit” of the period, one that took as a central project the redefinition of gender relations in English and American societies.49 And evangelicals, in order to continue their work, needed to fundraise and to provide proof to supporters in both Upper Canada and abroad that souls were being saved.50 But why did the souls need to have plates, European women’s dresses, and cleanand-tidy homes? Here, it is possible to venture a few suggestions about the relationship of Indigenous communities to the missionary enterprise in Upper Canada. The settlements at Rice Lake, the Credit River, and on Grape Island were presented to the readers of Upper Canada’s religious press as sites of education and enlightenment, not just for their Ojibwa inhabitants but also for those non-Indigenous audiences who might read about these scenes of religious and civilizing transformation for their own benefit. In reading about pious Indian mothers and thrifty, sober Indian fathers, white Upper Canadians could satisfy any number of colonial fantasies and desires about gender relations in their own society. During this period, gender relations in Britain and the United States underwent significant changes and redefinitions in which the middle-class

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home figured significantly.51 Those who were anxious about the assertion of colonial power could assuage their fears with the knowledge, produced by the quoted “voices” of Indigenous women, that their lives had been improved immeasurably by the missionaries, even given them the status of “human being,” formerly denied to them by their own culture. White women in particular might read such narratives as comforting proof that their own roles within the home and family were designed precisely for their uplift and elevation, not confinement and subjugation. Those who believed that Upper Canada was theirs by divine and imperial right, might be assured that missionary work was “taming savages,” turning them into men and women who would be docile and well behaved, who would bring up their children in the same manner, and who would not cause the new immigrants to fear their violence or any reprisals for encroaching on their lands. Other, related concerns may have shaped the reports and their reception. While the Methodists would gain political and social respectability in the following decades, during the 1820s and 1830s they were not immune to charges of political radicalism, religious fanaticism, and a lack of social niceties.52 Missionary work might also help them claim a particular kind of moral and cultural capital that other irreligious and unfeeling white Upper Canadians lacked, even if the latter sat on the Executive Council and were part of the York or Kingston elite. Given that feeling and expressing a sensibility to the sufferings of others was an important part of evangelicals’ world view … missionary work with Indigenous peoples could be viewed as undeniable proof of the evangelicals’ moral superiority and sensibility, despite the fact that their preachers might not have the social backgrounds and formal education of the Anglicans. Methodist claims to be helping and not exploiting Indigenous peoples were made in the context of a society that did not always see them as moral subjects, one that suspected them of sedition, irreligion, and ignorance. And male missionaries, who dominated this work, were also carving out an identity of Christian manhood in these enterprises.53 Through these labours, men such as William Case were able to create themselves as virtuous men who protected weaker beings such as Indigenous women and offered their own manliness as examples to Indigenous men. They created for themselves an authoritative voice and a moral and social authority that was at least partially reliant on their ability to speak for helpless others.54 Furthermore, given that missionary enterprises were also “work,” often laborious, tedious, and (although they

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did not like to admit it) at times thankless … they could present their work as proof of a manly bourgeois identity in this colonial context.55 If formal education, political connections, and social standing were of little use to the Methodists in the 1820s and 1830s, the claim that missionaries were performing “honest hard work” and inculcating it as a value and practice among Indigenous peoples could help overcome these social and cultural impediments. It also helped shape gendered identities for Methodist men and women, whether they were teaching Indigenous men carpentry, Indigenous women knitting, or collecting sewing supplies as members of Dorcas societies. But there was more to it than proving moral probity. As Catherine Hall has pointed out, missionary language during this period was riddled with uncertainties and ambivalences.56 … While evangelicals perceived themselves as superior to unconverted whites, they also wished to claim that the general tenets of white bourgeois domesticity were best for Indigenous peoples, thus making it clear that their program for the Ojibwa included assimilation into white culture. However, missionaries also expressed shame for the ways in which fellow Upper Canadians – Anglo-American or English – had treated Aboriginals. To be sure, secular writers were much more likely to express both guilt and the feeling that Indigenous people would have been better off in their “natural” state.57 … However, the Methodist missionaries generally saw pre-contact Aboriginal societies as enclaves of degradation and paganism that perverted relations between husbands and wives, parents and children. For them, a natural social arrangement was that which they brought to Indigenous communities. Such writers were well aware that whites bore some culpability for the state of affairs in Indigenous communities prior to conversion. “Viciousness” might have been a problem inherent to Indigenous culture but it had been exacerbated by those who should have known better, who offered alcohol to Aboriginals, and brought them corruption. In exchange for these “false gifts,” Methodist missionaries and their supporters would offer the true gifts of piety and a moral way of life; in so doing they would redeem both the Ojibwa and the rest of white society – thus, once again, proving themselves both Christian and civilized (as opposed to unwanted meddlers). Finally, missionary work provided examples for Methodist adherents. By providing explicit details of the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christian beliefs and ways of living, the missionaries also held up lessons of what was possible and desirable for whites. Well aware

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that religiosity could not be taken for granted, evangelicals understood that backsliding was a dreaded reality … The articles, editorials, and letters to the Christian Guardian’s editor reminded Methodist readers that if even the “degraded” and “heathen” Natives of the colony had been able to renounce their way of life and embrace new ways of being a Christian man or woman, then they might inspire those white men and women who were already one step closer to Christian morality to serve as examples to Indigenous people, who were in desperate need of models to emulate.58 … Conclusion Thus the Ojibwa became figures that could be “reformed, regulated, and disciplined,” processes that, it was suggested, would eventually occur by and through Indigenous people’s own desires. They also were figures appropriated for the edification and satisfaction of non-Indigenous audiences’ desires and fantasies even as, simultaneously, they served as warnings of the potentially tragic consequences of colonialism’s power and embodied the missionaries’ ambivalence towards colonialism. Not only were Indigenous people in these writings made to perform the gendered work of colonial transformation for, it was suggested, their own sakes, they were also – and more to the point – made to perform this work for a non-Indigenous audience. In doing so, the missionaries reminded their readers that, in the “new” society of Upper Canada, particular kinds of homes and families, wives and husbands, and mothers and fathers formed the basis of both Christianity and “civilization.”

NOTES 1 Philander Smith to the Editor, Christian Guardian, 27 November 1830; original emphasis. 2 A British colony established in 1791 in the aftermath of the American Revolution and the influx of Loyalist refugees, Upper Canada fell between the Ottawa River in the north and east, the St Clair River in the west, and lakes Erie and Ontario in the south (approximating present-day southern and central Ontario). Its name was changed to Canada West in 1841. 3 A tiny sample includes Jean Allman, “Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers and Women’s Work in Colonial Asante, 1924–1945,”

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5

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History Workshop Journal 38 (Autumn 1994): 23–47; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Recent work on British North America includes Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “Others or Brothers? Competing Settler and Anishinabe Discourses about Race in Upper Canada,” in Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek, eds., Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012) 170–94. This is not to denigrate the work in these areas. For example, John Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indian of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkequaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Elizabeth Graham, From Medicine-Man to Missionary: Missionaries as Agents of Change among the Indians of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975). Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7; see also Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Ruth Roach Pierson, “Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing of Canadian Women’s History,” in Karen Offen, Ruth Pierson, and Jane Rendall, eds., Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1991), 79–106. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 99. On rethinking the “imperial centre/ colonial margin” paradigm, see, for example, Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). Catherine Hall, “Missionary Stories: Gender and Ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s,” in her White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York, Routledge, 1992), 205–34. Grant, “Christianity and Civilization,” in Moon of Wintertime; Graham, Medicine-Man to Missionary; Smith, Sacred Feathers; and Peter Schmalz,

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Cecilia Morgan The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), chapters 5–7. In 1832 the colonial government invited the English-based Wesleyan Methodist Church into the province, as a means of countering the Episcopal Church’s American influence. See Graham, From Medicine-Man to Missionary, chapters 2 and 3; see also Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 75–81. Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 90. Although the possibility of forms of syncretic religion or, in Grant’s words, the “yes that means no,” should not be overlooked (ibid., chapter 11). Ibid., 91–5; Graham, From Medicine-Man to Missionary, chapter 7. Marguerite Van Die, “‘A Woman’s Awakening’: Evangelical Belief and Female Spirituality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in Wendy Mitchinson, Paula Bourne, Alison Prentice, Gail Cuthbert Brandt, Beth Light, and Naomi Black, eds., Canadian Women: A Reader (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1996). It’s not that the Church of England didn’t describe the moral health of converted Indigenous communities but the reports and journals of Anglican missionaries tend not towards lengthy descriptions of Indigenous peoples’ moral and subjective transformation; rather, they are usually balance sheets of sacraments performed, accounts of the numbers of souls baptized, married, and buried within the rites of the Church. See, for example, Adam Elliott’s letters in William Waddilove, ed., The Stewart Missions: A Series of Letters and Journals, Calculated to Exhibit to British Christians, the Spiritual Destitution of the Emigrants Settled in the Remote Parts of Upper Canada (London: J. Hatchard, 1838), 28–39. Grant, Moon of Wintertime, 90. Smith, Sacred Feathers. Schmalz, The Ojibwa, 145–79. I thank Sylvia Van Kirk for reminding me of this point. See also Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Indigenous American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 47–55; Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Robin Brownlie, “Work Hard and Be Grateful: Indigenous Soldier Settlers in Ontario after the First World War,” in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). A contemporary perspective on this process can be found in George F. Playter, The History of Methodism in Canada: With an Account of the Rise and Progress of the Work of God among the Canadian Indian Tribes and Occasional Notices of the Civil Affairs of the Province (Toronto: Anson Green, 1862), 240–50.

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20 See Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). However, missionaries did not always appreciate the irony that “drunken” Indigenous men consumed liquor brought to them by European traders and “explorers.” 21 Nathan Bangs, A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. 3, 1816–1828 (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1838), 219; Samuel Rose to John Rose, 24 August 1831, Rose papers, 1831–9, Archives of Ontario; Playter, History of Methodism, 268. 22 Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Politics and Religion in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 112–20. 23 Kingston Chronicle, 16 December 1840; John Carroll, Case and His Contemporaries; or, the Canadian Itinerants’ Memorial: Constituting a Biographical History of Methodism in Canada, vol. 3 (Toronto: Samuel Rose, 1871), 96. 24 Playter, History of Methodism, 250; Samuel Rose to John Rose, 24 August 1831. 25 See C. Hall, “Missionary Stories,” n11; Burton, Burdens of History; and Ware, Beyond the Pale, especially Part 2 (on abolition) and Part 3 (on feminism and imperialism). 26 Christian Guardian, 28 May 1834. 27 These writings were part of a tradition of missionary “descriptions” of the mission field that stretched back to the seventeenth-century Jesuit Relations, but by the early nineteenth century they were frequently shaped by the imagery and rhetoric of sentimental literature. See Cecilia Morgan, “‘Better than Diamonds’: Sentimental Strategies and Middle-Class Culture in Canada West,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, 4 (Winter 1997–8): 125–48. 28 Ibid. These writings included “Heathen Females – Licentiousness,” 11 May 1836; “Missions – Paganism,” 17 January 1838; “Missions – Paganism,” 4 April 1838. 29 “Missions – Paganism,” 17 January 1838. 30 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 266–79. 31 See, for example, Playter, History of Methodism, 249, 268; William Case’s letter to Reverend Emory concerning work at the Credit Mission, reprinted in the Colonial Advocate, 4 January 1828; Christian Guardian, 14 August 1830. 32 See Jane Haggis, “White Women and Colonialism: Toward a Nonrecuperative History,” in Clare Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 33 Christian Guardian, 12 June 1833. 34 For an interesting contrast, see Sylvia Van Kirk “Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria,” B.C. Studies 115/116 (1997–8): 148–79.

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35 John West, a chaplain with the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose trips throughout British North America and the United States were supported by the Church Missionary Society, observed of the Mississaugas at the Credit that “the neat apparel of some of the women affords a pleasing comment on the change which has taken place in their husbands and fathers” (The Substance of a Journal during a Residence at the Red River Colony [London: L.B. Seeley, 1827], 304). 36 Although we should not romanticize gender relations in Indigenous societies as prelapsarian, gender differences did not automatically lead to gender inequalities. See, for example, Devens, Countering Colonization, 34–5; Kathleen M. Brown, “The Anglo-American Gender Frontier,” in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Indigenous American Women (New York: Routledge, 1995). 37 F. Hall as quoted in Playter, History of Methodism, 345. 38 See, for example, Waddilove, Stewart Missions, 15; Christian Guardian, 27 November 1830. See also comments by “B” for the Kingston Chronicle, 28 November 1829. 39 Playter, History of Methodism, 339. 40 Christian Guardian, 27 November 1830. 41 See, for example, ibid., 4 February 1835; also Mariana Valverde, “The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse,” Victorian Studies 32, 2 (Winter 1989): 168–88. 42 Christian Guardian, 21 March 1838. For an analysis of the image of “the lady,” see Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, 2 (Winter 1992): 251–74. 43 Unlike Devens, Countering Colonization, I do not think such reports can be read literally as a way of understanding Indigenous women’s wholehearted embrace of Christianity, yet neither would I argue, as does Devens, that Ojibwa women were less important in missionary work. 44 Christian Guardian, 21 March 1838. Of course, moral discipline could also play an important role in regulating gender relations and family matters but Sunday’s writings, unlike those of non-Indigenous missionaries, did not stress this aspect of self-control. 45 Ibid., 7 October 1835. 46 George Copway, Recollections of a Forest Life, or, the Life and Travels of Kahge-go-gahbowh, or George Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation (London: C. Gilpin, 1850), 32, 41. 47 By this period, the Ojibwa in southern Ontario, for example, were not seen as part of the fur trade, nor were the missionaries trying to integrate them into resource-based industries such as lumbering.

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48 See, for example, Jensen, “Indigenous American Women and Agriculture”; also Theda Purdue, “Women, Men and American Indian Policy: The Cherokee Response to ‘Civilization,’” in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change (New York: Routledge, 1995), 90–114. 49 For example, see Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 50 Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women, 202–7. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 100–10. 53 This is not to suggest that women did not participate in the daily round of missionary work, but the sources do not permit an explicit exploration of how missionary women might have crafted their sense of selves around the “uplift” of Indigenous women. 54 On being a male “speaking subject,” see Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class. 55 Morgan, Public Men, 215–18. 56 Hall, “Missionary Stories,” 248. 57 Canadian Freeman, 9 September 1830. 58 “D.,” “Cause of Missions,” Christian Guardian, 11 March 1835. The rest of the article was a defence of the importance of missions to the “Indians.”

Whose Sisters and What Eyes? White Women, Race, and Immigration to British Columbia, 1849–1871 A d ele Per r y

Introduction White female immigration was an issue that garnered substantial popular attention in colonial British Columbia. It did so because it spoke deeply to that settler society’s concerns about race and gender. Analysing the movement that orchestrated the immigration and the migrants it sponsored suggests that historians need to revise the critical framework usually employed in much of the existing literature on women’s immigration to Canada. Historians especially need to recognize and interrogate the significance of race to the lives of all female immigrants, including white ones. Acknowledging the significance of race in turn leads to a questioning of assumptions of female community and commonality. In these ways, the history of white female immigration to British Columbia between 1849 and 1871 leads us to question whose sisters and what eyes we evoke in our histories of women’s experience of immigration. Historians of white settler colonies have found assisted female immigration a useful way of addressing related questions about gender, race, and immigration.1 Assisted female immigration, Rita Kranidis has argued, offers a unique glimpse into the “unauthorized” colonial experience and into historical subjects who were simultaneously colonizers and colonized.2 It also allows historians of immigration a revealing avenue into the relationship between migration and imperialism,

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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two related phenomena that are too rarely examined as such. White settler colonies were defined by the simultaneous need to dispossess Indigenous societies and create a relatively homogeneous, settler society in their stead.3 Immigration was central to both processes. The “Problem” of British Columbia, 1849–1871 The centrality of immigration to settler colonialism and its racialized and gendered character were made clear in mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia. This was a sorry example of settler imperialism. From the establishment of Vancouver Island as a British colony in 1849 to joining Canadian Confederation in 1871, the colony’s settler population was small. Despite the grandiose visions of colonial promoters, it would be dominated by the Aboriginal population until late in the nineteenth century.4 The apparent absence of firm lines separating Native from newcomer further dogged the colony’s claims to whiteness. Charles Gardiner, a visitor from Prince Edward Island, noted the hybridity that prevailed at a fur-trade ball in the late 1850s. “There were the English, Scotch, French and Kanackas present,” he observed, “and all so thoroughly mixed with the native Indian blood, that it would take a well-versed Zoologist to decide what class of people they were, and what relation they had to each other.”5 The efforts to transform British Columbia from a First Nations to a British society were troubled both by the scarcity of white settlers and by their extensive contact with local peoples. The prevailing ethnic and racial diversity of settler society further troubled those who hoped British Columbia could become a “little England.” Chinese, African American, Kanaka (Hawaiian), and Latin American settlers joined those from Continental Europe … In British Columbia, visions of an orderly white settler colony were haunted both by the continued dominance of the First Nations population and by the plurality of settler society. Visions of empire were thwarted by gender as well as by race. Gendered identities, behaviours, and structures that were increasingly constructed as normative failed to reproduce themselves in British Columbia. Settler society was overwhelmingly male: while the female proportion ebbed and flowed over the colonial period, it never exceeded a high of 35 per cent of the white society and reached lows of 5 per cent … A rough, backwoods male culture and conjugal relationships between First Nations women and settler men were two social

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phenomena that flowed from this demography. For many observers, they were the sharpest symbols of how gender was lived differently on this edge of empire.6 White Women and the Politics of Empire White women were routinely constructed as the penultimate solution to the supposed “problem” of race and gender in British Columbia. White women were accorded a threefold role in the local colonial project. First, white women would compel white men to reject the rough homosocial culture of the backwoods in favour of normative standards of masculinity and respectability … Second, they would both address shortages in the local labour market and relieve the “surplus woman” problem in Britain … Third, white women would discourage mixedrace sexual, domestic, and conjugal relationships. White-Aboriginal heterosexual unions, noted one observer, were an “evil” that could “only be remedied by the introduction of fair ones of a purer caste into the Colony.”7 This discourse emphasized the political utility of ordinary, workingclass women. We do not know very much about these imperial subjects whose history has been largely eclipsed by that of the articulate female elite of imperialism – missionaries, officers’ wives, travel writers, and the like. In British Columbia, working-class white women were accorded a related but nonetheless specific role in the colonial project. Their contribution lay not in independent action, but in their familial role, and more especially in their ability to transform plebeian men, especially gold miners. This was a familial and sexual rather than narrowly reproductive role. White women’s fertility would become highly politicized around the turn of the century,8 but in the mid-nineteenth century it was women’s ability to control adult men that was emphasized. In the Australian lexicon, they were “God’s police.”9 It was the imperial context that made them such: by actively participating in empire as immigrants, working-class women’s moral status was transformed. Young, working-class women threatened society when they filled the workhouses, factories, or the streets of the metropole but bolstered society when they filled colonies. Supporting the assisted migration of women to British Columbia, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, explained that there was a special connection between metropole, colony, and poor women. God, he thought, seemed to have “fitted one to the other.”10 …

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Assisted Female Immigration, 1859–1870 The discourse of imperial womanhood was sufficient to motivate four significant female immigration schemes. The first was piggy-backed on the arrival of the Royal Engineers, the soldier-settlers sent to assure British military authority over the mainland and colonize it. The initial detachment of 121 engineers was accompanied by 31 women and 34  children, and at least another 9 children were born on board the Thames City as it travelled via Cape Horn.11 In 1860, Commander Richard Moody inquired about the possibility of assisting the passage of non-commissioned soldiers’ wives and partners who had not joined the initial detachment, writing that his men were “most anxious for their wives and ‘promissi sposi’ to join them.”12 In a fit of unusual enthusiasm that would never again be repeated, the Colonial Office immediately pledged their support.13 Their patronage was premised on a rationale that would be evoked again and again in future discussions of immigration, colonialism, and gender: female immigration was desirable because it was both indicative and generative of respectable male behaviour, here represented most potently by permanent settlement.14 By the autumn of 1860, the emigration commissioner had coordinated the passage of the women on board the Marcella. Initially, all but one of the women accepted the offer of a free passage. On further rumination, three declined to go to British Columbia for a variety of reasons relating to the precarious circumstance and proud culture of workingclass British women. One was seriously ill, one was insulted by the suggestion that she would be considered an “emigrant” or an object of charity and perhaps a woman of dubious moral standing, and another lacked the necessary money to reach the port. The Marcella ultimately carried only three women and four children, their passages sponsored by the emigration branch of the imperial state.15 The issues of gender, race, and immigration raised by the Marcella were highlighted by the assisted migrations in 1862–3, still remembered in popular British Columbia lore as the “brideships.” These efforts were the result of the combined activity of British feminists, missionary agencies, and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia’s elite. In London, a small group of well-to-do women known as the “ladies of Langham Place” launched a multifaceted effort to broaden the acceptable sphere of activity for women, especially middle-class ones. Under the auspices of the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society (FMCES), they turned to immigration to British Columbia and other colonies as one among a

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series of means for fostering female self-sufficiency. They were joined in these efforts by the Columbia Emigration Society (CES), an off-shoot of British Columbia’s missionary agency, the Anglican Columbia Mission. The CES was formed in London in early 1862 “to facilitate the Emigration of Industrious Women to the Colony of British Columbia.”16 The FMCES’s first large-scale immigration was directed to British Columbia. Early attempts to establish a committee in Vancouver Island were thwarted by the unwillingness of local contacts to support female immigration. In 1861, Sarah Crease, wife of the attorney general, told the FMCES that “I regret that I cannot give you any hopes of being able to benefit educated women by sending them out here.” Crease worried about their morality in the perilous, rough environs of Vancouver Island. “The bane of the country is drink; assisted much by the removal of the pressure of that portion of public opinion consisting of social and family influence, which at home has so powerful an effect in helping to keep things straight,” she added.17 Crease, like so many other white colonials … suggested that colonial contexts would make migrants less rather than more moral. The establishment of the CES in the spring of 1862 provided the encouragement that correspondents like Crease had explicitly failed to. Maria Rye, the secretary of the FMCES, initially merely asked if she could attach a party of twenty women to the forty the CES had plucked from public institutions to travel on the Tynemouth.18 When the CES responded by asking Rye to coordinate their entire female emigration effort in the spring of 1862, a productive alliance between metropolitan feminists and missionaries was formed.19 It came as something of a shock for the local elite in Victoria. “This London ‘Columbia Mission Meeting’ has taken us quite by surprise,” wrote New Westminster missionary H.P. Wright in a private letter. While he had told metropolitan friends of British Columbia’s desire for white female immigrants, he expected neither the pace nor the form that it took. “The Bishop is as much puzzled as I am,” he added.20 The confusion that characterized the administration of this immigration did not dampen the unprecedented public spectacle organized to greet the Tynemouth when it finally rolled into James Bay on 19 September 1862. Similar fanfare met the thirty-eight working-class women carried by the second female immigration vessel, the Robert Lowe, which arrived in January 1863.21 It would be six more years before another female immigration effort was successfully launched. Endorsed by governors Frederick Seymour and Anthony Musgrave, this immigration was effectively managed by

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a local board that aimed to implicate the local middle class by having them promise to employ an immigrant as a domestic servant and assume responsibility for a portion of her passage. When the colonial bourgeoisie proved less than enthusiastic about the immigration effort, the board modified their scope, reduced the amount of money both servant and employer would be compelled to contribute, and allowed servants to submit promissory notes in lieu of cash.22 The board empowered Anglican Bishop George Hills, who was visiting England, to seek servants there and encouraged colonial bourgeois families to select their own servants or have British friends do so.23 This scheme produced twenty-one assisted female immigrants carried on the Alpha in June 1870. Each of these female immigration schemes was motivated by the conviction that white women had a special imperial mission and would help save British Columbia’s sorry imperial fortunes. Yet each of these immigration efforts left its supporters more ambivalent than assured. This constant dissatisfaction stemmed from the reformers’ disappointment with the white female immigrants. Despite the grandiose promises of high colonial discourse, they did not behave like the beacons of Britannic civilization they were promised to be. The young women were not the dutiful domestic servants hyped by immigration promoters. Governor James Douglas’s comments that “with very few exceptions” the women of the Tynemouth and Robert Lowe had “been comfortably provided for” rang hollow.24 Of the four women included in the FMCES annual reports, one became a schoolteacher and married in two years; another, dubbed “not very successful,” found employment as a needle-woman; a third “left situation rashly, and afterwards found difficulty in obtaining employment”; while the fourth was described as having gone to her sister.25 One observer remembered that many were “carried off and married a few days after arrival,” and only two laboured for the duration of their indentures.26 The assisted female migrants became more famed for their expressive heterosexuality than their dutiful service. From the outset, the local reformers charged with the immigrants’ care worked hard to limit the women’s contact with men. The rough male culture of the backwoods rendered this task especially difficult. Whenever female migrants arrived, crowds of men turned their landing into a ribald spectacle. When the Marcella arrived with her cargo, young men attempted to infiltrate the ship in the harbour, and a crowd met the women as it docked.27 When the Tynemouth was in harbour, five men tried, without success, to

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board the ship to “catch a glimpse of the rosy-cheeked English beauties.”28 The women’s landing occurred “before the admiring gaze of some 300 residents.”29 So thick was the crowd watching the women move from the gunboat to their accommodations at the Marine Barracks that “it required the united exertions of four policemen and the same number of stalwart marines to obtain a passage for the fair immigrants.”30 “Every available inch of ground from which a view could be obtained,” wrote the British Columbian, was “occupied by men of all ages and colors, eagerly looking for a sight of the long looked for and much talked about cargo.”31 The spectacle did not end when the women came ashore. The crowd followed the women to their residence at the Marine Barracks and continued their surveillance project. The press dubbed the motley but vigilant male observers “a large and anxious crowd of breeches-wearing bipeds.”32 However anxious, the crowd did open a passage large enough for the women to march two-by-two to their temporary quarters.33 A few days later, journalists remarked that the constant presence of young male eyes restricted the women’s movements. The “young women,” they wrote, “were unable to enjoy a walk in the enclosure without being subjected to the gaze of a rabble of some forty persons, who hung about the premises, and leaning on the fence, scanned the inmates in a manner that was disgraceful.”34 The Robert Lowe presented a similar challenge to those charged with the responsibility of morally regulating the young women. Before its arrival, the local press admonished the receiving committee to more effectively protect the women from the diabolical attentions of aimless young working-class men: “There is not the slightest necessity for any parade about so simple a matter as the landing of a few passengers, and we cannot conceive anything more heartless or ill considered than to have these poor young strangers, we don’t care of what sex, but jeered to the rude gaze of a motley crowd of roughs who, instead of running about idle, should be engaged with the shovel or the axe earning an honest living.”35 A special footpath between James Bay and the Immigration Barracks was created and lined by prominent bourgeois women, including the mayor’s wife, Mrs Harris, and Mrs Cridge, wife of Anglican minister Edward Cridge. Elite Indigenous women like Governor Douglas’ wife, Amelia Connolly Douglas, were notably absent … The ongoing and escalating efforts to monitor and protect the female migrants replicated the inevitable irony of moral regulation in a context of mandatory heterosexuality, namely, the need to simultaneously

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encourage and constrain, foster and monitor, male–female sexual contact. Victoria’s elite was mandated with an especially contradictory task, namely, to protect the women from that very thing that justified their importation – male attention and desire. A fence around the barracks ensured that the women could not leave, although “a few straggled away, but were brought back by the vigilant police,” a committee member reported.36 When a young woman staying at the barracks “engaged in an animated conversation with a young man on the outside of the enclosure,” two clergymen and a naval officer quickly intervened. The British Colonist mocked their prudishness by suggesting that a guard of marines be placed around the barracks and that interloping men be bayoneted.37 Instead, clergy as well as police were enlisted in the effort to shape the women’s contact with the community around them. A week after their landing, Reverend William Richard Scott, who had accompanied the women, bade them to remember their role as colonizers and representatives of English womanhood. He told them “always and under any circumstances to shape their conduct so that they might prove a credit to their English mothers, from whom many were now departed forever.”38 These efforts aimed to ensure that the brideships would produce respectable heterosexuality, and not easy, expressive, working-class sexual contact. Yet stories of the immigrants’ immorality and participation in rough, backwoods culture circulated widely. In 1863, Sophia Shaw of the Tynemouth married a wealthy Cariboo miner, Mr Pioneer. Their wedding, according to Edmund Hope Verney, was a pinnacle of backwoods excess. Everything was “carried out in tip-top style” and everyone was drunk.39 The British Columbian commented that a number of women could “fairly attribute their ruin” to the Tynemouth.40 Soon after the arrival of the Robert Lowe, a group was charged with thieving at the Immigration Barracks and in 1864, five of the Robert Lowe’s passengers – Charlotte Anne Eaton nee Bates, Bessie Lyons, Jane Smith, Ann Fish, and Jane Atkinson – were charged with having failed to pay the balance of their passages.41 A trial involving a Tynemouth immigrant suggests some of the smaller ways that the assisted female migrants thwarted prevailing images of white women and respectability. In 1864, shopkeepers Herman Schultz and Jasper Newton Trickey were charged with raping Esther Meiss, who had immigrated on the Tynemouth two years before. Meiss testified that both Schultz and Trickey “had connection with me while I was under the influence of the drink which Mr Schultz had given me.” The

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court testimony revealed a life that departed sharply from the images of white femininity peddled by the female immigration movement. The defence lawyer suggested Meiss had a continuing and consensual sexual relationship with various men, including Trickey. Meiss herself was willing to admit to having been “intimate” with other men before her marriage and to patronizing a “dancing room.” Her marriage was not a happy one. Defence witnesses testified that Meiss said her “husband had gone away and left nothing but bread in the house” and that he would not give her “a ‘bit’ to buy cheese with.” In response, she reportedly threatened to leave her husband, telling him, “You have driven it so far that I will have to turn bad.” She looked to Trickey, saying that her husband “feeds me on nothing but dry bread and fish, but I’ve got a key to Mr Trickey’s room where I can get anything I want.” While Meiss denied all this, she admitted to stealing money from her husband.42 Meiss also suggested some of the ways that working-class women manipulated the female migration movement to their own ends. In court, she revealed that she arrived under a false name, probably in an effort to hide her Jewishness. She “came to this country in my stepfather’s name, my maiden name is Hurst; I came out in the Tynemouth as Mary Hodges; I was married as Esther Hurst; my sister wrote me my name, she said I was not born a christian, and I changed the name of Mary Hodges to Esther Hurst.” Yet on arrival in Victoria, Meiss seems to have joined the local Jewish community; her husband was attending synagogue when the alleged rape occurred. Meiss did not keep in touch with her shipmates, and testified to having a very limited female community.43 Meiss hovered on the edge of operative definitions of both whiteness and respectable womanhood. Given Meiss’s difficulty in marshalling the image of a respectable white woman, it is not surprising the accused were found not guilty. The judge, who earlier banned her husband from the courtroom for prompting her, instructed the jury to find the men not guilty because of contradictory evidence. Meiss was outraged, claiming that the defence lawyer “was a d–nation liar,” and that she’d “like to get hold of him.”44 This case certainly reveals some of the profound ways that white, working-class women’s behaviour and identity in British Columbia departed from formal colonial discourse. Esther Meiss or Mary Hodges or Esther Hurst was not the imperial subject the FMCES had intended her to be. She does not seem to have worked as a domestic servant. Rather than reforming the disorderly, easy sociability of working-class white men in the colony, she seems to have participated in it, changing

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partners and attending dance halls, and, if witnesses against her are to be believed, taking cash and goods in exchange for sex. Instead of serving as a beacon for Britishness, she adopted a Jewish identity, and in doing so, revealed how she had hoodwinked the do-gooders who subsidized her passage. She did not take up the role of the dutiful workingclass housewife. Meiss avoided her shipmates and alienated her few female friends. She embezzled the housekeeping money, and complained bitterly and publicly when her husband failed to support her in a manner she deemed appropriate. Female Immigration Reconsidered Stories like Meiss’s led colonial pundits to question the merits of white female immigration. They expressed profound disappointment with the immigrants’ failure to live up to the standards white women were supposed to represent. Settlers mobilized their colonial experience to portray assisted female migration as a metropolitan fantasy concocted with no knowledge or regard for the conditions of the colonies. One letter writer claimed that immigration-supporter Angela Burdett Coutts lacked judgment in “her consignment of girls for miners’ wives.”45 Others mocked the middle-class manners and language of those who organized the Robert Lowe and Tynemouth, damning “the officious ‘meddling and muddling’ of the pseudo-philanthropic semi-religious immigration societies, and their committees, agents, or friends.”46 Criticism of the female immigration schemes became an axis of settler-identity, a tool whereby white colonials articulated a subjectposition rooted in their experience of British Columbia and explicitly differentiated from those who lacked it and implicitly from those who were native to it. English do-gooders, they suggested, possessed no genuine knowledge of colonial conditions. Rather than making workingclass women more moral, backwoods life tempted them further. The white female migrants failed, explained one, because Victoria was “crammed … with perhaps the most dissipated and reckless set of men on earth” and presented “no lack of temptation to the new comers.”47 Instead of reforming them, British Columbia made working-class women even more degraded. The “temptations of gold, rich trinkets and fine dresses,” explained another, “is too great to be long resisted by those who have been brought up in penury and have no one man to constantly remind them how much more precious than gold and precious stones is a virtuous woman.”48

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… By the close of the colonial period, the very do-gooders who nurtured these immigration efforts had come to doubt the utility of white female migration. Edmund Verney wrote to his father that the women were too obsessed with speedy marriages, easy labour, and high wages to be of much good. He preferred the young, guileless ones among the Tynemouth’s women, who, it seems, had no personal agendas to conflict with his own. Verney deemed the entire affair “anything but a cause for self-congratulation and pride.”49 In 1872, Gilbert Sproat declared that his experience with three separate female immigration efforts had undermined his faith in the entire project. Sproat thought that the fundamental problem was that single female migration necessarily led to immorality. Women needed to be monitored by families to be anything other than a social threat. In general, Sproat thought, “Unmarried female emigration does not lead to good results.” He continued that “no right thinking observant person will advocate female immigration by sea voyage from Europe to British Columbia. It is unjust to the women, and upon the whole, is disadvantageous to the province.”50 By the early 1870s, family migration was increasingly presented as the only way to solve the inevitable moral dilemmas presented by female immigration. The immigration board’s decision to shift its monies and attentions to the “assisted passages of Families, and relatives of Farmers, Mechanics, and others settled in this Colony” suggests a profound dissatisfaction with this female immigration scheme and, indeed, the entire project of single female immigration.51 “The very delicate and difficult question of introducing single unmarried women into British Columbia might be partly solved by sending out a few, in charge of the heads of families – the women being from the same district as the families, and thus having an additional guard for their self-respect,” Sproat argued.52 Assisted white female migration was problematic in large part because it suggested the possibility, and sometimes delivered the disturbing presence, of working-class female independence. Family migration, on the other hand, ensured that young women would not be allowed to run amok without adequate supervision. “They would never leave the proper surveillance of their natural guardians,” wrote the British Colonist in 1869.53 These arguments were premised on beliefs in male authority and on abiding assumptions about the nuclear family’s status as the natural unit of social organization. Indeed, anything other than family groups, wrote one fan of family migration, produced an “artificial assortment of human beings.”54 Just as it was difficult to square

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white women’s lives with the grandiose promises of colonial discourse, it was difficult indeed to reconcile “artificial assortments” with imperial visions of white womanhood. White Women and Colonialism Widespread disappointment in the political effect of female migration does not, however, mean that the white female immigrants failed to serve the local colonial project. White female immigrants reinforced as well as challenged the connections between white womanhood and imperial respectability. Their lives, like those of other white women in British Columbia, were intimately shaped by the construction of white women as symbolic of empire. This could constrict the parameters of their experience, but it could also accord them levels of power and authority usually denied women on the grounds of sex. And some of the white female immigrants seem to have relished, or at least enjoyed, the power they reaped from being icons of racial separation and hierarchy in a diverse colonial society. “Mary E.,” a Tynemouth emigrant and Yale schoolteacher, wrote, “I am quite surrounded by Chinese and Indians.” She also spoke of the racially liminal figures of backwoods miners, likening them to disreputable working-class men in Britain. “They are the most uncivilized-looking beings when they first come down; you would be quite frightened to be accosted by one at Brighton,” she explained. In the end, Mary found the “others” less threatening than anticipated and enjoyed the status this racial context afforded her as a white woman. “There are very few white women here, so they are treated with politeness by all,” she explained, adding that this status guaranteed them an audience with the local luminaries, including the “Governor, the Bishop, the Judge, and all the great folks.”55 Colonial life transformed Mary’s class and racial status, and for that she was willing to live among Chinese, Indians, and those who would have frightened her in Brighton. Yet, ideals of racial separation did not always define the white women’s experience in uncomplicated ways. Their lives, like the men’s, could be deeply intertwined with First Nations peoples, lifestyles, and customs … Settler women’s ability to be simultaneously racist and culturally hybrid sometimes struck metropolitan observers as ironic. Scientist Robert Brown described visiting Isabella Robb at her Comox farm in the summer of 1864. Robb, the former matron of the Tynemouth, apparently prided herself on being the “first white woman” in the settlement. Yet, to Brown’s metropolitan eyes, Robb seemed more Aboriginal than

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white. “The old lady,” he wrote, “apologized to me for having nothing better to offer. ‘Mowich [deer],’ she said, ‘was scarce just now. Formerly there was “hyou” [plenty] but now the “Siwashes” [Indians] brought in little and wanted for that little hyou chickaman [plenty money].” He found the juxtaposition of Robb’s racism and hybridity a peculiar one: “Mrs Robb is an Englishwoman and of course with all a Britisher’s contempt for savages, but like all others out here mixed in her conversation Indian Jargon.”56 Robb’s story suggests some of the ways that gender and class could complicate as well as reinforce racial politics. White women were summoned in the interests of empire, but they did not always serve it in a straightforward manner. The History of Women and Immigration Reconsidered The history of white female immigration to colonial British Columbia suggests that historians revise some of the ways in which they analyse women and immigration. It especially indicates how race is a useful analytical category to the history of immigration, including the immigration of those racialized as white. The female immigrants to colonial British Columbia were highly racialized: their importation was demanded on the grounds of empire and racial mission, and to fail to analyse their history as a chapter in the history of race as well as gender is to misunderstand the female immigration movement and the women whose lives it shaped. The story of female immigration affirms what scholars like Vron Ware, David Roediger, Ruth Frankenberg, and Catherine Hall have argued: namely, that whiteness, like blackness or brownness or redness, is a racial category with a history that deserves explication.57 It also suggests that we locate Canadian history within a broader context of imperial history instead of assigning it a historical isolation not merited by its history. Doing so not only honours Canada’s imperial context, but also allows us to benefit from the rich secondary literatures on colonial and imperial experience. Recognizing the significance of whiteness and empire leads feminist scholars to probe assumptions of female unity. Feminist historians need to explore more fully how race divided women from each other and structured their relationships to one another … When accessing the history of a group of female immigrants, we need to ask … when they looked into each others’ eyes, did they see sisters or strangers? White female immigrants to colonial British Columbia seem to have usually found strangers. Settler women’s recollections … contain little

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evidence of sustained interaction – let alone sympathy – with First Nations women, or even with non-white settler women, whether Asian, black, or Latin American. That it could be troubled by the cultural hybridity of their lifeways did not breech this palpable social distance. Nor was this distance unique. Scholars of gender and imperialism have explored how, throughout the colonial world, white women’s role as “gentle tamers” or “mothers of the race” structured their interactions both with white men and local peoples.58 Recognizing white women’s special relationship to colonialism should not lead us to exaggerate their racism in the interests of absolving white men of their fundamental responsibility for the ravages of imperialism.59 We can, instead, explore how white women benefited from their particular relationship to imperialism without exaggerating their real power within the colonial project. Doing so will equip us to better understand immigration as well as imperialism. The two phenomena, after all, were intimately connected … Exploring the relationship between empire and immigration necessitates examining the migrants sought by colonial regimes as well as those discouraged by them. Reconnecting immigration with colony and nation-building means returning to a largely forgotten moment in the writing of the history of immigration to Canada, if for entirely different reasons. Conclusion In a variety of ways, the history of assisted white-female immigration to British Columbia suggests that we question which sisters and whose eyes we refer to in our discussions of women and immigration. In the eleven years between 1859 and 1870, roughly 130 women, largely working class, mostly young, and entirely white, were imported to the hybrid, unstable settler society of British Columbia. Their immigration was orchestrated because white women were accorded a special racial mission within the colonial context of mid-nineteenth-century British Columbia. Whether the experience of white women challenged or confirmed these imperial roles, it can tell us much about the connections between race, gender, and immigration, and suggest some new ways of examining the history of women and immigration in Canada. We can begin this process by acknowledging immigrant women as the divided and unstable category they were. Sometimes they were sisters, sometimes they were strangers, and sometimes, uncomfortably, they were both.

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NOTES 1 A few examples are A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Jackie Lay, “To Columbia on the Tynemouth: The Immigration of Single Women and Girls in 1862,” in Barbara Latham and Cathy Kess, eds., In Her Own Right: Women’s History in B.C. (Victoria: Camosum College, 1980). 2 Rita S. Kranidis, ed., Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience (London: Twayne, 1998). 3 Daiva Staisulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, “Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies – Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies,” in Daiva Staisulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage, 1995). 4 Robert Galois and Cole Harris, “Recalibrating Society: The Population Geography of British Columbia in 1881,” Canadian Geographer 38, 1 (1994): 37–53. 5 C.C. Gardiner, in Robie L. Reid, ed., “To the Fraser River Mines in 1858,” British Columbia Historical Quarterly 1, 1 (October 1937): 248. 6 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 7 One of the Disappointed, untitled, British Columbian, 7 June 1862. 8 See, famously, Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–66. On British Columbia, Margaret Hillyard Little, “Claiming a Unique Place: The Introduction of Mothers’ Pensions in British Columbia,’ in Veronica Strong-Boag, Mona Gleason, and Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 4th ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9 From Anne Summer’s seminal Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (Victoria, AU: Penguin, 1975). 10 Bishop of Oxford, in Third Report of the Columbia Mission, 1981 (London: Rivingtons [1862]), 52. 11 “British Columbia – Its Attractions as a Field for Emigration,” British Columbian, 30 December 1863; “Naval and Military Intelligence,” The Emigrant Soldier’s Gazette and Cape Horn Chronicle 1 (6 November 1858) in Charles Sinnett, ed., The Emigrant Soldiers’ Gazette and Cape Horn Chronicle (New Westminster, BC: The “British Columbian,” 1863). 12 Colonel Moody to James Douglas, 29 March 1860, in James Douglas to the Duke of Newcastle, 12 May 1860, National Archives of Canada (hereafter NAC), MG 11, CO 60/6, Reel B-82.

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13 G.C. Lewis to James Douglas, 11 August 1860, draft reply, in James Douglas to the Duke of Newcastle, 12 May 1860, NAC, MG 11, CO 60/9, Reel B-83. 14 G.C.L. [G.C. Lewis], in R. Moody to Under Secretary of State, 9 April 1860, NAC, MG 11, CO 60/9, Reel B-84. 15 T.W.C. Murdoch to Frederic Rogers, 14 November 1860, NAC, MG 11, CO 60/9, reel B-84. 16 “Columbian Emigration Society,” Victoria Press, 8 June 1862. 17 Sarah Crease, in M.S.R. and B.R.P., “Stray Letters on the Emigration Question,” English Woman’s Journal 8, 45 (11 January 1861): 241. 18 Maria S. Rye to Bishop Hills, 16 May 1862, ADNW/EPBC, “Bishop Hills Correspondence,” Box 8 of 8, File 4. 19 Madame L.S. Bodichon to Anonymous, n.d. [1862]; Madame L.S. Bodichon to Lord Shaftesbury, 26 July 1862, Autograph Letter Collection, Fawcett Library (hereafter Fawcett). 20 H.P.W. to Sir, 30 April 1862, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, “Letters Received Columbia 1861–1867” (Transcript), BCA, Add Mss H/A/So2, vol. 2, 49–50. 21 B.R.P., “XXVIII. – The Last News of the Emigrants,” English Woman’s Journal 11, 63 (1 May 1863): 185. 22 Minutes for 20 May 1869, in Henry Mason to the Colonial Secretary, 18 September 1869, “Colonial Correspondence,” BCA, GR 1372, Reel B-1345, File 1117; Henry Mason to The Bishop, 9 July 1869, in “Female Immigration Letter Book,” 6–9; “Female Immigration,” British Columbian, 21 April 1869. 23 Henry Mason to Officer Administering the Government, 18 June 1869, 10, and Henry Mason to the Bishop, 26 June 1869, 11, in “Female Immigration Letter Book”; George Hills, “Hills Journal 1869” (Transcript), ADNW/EPBC, 6; Minutes for 20 April 1869, in Henry Mason to the Colonial Secretary, 18 September 1869, “Colonial Correspondence,” BCA, GR 1372, Reel B-1345, File 1117; “Female Immigration,” British Columbian, 21 April 1869. 24 James Douglas to the Duke of Newcastle, 14 June 1863, NA, MG 11, Great Britain, Colonial Office, Original Correspondence, Vancouver Island (hereafter CO 305), CO 305/20, Reel B-244. 25 “Female Middle Class Emigration Society Annual Report, 1861,” Fawcett, 1/FME, Box 1, File 1, 7–14. 26 S.R. Crease, “The Bride Ships,” “Crease Family Papers,” BCA, Add Mss 55, vol. 13, File 3, 83–5. 27 “Arrival of the ‘Marcella,’” British Colonist, 21 May 1861.

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37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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“Wouldn’t Let Them Aboard,” British Colonist, 19 September 1862. “Landed,” Victoria Press, 19 September 1862. “The Female Immigrants,” Victoria Press, 21 September 1862. “The Tynemouth and Her Cargo,” British Columbian, 24 September 1862. “The ‘Tynemouth’s’ Females,” British Colonist, 20 September 1862. “The Tynemouth and Her Cargo.” “The Female Immigrants,” Victoria Press, 22 September 1862. “Arrival of the Robert Lowe,” British Colonist, 12 January 1863. Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 20 September 1862, in Allan Pritchard, ed., Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney, 1862–1865 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996), 90. “Shocking Depravity,” British Colonist, 29 September 1862. “Impressive Sermon,” British Colonist, 22 September 1862. Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 6 January 1863, and Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 20 April 1863, 115, 131. “Female Emigration,” British Columbian, 3 February 1863. “The Alleged Larceny,” British Colonist, 6 March 1863; “Female Immigrants,” Victoria Daily Chronicle, 28 June 1864. “Deposition” of Esther Meiss, Police Court Testimony, Victoria VI, 31 May 1864, R. v. Schultz and Trickey, “Attorney General Documents,” BCA, GR 419, Box 4, File 1864/ 38; “Court of Assizes: Rape,” Victoria Daily Chronicle, 1 August 1864. Police Court Testimony, Victoria VI, 31 May 1864, R. v. Schultz and Trickey. “Profane, But Forcible,” Victoria Daily Chronicle, 1 August 1864. Tal. O Eifion, “A Missionary for Cariboo,” Cariboo Sentinel, 15 July 1867. C.J.H., “The ‘Female Immigration’ Suits in the Summary Court,” Victoria Daily Chronicle, 29 June 1864. Fenton Aylmer, ed., A Cruise in the Pacific: From the Log of a Naval Officer, vol. 2 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1860), 295–6. Monitor, “The Vote of $3,000 in Aid of Immigration,” Victoria Daily Chronicle, 1 March 1864. Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 20 September 1862, Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 14 September 1862, Edmund Hope Verney to Harry Verney, 22 September 1862, in √Pritchard, Vancouver Island Letters, 88, 91–2. Gilbert Sproat to Lieutenant Governor, 3 November 1871, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, “Memo re European Immigration into B.C.,” BCA, Add Mss 257, File 3 (emphasis in original). Wm. Pearse, John Robson, W.J. MacDonald to Colonial Secretary, 12 July 1870, “Colonial Correspondence,” BCA, GR 1372, Reel B-1314, File 955/23.

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52 G.M. Sproat, “Memorandum of a few Suggestions for opening the business of emigration to British Colombia, referred to as Memo C, in a letter of G.M. Sproat to the Honourable the Provincial Secretary, dated 29 August 1872,” “Attorney General Documents,” GR 419, Box 10, File 1872/1, 4–5. 53 Untitled, British Colonist, 17 April 1869. 54 Family Man, “Immigration,” British Colonist, 26 April 1869 (emphasis in original). 55 Mary E. to Aunt, 6 November 1862, in B.R.P., “XXVIII. – The Last News of the Emigrants,” English Woman’s Journal 11, 63 (May 1863): 185. 56 Richard Somerset Mackie, The Wilderness Profound: Victorian Life on the Gulf of Georgia (Victoria: Sono Nis, 1995), 65; Robert Brown, “Journal of the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition,” in John Hayman, ed., Robert Brown and the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989), 111 (his translations). 57 Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Routledge, 1991); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992). 58 For critiques of literature on white women and empire see, for instance, Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 59 For example, Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture, and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For trenchant critiques, see Jane Haggis, “Gendering Colonialism or Colonising Gender? Recent Women’s Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13, 1/2 (1990): 105–15; Margaret Jolly, “Colonizing Women: The Maternal Body and Empire,” in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman, eds., Feminism and the Politics of Difference (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993).

Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Making of Canada as a White Settler Nation Ena k sh i Dua

Introduction In this chapter I explore the ways in which concerns over nation, “race,” gender, and sexuality shaped late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury debates on whether Canada should exclude or include Asian female migrants from China, Japan, and India into the emerging nation-state. In the late nineteenth century, Canadians1 began to debate whether to allow female migration from China, Japan, and India. The vast majority of those who participated in the debate argued that female migrants from Asia should be excluded, as their exclusion would insure that male migrants from Asia would be rendered as temporary residents. On the other hand, there was a small but vocal minority who argued that female migrants from Asia should be allowed into Canada. As the presence of single male Asian residents raised the spectre of inter-racial sexuality, these Canadians suggested that it would be prudent to include female migrants from Asia within the nation-state. The ensuing debates raise interesting questions for scholars who study the relationships between nation, “race,” gender, and sexuality. First, they illustrate the economic, social, and political forces that have led to the inclusion of Asian male and female migrants into white settler nationalist projects. Second, they demonstrate the ways in which the inclusion of female migrants from Asia was seen as a strategy to figure Canada as a white settler society. As I will argue, during the

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version from Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 14, 4 (August 2007): 445–66.

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nation-building period, arguments for the inclusion of Asian female migrants were based on the same white nationalist discourse as were arguments for exclusion … This study traces Canadian administrative and public debates about female migration from China, Japan, and India between 1867 and 1920.2 I begin by locating these debates in the emergence of a white settler nationalism in Canada. Drawing on both primary and secondary material, I outline the ways in which the emergence of a Canadian nation led to exclusionary practices, while at the same time the demands of a capitalist economy led to the inclusion of Asian male migrants in Canada. Next, I discuss the ways in which scholars have conceptually highlighted exclusionary residency, citizenship, and immigration policies when exploring the racialized and gendered imaginaries of the nation. I argue that a focus on exclusionary practices obscures the economic, political, and social forces that led to the inclusion of Asian male and female migrants within the nation-state … My main focus is on the debates for the inclusion of female migrants from China, Japan, and India. I illustrate the ways in which concerns with the public and private manifestation of “race,” reproduction, sexuality, and nation, which had been deployed to exclude women racialized as outsiders, were also drawn on to make the case for the inclusion of female migrants from Asia. I conclude by discussing the ways in which politics of inclusion refined practices of exclusion, as they were constituted through new forms of racialized regimes of gender and sexual regulation as well as new forms of racialized domestic and spatial arrangements. I suggest that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates of including Asian female migrants into the nation-state represented refined practices of exclusion. The Canadian Context: White Settler Nationalism and Practices of Exclusion In 1867, John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, articulated the hegemonic vision of the nation-building project when, in a speech to Parliament, he proclaimed that Canada was “a white man’s country.” Constructing a white settler nation involved marginalizing Indigenous people from the emerging nation-state, and continuing to recruit white settlers to occupy the lands appropriated from Indigenous  peoples.3 In addition, constructing a white settler nation was tied to exclusionary practices, as a set of legal and social practices

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emerged that marginalized those racialized as “not white” from the nation-state. Despite its claim to whiteness, at Confederation in 1867 Canada was far from “a white man’s country,” as it had substantial numbers of Aboriginal, Asian, and black residents. At Confederation, Chinese migrants made up over 40 per cent of the non-Indigenous mainland population in British Columbia.4 Of these, there were fifty-two female Chinese immigrants. In the early days of Chinese migration, these residents were seen as an important part of the colonial project because Asian migration allowed colonial officials to open up new industries as well as to establish their hegemony in British Columbia. For example, in 1848, an editorial in the Colonist claimed that “the Chinese are a benefit to the government. They are industrious and law abiding people. The government should afford them protection.”5 Importantly, at Confederation, Chinese migrants had similar legal rights as “white” residents. Shortly after Confederation, attitudes towards Chinese residents began to shift. White settlers, particularly in British Columbia, began to complain that these residents were never “good citizens,” that they hoarded money, evaded taxes, and were more likely than whites to create “immorality.” White settlers began to demand the exclusion of Asians. According to the emerging racial politics, the greatest danger posed to the nation was the continued migration from Asia, which was defined as threatening a white nation-building project … By 1870, the British Columbia Legislature had become increasingly concerned that the province would be “overrun with an Asiatic population.”6 Politicians began to campaign on the promise of introducing anti-Asian legislation … It is in this context that migration from Japan and India began. The first recorded migrants from Japan arrived in 1887, and from India in 1908. Almost immediately provincial and federal committees and royal commissions were appointed to study the “problems” of Japanese and Indian settlement and migration. … While the years between 1867 and 1920 witnessed the emergence of a number of exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies, implementing these policies was not as straightforward as imagined … Canadian capital, particularly railway and logging companies, argued that given the shortage of labour, Canada required the migration of small numbers of Asian male workers. In contrast, trade unions, white settlers, and British Columbian politicians argued that even small numbers of these men would discourage the continued migration of white settlers.7

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Given the demand for labour, the federal government was reluctant to introduce legislation that would totally ban Asian male migration. As a result, between 1867 and 1920, Canadian policies towards migration from Asia were riddled by the contradictory demands of capitalist expansion and a racialized nationalist project … Given that the Canadian government had different legal and political relationships with China, Japan, and India, different measures were employed in each case. In 1887, the federal government implemented the Act to Restrict Chinese Immigration, introducing the infamous head tax as a method of restricting Chinese immigration. In 1908, the Canadian government entered into an agreement with the Japanese government in which it agreed to ensure that the numbers of specific kinds of migrants from Japan did not exceed a yearly quota of four hundred. In the same year, the Canadian government imposed what was called the “continuous journey regulation” to prevent the entry of those from India. … It is in this context that the Canadian state’s strategy towards the migration of women from China, Japan, and India emerged … Nationalism and Exclusionary and Inclusionary Practices Notably, feminist and postcolonial scholars have offered powerful explanations of the ways in which nationalist projects become implicated in racialized and gendered exclusionary practices. There are three central insights from this broad set of writings. First, as critical race scholars have illustrated, both metropolitan and colonial projects of nationbuilding have been premised on a discourse of race, and as a result, the exclusion of those racialized as outsiders has been an intrinsic feature of nationalism.8 Second, feminist scholars have argued that “race” and nation have been constituted by naturalizing certain women as the physical and cultural reproducers of the nation … As a result, feminist scholars have pointed out that the racialized politics of nationalist projects tied domestic arrangements, family, sexuality, and morality to the public order and state.9 … Third, focusing on white settler societies such as the United States and Canada, scholars have illustrated the ways in which technologies of migration and citizenship have been fundamental to the creation of racialized nations, space, and national identities.10 … My investigation into Canadian policies and practices towards female migration from China, Japan, and India provides an important opportunity to revisit the ways in which racialized and gendered discourses of

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nation led to both exclusionary and inclusionary practices, and in turn, how inclusionary practices come to be constituted through the contradictions of exclusionary practices. Through an examination of government and public documents, I trace the emergence of state approaches to female migration from Asia. My investigation draws on three sources of data. The first comprise government documents. Since female migration from China, Japan, and India was not recorded in a singular policy statement, but was a position that was implicitly understood and acted upon by government officials, I examine a range of government documents, including parliamentary debates, reports of government commissions on immigration, and immigration records. The documents examined span the period from 1867 to 1920. Second, in order to place the position of state officials in the context of social concerns with migration, race, and sexuality, I investigate the coverage of Asian male and female immigration in five Canadian newspapers: the Victoria Daily Colonist, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Winnipeg Free Standard. All of the newspapers are dailies. The main period covered was from 1910 to 1920. In addition, the period between 1867 and 1910 was also selectively covered. Third, as Asian men launched several court cases which challenged the legality of immigration laws and practices, I also examine the proceedings of these cases. Regulating Female Asian Migration: Excluding Asian Women to Prevent the Settlement of Asian Men The Canadian state’s approach towards female migration from Asia was located in attempts to prevent the permanent settlement of Asian men. Between 1880 and 1900, government policymakers argued that while restrictions on entry, residency, and citizenship status were all means to impose an alien status, the most effective measure was to prevent the entry of spouses. During this period, successive governments employed various means to restrict the immigration of women from China, Japan, and India. Through regulatory policies, similar to those applied to Asian male residents, the inclusion of Asian women into the Canadian national formation came to be defined as dangerous to the racialized nation. This racialized process took place through the gendered tropes of the family, sexuality, and morality. In 1883, facing pressure from British Columbian politicians, white settlers, and trade unions to restrict immigration from China, the federal government first began to discuss the question of female Asian migration. In a debate on the proposed restrictions to Chinese immigration,

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John A. Macdonald introduced to Parliament the policy of restricting the entry of the wives of Chinese men. He pointed out that the pattern of solitary migration offered a solution to the vexing problem of Chinese immigration, as it would ensure the temporary status of Chinese male residents: … that no permanent immigration of the Chinese people into Canada is to be encouraged as a body of settlers, but under the present system there is no fear of that. The Chinese when they come over to British Columbia, do not bring their families, their wives, with them … When they make money enough, they return to their own country, China, and take the money with them, and therefore are not permanent settlers … At any moment when the Legislature of Canada chooses, it can shut down the gate … those in the country will rapidly disappear. They have not their families with them and leave nobody behind them.11

The same year, the federal government appointed what would be the first in a series of royal commissions on the issue of Chinese migration, the purpose of which was to recommend specific policies. While … these commissions offered Canadians an opportunity to racialize Asian men, in addition, they also offered crucial sites for the racialization of Asian women. In the case of Chinese women, the 1885 Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration racialized and gendered these women as immoral, allowing the commissioners to legitimate restricting female Chinese migration. The majority of those who testified before the royal commission complained about the gender relations seen to characterize Chinese residents. A common complaint was that the Chinese women who were in Canada worked as prostitutes. As the commissioners stated: There can be no doubt that one of the causes of the strong feelings against the Chinese is that their immigration consists mostly of unmarried men and prostitutes, and it’s said that the Chinese prostitutes are more injurious to the community than white abandoned women …The Chinese are the only people coming to the continent the great bulk of whose women are prostitutes.12

These witnesses employed their perceptions of prostitution to racialize Chinese women as possessing a different moral character than that attributed to white women. Baker, a member of Parliament from Victoria, argued:

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I think there is sufficient evidence to show that the Chinese women are not, like Caesar’s wife above suspicion, and that there exists among the Chinese, both male and female, a very low scale of morality.13

Tied to the accusation of immorality was the complaint that Chinese men did not migrate with their wives. As the commissioners reported, “Chinese immigration is a bachelor immigration … He has no wife or family. He performs none of these duties.”14 Rather than arguing that policies be developed to promote family settlement (as employed in the cases of white immigrants), both of these social patterns were taken to be evidence of racially based differences and employed to justify the exclusion of Chinese migrants. The 1885 Report of the Royal Commission began to lay the ground for exclusionary immigration policies directed towards female Chinese migrants. The Report set out what would become the unofficial federal  government position on the migration of women from China. As Chapleau, one of the commissioners and the minister of immigration, pointed out, limiting the entry of wives offered an important mechanism towards ensuring that residents of Chinese origin did not permanently settle in Canada. Anticipating the argument that Chinese men be encouraged to sponsor their families, Chapleau, drawing on the trope of uncontrolled fertility, noted that “if they came with their women they would settle and what with immigration and their extraordinary fecundity, would soon overrun the country.”15 As a result, Chapleau pointed out that the exclusion of Chinese women could be seen to promote morality rather than greater immorality. In 1885, based on the recommendations contained within this Report, the federal government moved to entrench differential immigration policy for migrants from China. It passed the 1885 Act to Restrict and Regulate Chinese Immigration into Canada, legally defining immigration from China as different than that from Europe, and concomitantly requiring different regulations. The Act stated that Chinese immigration was dangerous to Canada, and required the imposition of a $50.00 tax on each individual to restrict further entry of Chinese migrants. While the Act did not specifically refer to female migrants and children, by not exempting these groups, it contained an unstated policy of discouraging family reunification. The 1885 Act raised a number of concerns. One was whether women of Chinese descent who were married to white men would be defined as Chinese. Another was whether certain groups, such as merchants,

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students, and wives of Chinese men should be exempt from the tax. In 1887, the House of Commons amended the 1885 Act, allowing it to differentiate Chinese migrants on the basis of class. Merchants were exempt from the tax, as well as the implicit restrictions in sponsoring their spouses. In discussing possible amendments, there were those who had noted that the Act discouraged family settlement, and questioned the efficacy of this. A member of the House of Commons raised the question of whether the head tax should be applied to the wives of Chinese residents. Davies, a member of Parliament from Nova Scotia, pointed out that allowing the migration of Chinese women would both solve the problem of prostitution and decrease hostility towards Chinese residents, asking: whether it was not desirable, in the interests of morality, that married Chinese women should be admitted free of this duty …The people protest against the introduction of the Chinese because a class of women who are not desirable come; but … if you adopt the more generous policy and allow the better class of Chinamen to come with their wives, the objections now naturally felt against Chinese immigration would naturally be lessened.16

In response, John. A. Macdonald pointed out: The whole point of this measure is to restrict the immigration of the Chinese into British Columbia and into Canada. On the whole it is not considered advantageous to the country that the Chinese should come and settle in Canada, producing a mongrel race … [thus] the objection to the admission of the wives of Chinese immigrants. If that were allowed, not a single immigrant would come over without a wife, and the immorality existing to a very great extent along the Pacific coast would be greatly aggravated in Canada … 17

… As in the case of migration from China, when addressing the question of restricting migration from Japan and India, state officials considered the strategy of preventing the entry of spouses. In the case of migration from Japan, the Canadian government’s approach was to limit numbers, rather than prevent their entry … In exchange for regulating the numbers of emigrants, the Japanese government was able to win an important concession: that Japanese male migrants would be allowed to sponsor their wives and children.18

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In the years following the Agreement, this concession was criticized by members of the opposition and the public. Part of the problem was that the text of the original Agreement failed to specify whether the quota of four hundred per year included women and children, leading the Japanese government to exceed the quota. In addition to these legal ambiguities, the number of Japanese women entering into Canada often exceeded that of men. Much to the apprehension of Canadian officials, the demographic composition of the Japanese community was very different from that of the Chinese community. Both government officials and the public began to protest that Japanese women were allowed to enter Canada. The Victoria Daily Colonist noted in a front-page article entitled “More Japanese Are Coming In”: In the last few years there has been a growing number of Japanese women coming to Canada, which to those opposed to Oriental immigration in all forms is not viewed with enthusiasm.19

Again, the concern was that such a policy would encourage the permanent settlement of Japanese men … Restricting immigration from India was a more complex task. Indians, unlike Japanese and most Chinese migrants, were British subjects, and British imperial policies allowed British subjects free movement within the empire. Under pressure from the British government to adapt the method of restricting immigration so that it did not appear to violate British imperial policies, in 1907 another royal commission was appointed. Mackenzie King, the commissioner in charge of the commission, proposed the Continuous Journey Regulation. This was an Order in Council that stipulated the landing of any immigrants be prohibited unless they had come on a continuous journey from their “native” country.20 As the only direct route to Canada from India was offered by the Canadian Pacific Railway, preventing migration from India became a matter of encouraging the CPR to not sell tickets to Indians. While this regulation did not specifically refer to female migration, in the ensuing debates it is clear that the government intended to employ the Continuous Journey Regulation to prevent Indian male residents from sponsoring their wives. In 1911, two Indian male residents, Bhagwan Singh and Bhag Singh attempted to sponsor entry of their wives, Kartar Kaur and Harman Kaur. These women came from India from an indirect journey, and on arriving in Canada they were denied entry. Bhagwan Singh and Bhag Singh then filed a court case that challenged the power

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of the Canadian government to restrict family settlement on the grounds of race. Their case generated national debate, and provided another opportunity for debate on the question of female migration from Asia … Beginning in 1885, a small but growing number of Canadians had raised the spectre of miscegenation. As the numbers of Asian men slowly increased, this fear had grown. Single Asian Men and the Fear of Miscegenation The discriminatory treatment of Asian men was based on the creation of the racial category “Asiatic” in which Asian men were constructed as incapable of assimilating into a “white” body politic … One of the themes in the popular press and in government documents was that, through their potential sexuality, Asian men posed a danger to the white national body politic. If they were allowed to permanently settle in Canada their children would constitute “a mongrel race,” a process that endangered Canadian society. By the turn of the century, a related fear emerged that the presence of single Chinese and Indian men would encourage mixed-race sexuality and miscegenation. The 1885 Report of The Royal Commission did note that including unmarried Chinese men in the national formation would raise the problem of mixed-race sexuality: “it is admitted that the Chinese can not amalgamate or intermarry with the people of the country.”21 Underlying this was the notion that mixed-race sexual relations between Asian men and white women posed a danger for the body politic … As the mayor of Vancouver stated in a speech: I am bringing this to your attention for consideration … But it should be provided that until an alien race or any race other than white men can assimilate with the whites, mingle freely and intermarry and adopt the customs and language of the white race, they should be barred. We know this to be practically impossible.22

… If Asian men should not marry white women, it was quickly pointed out that the presence of single men would pose problems, particularly as it would require the regulation of mixed-race sexuality. Baker, the member from Victoria, pointed out in a discussion in the House of Commons on the 1885 Act on the question of female migrants from China, that while the minister of immigration:

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did not state how many were males and how many were females; but I will state, without fear of contradiction, that there were not 10 females in the whole 900. Hon. gentlemen in this House know that we are all human, and so great a disparity between the males and the females of an importation is not likely to lead to any result which would stand good decent criticism; but it would be impolitic and lacking in good taste, under the circumstances with so many ladies in the galleries. I shall, therefore, leave Hon. gentlemen to draw their own inferences from so great a disparity between the male and female importation of Chinese.23

… Subsequent government reports on Asian immigration remained concerned over the presence of single men. In 1901, the government appointed another commission to investigate Asian immigration. British Columbians and trade unionists were claiming that the 1885 Act was ineffective. This, combined with the beginning of Japanese immigration, led to the demand for new legislation which would control the migration of both groups. In its Report, the 1902 commission pointed out under a section with the heading “Few Females,” that “it thus appears that out of a population of 3,273 there are 3,132 adult males; of these 92 have wives in Canada … The disproportion of males to females is even greater in other places than in Victoria.”24 The commission also investigated the concern that Chinese men were marrying white women. Witnesses who worked with Chinese residents were asked to comment on the extent to which there was intermarriage between Chinese men and white women. The Reverend Roland D. Grant reported: I have known a few of the Chinese to marry white people … If they could intermarry that would be the settlement and the only settlement … If you go down to the root of the matter it must centre itself in the question of the family. The Chinese coming here, as they are coming without families, must have a deteriorating tendency.25

Another witness, the Reverend Alexander Brown, alluding to the growth of a mixed-race population in the United States, warned that the exclusion of wives may lead to the growth of a mixed-race population: At present Chinese allege that they are afraid to bring their wives and children to the country … The number of Chinese who have intermarried with whites is greater than the number of Jews who have intermarried with Gentiles. It is possible that the coming here of the Chinese in large

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numbers might result in bringing about conditions similar to those now prevalent in the Southern United States.26

… One strategy used to prevent mixed-race sexual relations was to warn white women of the dangers of intermarriage. Newspapers reported that these relationships were doomed to failure. For example, the headline “Seeks Relief in Death” reported the unhappy ending of a Canadian woman deserted by her Indian lover.27 Similarly, another article stated: English girls who marry Indians … have been cautioned against accepting at their face value Indians of whom they know practically nothing direct, and against facing without careful inquiry the immense social disadvantages under which they must labour in India, or the dangers that arise from the entry of English girls into a social system which permits polygamy … it may be said as a general rule that they bring nothing but misery and distress, especially to the English woman … As the position stands today, the legal status of an Englishwoman married to an Indian is such that no civilised society should tolerate it for a day longer than can be helped.28

… Newspapers also cautioned Canadians that white women were in danger of physical violence from Asian men. Newspapers often reported on the involvement of Asian men in crime, particularly against white women. Infamous cases of Asian domestic servants accused of murdering their employers dominated headlines. “Was Murdered by Chinese Boy” ran on the same page as the headline “Killed by Japanese, Wife of Prominent Physician of Stockton, Cal. Shot Dead by Servant.”29 Fear of mixed-race sexual relations led to demands for laws to prevent white women from working in workplaces – such as factories, licensed hotels, Chinese laundries, and restaurants – that also employed Asian men. A letter to the editor complained that “those who make the laws … either cannot or will not rid us of the threat to our women, and much besides of which we have to complain.”30 In this period, such legislation was discussed within the British Columbian legislature, federal legislature, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Imperial Privy Council. However, such legislation was not enacted until the 1920s. Concerns over mixed-race relations also led Canadian state officials to issue their own warning to Canadian women. A State Department

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circular required Canadian registrars to warn white women before they underwent a marriage ceremony. The circular states: While the registrar of marriages has no power, according to British law, to prevent such mixed marriages, care should be taken to make the position clear to every woman contemplating such a union.31

The Globe and Mail concurred with this warning. An article headlined, “Women to Be Warned on Mixed Marriages, Danger of Repudiation by Non-Christian Husband, Where Polygamy or Concubinage Is Lawful Woman May Be Divorced without Formality – Cannot Be Prevented by British Law,” stated: The State Department has issued public notice through the Canada Gazette … that marriages between women of British nationality professing the Christian religion and Moslems, Hindus and other persons belonging to countries where polygamy or concubinage is legal should not be allowed, unless these women are first warned that such marriages may be repudiated by the husbands if they return to the country of their birth. The influx of Hindus in British Columbia with the exclusion of their womankind lends point to such a warning.32

Such interventions were not sufficient to reassure Canadians that white women would be protected from Asian men. By 1910, a growing number of Canadians had become concerned that what appeared to be a solution to the racial politics of the nation – discouraging family settlement among Asians – came with its own particular set of problems. Including Asian Women to Prevent Mixed-Race Relations In 1910, Chinese male residents lobbied the Canadian government to exempt their spouses and children from the tax, and, as noted earlier, in 1911, two Indian men launched a court case that challenged the implicit restrictions on the entry of their spouses. Both of these challenges provided an opportunity to evaluate immigration practices. In particular, it allowed a small but vocal minority the opportunity to question the way in which immigration policies were being employed to regulate race and sexuality. In a discussion in Parliament on the court challenge by Bhag Singh and Bhagwan Singh, Stevens, the member from Vancouver, noted the discomfort with restricting female Asian migration:

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A question has been raised about the admission of Hindu wives. We have been berated, those of us who are opposed to the regulations, for cruelty because we have not seen fit to give way on this point.33

A number of politicians, as well as members of the public, pointed out that removing these restrictions would be in the interest of the racial politics of the nation. Their opposition was located in concerns of how to best regulate sexuality. As these Canadians pointed out, preventing mixed-race sexual relationships was not easily accomplished. Despite state and public warnings, regulating mixed-race sexuality required “self-regulation” by white women. Given the reported incidence of mixed-race marriages, these Canadians doubted the ability of all white women to participate in regimes of sexual regulation. The initial newspaper response to Bhag Singh and Bhagwan Singh’s case was to support their demand. During the years of 1911 and 1912, all of the newspapers surveyed for this study carried editorials or letters to the editor which argued that Canada would benefit from the inclusion of Indian women. The editors of the Victoria Daily Colonist stated: We do not think this is an unreasonable claim – but on the contrary think that it might be a distinct advantage not only to the Hindus themselves, but also to the community, to grant.34

… Other groups of Canadians agreed, especially those affiliated with women’s groups or religious organizations. In a speech to the Canadian Women’s Club on the merits of allowing Indian women entry into Canada, Dr Wilkie, a long-time supporter of Indian men’s claims, stated, “The moral danger often spoken about would be much lessened by the admission of the wives, who are now being kept out.”35 … Women’s groups encouraged the Canadian government to move to protect the racial character of the nation. The National Council of Women called on the federal government to “end the present state of affairs by either allowing Sikh women to enter Canada or by sending Sikh men back.”36 Similarly, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, requested that the government “allow the men of India already in Canada and able to maintain them, the right to bring their wives and families.”37 A number of churches took the same position. The Ministerial Association of Winnipeg declared:

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Speaking of the Sikhs in British Columbia, who are separated from their wives … the Government owes it to these people to either let their wives come or to buy them out and let them get away home.38

Politicians also promoted this position. In 1911, the lobbying carried out by Chinese residents led to the proposal of an amendment to the Chinese Immigration Act. For the first time in Canadian history, the federal government proposed to broaden the ability of Chinese men to sponsor their wives. As Frank Oliver, the minister of immigration, reported: There is a serious change in principle, the privilege of admission without payment of the head tax is extended to wives and children to a degree that did not prevail in the previous Act. That is an important amendment.39

The ensuing discussion raised a new concern. When the amendment was debated in the Senate, politicians asserted that white women could not be trusted to regulate themselves: Rt H o n L o u gh e e d : It seems to me that it would be in the interest of morality if the wives of all Chinamen who have become entitled to enter Canada should be admitted free into the Dominion … I fancy these people are just as susceptible to the desire for domestic life as any other nationality, and yet we suppress it … Hon M r D a n du rand : Are there many marriages between Chinamen and white women? Hon. M r M acd o na l d : I think there are some, and Japanese also. Hon. M r D a n du ran d : They marry white women, do they? Hon. M r M acd o na l d : We find worthless white girls who will marry anybody, even a Negro as black as spades, as long as he is a man … Hon S e nat o r Cl or a n : Canada has no right to prevent a Chinese resident from living a moral domestic life … Chinamen have been coming here for the past 30 to 40 years and are not able to marry white women … I feel this from a fatherly point of view, because after all, the Chinamen are men as we are, and are entitled to a home and family as much as we are.40

… Politicians began to argue that including Asian women would protect the racialized nation in an important way; Asian women would form a barrier between lonely Asian men and untrustworthy white women. The debate in the Senate concluded with Lougheed arguing:

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I will put it to my hon. friend that the charge usually brought against the Chinamen, and probably which has created more indignation in the community than any other is that they have engaged, very largely, in debauching white women. How can it be expected that there is immunity from immorality of that kind so long as the Chinese women are excluded? It would be much better that they have the opportunity of debauching their own women than Europeans, particularly white women in the confines of Canada. I fail to see why any bad results would flow from permitting their women to come to Canada without the imposition of the head tax.41

Not only was the presence of Asian women now predominantly seen as providing a solution to the problem of mixed-race relations, but Asian women were also depicted as protecting white women from the threat of violence by Asian men. Newspaper articles also deployed the trope of the vulnerable white woman to make the argument that Asian women were beneficial to the racialized nation. An editorial in the Victoria Daily Colonist linked the murder of a white woman by a Chinese man to the question of permitting the entry of women from India. The editors suggested the entry of Asian women would protect white women from violence: The recent murder of a Vancouver lady by a Chinaman aroused a great deal of feeling in that city against the Chinese generally … the disposition of the body and the callousness of the murderer indicates a phase of character which is exceedingly rare among people of our own race … In an article of our last Sunday section, the writer suggested the segregation of the Sikhs from the rest of the community … this opinion was not suggested in a haphazard way but after a very careful study of the position occupied by Sikhs here. It is a very serious question of the ultimate relations between white people and Asiatic in Canada.42

Ironically, segregated communities were seen as a means of protecting and segregating white women from Asian men. As these Canadians pointed out, the inclusion of Asian women allowed for a new and more efficient way of regulating mixed-race sexuality. Rather than regulating mixed-race sexuality through self-regulation, the regulation of sexuality would take place through the formation of ethnic communities.43 In these communities, Asian women would be responsible for ensuring that Asian men harmed neither white women nor the racialized nation.

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Back to Exclusion As events unfolded, Chinese and Indian men lost their battle to change immigration policies. Growing anti-Asian sentiment led to a renewed call for exclusionary Asian immigration policies. In 1911 a new Conservative government was elected. Incoming Prime Minister Robert Borden had long campaigned on a platform to implement tougher measures to prevent the entry of all Asians, male and female. Facing such a climate, the proposed amendment to the Chinese Immigration Act failed to pass in Parliament. A special Order in Council allowed Kartar Kaur and Harman Kaur to remain in Canada on humanitarian grounds. Allowing these women entry was a compromise which prevented Indian men from challenging the legalities of immigration laws, and kept the restrictions on the entry of Indian women intact. … Shifts in newspaper accounts suggest that the majority of Canadians again supported the policy of excluding Asian women, on the grounds that it was necessary to prevent the permanent settlement of Asian men. The editors of the Globe and Mail reflected this shift in popular opinion when they stated: The policy of setting strict limits to Oriental immigration is necessary to preserve British Columbia for the white race. If the demands of the Sikhs were granted, the Sikh families would be the nucleus of a growing colony. The Oriental problem can be kept under control but not if it is rooted in the soil by family life. The domestication of Asiatics has been permitted in a small way in this country, but it has gone far enough. The Canadian of today must not forget that they are trustees for generations to come … It would soon be swamped by numbers in America and other sparsely populated portions of the world pre-empted by it if the barriers were removed. Canada in self-defense, denied that the Hindus have a right to colonise.44

The promise of new exclusionary policies mediated fears of mixed-race relations. While broad public support for including Asian women into the national formation decreased, Canadians continued to be at odds on the issue of including Asian women in the national formation. A small number of Canadians continued to press for the inclusion of Asian women into the body politic. While they failed to change government policy or

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significantly shift public opinion, their activities placed considerable pressure on government officials to deal with concerns with mixedrace sexual relations. In 1919, the government of Saskatchewan passed legislation that prevented Chinese men from employing white women. The government of British Columbia followed, implementing the Factory Act in 1922, and, in 1923, the Women’s and Girl’s Protection Act. In 1923, the Canadian government enacted legislation that barred all Chinese from entering Canada. This remained in effect until after the Second World War, when overtly racially discriminatory clauses began to be removed from Canadian immigration, citizenship, and other legislative acts. Conclusion The research reported here confirms the scholarship which has argued that when nationalist projects are imagined through the iconography of “race,” such projects become associated with exclusionary practices. The way in which the question of male and female migration from Asia was socially and administratively handled was located in a social agenda of producing a “white” nation. Within such an imaginary, state policies emerged which rendered Asian residents as ineligible for legal and social membership within the nation-state. Rendering Asian men as ineligible for membership within the nation-state led to new forms of domestic arrangements. In particular, this was tied to the strategy to exclude female migrants from Asia, which in turn presumed domestic arrangements that would span across borders … As Asian men became racialized as outsiders to the nationalist project, their sexuality and reproductive capacity became dangerous. … This study suggests that producing a racialized nation can take place not only through practices of exclusion, but also, through practices of inclusion. The arguments to include female migrants from China, Japan, and India were also located within a project of constructing whiteness. Tasked with the maintenance of racial boundaries, the inclusion of Asian women within the body politic seemingly offered the assurance that white women would continue to reproduce the racialized nation. However, assigning Asian women this task was also seen as dangerously contaminating, as their very inclusion in the national formation undermined the bio-politics of the nation. Thus, the inclusion of Asian women was defined as simultaneously dangerous and desirable,

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placing these women in an ambiguous position within the emerging nation-state, and suggesting that early twentieth-century practices of inclusion operated as more refined practices of exclusion. Significantly, arguments to include female migrants from Asia led to practices which further redefined the ways in which domestic arrangements would be linked to the state, the regulation of sexuality to the public order, and racialization of place. The arguments for allowing the entry of Asian women tied their inclusion to the construction of “ethnic communities,” which in turn, allowed for further racializing of the social geography of the nation. My research suggests that the emergence of ethnic communities needs to be placed in the context of social regimes of racial and sexual regulation. Ethnic communities emerged as strategies that would allow for the inclusion of Asian men within the economy as marginal workers, but simultaneously exclude these residents from the dominant social and political geographies of the nation. In advocating such domestic and residential arrangements, the spatialization of race further tied racial type to national essence, as the location of Asian residents in ethnic communities consolidated the politics of whiteness and nation. Importantly, this form of racial and sexual regulation was constituted through women, as it was the entry of Asian women that allowed for the internal geography of the nation to be racialized, and for ethnic communities to be produced … Racialized nationalist projects have been challenged by Indigenous, Asian, black, and some white residents. Asian residents challenged the racialized barriers to entry and settlement. In addition, some Asian and white residents rejected the social and legal codes that regulated mixedrace sexual relations, which made it impossible to thoroughly police mixed-race sexual relations. Neither state nor moral regulation could ensure that all residents would cooperate in the racialized nationalist project. Asian men and women, and some white men and women were unruly subjects.

NOTES 1 … The term “Canadian” refers to those who were legally defined as Canadian. This includes white immigrants and their descendants. I use the terms First Nations, Indigenous, Metis, Asian, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese to refer to those groups of residents excluded from citizenship rights [in this period].

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2 Tensions around Asian migration emerged with Confederation, in 1867, and continued until the 1920s by when the Canadian state had implemented a number of anti-Asian immigration measures. 3 Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991); Barbara Roberts, “‘A Work of Empire’: Canadian Reformers and British Female Immigration,” in Linda Kealey, ed., A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880–1920 (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1979); Adele Perry, “‘Fair Ones of a Purer Caste’: White Women and Colonialism in NineteenthCentury British Columbia,” Feminist Studies 23, 3 (1997): 501–24. 4 In 1867, the population of mainland British Columbia was made up of 5,035 “white” residents, 2,195 Chinese residents, and over 33,000 Indigenous people (Canada, Report on the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 1902). 5 Cited in Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 5. 6 Cited in ibid., 48. 7 See Singh Bolaria and Peter Li, Racial Oppression in Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Garamond, 1988); Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown. 8 See, for example, Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), 86-106; David Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writings on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989). 9 See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., WomenNation-State (London: Macmillan, 1989); Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Feminism and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 209–52; Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 10 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Enakshi Dua, “From Subjects to Aliens:

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Enakshi Dua Indian Migrants and the Racialisation of Canadian Citizenship,” Sociologie et societé 31, 2 (1999): 145–62; Radhika Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 198–214; Renisa Mawani, “The Island of the Unclean: Race, Colonialism and ‘Chinese leprosy’ in British Columbia, 1891–1924,” Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal 1 (2003): 1–29. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1883, 905. Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 1885, ixxvii. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1885, 3016. Canada, Report, 1885, iv–v. Ibid. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1887, 642. Ibid. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1908, 1230–1. 3 Dec. 1910, 1. Canada, Revised Statutes, 1910. Canada, Report, 1885, xciv. Cited in the Victoria Daily Colonist, 12 July 1911, 11. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1885, 3017. Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 1902, 13. Hereafter referred to as Canada, Report, 1902. Ibid., 31–2. Ibid., 36. Victoria Daily Colonist, 18 Feb. 1913, 10. Ibid., 15 June 1913, 6. Ibid., Apr. 1914, 1. Ottawa Citizen, 15 Mar. 1911, 14. Canada Gazette, 1914. 23 Mar. 1914, 2. House of Commons, Debates, 2 Mar. 1914, 1242. 2 Apr. 1911, 4. Globe and Mail, 17 Feb. 1912, 10. Quoted in Globe and Mail, 29 May 1912. Quoted in Victoria Daily Colonist, 23 Jan. 1912. Ibid. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1911, 7871. Canada, Senate, Debates, 11 Mar. 1911, 328–32. Ibid. 18 Apr. 1914, 8.

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43 Notably, as Canadians acted to protect the racialized character of the Canadian national polity, they also proposed a particular set of gender relations in Asian communities, relationships that were centeed on the institution of the nuclear family. For a more detailed discussion, see Enakshi Dua, “The Hindu Woman’s Question: Canadian Nation-Building and the Social Construction of Gender for South Asian-Canadian women,” in George Dei and Agnes Calliste, eds., Anti-Racist Feminism (Halifax: Fernwood, 2000), 55–71. 44 31 Dec. 1917, 4.

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PART THREE Letters and Tales of Settlement and Longing

Historians are increasingly identifying and using immigrant letters to analyse women’s lives in transnational and cross-border settings. Many of the chapters in this book utilize the idea of transnationalism, whether explicitly or just implicitly, in their analysis. As noted in the Introduction to this book, transnationalism is a concept which recognizes that most immigrants maintain various relationships – physical, political, psychological – that link their pre- and post-migration lives, and sometimes multiple places with which they have ongoing ties. Letter writing is certainly one method that enhances this dynamic, and in eras before the Internet or even telephone, writing letters by hand on paper and sent by road, rail, or ship was the only means for people, separated by long distances, to communicate with one another. The immigrant letter is a familiar source to migration historians, but some researchers are building archives of never-before-seen letters that have been entrusted to them. Such first-person and, in most cases, private sources allow historians to analyse past experience for what letters reveal about everyday happenings, about migrants’ opinions and beliefs, and also about their emotional lives. Women were often the letter writers of a household, maintaining connections with friends and family far away by sending important and mundane information, and by expressing their ideas and feelings in a medium that was private and safe. Two of the chapters in this section examine very different kinds of letters. In analysing love letters between Canada and Italy in the period soon after the Second World War, Sonia Cancian demonstrates the importance of transnational relationships in the lives of immigrants and non-migrants alike and also challenges stereotypes of immigrant

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women as “sexless subjects,” maintaining instead that these women had romantic ideals and desires. Cancian’s study introduces us to a relatively new field of study – the history of emotion, or what is sometimes referred to as “affect.” The collection of letters that she uses gives us access to topics like intimate love and longing between two people. Letters helped to reduce the time and distance between, in this case, lovers separated by an ocean, and also demanded an ongoing connection, since a letter sent necessitated a letter returned, and so on. Her case study is set within a context of high levels of immigration from Italy to Canada after the war. Dealing with an earlier era, Lisa Chilton’s chapter discusses a very different kind of letter exchange. Her study of British female migration to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this massive managed migration by analysing the letters written by female settlers that shed light on the relationship between the emigrants and the emigrators – the individuals who organized the process. The turn of the twentieth century saw tens of thousands of single British women emigrate to Canada seeking paid work, independence, and sometimes marriage. Unlike Cancian’s letters between Montreal and Venice that were very personal and emotional, the letters that Chilton analyses were actually printed in a journal published by a British women’s immigration association, and had the political purpose – on the part of the recipients – to promote female migration to Canada. The letters also reveal a deeper agenda: expectations that the women emigrants would civilize the frontier as part of a British project of cultural imperialism. The way in which letters are used by historians is more multi-varied than in the past, but their actual usage is not. Similarly, some of the approaches to analysing the lives of immigrant and ethnic women are not necessarily “new” but are nevertheless extremely valuable in recovering little-known people and places of the past. Such recovery is evident in the chapter by Lesley Erickson on Swedish women immigrants in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century rural Saskatchewan. Settlement of the Canadian West by white Europeans was a priority for the government after Confederation in 1867. And so the decades up to the First World War saw hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrive mainly from northern and Eastern Europe to create rural, farming communities on the prairies. Erickson’s more recent scholarship uses criminal cases involving women to explore the interconnections between

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the law, gender, and colonialism (see Part One), but her earlier work on Swedes in Saskatchewan was chosen for inclusion in this volume because there is so little written about rural women immigrants to the Canadian West who were not of Anglo descent. Through her analysis, we learn about what historians have called the “lived experience” of women whose activity, like that of other immigrant women across time, was crucial to the maintenance of ethnic and religious traditions in a new country, yet was also subject to remarkable shifts in household and community gender roles as both men and women adapted to the necessities of a new environment. The “tales” – one important source used in this chapter is a historical novel – of travel and settlement that these women told provide a vivid sense of both the arduous and liberating aspects of the rural immigrant experience over a century ago. What kinds of gender role changes might occur through the process of immigration? Why was letter writing and letter receiving important to immigrant women? What forms of communication maintain ties among lovers, friends, and family who are separated by migration in today’s world? What themes and topics do you think dominate the letters (or Internet messaging) of today’s immigrant women?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Cancian, Sonia. Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010. Chilton, Lisa. Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Elliott, Bruce C., David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds. Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hoerder, Dirk. Creating Societies: Immigrant Lives in Canada. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1999. Errington, Elizabeth J. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2007. “The Historical Study of Emotions.” American Historical Review 117, 5 (2012): 1487–1531. Iacovetta, Franca. Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

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Loewen, Royden. “‘The Children, the Cows, My Dear Man and My Sister’: The Transplanted Lives of Mennonite Farm Women, 1874–1900.” Canadian Historical Review 73, 3 (1992): 344–73. Silverman, Elaine Leslau. The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier. Montreal: Eden Press, 1984. Swyripa, Frances. Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Letters “Home” from Canada: British Female Emigrants and the Imperial Family of Women Lisa C h ilton

Introduction In March 1910, A. Glanville left England for Canada as a member of a chaperoned party of women who were emigrating under the auspices of the British Women’s Emigration Association (BWEA). Eight months after her departure, a set of four letters penned by Glanville were published in the BWEA’s monthly journal, the Imperial Colonist.1 Glanville’s letters tell of her work as a nurse, first in a Columbia Coast Mission Loggers’ Hospital 140 miles up the coast from Vancouver, then at a hospital in Revelstoke, British Columbia. They also hint at Glanville’s changing state of mind during her first few months in Canada. The first couple of letters exude enthusiasm, in spite of her obviously heavy workload and trying work conditions. They show that she revelled in her position of authority at the mission hospital and that she was enjoying her new physical surroundings. “It is all so wonderfully new to me and the whole coast is truly beautiful. I feel so well,” she wrote. “God has been good to me!”2 The last two letters have a completely different tone. On 3 September, the hospital in which Glanville was working burnt down. At the time, Glanville was working alone. She managed to evacuate all of her fourteen patients, but she lost the building with its equipment and supplies, as well as most of her personal belongings, including all of her books and papers. Within a few days her superiors had assigned her to a new post at another hospital in BC, but Glanville This chapter is excerpted and revised with permission from Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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now questioned her ability to handle the heavy workload and responsibility involved in “frontier” nursing. Her enthusiasm shaken by the trauma of the fire, she indicated that she might have to give up her current position for something less taxing while trying to regain her physical and psychological strength. Between the mid-1880s and the start of the First World War the BWEA (together with its sister organization, the South Africa Colonisation Society) promoted and facilitated the emigration of approximately a quarter of a million “respectable” British women, like Glanville, to imperial destinations.3 Like other emigrant letters that were published in the Imperial Colonist, Glanville’s letters were selected by the journal’s editor because they conveyed information that helped to drive home the various arguments that the imperially minded women who produced the journal (women I refer to as “emigrators”) had been making for decades. Glanville’s early letters helped to promote single British women’s emigration to the Canadian frontier. They emphasized the physical beauty of Glanville’s new environment and her sense of joy at her improved circumstances. They also highlighted the adventure involved in imperial migration, as well as the potential for romance. Glanville wrote of being surprised to discover that the loggers she nursed were “a very interesting lot,” some of them “Old Country men, gentlemen” one scarcely expected to find “in the back woods of Canada.”4 Her comments made it clear that she was both touched and flattered by the attention she had received from the men in the logging camps she had visited. But if Glanville’s letters could be used to promote the settlement of educated British women on the Canadian frontier, they also added a serious cautionary note, and in doing so, added weight to the arguments of the middle-class female emigrators who stressed that relocation to the empire’s frontier spaces required exceptionally strong, adaptable, resilient women. As Glanville’s letters demonstrated, and as the emigrators confirmed, through the movement of this class of women (as opposed to women of the “workhouse type”5) there was a world of good work to be done. Finally, the letters communicated their author’s gratitude for the trouble the emigrators had taken on her behalf. They indicate that for this relatively welleducated, competent woman, emigration to the Canadian West could not have been possible – or at least, that it would have been far less comfortable – without the assistance provided by the BWEA. A key primary source for historians of migration, migrants’ correspondence was critical to the creation and maintenance of networks of information and support among people separated by large distances.

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Migrants’ letters varied in form, length, and quality, and in how they were preserved or distributed.6 Some, such as those discussed in Sonia Cancian’s chapter in this volume, might remain for decades in private hands until researchers discovered them; others, like those examined here, were written not to family and friends, but to members of a public organization or institution that expected to publish at least some of them immediately. As a monthly publication mandated to explore issues relating to women, the Imperial Colonist (1902–27) came to house hundreds of letters from women who settled across the British Empire. For feminist scholars of the new imperialism, and particularly for historians interested in British women’s experiences of transoceanic emigration and settlement within the context of empire, the letters contained in the Imperial Colonist are valuable documents.7 When read with careful attention to the circumstances of their creation, collection, and publication, they may be used to shed light on subjects ranging from the mechanics of migration to how individual women felt about their host communities, their work, and the lives they had left behind. The letters in the Imperial Colonist also offer an interesting source of information about the relationships that were established between the migrants themselves and the women who had managed their migration. Why did women like Glanville write at least four letters back to the women in England who had encouraged and facilitated her emigration? What purposes did the relationships that she continued to foster with these emigrators serve? This chapter takes such questions as an entry point for an exploration of managed British female migration to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrants and Emigrators The female emigrators became involved in emigration work because they were avid imperialists. As British women who were interested in the development of the British Empire, and as Canadian – as well as Australian, New Zealand, South African, and Rhodesian – women keen to see their nation firmly embedded within the British Empire, the emigrators sought to create their versions of the ideal empire through carefully managed British female migration. By inserting large numbers of appropriately educated women into colonial spaces – and especially into the “rougher” frontier areas of European settlement – the emigrators imagined that they were ensuring the growth of the “right” sort of sociopolitical views and values within colonial populations. They

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believed that respectable women of British background would help to civilize frontier societies in ways that their male counterparts could not. They felt that if they could alter the character of Canadian immigration to conform more closely to their own understandings of what Canada needed, namely, an infusion of respectable white British women, they could fundamentally alter the nature of Canadian society and improve the health of the British Empire for the foreseeable future. This was unabashedly a project of British cultural imperialism. Studies of British female migration tend to make three key points about the relationships between emigrators and emigrants: that the twinned themes of “protection and control” were omnipresent in these relationships; that emigrants’ agency was usually demonstrated through various forms of passive and active resistance; and that when emigrants did embrace the emigrators’ schemes, they did so for practical shortterm gains – not because they shared the emigrators’ visions or because of their emotional attachment to the emigrators themselves.8 Such historical analyses of the emigrator-emigrant relationship have tended to focus more on the emigrators than on the emigrants themselves. As we shall see, however, a closer reading of published emigrant letters, like those written by Glanville, suggests a more complicated and sometimes more positive relationship between emigrant women and the female emigrators than is to be found when one assumes that agency necessarily equalled resistance or short-term strategic tolerance. To be sure, the relationships that developed among these women occurred in a context of significant inequalities of material wealth and power; this power differential lay just beneath the surface of all emigrator-emigrant correspondence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this regard, the two groups of women could scarcely be described as equal sisters in migration, but nor were they complete strangers, if by strangers we mean they shared no common ground. Hardly passive victims, the female emigrants responded to the oppressive features of the schemes laid out by the female emigration societies, and also to the opportunities they offered, according to their own sensibilities and agendas. For some emigrants, the benefits obtained from extended involvement with an imperial network of women were worth the annoyances. Moreover, by embracing the concept that emigrators and emigrants were all one big happy family of imperial women, containing mothers, daughters, and sisters, the emigrants were able to help shape the structure and identity of that family.9 In so doing, they also contributed to the evolution of this managed female migration.

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There were actually three different groups of women who together made up the international network of women who supported single British women’s imperial migration: the British emigrators belonging to the British female emigration societies; those who worked, usually as volunteers, at reception in the dominions (Canada, Australia, Southern Africa, and New Zealand); and those who worked, usually for pay as matrons on ships, on trains, and in hostels. Because of the opportunity for longer-term personal interactions, emigrant women were most likely to forge lasting friendships with people involved in reception work close to their place of settlement. The women who ran women’s hostels tried to make these institutions a home away from home. Should an emigrant so desire, the hostel could become the centre of her new social world.10 By contrast, the settled immigrant was unlikely to see much of the British emigrators or matrons who had overseen the earlier stages of her migration. Yet, the character of the emigration societies, with their aim to encourage more middle-class female emigration, meant that the emigrants were not only encouraged to write “back home” to women who were not relatives, but that this correspondence would be relatively well preserved. It was the British emigrators who collected and published emigrants’ letters in the Imperial Colonist. Like most of the emigrant letters reproduced in the female emigration societies’ publications, Glanville’s correspondence had originally been sent to particular emigrators with whom she had become acquainted in the early stages of her migration. The recipients of her letters, Ellen Joyce and Grace Lefroy, were the two emigrators most likely to receive letters from emigrants during the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century.11 Like so many of the women who emigrated with the BWEA, Glanville lacked financial means of her own and had required a loan from the association in order to pay her way to Canada. As the BWEA’s secretary, Lefroy would have had extensive correspondence and possibly some meetings with Glanville during her preparation for departure. It was also Lefroy who would oversee Glanville’s repayment of the loan. Despite their brevity, Glanville’s letters are surprisingly revealing. For example, her correspondence indicates that before deciding to emigrate, she had received formal training as a nurse, and had completed four years of “Queen’s Work” in London.12 She had no specific destination in mind when she set off for Canada, leaving it to a superintendent with the Victorian Order of Nurses at Ottawa to select a post for her in BC. It appears that she had no close friends or family in Canada. In

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many respects she fit the image of the “surplus” woman – middle-class, relatively well educated, with few prospects of marriage in Britain because of a shortage of appropriately classed, marriageable men – that female philanthropists were so anxious to help through emigration during this period.13 Glanville sailed from England on 16 March 1910, in the SS Lake Champlain along with seventy-one other BWEA emigrants. Before the group’s departure, the emigrants had gathered at the Wortley Hostel in London. While there, they met a few of their sponsoring emigrators, including Ellen Joyce, who had come from Winchester specifically to meet with them. They were also introduced to Mrs Forster of Toronto, who had connections with the Toronto chapter of the imperially oriented Girls’ Friendly Society, and Miss Townsend, “who had lately made a tour in Canada and who knew nearly every place to which the travellers were going.” All three women had plenty of advice to give the departing emigrants.14 Miss Black, a veteran matron, was in charge of the group while they were in transit. It is unclear whether Glanville travelled as a second or third class passenger – the group consisted of both.15 The ship’s destination was St John, New Brunswick, but Black would have accompanied Glanville and her fellow westward travellers by train at least as far as Montreal. Why They Wrote and What They Wrote Clearly, many of the emigrant letters that were published in the Imperial Colonist had been constructed with the writer’s understanding that they might end up, in part or in full, in print. After all, most of these female emigrants would have had access to the Imperial Colonist during the process of their migration and thus would have been able to read excerpts from similar letters. Moreover, the emigrators urged them to send letters “home” containing news of how they were getting on, and this request itself would have prompted some emigrants to think about the relationship between the writing of these letters and the emigrators’ published texts. Yet, some of the letters that the emigrators published were likely intended for their recipients’ eyes only. Glanville’s letters appear to fit into this category. Although she was aware of the roles that Joyce and Lefroy played in disseminating colonists’ news, her letters to these women do not appear to have been written with the possibility of their later publication in mind. Rather, they read as if they were penned in haste – private communications, rather than carefully arranged statements of fact and impression for a potentially larger audience.

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A careful examination of Glanville’s letters and those of other emigrants reveals a complicated set of factors that influenced their construction. At a basic level, a sense of obligation motivated Glanville to communicate with Joyce and Lefroy. After all, she was still in debt to their organization. But, like other emigrants who wrote back, Glanville also felt the need to express her gratitude to these women for having arranged her migration and settlement. Most of the published letters reveal that part of the debt that emigrants felt they owed to the emigrators was to write one or more letters after they had settled abroad. Many thus began with some form of apology for having taken so long to write the promised letter. Ellen Joyce, and other emigrators who took their leads from her, explicitly requested that letters should be sent as soon as the emigrants were in a position to supply informed opinions on relevant subjects: she instructed nurses to report upon nursing conditions; she asked women going out to settle on the land to write back about their farming experiences; she suggested that home helps advise about how best to prepare for domestic work in Canada; and she asked all female emigrants to keep an eye out for new career openings for capable women. The emigrators understood that settled emigrants were excellent sources of up-to-date information about matters relevant to emigration work, and they emphasized to departing women that their communications would be of great value to the emigrants who would follow them.16 A large number of emigrants seem to have taken these requests to heart, and the result was a stream of letters back overseas that outlined colonial conditions in a way that prospective emigrants might find useful. But if Glanville wrote back out of obligation, she, like other such emigrants, also wrote back for more personal, self-interested reasons. Settled immigrants used the fact that the emigrators disseminated their news widely to further their own agendas. For example, the emigrators regularly received emigrants’ requests for assistance in advertising investment opportunities and properties for sale. Published correspondence from the Topham sisters is fairly typical. Writing to Miss Vernon, another key member of the BWEA, I.M. Topham suggested that, “possibly among the numerous girls who ask the B.W.E.A. at home for information there might be some with a knowledge of dressmaking who would like to start for themselves.” She explained that their shop in Vancouver had been opened the previous spring and that it had done well, but that she had been ill and wanted out of the business. Her sister did not wish to keep the shop going by herself, so they were looking for a buyer.17 Mrs Eugenie Reeves, who wrote to the editor of the Imperial

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Colonist in 1921, had similar hopes that a mention in this journal might solve her business worries. More than a decade and a half after her relationship with the BWEA might have ended, Reeves found it expedient to again use the services provided by this imperial network of women. Her letter indicates that she thought the editor might “introduce a buyer” for her farm in Saskatchewan. At nearly seventy years old, Reeves wanted to sell the property she had homesteaded with her son after emigrating to Canada as a BWEA emigrant sixteen years earlier.18 A significant number of the letters that were sent back to the emigrators requesting assistance were not merely self-interested. In the case of Glanville and many others like her, the emigrators were being asked for charitable donations that would assist people more needy than those making the requests. “[Now] I am writing to you[,] may I beg for my hospital?” she asked Lefroy. “Of course it’s a crude little place and many, many things are wanted, should you know of anyone wanting to do some good work.” She noted that among the “many little comforts missing” were “wearing apparel and household things.”19 She repeated her request, this time with a leaflet about the hospital’s work, in a letter to Joyce a month later.20 Like other emigrants writing back in times of more pressing hardship, it is possible that Glanville’s subsequent description of the devastation wrought by the burning of her hospital was aimed at soliciting a more substantial sort of aid.21 But even if she did not imagine that some wealthy philanthropist in Britain might take up her devastated hospital as a pet project, she evidently assumed that her letters would alert the emigrators to the fact that she could not repay her loan as quickly as had been anticipated. Readers of the emigrators’ publications would have known that pleas for aid in times of extreme need did not fall upon deaf ears. Throughout the Imperial Colonist are scattered references to “gifts” made by British benefactors to worthy overseas cases.22 In the event of a newsworthy personal or local disaster, the editor of the Imperial Colonist was quick to solicit help. For example, an emotional plea for assistance was registered in the October 1908 issue of the journal under the title, “A Pathetic Appeal,” from a correspondent living in Cranbrook, BC. “Terrible fires have been raging all around us, and every moment we were afraid we should all be burnt out,” wrote Mrs Hyde Baker. Saved by a sudden change in the direction of the wind, the residents of Cranbrook found themselves playing host to over two thousand refugees from Fernie, a neighbouring town that had not experienced the same good fortune. Fernie was gutted by the fire in the space of only

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two hours; those who managed to escape the fire were forced to flee without their belongings. “[Most] of them arrived almost clothesless in their hurry to escape. They had to throw any superfluous clothes away getting through the burning woods down to the river or the railway track … All the money the men are earning now will have to go to buying lumber to rebuild their homes,” wrote Baker. Many of the residents were recent immigrants (some of whom had travelled with the BWEA). Hardly any were insured. The struggle ahead – for the comparatively lucky Cranbrook hosts and for the Fernie refugees – was daunting. “The winter will soon be on us; in Fernie the thermometer goes down to 20°, 30° and 40° below zero,” Baker noted. “I wonder if I might beg some warm clothing, especially women’s coats, cloaks and shawls?”23 The response from the network of emigrators and their friends was immediate. The next month’s journal recorded that two parcels of clothing had already been dispatched. The clothing would be delivered by “one of the young women of the October 29 party, who happen[ed] to be going there.”24 The maintenance of connections with emigrators postmigration could produce concrete benefits. Emotional accounts of hard-luck experiences such as those related in Glanville’s and Baker’s letters were periodically featured in the emigrators’ publications. They made for very interesting reading, and they certainly added variety to the journal’s contents. However, the emigrators would have received more letters of this kind than they were willing to publish. After all, their literature was designed to promote emigration. Emigrants’ accounts of their never-ending struggles to find decent employment, recover from major setbacks, adapt to extreme weather conditions, and overcome homesickness and feelings of social isolation were unlikely to entice uncertain prospective emigrants. We cannot tell from the available sources whether Glanville received material assistance, via the emigrators, for her mission hospital. But she does convey her gratitude for the gifts of reading materials that she received from Lefroy. References to the joy and comfort derived from these parcels of British newspapers, magazines, and journals featured prominently in the letters of various women. “Thank you for sending me the ‘Daily Mirror,’” wrote LC from Saskatchewan, who explained, “[We] get very little news here, as we are so far up country. This is a lonely homestead … there is no school or railway closer than Crooked River, so I teach my children what I can, and we are very glad of anything to read and pass it on to other settlers.”25 LHW wrote back to her British correspondent: “I’m only out from the Old Country seven years

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and still think so much of home there. I have received a paper twice, which was very welcome. Any illustrated papers and magazines from the Old Land are such treats. We can get them in Canada, but way up here everything is so costly and very often unobtainable.”26 Echoing these sentiments, EMR wrote back from Manitoba that the parcel of magazines that she had received helped to keep her connected to the social world she had left behind her: “We are, as I told you before, very isolated up here. Besides my husband, two trappers, and two Indians, who put into the river to camp for one night, I have seen no one since August 16th of last year, until a week ago, when I went with my husband to Shoal River.” “I thought perhaps I might see some other woman as a little change from masculine society,” she reflected, but then noted her disappointment: “I saw an Indian woman or girl in the distance, but that was all, and the only white man in the place was one left in charge of the trading store and post office.”27 The women in Britain and in the dominions’ urban centres, who worked to promote the settlement of “respectable” British women in frontier spaces, understood that as culturally resilient as a woman like EMR might be, periodic reminders of her more civilized past and of her colonizing mission were important bulwarks against a loss of “proper” perspective. Women whose daily social interactions with adults were with white men and people of Aboriginal or mixed-race heritage needed assurances that they were different from, and in many ways more cultured than, their companions. Networks of Support A multilayered sense of obligation and a desire to tap into resources available through the imperial network of female emigrators combined to determine that emigrants like Glanville would write to the British emigrators shortly after arriving at their colonial destinations. But the emotional content that may be found in emigrants’ letters requires further examination. Glanville’s letters to Joyce and Lefroy seem to convey a genuine emotional attachment to these women. Miss Black, the matron who had chaperoned Glanville’s party to Canada, also gained a position of emotional importance in Glanville’s post-emigration world. Black evidently did the rounds of ex-emigrant visiting that were expected of all regular travelling matrons.28 For some emigrants, periodic post-settlement contact with the matrons who had played supportive roles in the life-altering experience of migration proved to be comforting. Glanville was one such emigrant; her reference to a chance meeting

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she had had with Black is the only positive note in the otherwise thoroughly dejected letter she sent to Lefroy three weeks after the disastrous hospital fire.29 It is not surprising that Glanville would feel attached to Black. The emigrators tried hard to select matrons who would gain the respect and affection of their charges. The success of their project demanded that they do so, as the matrons had little other than the force of their personalities with which to encourage emigrant compliance with their rules of conduct. At times the matrons were resented for their heavy-handed treatment of emigrant women, but their efforts could also be greatly appreciated.30 In the same month that Glanville wrote back to Lefroy about meeting Black, another letter – this one sent to a matron by a group of female emigrants – was published in the Imperial Colonist. Obviously meant to serve as a letter of reference or support, this letter was both formal and deferential, but there is no reason to assume that it was insincere. The letter read: We, your party of second class girls, wish to express our appreciation of the thought and care and labour you have given that every arrangement should be made for our comfort. We want to say how much we value the protection and pleasant company which being members of your party has secured for us, and to thank you for your kind words and counsel, and for the high ideals you placed before us. We know your words of advice will help to carry us through the difficulties we may have to face, and thus prove that the seed has not fallen upon barren ground.31

In less formal ways, large numbers of emigrants made similar points about their matrons in their letters back home. As one of the BWEA’s “regulars,” Black took her role as a motherly friend to emigrants seriously. As another Canadian immigrant (this one writing eight years earlier than Glanville) explained, “It is quite impossible to say all Miss Black was to us [during our journey]. The hardest thing we had to do after leaving England was to say good-bye to her. She took all our difficulties and fought all our battles, and in spite of her responsibilities was always bright and happy. We all owe the Society much, but the greatest of all our debts is for Miss Black.”32 The migration process completely stripped some women of their previous systems of emotional and financial support. For others, the systems of support that they might have had in Britain had been dismantled even before they set off for new lives overseas. As Jan Gothard has

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shown in her study of single British emigrant women in nineteenthcentury Australia, a high proportion of these migrants had experienced the loosening of family ties – through their own, earlier migrations within Britain and/or through the death of family members – prior to their departure from the British Isles.33 The social dislocation that came with emigration was an important factor in some emigrant women’s interactions with members of the imperial migration network. Writing back to England from South Africa, emigrant JB put in words what many other emigrants merely hinted at when she told her emigrator correspondent, “Your reply [to my letter] has been quite a treasure to me.” She explained that her “few friends at home have almost forgotten me, although I write to them from time to time.” Wistfully, she concluded, “My parents are both dead and my sisters and brothers married, so perhaps that accounts for it, but I still long to visit the dear old home, and mean to do so as soon as possible.”34 JB was by no means an unsuccessful emigrant. She had fared well in her employment as a governess and she was happily engaged to a fellow Scottish emigrant. Yet her desire for strong ties with people “back home” was clearly evident. In the early twentieth century, emigration for many single women meant limited contact by mail with people who previously had been central to their lives. Actually reuniting with people from their premigration past was, in most cases, unlikely. In these circumstances, continued contact by post and in person with the emigrators, who formed a psychological link between emigrants’ past and present lives, took on a heavily loaded significance. This contact helped to ground emigrants who were looking for ways to make sense of unfamiliar situations. JB’s letter was unusual in the extent to which its author was explicit about the relationship between her appreciation for the emigrator’s interest in her and her sorrow about the absence of a satisfactory set of relationships with overseas family and friends. But the sense of wistfulness – of a need for the gap to be filled – and the corresponding idea that women working within the female emigration network might go part way to filling that gap, may be found in a great number of the letters published in the Imperial Colonist. Emigrants drew upon their sense of being a part of an international network of imperial, colonizing women when constructing new identities for themselves in unfamiliar social contexts. Membership within an empire-wide community of women emigrators and emigrants – people who were linked by their shared assumptions concerning the benefits bestowed upon colonial societies by the immigration of virtuous British

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women – provided emigrants with a framework within which to situate their own experiences and attitudes towards migration and settlement. For some women, this sense of community was immensely useful. It provided them with a clear sense of identity and purpose – not as outcasts from their homeland, nor as foreigners to their new locales, but as participants in a mass movement of like-circumstanced British female emigrants. This family of women helped to ground emigrants who might otherwise have felt unmoored in new surroundings where they lacked familiar frames of reference. As newcomers to Canada, these immigrants were often painfully aware of their own knowledge gaps – their lack of expertise – relating to colonial social practices and the challenges posed by their new physical environments. But when writing back to the emigrators overseas, these same women were able to position themselves as experts. Their experiences as new immigrants gave them insights that prospective emigrants and emigration managers overseas desired to tap into. Their correspondence with British emigrators also provided them with an outlet for their frustrations with colonial society. Within these letters they could note their disapproval of “colonial” habits and attitudes, comfortable in the knowledge that their thoughts would reach a relatively sympathetic audience. Historians have tended to emphasize the social distance that existed between the imperially minded middle- and upper-class emigrators and the working- and lower-middle-class women who emigrated to Canada (and elsewhere in the British Empire) as assisted immigrants.35 Clearly, this distance could be significant. Yet, for some emigrants, the lines between emigrators and emigrants were easily crossed, because the relationships that they formed with members of the emigration societies were determined more by their sense of being part of a women-centred civilizing mission than their sense of class difference. One way of demonstrating their affinity for the emigrators’ project was to take up reception work (and thus, like the emigrators, to adopt the role of surrogate mother to new immigrants36) themselves. The importance of integrating recent emigrants into the emigration women’s network was evident to emigrators and emigrants alike from at least the middle of the nineteenth century, when it became clear that emigrants who were going out to join friends or family overseas fared much better than did those who had no one to receive them.37 The creation and maintenance of an extensive network of women who were willing to provide information about local conditions to the British emigrators, and who would serve as friends to emigrants who settled in their communities, became a crucial

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part of an effective support system for migrating single women. As previously assisted female immigrants proved themselves to be committed to supporting the immigration programs that the emigrators had designed, the emigrators turned to using them as front-line receivers. Historians have written at length about the independent spirits of young single women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is reasonable to assume that single women who emigrated from Britain without kin would have shared outlooks and attitudes with the working-class, wage-earning “good time girls” of the city, or the middle-class, liberated “New Women” who demanded the right to enter institutions of higher education and to be employed in professions previously barred to them.38 The fact that female emigrants did enjoy their independence and liberty from conventional social constraints is evident in their writing. Migration historian Jan Gothard has shown that the myth of the female emigrant as a husband hunter is largely groundless; women emigrated to find paid work and financial independence.39 Yet, as Angela Woollacott has argued, it is useful to push beyond an understanding of women’s travelling as “an assertion of independence, a bid for self-discovery, and an escape from domestic gender constraints,” to one that allows for more complex self-identities, and more nuanced meanings of travel.40 Woollacott suggests that we need to understand how the particular sociopolitical imperial contexts in which women moved, and how the various combinations of ambitions and anxieties that they carried with them, shaped the ways in which their experiences were understood and then repackaged for consumption by others. In the case of assisted female emigrants, this way of thinking about their correspondence is extremely useful. The fact that single female emigrants sometimes embraced the roles of dutiful daughters (as opposed to younger or unequal sisters) to maternal philanthropists and social reformers does not mean that they looked to replace one form of family dependency for another. Rather, emigrant women were able to manipulate and use this discourse to forge useful relationships with other women in a context where their usual networks of support were absent. The role of surrogate daughter could, in fact, provide a context and identity that was empowering. As the examples cited in this chapter illustrate, emigrants used the idea that they were part of a family to solidify the system of support that was in place for their use, and to squeeze more out of their relationships with the emigrators than might otherwise have been on offer. Their embrace of the familial discourse served to promote the continuation of the

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emigration societies’ services considered most worthwhile by the emigrants themselves. They used the emigrators’ publications and informal communications system to advertise their business ventures and charitable endeavours; they encouraged the further distribution of British newspapers and magazines; and they tapped into a wide range of reception programs that the emigrators supported. At the same time, the way in which the emigrants engaged with the emigrators’ familial discourse contained an element of resistance to the emigrators’ efforts to dominate them. The hierarchical nature of the emigrator-emigrant relationship was typically de-emphasized in emigrant letters, while emigrants’ claims to adult status were validated through illustration. Not children, but intelligent adult members of this family of women, the emigrants writing back to the emigrators indicated that they were clearly capable of speaking for themselves. The letters affirmed that their relationship involved mutual dependency and support. After all, the emigration societies’ successes were determined by the actions and attitudes of female emigrants. Conclusion The correspondence reviewed here illustrates that emigrants were not simply either the passive or resistant objects of emigrators’ attention; their relationship with the emigrators was not solely about being managed or controlled. For emigrants like Glanville, the system established by the emigrators provided more than just loans and protection. There were also important social and psychological sides to this relationship. Moreover, emigrants also gave back to the system in terms of advice and support to the next generation of immigrants (perhaps viewing these as potential sisters in emigration) and praise and validation of the emigrators’ work. The relationship between the emigrants and emigrators – or perhaps more appropriately, the emigrants and the emigrators’ imperial female migration system – was dynamic and multifaceted. When trying to understand single British women’s strategies for coping with the stresses involved in migration and colonization, it is useful to look at the relationships that they forged with the imperial network of female emigrators. There is no evidence in the Imperial Colonist that Glanville’s relationship with the emigrators and their emigration system would outlast her financial debt to the BWEA. Yet it is clear that in the months following her arrival in Canada, Glanville considered Joyce, Lefroy, and Black to be more than just the administrators and chaperone

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who had overseen her movement from one location to another. The emigrators gained their positions of importance in Glanville’s life because they worked hard to do so, but they would not have been able to do so if Glanville’s personal situation had not allowed it. Women like Glanville retained contact with the emigrators in the months and years after their migration for their own reasons, and, as far as possible, they did so on their own terms. Emigrants’ relationships with specific emigrators changed over time, according to the emigrants’ financial and emotional needs. They continued to foster these relationships for as long as they served a purpose for themselves, and they quietly stopped writing when there was no longer an incentive to do so.

NOTES 1 Imperial Colonist VIII, 107 (November 1910): 181–2. 2 Ibid., 181. 3 Marjory Harper, Beyond the Broad Atlantic: Emigration from North-East Scotland, vol. 2 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 286 (Table 1). Evolving out of earlier female-centred emigration associations based in England, the British Women’s Emigration Association became British in its official orientation in 1888. On the history of these organizations, see Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Marilyn Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1991); Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (New York: Leicester University Press, 2000); Marion Diamond, Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (New York: Garland, 1999); Janice Gothard, Blue China: Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001); James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Barbara Roberts, “Ladies, Women and the State: Managing Female Migration,” in Roxana Ng et al., eds., Community Organization and the Canadian State (Toronto: Garamond, 1990); Cecilie Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820–1939 (Providence, RI: Berg, 1993). 4 Imperial Colonist VIII, 107 (November 1910): 181. 5 On British working-class and poor women who were taken from the workhouses and “shipped out” to the colonies, see, for example, Adele Perry’s contribution to this volume.

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6 On letters as primary sources, see also Sonia Cancian’s chapter in this volume as well as Sonia Cancian, Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010); Bruce S. Elliot, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaption of English and Scottish Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 5; Elizabeth Jane Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); David Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Accounts of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Angela McCarthy, “‘A Good Idea of Colonial Life’: Personal Letters and Irish Migration to New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 35, 1 (2001): 1–21; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 7 A microfilm copy of the full run of the Imperial Colonist is available at Library and Archives Canada. 8 For examples, see Gothard, Blue China; Paula Hamilton, “The ‘Servant Class’: Poor Female Migration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century,” in Eric Richards, ed., Poor Australian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century: Visible Immigrants (Canberra: Highland Press, 1991); and Roberts, “Ladies, Women and the State.” 9 I discuss the mother-daughter dynamic in Agents of Empire: see especially chapter 2. 10 Hostels for single British female emigrants were established in all major cities across Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Marilyn Barber, “The Gentlewomen of Queen Mary’s Coronation Hostel,” in Barbara K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro, eds., Not Just Pin Money: Selected Essays on the History of Women’s Work in British Columbia (Victoria, BC: Camosun College, 1984); Lisa Chilton, “Migrants in Montreal: Managing British Female Immigrants at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 16, 1 (2003): 59–70. 11 Ellen Joyce and Grace Lefroy corresponded with thousands of emigrants and prospective emigrants over their careers, but the correspondence does not appear to have been saved. Joyce’s album of emigrants’ photographs has been archived with other female emigration society documents at the Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University.

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12 “Queen’s Work” is a reference to a system of organized home-care nursing that was given the queen’s name with the establishment of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute for Nurses in 1889. 13 On the surplus women “problem,” see chapter 3 of my Agents of Empire. 14 Imperial Colonist VIII, 100 (April 1910): 58. 15 Eleven members of the party travelled in second class accommodation; 61 members travelled third class. Ibid. 16 For two examples of letters that were clearly solicited, see “Letter from a former Student of Stoke Prior Training College,” and “Canada for the Teacher,” Imperial Colonist IX, 115 (July 1911): 334–6. 17 “A Business Opening in Vancouver,” Imperial Colonist XI, 133 (January 1913): 227–8. 18 “Farm for Sale in Saskatchewan,” Imperial Colonist XIX, 227 (July 1921): 91. For a sample of other business ventures that were advertised in this way, see Imperial Colonist II, 12 (December 1903): 140–1; and Imperial Colonist X, 131 (November 1912): 190–1. 19 Imperial Colonist VIII, 107 (November 1910): 182. 20 Ibid., 181. 21 For a particularly interesting example of an effort to elicit help for a charitable cause, see a nurse’s request for financial assistance to set up a nursing home in South Africa, Imperial Colonist X, 131 (November 1912): 109–1. 22 That details concerning financial donations were not provided in the societies’ publications – even when they were made to hostels of small communities’ churches – likely reflected an effort to protect the editor and donors from an onslaught of requests for more of the same. However, donations were noted in the hostels’ annual reports. 23 “A Pathetic Appeal,” Imperial Colonist VI, 82 (October 1908): 9 (emphasis in original). 24 Imperial Colonist VI, 83 (November 1908): 10. 25 Imperial Colonist XIV, 174 (July 1916): 102. 26 Imperial Colonist XIX, 232 (December 1921): 60. 27 Imperial Colonist XVIII, 28 (July 1919): 105. 28 Black had overseen the migration of at least one other group of women to Canada between her trip with Glanville in March and the beginning of the fall, 2010. On 9 June, Black had set sail with Miss Rintoul, another matron, and 146 second and third class emigrants, travelling to Vancouver with the women headed to that city. Whether she stayed on in BC until Glanville met her in Vancouver on the morning of 23 September, or whether she made yet another trip as chaperone in the interim, is unclear. Imperial Colonist VIII, 102 (June 1910): 91.

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29 Imperial Colonist VIII, 107 (November 1910): 182. 30 Emigrants’ responses to ship matrons are discussed in Gothard, Blue China, chapter 5; Hamilton, “The ‘Servant Class”’; Emma Curtin, “Gentility Afloat: Gentlewomen’s Diaries and the Voyage to Australia, 1830–80,” Australian Historical Studies 26, 105 (1995): 634–52; and Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen. 31 Imperial Colonist VIII, 105 (September 1910): 139–40. 32 Imperial Colonist I, 5 (May 1902): 44 (emphasis in original). 33 Gothard, Blue China, 4–7. 34 Imperial Colonist VI, 65 (May 1907): 9–10. 35 See, for example, Roberts, “Ladies, Women and the State”; and Gothard, Blue China. 36 Unlike the emigrators-emigrants relations that I see as fundamentally maternal in dynamic, relations that were established between settled and incoming (new) immigrants might also be viewed as that of unequal sisters along the lines explored in other essays in this collection and in the influential American volume, Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). 37 Fawcett Library, 1/FME, 2/1-2, FMCES Letterbooks 1 and 2 (since the publication of Agents of Empire, these documents have been moved to the Women’s Library, at the London Metropolitan University). 38 On the “independent” women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary public responses to their presence, see Kate Boyer, “‘Miss Remington’ Goes to Work: Gender, Space and Technology at the Dawn of the Information Age,” in James Opp and John C. Walsh, eds., Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2010); Carol Dyehouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (Boston: Pandora, 1985); Tamara Myers, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Joan Sangster, Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002); Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 39 Gothard, Blue China. 40 Angela Woollacott, “‘All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, 4 (1997): 1004.

The Interplay of Ethnicity and Gender: Swedish Women in Southeastern Saskatchewan Les ley Er ic k son

Introduction In 1893 Karen Olson, with her husband and children, arrived in Stockholm, Saskatchewan. While her husband worked as a tailor in Whitewood, she and her eleven children farmed their homestead – bringing in extra money by making butter, packing it into thirty-five-pound tubs, and selling it in town for ten cents a pound.1 Like many Swedish women who farmed in Saskatchewan between 1880 and 1940, Olson experienced the loneliness of being separated from her husband. She farmed alone with her children, and she engaged in market-based activities to earn extra cash. Contrary to what she had known in Sweden, Olson now had a unique opportunity to make decisions in the family and to expand her role in the Swedish Canadian community. Unlike other ethnic groups, the Swedish clergy and males in the community made few attempts to use the church as a form of social control over the activities of women such as Olson. Swedish women became active participants in the religious, social, and economic development of their communities, contributing to the formation of a distinct prairie society. Swedish women’s experiences in Saskatchewan demonstrate the extent to which immigrant women’s gender and ethnicity can intertwine to define their role in family and community. In 1891, Swedes represented only 3.1 per cent of the population of southern Saskatchewan, and Swedish women remained a minority This chapter is reprinted with permission from “Other” Voices: Historical Essays on Saskatchewan Women, edited by Dave De Brou and Aileen Moffatt (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1995).

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throughout the period: in 1931, there were only 2,570 women as compared with 5,010 men in the province.2 To explore how they came to play such an influential role in Swedish communities, I focus on the lives and experiences of those women who settled in Stockholm, Percival, and, to a lesser extent, the Dubuc districts. These Swedish communities, located in the southeastern part of the province, were homogeneous and thus easy to identify. To bring to light the interplay of gender and ethnicity in their lives, I explore their experiences within four networks of association: church, school, family, and the outside world. Carol K. Coburn, building on the work of fellow American historian Barbara Finkelstein, employs a similar method to examine the role of German Lutheran– Missouri Synod women in Block, Kansas. Although Coburn acknowledges that dividing women’s activities into these four distinct areas ideally suits the experiences of women within patriarchal societies or institutions, the four networks define the parameters of most rural women’s lives. The method also makes it possible to isolate how these networks transmitted education and culture throughout a woman’s life cycle and across generations. Finally, this approach “does not assume a dichotomy between public (male) and private (female) spheres … because for many women a clear separation does not and never has existed.”3 Discussing Swedish women’s lives in terms of their relationship with their church, school, family, and outside world reveals both the formal and informal ways Swedish women functioned in and adapted to living in Saskatchewan.4 Changing Gender Roles in New Settlements The majority of Swedish women who settled in southeastern Saskatchewan came directly from Sweden rather than via the United States. The first Swedish immigrants settled at Stockholm, north of the Qu’Appelle River, in 1886. In time, the Stockholm settlement expanded to include three townships and fifty-four sections. In the early 1890s, Swedes from Stockholm moved to Percival and established a new Swedish community alongside the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) between Whitewood and Broadview. Dubuc, approximately ten miles west of Stockholm, was also an outgrowth of the Stockholm colony. Most Swedish women did not accompany their husbands but instead followed a few years after their husbands had filed on homesteads. This practice enabled husbands to gain employment in Canada, to save money for their family’s passage, and to build a shelter on the land

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before sending for their families. For instance, Mrs P.O. Eckstrand and her children arrived in Dubuc in 1911, two years after her husband.5 Likewise, in 1911 Martin Nelson emigrated from Sweden to Percival, where he worked on an elevator construction gang until he raised enough money to support his family’s passage to Canada in 1913.6 To reach Stockholm, Dubuc, and Percival, the women and their children followed various routes, depending on their destination. The route to Stockholm was long and tedious. Departing from Ostersand, Sweden, women sailed to Hull, England, and then caught the train heading for Liverpool, the common point of departure for immigrants heading to North America. More often than not, Swedes, like many immigrants, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in converted cattle boats. Upon arriving in New York, they travelled by riverboat to Duluth, Minnesota, and from there took the train to Winnipeg, where a Swedish immigrant agent would direct the woman to her husband’s homestead.7 The migration pattern to Percival was somewhat different, perhaps because the district lacked an immigrant agent. In an article titled “Percival Hamlet,” Meda Johnston recalled that settlers had come to Percival by various modes of transportation: first by ship, then by train and wagon. To reach Percival, women generally followed a straight-line route from Halifax to Montreal and then to Winnipeg.8 In “Percival School District no. 2101,” a Percival School student in 1955 recalled that women and their families, upon arriving in Whitewood, stayed in an immigrant house until their husbands came to meet them.9 Once the women and their children settled on the family farm, and prior to the establishment of a church and school, the family was their only sphere of activity. Although it is often in the family that immigrant women most keenly feel the double bind of ethnicity and femininity,10 Swedish women experienced an expansion of their role once they arrived in Saskatchewan. As Roberto Perin argues in “Writing about Ethnicity,” immigrants do not carry their ancestral culture with them and transplant it in the new land so that it survives unaltered through successive generations. Rather, intellectuals who identify with a particular ethnic group are often dismayed by the discrepancies between their local culture and that of the country of origin.11 Upon coming to Saskatchewan, Swedish women of all classes gained a degree of independence that would have been uncommon in their homeland. Because Swedish men tended to be artisans as well as farmers, and since they often lacked the funds required to farm successfully in Saskatchewan, they hired themselves out as labourers or practised

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their trade in rural towns. This phenomenon, which made women the temporary head of the household, was not limited to the artisan or farming classes. Mrs C.O. Hofstrand and her husband, for instance, arrived in Stockholm in 1888 with a domestic servant. While her husband, a high school teacher in Sweden, studied, preached, and worked as assistant editor to a Swedish-language newspaper in Winnipeg, she farmed in Stockholm. In 1913, her husband again left the farm as vice-consul for Sweden.12 Likewise, in Percival, Mrs Magnus Strandlund, who immigrated in 1909, sold goat’s milk and farmed while her husband helped to grade the Number One Highway.13 In the early years of settlement at Percival, the absence of husbands from the homestead was more prevalent than in Stockholm because of the economic nature of the community. Unlike in Stockholm or Dubuc, the CPR ran through the Percival district, and the grain elevator became the economic centre of the community. When the railway was relocated in 1897, Swedish men worked on Cooperative Elevator Company construction gangs and on the CPR construction crews, leaving their wives and children on the farm to fulfil the requirements of the Dominion Lands Act.14 Because they had no children, both Mr and Mrs Polson worked: Lars worked on bridge-building gangs for the CPR while Christina cooked for the crew.15 Considering that most men were artisans and labourers who worked at odd jobs to earn money, the influence of these women over their families, and their ability to influence the decision-making process in the family, was significant. In Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1911, Francis Swyripa agrees that periodic male absences from the homestead might have “challenged traditional gender roles and relationships in Canada,” although substantial evidence is not available in the case of Ukrainian women.16 That male absenteeism from the farm did challenge traditional gender roles among the Swedes in Saskatchewan is without doubt, for the situation was the reverse of that experienced by many Swedish women in the homeland. In Sweden, rural farmwomen and their daughters traditionally spent summers in the hills, caring for cattle and goats and all other aspects of dairy production. While the women were in the hills, the men remained on the farmstead and were responsible for grain production.17 Accustomed to the isolation and of living in the hills, Swedish women, when they came to Saskatchewan, had to adapt to a new scenario that increased their control over their children’s development and the power structure in the family.

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In Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto, Franca Iacovetta notes the importance of power relationships in the family and the central role that women often played in influencing the decision-making process in the home. Although Italian women assumed a submissive role in the public sphere, in private they could wield influence over their families through informal means of persuasion. Likewise, Italian men, who might boast of their authority in public, would share decision making in the family as a matter of course.18 Wild Daisies (1977), a novel by Thelma Hofstrand Foster, who was born in Stockholm and worked as a teacher in rural schools in Saskatchwan, provides evidence that the ability of Swedish women to make decisions within the family was not confined to the homestead years. The decision-making process was complex in nature and depended on a woman’s age and marital status. In the novel, Foster, through the character of Anna Sandell, relates her experiences growing up Swedish and female in the 1920s and 1930s. Told from a female perspective, the novel is an invaluable source for determining power relationships in Swedish families, a topic not readily found in community histories or archival sources. For instance, upon the death of Anna’s father in 1925, Foster writes, “Daniel’s death brought many changes into the lives of Anna and her mother. They were to come and live at the manse: this was Grandma’s decision. Esther [Anna’s mother], who rose from her sickbed weak and irresolute, had no say in the matter at all.”19 Once Esther Sandell was widowed, she no longer filled the role of mother to Anna but again became the daughter who could be ruled by her mother’s iron will. When Esther remarried, she resumed a position of power in the family – she, and not her new husband, made the decision to sell the land she had inherited on her former husband’s death. Maintaining Ethnic Identity Acknowledging that women were not always powerless in the family makes their contributions to maintaining ethnic identity in the family more significant. In “Ethnicity and Femininity,” Danielle Juteau-Lee and Barbara Roberts pinpoint the essential connection between ethnicity, gender, and the importance of women’s activities in the family. They argue that much of what we perceive as being “ethnic” is based on activities traditionally done by women: costumes, festivals, food eaten, language spoken in the home, type of clothing worn, character of family life, and education or training activities outside the normal

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school hours to teach the practices of the group.20 And indeed, ethnic groups often embrace symbols of their ethnicity that acknowledge this fact. In Ukrainian communities, for instance, historian Frances Swyripa argues that the peasant immigrant pioneer as baba, the old woman or grandmother, came to symbolize customs and cultural artefacts identified with Ukrainianness, especially food preparation and handicrafts – activities traditionally associated with women.21 In the Swedish settlements in southeastern Saskatchewan, women strove to maintain the ethnic traditions of the homeland in the family and the community. Weddings and holiday celebrations became more elaborate as ties with the homeland became more tenuous.22 The congregation of New Stockholm Mission Covenant Church, for instance, celebrated the first wedding in the colony on 1 February 1899. Sarah Johanson wore a white lace-trimmed cashmere dress with a high collar, lily-point sleeves, and a veil decorated with orange blossoms. Following the ceremony, the women of the congregation organized a reception, the highlight of which was a Swedish high tea.23 In Percival, Olaf Pearson married Lena Strandlund in the Lutheran church on 7 June 1909. Prepared by the ladies of the church, the wedding celebration lasted for two days: the first day for the adults, the second for the children.24 Women were also responsible for the dishes and feasts that were so much a part of Christmas celebrations. Christmas Eve began with a thorough housecleaning and ended with a supper of rice porridge, lutefisk (cod fish cured in lye), and pudding made with fruit juice and flour. As the Swedish communities in Saskatchewan became more entrenched, Christmas Eve dinners became more elaborate, and Swedes adopted new traditions such as gift giving. On Christmas morning, women prepared an early breakfast of porridge, tunnbröd (thin bread), and mesost (a dark cheese). The family then went to the six o’clock church service. After church, the family returned home to enjoy another, more elaborate, breakfast. The community again convened in the local church to celebrate the eleven o’clock church service.25 The tradition gave women and their families the opportunity to leave the homestead and socialize with neighbours and extended family, but it was also hard work. Women maintained traditions in the home and occasionally capitalized on their skills to bring money into the community. In 1936, for instance, women of the Scandia school district in the Stockholm region entered a contest put on by the CPR to promote interest in the handicrafts of the Old World. The women won second place for their display

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of handicrafts and foods, and they used the money to buy a purebred Hereford bull for the community.26 The Importance of Education Prior to the creation of schools at Stockholm, Dubuc, and Percival, many Swedish women taught their children at home. Attending public schools in Sweden had given Swedes a high level of education that they hoped to maintain in the new country. Alma Wickberg, who, unlike her husband, had completed her public school education, strove to educate her children in the New World. She taught Swedish in her home as a supplement to the Swedish learned in the church and Sunday school, and she was instrumental in establishing East Mount School in 1907.27 Foster reiterates this point in Wild Daisies, implying that Swedish women, more so than men, had an interest in their children’s education. In the novel, Anna’s mother used the money she earned selling her chickens to buy papers that would keep the family informed: The Country Guide, Western Producer, Family Herald, Free Press, and Saskatchewan Farmer.28 Although speculative at most, that Foster includes neither Swedish newspapers nor women’s journals in this list could indicate that women were concerned with easing their husbands’ and children’s transition into Canadian society. Swedish mothers also demonstrated a marked interest in teaching their children the religion of the homeland. Olaf Olson recalled that his mother combined education with religion: she taught the children and her husband how to read Swedish by using the Bible as a textbook.29 The portrait that Foster paints of religious education in the home is compatible with Olson’s. In the Sandell family, Anna’s mother, not her father, taught her the evening prayer in Swedish: “These words and her mother’s kiss signaled a peaceful night and complete trust in Someone all-powerful.”30 Sociologists often offer statistics concerning language maintenance in the home as an indication of the degree to which ethnic groups have been assimilated into Canadian society. In “Assimilation in the Bloc Settlements of North Central Saskatchewan,” for instance, Alan Anderson notes the swiftness by which Swedes adopted English as the language spoken in the home. While only 8 per cent of first-generation immigrants spoke English, 44 per cent of the second generation did so. By the third generation, almost all Swedes, 97 per cent, spoke fluent English.31 Although statistics are useful for generalizing the experiences of ethnic

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groups, their usefulness for understanding the realities of women’s experiences is limited. Statistics cannot tell us, for instance, that rural immigrant women, isolated on farms, did not have the same access as did men to the informal educational networks necessary to learning English. My father, Gary Erickson, whose grandfather immigrated to Percival in the late nineteenth century, indicated that when he was a child in the 1950s the women in his family, including his sister, always spoke Swedish, whereas the men tended to speak English. Neils Persson Dahl, writing home to his sister Maria in Sweden, indicated that men deliberately took up jobs to learn English: “John [his son] has been away working for two months partly for to learn to work here and to learn something of the language.”32 Because women remained on the farm and responsible for children, children could often speak little or no English upon entering the public school system. When Glen Olson started at Broadview School in 1948, he could not speak one word of English, although his mother had immigrated to Canada in 1927.33 But when children did enter school, it often gave their mothers the opportunity to learn English. Mrs Nels Peter Jacobson, who came to Stockholm in 1888, studied English at home with her children when they began to attend Svea School in 1891.34 The Work of Homesteading First-generation Swedish women, like most immigrant women in Saskatchewan, performed both indoor and outdoor labour in the homesteading years. Mrs H. Closson, who settled with her husband in Dubuc in 1909, remembers: “There were many hardships but I preferred Canada to the Old Country. We had nothing to start with. I used to work in the fields helping my husband with oxen and horses. We also used a small seeder.”35 The “we” in this statement is telling for it shows that Closson recognized the value of her labour and viewed the homesteading experience as a joint economic venture. As Roberto Perin notes, immigrant families were often coherent economic units in which wives and children played an integral and valued part.36 Foster’s Wild Daisies suggest that even when a family was well established, women still did outdoor work traditionally associated with men if the situation warranted. In the novel, Anna cares for the livestock and helps her stepfather with the stooking and planting. Her stepfather required her labour because her siblings were too young to work outdoors. A husband’s illness or death would also necessitate women working and running

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the farm. For example, in the 1930s, when Hans Hanson’s health began to fail, his wife, Esther, did most of the outdoor work because her sons were too small. When Hans died in 1947, Esther, with the aid of her sons, continued to farm.37 Women’s indoor labour included cooking, sewing, and spinning wool. In some instances, Swedish families brought only women’s household utensils from the homeland. Mr and Mrs Mikael Strandlund’s son recalled: We just had to have with us the copper coffee grinder, the big copper kettle that mom used for making cheese and Mes Ost, the spinning wheel and wool carders, and the sewing machine. Dad snuck in a few tools such as a hand saw, a plane, a hammer and an axe. These things are a must in the new land where our money was scarce as hens’ teeth.38

Although both men and women made shoes, women alone were responsible for making cheese, thin bread, and butter. Mrs Isakson, who arrived in Stockholm in 1902, in one year made twelve hundred pounds of butter that she sold at thirty-five to forty cents a pound.39 In the first decades of Stockholm’s development, the Swedes were determined to create a replica of the homeland through economic self-sufficiency. In this scenario, Swedish women’s earning from the sale of butter and livestock helped to make the community’s ideal a reality. Bearing Children and Raising Families Another equally important aspect of women’s work in the family setting was their reproductive and nurturing labour: childbearing, midwifery, and treating ailments. A careful analysis of local histories reveals that Swedish women had anywhere from four to fourteen children. In Wild Daisies, Esther delivers all of her children except her last with the aid of midwives (a physician in Estevan delivered the last baby). Most Swedish women at some point in their lives acted as midwives to their relatives and neighbours, although some women specialized in midwifery. Alexandra Svea Stenberg recalled, “Mother was an amateur nurse [who] was called up when anyone [was] sick. She acted as Maternity nurse to over 600 babies, often and mostly without Doctors present.”40 Home remedies included chokecherry syrup made from the strained liquid of boiled bark and linseed and bread poultices for boils and swells. Women frequently extended their healing knowledge to their communities’ livestock. Mrs Eric Wickberg, for instance, delivered many calves and was known to have set the leg of a colt.41

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The quantity and quality of the work performed by Swedish girls reflected the girls’ ages and the rites of passage through which they had passed. Historian Carol K. Coburn refers to this same phenomenon among German Lutheran women. In the life cycle of the German Lutheran–Missouri Synod woman, Confirmation signalled when a girl could participate in Holy Communion, leave school to do labour as a domestic servant, or take on a larger workload in the home.42 In Wild Daisies, Foster makes frequent references to the work required of Swedish girls at a certain age. At the age of ten, Anna’s mother taught her to hemstitch, knit mittens, and embroider lazy daisies; Anna was then expected to do her share of the work for the Ladies Aid. At the age of twelve, Anna became responsible for helping her mother with indoor tasks. During the summer, and following her completion of school, she hired herself out as a domestic servant to other families in the community.43 In the Percival district, girls tended to seek employment in Broadview, Percival, or on a neighbour’s farm after completion of grade 8 or 10.44 Building a Church Community Outside of the family, Swedish women displayed a marked interest in the establishment and development of the local church. Roberto Perin notes that many immigrants built their local community church as a symbol of their “arrival.” But he also acknowledges that it is not always clear what the church symbolized.45 At Dubuc, Stockholm, and Percival, the church fulfilled women’s immediate need for a sense of belonging. Involvement in church organizations also gave Swedish women access to informal educational networks that broke down rural isolation. As Alan Anderson suggests, the church might have symbolized or meant more for Swedish women than it did for Swedish men, who, unlike women, had wider access to activities and organizations outside of the local community. He notes the activity of Swedish women in the church as compared with the inactivity of men. Unlike French, Ukrainian, Polish, and Doukhobor immigrants, Swedish women attended church more often than men. Furthermore, 88 per cent of Scandinavian women participated in ethnic-oriented voluntary associations, as opposed to no men, a reversal of the trends in other ethnic communities.46 Swedish women therefore displayed a marked ability to influence the decisionmaking process in religious affairs. When it came to establishing a local church in Stockholm, women made their voices heard. On 30 June 1888, the community met with the

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intention to establish a church called the Scandinavian Christian Brotherhood. The women present at the meeting objected because they felt that the men were taking the decision too lightly. The women wanted to establish a Scandinavian Mission Church on the Winnipeg model. Reaching a stalemate, the potential congregation called another meeting for 20 October 1888. In October, the women approved the adoption of the following doctrines and tenets: 1 The Bible is the only authentic authority for moral behaviour. 2 The congregation is to labour for God’s Kingdom and to live according to God’s word. 3 Each person is to experience conversion and to be baptized before becoming a member of the church. 4 New members are to be accepted at regular meetings and open confession of faith. 5 Members’ names are to be inscribed in the church membership book, and members thereafter are to make annual contributions for the support of church work. 6 Stewards are to be elected for the term of one year, and a minister is to be elected by a two-thirds’ majority vote.47 The Swedish Mission Covenant Church was established in 1888 with C.O. Hofstrand acting as the first minister. With less controversy, Swedish Lutherans at Stockholm built their own church in 1889.48 The community at Percival was less divided; the community organized only one church, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran, on 8 June 1897. Because the Percival congregation consisted of Swedish migrants from Stockholm, the New Stockholm Lutheran Church was quick to give the Percival group letters of transfer.49 The congregation to which a woman belonged affected the extent to which the church acted as an agent of social control over her behaviour. In Wild Daisies, Foster’s characters discuss the differences between the Swedish Mission Covenant and Lutheran churches and the implications of these differences on women’s lives: “Yes, Carl is a good worker,” Pell was saying. “It is too bad he is just a heathen.” “He goes to the big church,” Mama defended. The big church was the Lutheran church to the West [probably New Stockholm Lutheran]. The Sandells had attended it on special occasions. Anna loved its beautiful stained-glass windows and deep-toned bell. The Mission Friends looked

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upon it as too rich, its congregation too worldly. “I am afraid the women go there to show off their immodest clothes and painted faces,” murmured Mrs Pell.50

As Mrs Pell’s exclamation suggests, community members interpreted the appearance and behaviour of women as a reflection of the differing moral codes of the churches. Perhaps more significant, members of the Swedish Mission Church, unlike Swedish Lutherans, strongly bound their ethnicity to their religion. Women of the Mission Church were instrumental in establishing a church that would act as a safety valve against assimilation. The majority of Swedish women in this part of Saskatchewan, however, belonged to the Lutheran faith, which provided them with a variety of outlets for their aspirations as well as access to informal educational networks. Lutheran women interacted with and were involved in the activities of their local church in a variety of ways. The Percival Church School, for instance, was established in 1911 and designed for adults. It gave Swedish farmwomen the opportunity to study Swedish, English, math, history, Christianity, and music.51 A list of the organists at the Percival church indicates that they were exclusively women throughout the congregation’s history.52 Because Swedes highly valued music, this was often a position of prestige. More importantly, playing the organ increased second- and third-generation girls’ contacts with the world outside their ethnic enclaves. The first organist of the New Stockholm Lutheran Church took music lessons in Whitewood, at that time the most cosmopolitan centre in southeastern Saskatchewan: “It came to be a saying that one should know eleven languages to do business in Whitewood.”53 Swedish women also volunteered their time to teach Sunday school and lead the church choir. Swedish women, much like their counterparts in other ethnic communities, were active in various church organizations. Each of the congregations in Percival, Dubuc, and Stockholm had an affiliated Ladies Aid. On 7 January 1895, at the annual congregational meeting at New Stockholm Evangelical Lutheran Church, members passed a resolution urging the women of the congregation to organize a Ladies Aid Society. In 1895 alone, the Ladies Aid met thirty-six times. For the first thirtyfive years, the Ladies Aid donated the money it raised to building funds that contributed to the church’s and community’s development. Its first project, however, was to buy an organ for the church, which it presented to the congregation on 27 June 1897.54 In Percival, the activities of the

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Ladies Aid are less well known. The 1936 records for the church indicate that fifteen women belonged to the “Mary Marthas,” a Ladies Aid, but a list of its activities is not provided. The records also indicate that there were fourteen members in the girls’ auxiliary.55 Anderson found similar organizations among Scandinavian Lutherans in north-central Saskatchewan. These organizations were similar to youth groups in Sweden such as the Little Children of the Reformation and the Lutheran Daughters of the Reformation.56 I found no mention of a boys’ auxiliary, suggesting, again, that Swedish women experienced a more intimate relationship with their church than did Swedish men. As in other ethnic groups, membership in organizations such as Ladies Aids and youth groups gave Swedish Lutheran women access to an expanding, though informal, educational network.57 Women and girls who joined these societies learned financial management, leadership skills, and group interaction: they broke the isolation so prevalent on rural farms by interacting with other women. In doing so, they contributed to the development of social institutions in their communities. Resisting Assimilation and Confronting the World Because Swedish immigrants settled in bloc settlements where they could more readily retain the traditions of the group, first-generation Swedish women, isolated in the home and in the church, might have been unaware of their “ethnicity.” In “Constituting Ethnic Phenomenon,” Roxanna Ng distinguishes between the immigrant’s perception of herself and the dominant society’s perception of her. Ng argues that ethnicity arises for people only when they come to Canada and are confronted by the dominant culture and people from differing ethnic backgrounds.58 Juteau-Lee and Roberts likewise distinguish between “Ethnicity” and “ethnicity.” “Ethnicity” comprises those attributes of an ethnocultural group that are observable to those outside of the group. These attributes include language, traditions, country of origin, religion, attitudes, food, and social patterns. In contrast, “ethnicity” is the social meaning assigned to the items on this list – minority status and subordination or, conversely, majority status and domination.59 When second-generation Swedish girls attended public schools, they met children and teachers from other ethnic backgrounds: this interaction did much to affect perceptions of their status in society. When the North-West Territories (what would become the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan) began to be populated by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Clifford Sifton, federal minister of the interior

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from 1896 to 1905, saw the public school system as a potential agent of assimilation. In the Swedish settlements, schools served this purpose by providing Swedish girls with female role models from different ethnic backgrounds. At Percival School, for instance, Esther Hanson, who began teaching in 1958, was the only teacher of Swedish background who taught at the school between 1908 and 1965.60 That the other teachers at Percival hoped to Canadianize their students is evident. In 1911, the teacher, R. Hawkes, complained bitterly of the continued use of Swedish on the school grounds and in the classroom.61 In Wild Daisies, Foster describes, probably from experience, the assimilationist tendencies of Anglo-Celtic teachers who taught in Swedish ethnic enclaves. Miss Brown, a teacher of British-Canadian descent, taught Anna when she was nine: Miss Brown’s self-imposed task seemed to be to foster in her pupils love for their country and pride in the British empire. A large map of the world hung on the wall. On it, marked in red, were all the nations that claimed England as their mother country. The pupils were proud to belong to the family of nations on which the sun never set. They all thought of themselves as English.62

In the 1930s, when Anna was in her teens, her teacher, Miss Bramble, introduced the world of fashion to her Swedish students: “Miss Bramble was changing them all … Anna came home from school with the latest sheet music. She began to long for the stylish dresses in Eaton’s catalogue.”63 The values taught in the school were often at odds with the values of the ethnic church and family. Teachers introduced Swedish girls to values that were not only ethnic but also generational. Consequently, the teacher’s influence over Swedish girls might have undermined the mother’s authority in the family. Although Anna’s mother admonished that wearing makeup, rayon stockings, and jeans would lead to her moral downfall, Anna insisted on wearing them.64 In Percival, photographs of students and lists of their names indicate that all or most were Swedish. In contrast, the Stockholm and Dubuc districts, beginning in the early 1900s, began to be populated by Hungarians. In Wild Daisies, there is a noticeable parallel between Swedish children’s interactions with Hungarians and the fostering of ethnocentrism among Swedes: “‘Did you know there’s a new girl starting school today? She’s Hungarian, I think.’ Oh! Anna was disappointed. A foreigner with limited English, bare feet, and likely smelling of garlic.”65

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Over time, as more Hungarians attended the public school system, however, intermarriage occurred between the two groups. Because young Swedish men postponed marriage until they were well established on their own farms, women found the option of marrying men from different backgrounds appealing. Anderson’s analysis of intergenerational attitudes towards ethnic intermarriage among Scandinavians in north-central Saskatchewan supports Foster’s portrayal in Wild Daisies. Although 95 per cent of first-generation Scandinavians opposed intermarriage, only 90 per cent of the second generation did so. Third-generations Scandinavians, such as Anna, showed a marked drop in disapproval: 62 per cent.66 As western Canadian society became more developed economically and socially, Swedish women were increasingly confronted by the outside world: their activities became more cosmopolitan, their organizations more secular. The CPR, built through Percival in the 1890s, became the lifeblood of the community. It was rather common for girls, upon completing school (or coming to Canada), to work in Broadview or Percival until they married. For instance, Emma Maria Larson immigrated with her family to Percival in 1905. She then worked in the Broadview Hotel and at the CPR dining hall until she married in 1909. Lena Strandlund, born in Percival, worked at the Broadview Hotel until she married Olaf Pearson in 1909. Similarly, Katrina Anderson worked in the CPR dining hall before marrying Carl Strandlund from Stockholm in 1918.67 While first-generation Swedish farm wives in Stockholm viewed brief trips into town as a relief from the monotony of farm life, the Swedish women who relocated to rural hamlets, villages, and towns learned new skills and met women of all backgrounds. For young Swedish girls, rural centres were a place to gain employment outside of the ethnic enclave and, perhaps, a place to meet potential husbands. In 1905, Sven Erickson Svedberg purchased the Temperance Hotel in the village of Stockholm. He employed local Swedish girls and provided them with a sitting room upstairs where they could entertain men (carefully chaperoned, of course).68 Likewise, Sarah Erickson and her husband moved to Stockholm in 1906. In 1912, they bought a corner store, which they turned into a confectionary. While Sarah managed the shop, her daughter, Elinda, served as a clerk.69 Swedish farmwomen also became involved in agricultural societies and organizations that promoted an expanded role for women in the community. In 1895, farmers in the Stockholm area organized and

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named themselves the Stockholm Little Cut Arm and Qu’Appelle Society. The society included both men and women, from Ohlen, Esterhazy, and Stockholm. In this organization, Swedish women had the opportunity to interact with women from other communities. They could also hold office in the society: its first secretary-treasurer was a woman. Each year, members organized an exhibition in which women could display and sell their produce and handicrafts.70 Women in the Dubuc Homemakers’ Club also began to diversify their activities. The club, established in 1914, included women from various ethnic backgrounds. Its purpose, by meeting in town, was to give farmwomen relief from the drudgery of farm life. Following the outbreak of the First World War, its members provided war relief in the form of care packages. In the 1920s, the women organized a baby clinic with the cooperation of parents and teachers.71 The Saskatchewan Homemakers’ Club, organized in 1911, was modelled after the Ontario Women’s Institute. Sponsored by the Extension Department of the University of Saskatchewan and closely associated with the Agriculture Department, its raison d’être was to solve rural problems by modernizing the skills of the rural housewife. Swedish women’s involvement in such an organization marked their entry into the dominant Anglo-Celtic society in the province. Conclusion The period 1886 to 1940 encompasses three generations of Swedish women who lived in southeastern Saskatchewan. During this time, Swedish women’s ethnicity and their gender determined their role in the family, the church, and the community. Upon coming to Saskatchewan, Swedish women laboured much as they had in the homeland. However, the nature of the prairie economy and the occupational background of Swedish men required adaptations on the part of the family. Men were forced to seek employment away from the farm, allowing women to take on a position of authority in the family and to contribute extensively to the economic welfare of the farm. Furthermore, in Saskatchewan, where religious pluralism prevailed, Swedish women had the freedom to establish the church of their choice, an option not available in Sweden. Just as prairie society became more cosmopolitan and complex, so too did the lives of Swedish farmwomen, as their sphere of activity became less defined by their gender and ethnicity and more by the dictates of the outside world. Ironically, as the

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mandate of the Saskatchewan Homemakers’ Society suggests, the dominant culture’s ideals of the proper role for women in the family may have been more constricting than what rural women had experienced on their isolated farmsteads.

NOTES 1 Gladys M. Halliwell and Zetta Persson, Three Score and Ten: A Story of the Swedish Settlement of Stockholm and District (Yorkton: Redeemer’s Press, 1959), 8. 2 Helge Nelson, The Swedes and the Swedish Settlements in North America (New York: Arno, 1979), 356, 409. 3 Carol K. Coburn, “Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender: The Women of Block, Kansas, 1868–1940,” Great Plains Quarterly 8 (Fall 1988): 222. See also Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992). 4 Coburn, “Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender,” 223. 5 Dubuc and Community 5th-Anniversary History Committee, coordinated by Linda Unger, Dubuc: From Here to Yesterday – Dubuc, 1905–1980 (Yorkton: Dowie Quick Print, 1980), 10. 6 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 1882–1982: Centennial Tribute (Broadview: Broadview History Society, 1982), 380. 7 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 8. 8 Meda Johnson, “Percival Hamlet,” in Cliff Ashfield, ed., Whitewood and Area, 1882–1992, vol. 1 (Regina: Brigdens, 1992), 86. 9 Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB), Anonymous, “Percival School District no. 2101,” handwritten, microfilm, 1955, 2. 10 Danielle Juteau-Lee and Barbara Roberts, “Ethnicity and Femininity: D’après nos experiences,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 13 (1981): 4. 11 Roberto Perin, “Writing about Ethnicity,” in John Schultz, ed., Writing about Canada: A Handbook for Modern Canadian History (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 203. 12 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 41. 13 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 418. 14 Johnson, “Percival Hamlet,” 88. 15 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 396. 16 Francis Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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17 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 10. Living in the hills of Sweden gave many women a keen knowledge of the medicinal value of herbs, barks, and roots, which they used to good effect in Saskatchewan. 18 Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 82–3. 19 Thelma Hofstrand Foster, Wild Daisies: A Novel (Saskatoon: Modern Press, 1977), 9. 20 Juteau-Lee and Roberts, “Ethnicity and Femininity,” 5. 21 Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause, 248. 22 Juteau-Lee and Roberts, “Ethnicity and Femininity,” 5. 23 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 25. 24 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 391. 25 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 71. 26 Ibid., 170. 27 SAB, Olaf Olson, “And So It Happened: The Olson History,” 1987, unpublished typescript, 4, 32, 25. 28 Foster, Wild Daisies, 92. 29 Olson, “And So It Happened,” 31. 30 Foster, Wild Daisies, 21. 31 Alan Anderson, “Assimilation in the Bloc Settlements of North Central Saskatchewan: A Comparative Study of Identity Change among Seven Ethnic Religious Groups in a Prairie Region” (doctoral dissertation, University of Saskatchewan, 1972), 230, 232. 32 SAB, Neils Persson Dahl to Maria, Ohlen, 6 November 189?. In Wedded to the Cause, Swyripa notes a similar situation in rural Ukrainian communities. Because women had fewer contacts with the “English world,” the Ukrainian elite perceived them as being more backward than men, in need of greater modernization and emancipation. 33 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 344. 34 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 25. 35 SAB, Mrs H. Closson, Reminiscence for the Dubuc History Committee, handwritten, photocopy, 2. 36 Perin, “Writing about Ethnicity,” 201–2. 37 Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 344. 38 Ibid., 419. 39 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 75. 40 SAB, Alexandra Svea Stenberg, Reminiscence for the Dubuc History Committee, handwritten, photocopy, 3. 41 Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 70.

190 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Lesley Erickson Coburn, “Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender,” 226. Foster, Wild Daisies, 49. Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 177. Perin, “Writing about Ethnicity,” 213. Anderson, “Assimilation in the Bloc Settlements,” 234. Hallliwel and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 43, 80. Ibid., 80, 83. Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 122. Foster, Wild Daisies, 23. Meda Johnson, “The Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church,” in Ashfield, Whitewood and Area, 96. Ibid., 97. John Hawkes, The Story of Saskatchewan and Its People, vol. 2 (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1924), 691. Anonymous, 90th Anniversary, New Stockholm Evangelical Lutheran Church: 1889–1979 (Stockholm: n.p., 1979), 8–9. Cited in Broadview History Society, Okshela, Broadview, Percival, 123. Anderson, “Assimilation in the Bloc Settlements,” 309. Coburn, “Ethnicity, Religion, and Gender,” 225. Roxanna Ng, “Constituting Ethnic Phenomenon: An Account from the Perspective of Immigrant Women,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 11 (1981): 97. Juteau-Lee and Roberts, “Ethnicity and Femininity,” 1. Broadview History Society, Oakshela, Percival, Broadview, 180. Meda Johnson, “Percival School,” in Ashfield, Whitewood and Area, 93. Foster, Wild Daisies, 17. Ibid., 59. Ibid. Ibid., 32. Anderson, “Assimilation in the Bloc Settlements,” 230–2. Broadview Historical Society, Oakshela, Broadview, Percival, 361, 391, 416. SAB, Carl Ian Walker, “Sven Erickson Svedberg: A Swedish Pioneer,” 8. Halliwell and Persson, Three Score and Ten, 138. Ibid., 62, 100. SAB, clippings file – “Women’s Clubs,” “Dubuc Homemakers’ Club Looks Back on 37 Years of Community Activity,” Melville Advance, 2 May 1951.

From Montreal and Venice with Love: Migrant Letters and Romantic Intimacy in Italian Migration to Postwar Canada S o nia C anc ia n

Introduction As I write to you my thoughts transport me to the stupendous Fenice Theatre, I recall the moving story of the young Japanese woman, Cio-Cio-San and the marvellous romantic music, “One fine day we’ll see.” This is the way she waited, with constancy and faith, he was required to return home, where the young girl waited for him, and wished to hear him sing, oh my “tiny little wife, perfume of verbena,” But alas! Poor her, how deceived she was! … As I wait for you now, I will have to draw inspiration from her, to live for you and with you – to wait for you and be certain that you will return one day, and call me “My little Nietta.”1

In this excerpt of a letter exchanged between an Italian couple separated by migration, the woman correspondent in Montreal describes her strong emotional attachment to the man she loves, who has remained in Venice, Italy. Like the hundreds of thousands of Italians immigrating to Canada after 1945, the writer had migrated to be reunited with her immediate family. Separated from her fidanzato (fiancé) by the Atlantic Ocean, she writes him a love letter by drawing on the romantic narrative of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. Drawing on the full set of letter exchanges written over the course of this couple’s transnational relationship between 1948 and 1949 in Venice and Montreal, this This chapter is excerpted and revised with permission from chapter 4 of Sonia Cancian, Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010).

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chapter illustrates some of the ways in which young lovers living in postwar Italy and Canada mobilized a plethora of emotional expressions to pledge reassurances and affections to each other while actively reaching out across geographical and cultural distances. More broadly, the chapter highlights the role of romantic letters in international migration, a subject in need of more attention, and illustrates the value of a history of emotions perspective for analysing immigrant love letters. The product of a relationship, the types of letter sources under scrutiny here offer a rare window on the romantic ideals and desires of immigrant women, who so often are portrayed as sexless subjects in migration history, and that of their men as well. Especially over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, migrant letters have operated as crucial conduits of information, news, and support during short- and long-term separations between migrants and non-migrants across nations, oceans, and continents.2 In their letters, migrants and their familial non-migrants who remained behind issued reminders to keep writing, to answer questions, to transmit information and news, and most especially, to maintain close ties of affection. In the context of migration, letter writing served other functions as well. Similar to wartime conditions, the practice and urgency of writing in migration – propelled by the necessity to stay in touch with a loved one – provided the opportunity for letter writers to translate their new world views and experiences to their families and friends. In letters, migrants typically discussed firsthand experiences, remittances, migration practices, and regulations. They offered prospective migrants tips about the voyage and work opportunities and reported on acquaintances and friendships made. Separation and letter writing also produced abundant expressions of longing, nostalgia, and affection and an intense desire for a hoped-for reunion. Although the love letters written by everyday or newly literate writers are particularly rich sources, historians and other scholars researching migration have seldom mined this epistolary genre to map complex transnational relationships.3 In large part, this is because such private letters were rarely published, though certainly some collections do exist, including those collected during fieldwork and preserved. Migrant love letters capture the emotional highs and lows experienced by migrants and non-migrants writing intimate letters in order to keep alive their emotional connection and romantic relationship. A rich, even rare, source, they allow us to reflect on the emotional tensions that emerge in transnational relationships. In taking as a case study the love

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letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma, I illustrate some of the ways in which lovers writing in a context of international migration were – perhaps similarly to lovers writing in other contexts – by turns melancholic and nostalgic, resilient, creative, and self-empowered. Historians of the immigrant letter have shed much light on its importance as a source. As they note, the practice of writing letters created an opportunity and a need for a person “to construct, articulate and deliberate their knowledge of the world.”4 An indication of its importance, people wrote even though writing was a demanding activity that required time from one’s workday, seclusion from the family and others, and inspiration and literary effort to write a good letter. The study of immigrant letters has undergone a scholarly resurgence in recent years, although the letter’s form and contents have yet to be thoroughly examined. An important early contribution was the multivolume Polish Peasant in Europe and America by William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918–20) – featuring over 750 letters from fifty families writing between Poland and the United States.5 Since then, a variety of similar as well as different studies of letters have been published for other continents, languages, and cultures. For their part, the group of Scandinavian migration historians (associated with the Minnesota School of Immigration and Refugee Studies6) argued that the migrant letter was “a great spur to mass migration, which certainly transformed both Europe and North America, and linked their histories inseparably.”7 With the rise of the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s – or history from the ground up – the historical value of everyday people’s voices increased significantly, and new collections appeared. Most recently, we can speak of an interpretative turn in the study of migrant letters as historians apply innovative methodologies and approaches. In his examination of the cycle of correspondence exchanged between nineteenth-century British immigrants in the United States and their significant others in North America, David Gerber, in Authors of Their Lives, demonstrates how letters helped to reformulate and sustain personal identities and relationships disrupted by migration. Also innovative in their analytical approach are two volumes published in 2006: Letters across Borders, edited by historians Bruce Elliott, David Gerber, and Suzanne Sinke, and Envoyer et recevoir: Lettres et correspondances dans les diasporas francophones, edited by Yves Frenette, Marcel Martel, and John Willis. Each anthology underscores the heterogeneity of experiences across borders and the transnationality of communication between families and individuals engaged in a migration process

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distinguished by time, geographies, and culture. While much of this work focuses on migrant letter collections that were not intended for publication, other studies, such as Lisa Chilton’s Agents of British Empire, and her chapter in this volume, offer a feminist-informed gender analysis of the female correspondence that was published in the proemigration press. Taken together, these studies explore new ways of working with letters so as to to better gauge the state of mind and heart of migrants and their significant others, and it includes addressing “the intellectual puzzles presented by the gaps, silences, and textual inadequacies”8 in these texts. What remains unexplored is the dynamics of romantic love in migration, though, as we shall see, my analysis similarly demonstrates that letters “cannot truly ‘speak for themselves’” and require in-depth analysis.9 Italian postwar migration to Canada, which by 1971 had involved more than 500,000 Italian women, men, and children,10 had separated friends and families, making the letter a fundamental form of communication for those who left and those who stayed behind. Indeed, well into the 1970s the letter remained the most popular form of communication among Italians divided by migration. The letters that speak to an intense emotional attachment of couples varied; some were written between women and men who had known each other since childhood in their native or neighbouring towns; others, by couples who had met shortly before one of them left for Canada. In still others, declarations of love were exchanged in letters once a couple had agreed to marry, whether by proxy or right after re-uniting in Canada. The letters written and exchanged by Antonietta Petris in Montreal and Loris Palma in Venice between 1948 and 1949 are romantic love letters written in the context of a heterosexual relationship. Historically, the love letter has been a highly covetted document, especially when the letters in question were authored by professional writers, such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, or Simone de Beauvoir. In the growing field of the history of emotions, love letters written by everyday writers are especially valuable for their insights on the plethora of emotions in dynamics and conditions including international migration.11 Letters provide insight on ways that emotions work, their construction and expression over time and space. In the case of transnational relationships, letters are a lens that throws light on lovers’ navigation of absence, the uncertainties that separation brings, the emotional highs and lows that typically occur, and related tensions. At the same time,

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as literary scholars have observed, love letters do not discuss only love and affections, but also describe personal reflections, discoveries, confidences, and world views of the writers. In the case of migrant love letters, they describe new day-to-day experiences from both an external and internal viewpoint, together with explanations and descriptions of activities that were experienced and negotiated personally. The “spiritual communion” – a term borrowed from Gerber’s Authors of Their Lives – hinted at in these letters makes evident the indelible and indissoluble connection shared by letter writers. The writers’ definition and negotiation of time and space, their creative use of literary references and literary inventiveness, also help us better understand the psychological and emotional mindset as well as the extraordinary resourcefulness that operated between lovers writing to each other. Romantic Energies in the Letters Despite the respect for letter-writing conventions learned in school, and their mutual understanding of each other and their relationship, much like other lovers, Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma wrote so they could remain “virtually” together and emotionally connected despite the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. They wrote to each other long letters that resembled diary entries, posting them once or twice per week frequently in response to each other’s mail. By the time Antonietta arrived in Montreal in September 1948, Loris and Antonietta had grown accustomed to their relationship at a distance. They had first embraced and declared their affections to each other two years earlier, in August 1946, in Ampezzo Carnico, a town nestled in the Friulian Alps in northeastern Italy. Loris, a young electrical technician, was from Venice, where he lived with his family and worked in an electrical firm in the industrial sector of Marghera. Antonietta, eighteen, lived with her mother and their extended family in Ampezzo Carnico, where she learned the seamstress trade. She barely knew her father, who had left for the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a few miles south of Newfoundland, when she was barely six months old. She met him again almost twenty years later. In July 1946, Antonietta was introduced to Loris at an outdoor dance hall in Ampezzo. Loris by this time was planning to return to Venice, but he felt an immediate attraction to Antonietta, and his feelings quickly intensified over the weeks that followed. For Antonietta, the attraction for Loris developed more slowly,

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in the course of going on hikes and to dances with friends. The letters they exchanged, first between Venice and Ampezzo Carnico and, later (after Antonietta immigrated to Montreal in September 1948), between Venice and Montreal, brought both of them unanticipated discoveries  about themselves, their love, and the dream of a life together in Canada.12 Their letters meet the definition of love letters in their repetitious and eternal expressions of love and affection and adoration, doing so with codes of intimate expression. The letters are infused with love and affect and the intense desire for intimacy, the projecting of dreams, and idealization of the other.13 As epistolary studies show, the power of a love letter rests, in part, in the nature of the document itself, which allows both for a first reading and subsequent rereadings to discern underlying meanings. While emotions that are integral to romantic love are socially and historically constructed and subject to a myriad of contexts, my concern is not to gauge the level of emotional veracity in the letters but rather to investigate the kinds of meanings and negotiations that lovers like Antonietta and Loris practised in order to keep alive their emotional attachment in a context of international migration. Indeed, these letters underscore how things that cross personal boundaries, like intimate and revealing words, take on deep emotional significance.14 The process of letter writing in love correspondence hinges in part on dynamics that are specific to the process itself, that is, waiting, receiving, reading, rereading, writing, and sending a letter, as well as on the specificity of the context, content, and relational dynamics of the correspondents and their letters. These traits and dynamics are expressed, implicitly or explicitly, in our letter collection. They hint, too, at a dynamic jumble of emotions in which the body is present, the writing is symbolic of the writer’s self, and the contents’ expressions offer an overflow of emotions whose expression is not fulfilled by the simple words of “I love you.” Instead, these correspondents, like other writers of intimate letters, felt an intensified need to say more to each other, and to prove, show, and reassure their love and fidelty – all of which involved words of tenderness, affective outreach, and literary inventiveness. We see this in the following excerpt written by Loris a few days after Antonietta’s transatlantic flight: That day an abyss opened under my feet, and I had to pay careful attention not to plunge inside … my body had never before felt a similar fatigue, my legs did not hold me steady, rather they were there to vacillate my body back and forth, every part of me felt the symptoms of a general

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exhaustion, and I remained standing there more out of courage, than out of willpower and strength … (23 September 1948)

In a letter written four months later, the desperate tone is subdued, and a measure of resignation becomes part of the narrative, as Antonietta wrote, “I think you think of me as much as I think of you, that you love me as much as I love you, and so, this is enough to put my heart at peace and to set aside my worries … I dream to see you again soon because, believe me, I miss you terribly” (15 January 1949). In a contemporary study of romantic love correspondence, Laura Ahearn writes that love is perceived as something that afflicts and torments young couples; it makes them feel like they’re going crazy, and at the same time, it empowers them and gives them agency in other aspects of their lives.15 The interconnection between correspondence, romantic love, and self-empowerment also characterized the nineteenth-century American letters examined by Karen Lystra, who argues that the selfempowerment these young couples felt was generated by the pleasures, satisfactions, and identities they shared and expressed in their correspondence.16 The correspondence of Antonietta and Loris illustrates ways in which feelings of self-empowerment and satisfaction operated hand-in-hand with feelings of disappointment and empathy as their day of reunion was prolonged. Expressions of self-empowerment and satisfaction were evident when they spoke concretely about Loris’s migration to Canada, the discussion of plans helping them to circumvent some of the melancholy that plagued them daily. As Antonietta wrote at one point: Tonight, I just couldn’t resist. For better or for worse I wanted to write to you so that I could also send you these papers that you will find included here … in any case together with the papers you’ll be bringing to Rome, I would include even this one, but before going to the interview, you’ll need to be in possession of the ticket for your passage. I will send it to you as soon as I hear something from you advising me of the stage in which you are at with the procedures. (8 May 1949)

Empathy between correspondents was demonstrated through expressions of sorrow and disappointment generated by the realities of separation, as Antonietta reflected in a letter to Loris: “I received your letter in which you tell me that you are recovering. You cannot imagine how sorry I felt knowing that you were ill, despite it not being serious.

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This is what it means to be apart from each other, the person you love the most in the world is suffering and you are totally unaware of it … However, now that I know that you are feeling better, I am very happy” (15 February 1949). By contrast, good news generated optimism that was then communicated to the lover. As Loris wrote to Antonietta, “You cannot imagine how relieved I am to read this news and how much happiness they bring to me” (14 November 1948). Parallel to other lovers’ correspondence, feelings of fading and desperation were also integral to the young couple’s letters. Fading – defined as a “painful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact”17 – coupled with discouragement were experienced as each letter writer failed to make sense of their separation, and as each grew increasingly weary of their separation. As the excerpt below illustrates, love letters written in international migration contained a mix of emotions, sometimes all jumbled into a single letter, inevitably resulting in a dialectic mired in hope and misery. For instance, Antonietta wrote: My beloved Loris, if I have delayed a little in sending you news, it’s only because I was waiting for a reply from those two letters I had sent you some time ago. I have anxiously waited all this week and I leave this up to you to imagine … Yes, I received the letter you sent me from Ampezzo (noted) with a 15-day delay from the other letter, and then nothing. What happened? You tell me what I should be thinking. Or maybe you want me to go crazy? Oh Loris, you shouldn’t do this to me. If you bear a grudge against me for that letter that I wrote to you in a moment of disgust and disappointment, you are wrong, very wrong! … We need to understand and empathize … I am so happy to hear how much your visit was appreciated by my family back home. Oh! I knew it would be so. They are so fond of you! I couldn’t stop myself from crying when I read your descriptions and heard you speak of my dearly beloveds, and my little and dear country … one thing remains for me, one hope and that is to see you again … I’m going to sleep now, hoping that tomorrow is a new day, a day that will bring me your news … (8 May 1949)

To remain in constant dialogue was part of the main objectives of lovers’ correspondence.18 Letters, as Dirk Hoerder notes, demanded responses, sought answers, requested money and information from the corresponding writers.19 We see in the transatlantic letters of Antonietta and Loris the frequent inquiries made to ensure actively engaged correspondence, to maintain a continuum in the letter-writing process. So,

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too, the pacts about writing frequently. At one point, Antonietta insisted, “I beg you to write to me, to write to me: once a week punctually, I’ll try to do the same so that neither of us needs to suffer … one line, one short letter is all we need … but the flow must be constant, lively and continuous because if one day that disappears, it is over” (14 November 1948). Creative imaginary impulses and literary inventiveness run through lovers’ correspondence exchanged in international migration. Italo Calvino’s definition of imagination – “a kind of electronic machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose, or are simply the most interesting, pleasing, or amusing”20 – is especially appropriate to this kind of letter writing. How each writer creatively employed one’s imagination (literary or other) to negotiate the time and space that kept them apart is a recurring theme in the letters under review, especially when we consider the numerous Italian opera lyrics permeating them, occasionally adapted to the dynamics of their relationship. One such illustration is identified in the opening excerpt of this chapter; another is in a letter written by Loris in which he reflected on his new familial responsibilities in Venice and his longing for Antonietta: It’s cold in this new room of mine, a room that offers me nothing but a gloomy silence, yet I need this space to find a reaction in my heart. It’s a silence that inspires a voice; a silence that echoes the beat of my heart. “All is still, and yet all to the heart speaks to me … This peace away from here where can I find it? You are lovely, season of springtime, Renew flowers and love”21 Of your memory, I embrace my every thought, Of your love, I crown my every sorrow. (1 January 1949)

Letter writers turned to their imagination to reinforce the promise of a desired journey, offering descriptions of a future nest they would share or some other place where they would enjoy happiness, or repeatedly invoked a shared memory or a desired present.22 Like other transnational couples, Antonietta imagined what life would be like for her and Loris once they were reunited and married. She wrote with the aspired hope that a deeper understanding would develop between them and that each would feel less lonely when they could rely on each other’s company: “I know we will have our share of sorrows as well, but we’ll

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be able to overcome them, it will be the two of us then, we won’t be alone,” Antonietta wrote to Loris on 27 May 1949. To abolish time and distance was an additional objective in transnational correspondence. To do so, transnational lovers like Antonietta and Loris reflected in their letters on ways in which time could be compressed so that they could feel “virtually” closer to each other; recalling a past event or invoking a dreamed-about present or future activity together had the effect of temporarily removing the obstacles of time and space. These temporal oscillations in the letters coupled with lovers’ consciousness of “epistolary time” were frequently described in migrant letters exchanged between families. They are ever-present, however, in migrant correspondence exchanged between lovers.23 One recurring example is illustrated in the way that the slow passage of time and its velocity are discussed together: “Nearly two months have passed since we left each other, I don’t know how you feel about it. Sometimes it feels like I arrived only yesterday. Other times, it feels like I’ve been here forever. Oh! If only it were so … then there would be less time for me to wait for you” (14 November 1948). Conclusion The emotions expressed in the love letters written in international migration are heterogeneous, multifaceted, and highly complex. This chapter has analysed some of the ways in which migrant correspondence exchanged between lovers describe at an intimate level the emotional tensions that emerged in transnational romantic correspondences. The letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma capture some of the ways in which lovers writing in a context of international migration were resourceful and creative, imaginary and nostalgic, actively engaged and self-empowered. All of this served to turn the experience of transnational relationship from one of countless frustrations, extraordinary patience, and misery to one of action, of creative literary and affective inventiveness. Developing future plans, for example, signified resistance to the tethers of distance and separation. Writing letters in this context compelled lovers to create worlds of their own, where their own intimate codes and language would be singularly understood and respected by them. The preservation of and access to these letters enables researchers to understand more fully lovers’ intimate experiences and how they actively sought to close the gap of distance and separation caused by international migration.

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NOTES 1 Letter from Antonietta Petris to Loris Palma, 31 March 1947, private collection. 2 I use the term “migrant letter” and “immigrant letter” interchangeably. Although the latter term is most commonly used in the scholarship, the former incorporates different types of migration, such as temporary or short term as well as permanent or long term. 3 Some exceptions include William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, vols.1–5 (Boston: Gorham, 1918–20); Sonia Cancian, Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010). 4 Kathleen DeHaan, “Negotiating the Transnational Moment: Immigrant Letters as Performance of a Diasporic Identity,” National Identities 12, 2 (2010), 108. 5 Liz Stanley, “To the Letter: Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, and Writing a Life, Sociologically,” Life Writing 7, 2 (2010): 139–51. 6 See Donna R. Gabaccia, “The Minnesota School and Immigration and Refugee Studies,” http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/publications/pdf/ MinnesotaSchool-1.pdf. 7 David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 41. 8 Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, “Introduction,” in Letters across Borders, The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4. 9 In addition to works cited above, a small sample of this large literature includes David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Dirk Hoerder, Creating Societies: Immigrant Lives in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999); Samuel Baily and Franco Ramella, One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s Correspondence across the Atlantic, 1901–1922 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Elizabeth J. Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); Walter Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrich Sommer, News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Lisa Chilton, Agents

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10

11

12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Sonia Cancian of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). On this migration, see, for example, Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992) and my Family, Lovers, and Their Letters. See especially Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois,” Les Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (January– June 1941): 5–20; Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, 3 (June 2002): 823–4; Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Revew 90, 4 (1985): 813–35; and Jack Goody, Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West (New York: Verso, 1998). A small selection of letters from the Petris-Palma collection was first identified in 1998 in my conversations with Mr Palma for an MA research project on immigrant letters. In response to my efforts to secure a large number of letters exchanged between Canada and Italy for my doctoral research, he loaned me an additional set of letters, excerpts of which are in Families, Lovers, and Their Letters. Sadly, Mr Palma had recently died, but his wife, Mrs Petris, has generously loaned me the had remaining 400 love letters from their collection for my new project on migrant love letters. Mireille Bossis, “Table Ronde: La lettre d’amour,” in Mireille Bossis and Charles Porter, eds., L’Epistolarité à travers les siècles: Geste de communication et/ou d’écriture (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 39. Jan Clanton Collins and Thomas Gregor, “Boundaries of Love,” in William Jankowiak, ed., Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 73. Laura Ahearn, Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 48–9. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 51–2. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 112. On the dialogic element in letters of migration, see Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 72. Hoerder, Creating Societies, 18. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 91. Pietro Mascagni, L’Amico Fritz, Act 2, Libretto by P. Suardon, in Nico Castel, Italian Verismo Opera Libretti, edited by Scott Jackson Wiley, vol. 1 (Mount Morris, NY: Leyerle, 2000), 688.

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22 Bernard Bray, “Treize Propos sur la lettre d’amour,” in Bossis and Porter, L’Epistolarité à travers les siècles, 42–3. 23 Epistolary time (“le temps épistolaire”) constitutes the temporal dynamics involved in the waiting, reading, and writing practices of a letter. See Cécile Dauphin, “Les manuels épistolaires au XIXe siècle,” in Roger Chartier, ed., La Correspondance: Les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 235–6.

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PART FOUR Labouring Domestics and Canadian Constraints

Historically, the vast majority of women who have immigrated to Canada have done so as members of families, whether accompanying a husband or arriving later. And most of them did not enter the paid labour force, though their tremendous resourcefulness, whether in reducing costs (such as growing gardens and stitching up handme-downs for the children) or generating money by informal means (taking in boarders or doing other people’s laundry), kept many a struggling family afloat. However, successive waves of “single” or “lone” immigrant women have toiled as domestic servants in Canada, many of them young women from impoverished locales recruited through various schemes to help meet a persistently high demand for maids among middle- and upperclass Canadians. The lengthy association between immigrant women and domestic service is suggested by the enslaved household servant Angélique in early eighteenth-century New France (see Part One), some of the British women sent to colonial British Columbia (see Part Two) and, in this section, the Irish domestics in nineteenth-century Ontario studied by Lorna McLean and Marilyn Barber, and the recent and contemporary Filipino live-in caregivers studied by Glenda Tibe Bonifacio. The route to domestic service was varied. Better-off English immigrants might bring an Irish domestic with them. The daughters of farm families in pre-industrial Ontario, Quebec, or Nova Scotia might be sent to a neighbouring family to work in exchange for room and board; later, the daughters of European “pioneers” on the prairies became “city maids” sending wages back home. Many British domestics arrived through the imperial-based schemes led by British middle-class women, including feminists, who wished to provide jobs and, they argued,

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a future for working-class women who, outnumbering the men, might never marry at home. Their Anglo-Canadian counterparts participated in and benefited from these schemes, a new maid freeing them up to do “good works.” The “child rescue” scheme shipped out thousands of girls and boys from British orphanages to Canada between the 1870s and 1920s. A succession of government-run labour recruitment schemes has brought a wide array of immigrant domestics to Canada. In pre-industrial Canada, many young Canadian women from the countryside and poorer urban families worked as maids in the growing cities. Indeed, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada, domestic service was still a large employer of women. As Canadian working women increasingly chose factory and clerical work over service, the job became increasingly defined as a “dead-end job” or “job ghetto” for immigrant women – an association that remains to this day. Another important pattern also reflected in these chapters, which together cover the period from the nineteenth century to 2008, concerns the changing racial-ethnic composition of Canada’s immigrant domestics. While British women dominated the domestic schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the First World War and interwar era saw continental Europeans, such as Finns and Mennonites, also fill these jobs; the post-1945 recruits included refugee women from the Displaced Persons camps and countries like Germany and Greece, and, later, more came from “not-white” sources such as the Caribbean, South East Asia, and the Philippines. Moreover, after 1967, most immigrant domestics in Canada have arrived not as landed immigrants, which had been the case for earlier British and European domestics, but as temporary migrant workers with less security and fewer rights. This subject thus offers another critical lens through which to consider the interplay between domestic economic priorities and racialist ideals. As the readings also suggest, the topic requires as well an historical understanding of the differences among earlier “white” groups and of the “in between” racial status of “peripheral” Europeans. While all three chapters consider the job’s exploitative conditions, none is an explicitly workplace study. McLean and Barber’s discussion of Irish domestics in nineteenth-century Ontario focuses on their encounters with the law, particularly over incidents of drunkenness and criminality, and their rates of imprisonment. It also deals with the particular vulnerability of Catholic domestics to diagnoses of insanity. Drawing on government records and oral interviews, Noula Mina examines Canada’s recruitment

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of Greek female domestics in the 1950s and early 1960s through a racial as well as class and gender frame. She highlights the role of the bureaucrats, the contradictory portrayals of the women, and how they negotiated the challenges involved. Regarding the Filipino women who since the 1990s have dominated Canada’s restrictive Live-in Caregiver Program, Bonifacio notes that many of the women, having entered Canada on a temporary work visa, wish to pursue the (limited) opportunities provided to become permanent residents and sponsor their husbands and children. Using fieldwork methods with Filipino women in southern Alberta, she assesses the settlement services available (in Canada and through the Philippine government) to these women. Why did so many Irish women emigrate in the nineteenth century? Why were their rates of incarceration and institutionalization in Ontario high? Why did Canada recruit more than ten thousand Greek women after the Second World War? What does the Athens-based training centre and guide reveal about Canadian stereotypes, expectations, and ideals? Why did women break their labour contracts? How do Filipino women, who must leave their own families to care for the members of other families, deal with the challenges involved? Why are they called “new heroes”? To what extent are these women part of transnational migration? How do these chapters shed light on the importance of gender, race, and sexuality in understanding female migration?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Arat-Koc, Sedef. “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant Worker.” In Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, eds., Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada, 78–99. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Barber, Marilyn. Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1991. Bonifacio, Glenda Tibe. Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. Calliste, Agnes. “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900–1932.” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, 4 (Winter 1993): 131–48. Epp, Marlene. “The Mennonite Girls’ Homes of Winnipeg: A Home Away from Home.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 6 (1988): 100–14. Iacovetta, Franca. “‘Primitive Villagers and Uneducated Girls’: Canada Recruits Domestics from Italy, 1951–52.” Canadian Woman Studies 7, 4 (1986): 14–18.

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Lindström-Best, Varpu. Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1988. Parr, Joy. Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924. London: Croom Helm, 1980. Also Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Silvera, Makeda. Silenced. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1989. Stasiulis, Daiva, and Abigail Bakan. Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

In Search of Comfort and Independence: Irish Immigrant Domestic Servants Encounter the Courts, Jails, and Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Lo rna R . M c L e an an d Marily n B a r b e r

Introduction In nineteenth-century Ontario, domestic servants were predominantly Irish, but most Irish women who worked as servants have remained anonymous shadowy figures in the historical record. One notable exception is Grace Marks, the subject of Margaret Atwood’s prize-winning novel Alias Grace.1 Previously, historian Susan Houston also used Grace Marks as a case study in an article examining how gender affected the construction of youthful criminal behaviour in the mid-nineteenth century.2 Not only has Grace Marks received recent literary and historical attention, but she was even better known to Canadians in the midnineteenth century, being extensively reported in newspapers and written about by Susanna Moodie in Life in the Clearings.3 A youthful Irish immigrant, one of thousands to come to North America in search of better conditions, Grace Marks achieved notoriety because, at the age of sixteen, she was convicted of the murder of her employer. Her fellow Irish servant, James McDermott, who was similarly found guilty of the crime, was hanged, but Grace had her sentence commuted to life in prison because of her “feeble sex” and “extreme youth.” The sensational case, involving sex, violence, and insubordination carried to an extreme, portrayed in stark relief the gender, class, and ethnic tensions in the master/mistress–servant relationship. It also revealed the complex and gendered public response to Irish immigrants. Although murder was an exceptional charge, the fate of Grace Marks exemplified the

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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hazards encountered by some Irish immigrant women seeking comfort and independence in the new world. While Grace Marks’s Irish immigrant identity has been noted in the literature, most attention has been focused on the significance of her gender and her youth. Susan Houston assesses how notions of femininity and masculinity influenced the evaluation of youthful criminal behaviour, thus allowing the defence for Grace Marks to call upon conventional gender stereotypes of the naive vulnerable female acceptable in mid-nineteenth-century Canada. While she links Grace Marks’s love of clothes and her supposed lack of “strength of mind” to stock qualities attributed to young Irish servant girls, she does not develop the significance of the ethnic immigrant dimension in her analysis. Similarly, Margaret Atwood, writing an historical novel rather than a documentary, tells a compelling story of Grace’s harsh emigrant experience, but does not explicitly link the Irish emigrant background to Grace’s own sense of her identity and her treatment. Both individual and collective memory are, as Atwood emphasizes, mutable and selective.4 Our chapter highlights the bonding of ethnicity with gender and class in the lives of Irish female domestic servants such as Grace Marks. Whereas most transatlantic migrations of people to North America were dominated by men, for significant periods of time women formed the majority of Irish migrants.5 The importance of this unusual migration pattern for understanding the lives of Irish female migrants to the United States was emphasized in two American studies published in the 1980s. Both Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan attributed the preponderance of young single women among Irish migrants to economic and social conditions in post-famine Ireland.6 The urgent need to stop the subdivision of the land meant that marriage became increasingly an economic arrangement whereby only one son inherited the family property and his wife required a dowry. As a result, by the 1880s, the Irish married at the latest age in Europe, and the custom of providing a dowry for only one daughter meant that many young women had difficulty achieving adult status through marriage. At the same time, the opportunities for women to earn a living outside the family were constrained by the lack of both industrialization and of a bourgeoning middle class that demanded domestic servants. By contrast, Irish women could readily find work as domestic servants in America and, unlike much of the work available for men, domestic service was not seasonal or sporadic. Domestic service in America was attractive as both an individual and a family strategy for betterment: it seemed to guarantee that

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Irish immigrant women could save money for their own future and/or send money home to aid their families. Consequently, a high percentage of Irish-born women in America worked as domestic servants … Canadian historians have convincingly demonstrated that the pattern of Irish migration to Ontario was quite distinct from the United States. For instance, more Protestants than Catholics arrived in Ontario during the nineteenth century and the majority settled in rural rather than urban areas. In addition, the famine did not initiate mass Irish migration to Canada as it did to the United States, but instead was an aberration within a voluntary economic migration movement from traditional source areas that early had established close links with Canada.7 But these interpretations have done little to help us better understand Irish female migrants. We need also to explore the gendered features of this distinctive Irish migration movement to Canada. Preliminary research seems to indicate that, unlike the United States, women did not outnumber men among Irish migrants to Canada throughout the latter nineteenth century. Canada did not offer as many attractive female employment opportunities in either home or factory as did the United States with its larger urban centres near the Eastern Seaboard and its more mature industrial economy. In addition, postfamine chain migration to the United States helped to reinforce women’s migration through family and female networks. For a brief period during the 1850s, however, women did form the majority of the Irish migrants to British North America.8 Patterns of Female Migration The predominance of female emigration occurred at a time when the source areas for Irish migration to Canada had expanded from the traditional regions of Ulster, Cork, and Dublin into the more impoverished western districts as a result of the economic problems surrounding the famine. It also coincided with the shift from Australia to Canada as the main destination for large parties of women sent from the Irish workhouses.9 Irish women arriving in the 1840s and 1850s formed part of an immigrant group that as a whole was more destitute and had fewer skills and resources than earlier or later nineteenth-century migrants to Ontario. A larger proportion of the famine-era migrants also were Roman Catholic and hence outsiders in the dominant Protestant culture of mid-nineteenth-century Ontario. Those coming from beyond the traditional source areas were additionally handicapped by the lack

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of kinship or community networks that were so important in offering aid and security to newcomers. The sheer number of immigrants arriving in the late 1840s also created more problems for that group and their immediate successors. The brief period when women seemed to outnumber men among Irish migrants to Canada thus coincided with a time when integration into Canadian society might prove particularly difficult. In Canada, domestic service was the main paid employment for Irish female emigrants. Women (like Grace Marks) who came as part of a family migration often entered domestic service because the lack of family resources forced daughters, and sometimes wives, to seek work outside the home. The scarcity of domestic servants in Canada also enabled women to emigrate on their own from at least the 1830s. Included among these migrants were the parties of workhouse women whom government agents placed in domestic positions. In addition, after Confederation, the Ontario and Canadian governments explicitly recruited female domestic servants in Ireland, providing bonuses and reduced passage fares as an inducement to emigration. They had limited success primarily in northern Ireland because agents reported that the lack of direct connections from southern ports to Canada made recruitment difficult in the south.10 These “women alone” sometimes lacked kin or friendship networks for advice and aid and hence were more vulnerable, but it must be remembered as well that the family was not always a supportive institution for women. Partly because of the predominance of Irish migration to Ontario in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the majority of domestic servants in the province for most of the century were Irish. Similarly, a high proportion of Irish women, and especially Irish Catholic women, worked in service at some point in their lives. Indeed, in his study of Hamilton in the mid-nineteenth century, Katz concluded that almost every Irish Catholic woman in the city spent part of her life as a resident servant …11 Hence, domestic servants in nineteenth-century Ontario, and especially immigrant domestic servants, became identified with the Irish. Employment of an Irish servant, particularly an Irish Catholic servant, did not necessarily indicate racial tolerance on the part of a nonIrish or Protestant employer. Instead racial and religious divisions exacerbated the class tensions in the employer-servant relationship. Stereotypes of the “Irish Biddy” or “Bridget” abounded. Frequently Biddy was portrayed as good-hearted and willing, but dim, inept, untidy, and careless. At times, though, her seeming lack of understanding of the

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mistress’s instructions could also be interpreted as an assertive refusal to recognize her subordinate place in the household. For example, as depicted in the Canadian Illustrated News, when told by her mistress that she could no longer receive her sweetheart in the kitchen, Bridget replied, “Thank you kindly, Mum, but he’s too bashful for the Parlour.”12 Susanna Moodie, in Life in the Clearings, showed some understanding of how the poverty of an Irish background ill prepared many Irish servants to meet their mistress’s expectations for care of material possessions: “‘Shure, Ma’am, it can be used,’ said an Irish girl to me, after breaking the spout out of an expensive china jug. ‘It is not a hair the worse!’ She could not imagine that a mutilated object could occasion the least discomfort to those accustomed to order and neatness in their household arrangements.”13 Others expressed more alarm regarding the possible risks of allowing unknown immigrants into the private sanctum of the home. Because of their supposed love of finery, Irish domestics were frequently suspected of trying on their mistress’s clothes in their absence. The fear existed that such relatively harmless acts of insubordination could mirror more serious crimes such as theft from their employers or, at an extreme as in the case of Grace Marks, even murder … Suspicions surrounding the Irish, heightened by famine-era and workhouse migration in the mid-nineteenth century, could make life more difficult for Irish women seeking work as domestic servants … In spite of Victorian imagery, neither the home nor rural society was necessarily safe territory for women. Although domestic service offered an opportunity for Irish women to save for a better life, it also led to downward mobility for the unfortunate. Isolation and loneliness in both rural and urban work increased the vulnerability to conflict with employers or to sexual exploitation. And a live-in domestic servant who left her work or was dismissed lost her place of residence as well as her employment. Irish Domestics and the Courts In this chapter, we seek to construct a gendered analysis of Irish immigrants by exploring a particular neglected aspect: Irish domestics in courts, jails, and asylums.14 Court records tell us about immigrant Irish servants and their work, about relationships with their employers, and about the nature of their interaction with the judicial system. Unfortunately, the records do not allow us to link directly the Canadian experience with the regional or family background of the migrant. The following sampling of cases from four Ontario communities also offers

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From Canadian Illustrated News, 7 January 1882.

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hints as to the experience of immigration for female domestics who arrived in Canada from the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The limitations of these documents, however, allow us to see only those who were committed to jail, as recorded in the registers, and/or trial reports. Domestics who were dismissed or left of their own accord because of disagreements with, or accusations by, their employers, do not appear. A careful reading of the cases, however, does suggest ways in which servants negotiated the imbalance of social and economic relationships in the workplace. Moreover, these records allow us to profile the women and the typology of crimes that brought them into contact with the law, and to identify how the gendered nature of public morality, as in the case of drunkenness, impacted on their lives. At the same time, we note how some female domestics may have used the jails as a refuge between periods of employment. Finally, we can observe the ways in which the legal process intersected with expanding mental illness and reform asylums. To profile the type of criminal act that brought Irish servants into contact with the law, four counties were selected (see table 10.1). These counties, York, Leeds/Grenville, Perth, and Grey, represent a crosssection of urban and rural communities across Ontario. Taken together, these counties encompass a range of the social and economic diversity in Ontario during the Victorian era. Of a total of 1,481 women sampled from the jail registers between 1841 and 1881, 584 listed paid employment.15 Given the large number of women who worked as servants during this period, it is perhaps not surprising that almost half the women in jail who listed occupations were servants or housekeepers. Similarly, the ethnic composition of the inmates also reflected immigrant trends during this period. Among the 239 jailed servants, the largest immigrant population was from Ireland (29 per cent or 68 women). Because the records do not list ethnic affiliation among the native-born domestics (54 per cent), we cannot determine with certainty how many were second-generation Irish. The following sections outline the four most frequent reasons that led women to being committed to jail: drunkenness, vagrancy, larceny, and insanity. While insanity was not a crime per se, as we shall see, the jail served as one of several routes for individuals, including Irish servants, into asylums for the mentally ill. As well, until 1850, when the first mental asylum was built in Toronto, local jails housed many of those deemed “insane.” The types of offences for which servants were committed are significant because they relate to the nature of the domestics’ work and

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Table 10.1: Summary of Committals for Women and Servants, 1841–1881 All Women Charges

(N)

(%)

Irish Womena (N)

(%)

All Servantsa (N)

(%)

Irish Servantsa (N)

(%)

Drunkenness

481

32.5

248

43.9

57

23.9

30

44.1

Vagrancy

305

20.6

106

18.8

75

31.4

19

27.9

Larceny

181

12.2

58

10.3

42

17.6

5

7.4

Insanity

131

8.8

40

7.1

42

17.6

4

5.9

1,481

100.0

475

100.0

239

100.0

68

100.0

Total a

The number of Irish women and servants is underrepresented in the data. In Toronto, occupation first appears as a category in 1854, and between January 1860 and February 1864, only summary registers exist. Summary registers list only name, sex, charge, and other information related to incarceration. In addition, Toronto registers are missing between January 1874 and September 1876. In Leeds/Grenville and Grey counties, occupation is not listed until 1865, and in Perth County, it appears as late as 1869. Source: Archives of Ontario, RG 20, R-6, Brockville Jail Registers, 1848–81; RG 20, F-28, Owen Sound Jail Registers 1857–81; RG 20, F-40, Stratford Calendar of Prisoners, 1853–64, and Stratford Jail Registers 1865–81; RG 22, F-43, Toronto Jail Registers 1841–53, 1860–73, October 1876 to December 1881, and RG, F-20, F-4, Brampton Jail Registers 1854–59.22.

to the specific circumstances of female immigration and Irish ethnicity. Overall the most common reason for women and for servants to be in jail was for drunkenness and alcohol-related charges.

Drunkenness While studies of nineteenth-century Ontario temperance societies identified excessive drinking as a male problem,16 little is known of the public or private drinking habits of women,17 particularly among specific cultural groups. Overall, public peace offences such as drunkenness formed the majority of committals in Ontario jails. For some contemporary observers, excessive drinking and the apparent rise of crime in urban areas stemmed, in part, from the recent influx of immigrants. In the minds of a particularly influential and vocal constituency, drink, immorality, and crime were intertwined, and law could play a central role in policing and punishing the offenders. A study of Toronto where half the jailed Irish servants resided allows us to see how Irish culture affected the way drunkenness was interpreted within a large urban centre.

40

Number of committals

30

20

10

0 50

52

54

56

58

60

62

64

66

68

70

72

19th century (years) All women

All Irish

All servants

Irish servants

Graph 10.1: Irish servants and all women committed to the Toronto jail for drunkenness. Note: Data were not available from January 1874 to October 1876.

74

76

78

80

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Charges for drunkenness among Toronto women rose dramatically between 1856 and 1859 (see graph 10.1). The records for 1860 to 1864 are incomplete for ethnicity and occupation; however, the data for sex and charges demonstrate that although the number of women on the register declined after 1860, most committals were for drunkenness … Convictions for drunkenness, as with other public peace offences, carried a specific stigma for women.18 The rhetoric of domesticity that relegated women to the moral and domestic sphere meant harsh penalties for those who abandoned their true womanhood for the streets and bars of Toronto.19 Notably, over several years between 1856 and 1865, an increase in the number of arrests of Irish servants for drunkenness contributed to a higher total number of female than male committals in the Toronto jail. The high incarceration rates for the mostly single, employed working women suggest an earlier date than 1880 for the socially problematic, independent woman, and highlight the gendered nature of public peace and prosecution charges in large urban centres in the mid- to late nineteenth century …20 Local structural, cultural, and economic factors also contributed to the rise in jailed Irish women and servants in mid-century Toronto/York. Increased incarcerations coincided with the particularly zealous efforts of Toronto officials to define and regulate behaviour on the streets and other public places within this prosperous, industrializing provincial capital.21 Between 1852 and 1859 the number of constables almost doubled to sixty patrolling the streets and arresting disruptive drunkards.22 The degree to which the size of police units influenced the number of committals is further supported by the rapid decline in arrests in the early 1860s when the number of police was reduced to thirty-eight men.23 The rise of committals in the 1870s again paralleled a resurgence in the size of the force … Cultural stereotypes of Irish drinking, as depicted in the local media, cast a shadow of suspicion over Irish servants along with other Irish immigrants. An 1865 reprint of an article from a Montreal newspaper appeared without comment in the Toronto media. “Those Emigrants,” it noted, with particular reference to the young women who were sent out from the workhouses in Ireland, “turn out to be thoroughly disgraceful characters.” As proof of the Irish women’s undesirable traits, the paper recounted how some were “provided with situations but in a day or two they returned drunk.” Worse still, these immigrants lacked the moral character to conduct themselves in a seemingly proper womanly fashion: “In one respectable tavern … their conduct was so bad

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they had to be expelled, and nobody who had heard of them would take them in …”24 Additional evidence also suggests that religious friction may have played a part in the large number of Roman Catholic women in jail. Across the spectrum of four counties the percentage of Irish Catholic women charged with drunkenness exceeded that of all other ethnic groups in jail. Of the twenty-five servants arrested for drunkenness in Toronto, almost two-thirds were Roman Catholic and by far the largest group were Irish … As Michael Cottrell and others have written, by the 1860s many, if not the majority, of Toronto constables and municipal politicians were members or supporters of the Protestant Orange Order and displayed their partisanship on several occasions during this period of religious as well as ethnic tensions that originated from the late 1850s … Statistics tell us about the patterns of incarceration and the typology of the Irish servants in jail. But we are left wondering about the motivation for drinking, and the impact of incarceration on servants’ lives. Undoubtedly, servants drank to ameliorate periods of illness or chronic pain, to dull feelings of loneliness, and to lessen the stresses and strains of a long workday.25 Even favourable situations did not compensate for a lack of companionship, especially among immigrant women living in Canada without friends or family. Anne Slattery, an Irish servant in Kingston, Ontario, wrote in 1865, “My dear Sister it is very lonesome to be here alone. You will meet many strange faces before you will friends … Oh how happy I would be if I had a relation to spend my leisure hours with … when my work is done I sit down and thinks [sic] of the pleasant home and loving faces I used to gaze on and tell my trouble[s] to …”26

Vagrancy Although jail deprived women of their liberty, incarceration could also provide shelter and food during periods of unemployment when desperate circumstances forced Irish servants, like many others, without family to seek out temporary accommodations. As was often noted in jail inspection reports, conditions were clean if spartan. Food was often adequate but rationed.27 For some this crude form of hospitality was better than the alternative of living on the streets.28 A careful examination of vagrancy charges highlights the particular desperation that relates directly to the nature of servants’ work: dismissal from employment also meant the loss of a place to live.

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As previously noted, both servants and Irish women were among the largest percentage of committals for vagrancy. An analysis of jail registers reveals a trend which suggests that some women in rural areas with limited alternatives entered jails during the winter months and/ or periods of economic depression. For instance, in Leeds/Grenville, Eleanor Madden, an Irish servant, and her ten-year-old daughter were convicted of vagrancy and spent a month in jail in March 1870. Similarly, Mary Cavanagh, a fifty-seven-year-old domestic worker from Ireland, was jailed for vagrancy in the winter of 1873.29

Larceny While Irish servants were overrepresented among women charged with drunkenness and to a lesser extent those charged with vagrancy, few Irish servants were committed for larceny.30 In Toronto/York, Grey, and Perth counties, almost a third of the women charged with larceny were servants, but among those only 8 per cent were Irish migrants. Surprisingly, in Leeds/Grenville, with only one exception, the fifteen women charged with larceny who listed an occupation all worked as domestics. Of those, only one was Irish. Whether Irish servants were more readily dismissed than others, as suggested in the earlier remarks, is uncertain. A closer examination of several court cases allows us to explore aspects of domestic work that may have contributed to charges of larceny and/or dismissal. Without doubt, servants had ample opportunities to steal. They were familiar with household valuables and money, information usually privy to the immediate family. Often alone and unsupervised, these women lived and worked surrounded by possessions and wealth they would never acquire. Working for and in homes of the propertied middle and upper classes, they confronted the reality of nineteenth-century economic disparity in its most transparent form. For some the temptation to steal must have been great. Despite the unbalanced nature of this relationship, both parties shared, albeit unequally, a degree of dependency and vulnerability. Given the arduous chores of nineteenthcentury domestic households, many families relied on a limited pool of servants for cooking and cleaning. Servants, on the other hand, relied on a contract of employment that was at best maternalistic and at worst exploitative.31 Furthermore, within this private household arrangement employers were vulnerable to theft by servants, and arguably servants were vulnerable to accusations of theft by employers.

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Problematic aspects of the relationship between servants and employers may have also contributed to incidents of theft. Glimpses of this can be gleaned only from the testimony of witnesses, oftentimes under cross-examination by defence attorneys.32 Details of a case in Toronto Township in 1860 suggest some of the negative aspects in household working relationships. Mary Jane Borland, a servant, was charged with stealing a gold broach, locket, and purse containing $14.25. She was hired at $2.50 a month to work in a house with five related adults – grandmother, grandfather, uncle, grandson, and granddaughter. After  three weeks of service, she left without payment. Under crossexamination at trial, the reportings of the granddaughter offer evocative hints about possible abuse: the granddaughter denied that her brother had abused Mary Jane by pulling her hair, and that she had never “heard her [Mary Jane] complain of ill usage.” Furthermore, Mary Jane’s employer insisted that she “was well treated whilst there, I never quarreled with her. They quarreled on some days, I never heard what it was about. It was not more than words that I know of.”33 The case files suggest that servants may have exacted a form of balance of payments or revenge for ill-treatment by stealing the personal possessions of their employers … From Courts to Asylum Although insanity was less common than drunkenness, vagrancy, or larceny as a reason for committing women to jail in the four counties sampled, the charge of insanity usually led to a much longer incarceration. From the mid-nineteenth century, persons placed in county jails because they were found to be insane and dangerous could then be transferred to an asylum for the insane by the warrant system. Warrant cases had priority over private admissions to asylums and also bypassed the requirement to have a certificate of insanity signed by three physicians. The jail route required only one doctor and the jail surgeon to sign the certificate.34 Not surprisingly, persons admitted to provincial insane asylums, female as well as male, frequently came through local jails charged with being dangerous and likely to commit some crime. Warrant cases especially dominated admissions from the poorer or more rural parts of Ontario society, precisely the part of the population that included many of the immigrants from Ireland. The first permanent Ontario asylum opened in Toronto in 1850 as part of a widespread movement to create specialized institutions where the insane could receive “moral treatment” rather than simply be restrained.

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Prior to the building of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, the government paid for the maintenance of lunatics in county jails where little attention was given to their health or special needs.35 The Toronto asylum filled a major need and quickly became overcrowded. One of the early patients transferred to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, not from a county jail but from the Kingston Penitentiary, was Grace Marks. Admitted by warrant to the asylum in May 1852,36 she was observed there in the violent ward by Susanna Moodie who wanted to view the celebrated murderess in the asylum as well as in the penitentiary. In Life in the Clearings, Moodie painted a lurid picture of Grace Marks, the madwoman: “Among these raving maniacs I recognised the singular face of Grace Marks – no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.”37 As a convicted murderer sentenced to life in the penitentiary, Grace Marks differed from the majority of women committed to asylums in Ontario in the nineteenth century. The ambiguities surrounding her committal for “insanity,” however, were not unusual. In addition, Grace Marks was definitely not the only Irish immigrant domestic servant labelled both “mad” and “bad” whether because of intolerable conditions, poverty, overwork, rebellion, physical or mental illness, or mental retardation. The Rockwood Asylum for the criminally insane was opened in Kingston in 1856 and was later integrated into the Ontario provincial asylum system … In the years from 1857 to 1885, slightly over onequarter of the women admitted to Rockwood were identified as from Ireland (105 of 399 patients) and of these Irish women, one-third (36 or 34.4 per cent) were listed by occupation as servants. The prevalence of domestic servants among women committed to Rockwood is a clear indication of the stresses that could accompany a life in service. Significantly, servant was the occupation of over one-quarter of all women committed to Rockwood by 1875 (113 of 399 cases). As well, among the immigrant servants committed, Irish women far outnumbered all other ethnic groups combined. As revealed by the Rockwood case files, Irish immigrant domestics admitted to the asylum were women who for a variety of reasons did not behave in a socially acceptable manner. The reasons for admission, of course, were constructed by those committing and overseeing the inmates, not by the patients themselves.38 Hence, the majority of female Irish servants committed to Rockwood were “said to be dangerous,” a characteristic that ensured speedy admission more than it necessarily

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described their behaviour. Nonetheless, the ascription could reinforce stereotypes of the unruly Irish, without distinction of gender, and arouse apprehension regarding women who were seen as deviating drastically from socially approved female behaviour. The asylum records contain hints of the trauma that certain Irish immigrant domestics experienced in the new land, leading to the diagnosis of chronic or acute mania, or occasionally melancholia. Harriet, age twenty-three, was sent to Rockwood from the Lennox and Addington jail in 1870 suffering from chronic mania because “being a perfect stranger … she was arrested from her conduct as a lunatic.” Plagued by poor physical health, which undoubtedly contributed to her problems, she died of blood circulation problems ten years later.39 Harriet’s condition reflected that of other Irish domestics committed to Rockwood who suffered from isolation, poverty, or disease, but her youth was exceptional. Of the thirty-three Irish servants admitted between 1857 and 1885 for whom age is recorded, all but four were over the age of thirty, the majority being in their thirties and forties. Older age apparently made the women either less resilient or less compliant. Catherine, age thirty-four, came to the Frontenac police station in 1878 for protection because she was a stranger in the district. Arrested for vagrancy, she was transferred to Rockwood because she had delusions of being a great personage and assaulted other women in the jail.40 Frequently the women committed were reported as having religious or other delusions. Ann, age forty, who was sent from the Carleton jail in 1869, was tormented by witches and spirits, was jealous of all women, and attempted to burn her mistress and house …41 While some of the women, like Harriet and Catherine, were strangers and alone in the new world, others had family who were unable or unwilling to provide the considerable support needed. Pressed for survival, poorer Irish immigrant families did not have the resources to cope with women with serious problems …42 Most domestic servants were not married so the predominantly single status of Irish domestics confined to Rockwood is not surprising. Slightly over half of the Irish servants committed to Rockwood died in the institution, often after ten or more years in custody. For these women, the walls of the asylum starkly confined and buried the sad distortions of their immigrant dreams … For example, one woman, after twenty years in the asylum, died at a kettle while working in the kitchen as part of her asylum treatment.43 Some of the Irish servants who did not die in Rockwood were transferred to another asylum,

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usually Toronto. Only one-quarter of the Irish servants committed by 1885 were reported as discharged, usually to family or friends. Refuge in Reform Asylums Refuge in reform asylums or Magdalene asylums provided a somewhat more hopeful route from jail for Irish immigrant women down on their luck than did asylums for the insane. Reform asylums served as a type of halfway house between jail, or the street, and restoration to a respectable life in the community. For nineteenth-century Magdalene asylums, religious salvation was an integral part of the redemption process. They wished to restore unfortunate women to a respectable life of work and family and also to save them for the life to come. Because of the close connection between domesticity and respectability for mid-nineteenthcentury Ontario women, Magdalene asylums prepared homeless women for domestic service. Hence, Magdalene asylums may have provided some Irish immigrant domestics with a second chance for a better life in Ontario, but only in their former occupation and only if they adapted to the discipline taught in the asylum. Because of its importance as an immigrant-receiving city, Toronto is a good centre for examining the sanctuary offered by refuge asylums. The downward mobility of certain female migrants to Toronto aroused concern regarding unprotected women adrift in the city as early as the 1850s. Consequently, with the support of influential men and the Protestant clergy, a group of Toronto women began the Toronto Magdalene Asylum or Industrial House of Refuge in the mid-1850s.44 The women’s committee visited jails to make contact with women who were willing to come to the refuge and also admitted “wanderers” from the streets. They aimed to “afford the means of reformation to every fallen woman, without reference to creed or origin, who seriously desires to amend her life.”45 The women on the streets and in the jails were portrayed not as criminals but as sinners in need of salvation. The literature shifted, however, from most frequently portraying the women as weak and being led into temptation by unsavoury surroundings to later portraying them as actively seeking pleasure … The asylum sought to reform inmates through work discipline and the gospel of love. Inmates had to agree to remain at least a year, not leaving the premises or having any contact with former friends or associates. Within the refuge, they were expected to adhere to a strict daily schedule of duties, work, and worship.46 Those who showed

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suitable progress after twelve months were found positions in domestic service, preferably in a country setting. The reformers urged mistresses to exercise benevolent supervision over their servants.47 The emphasis on personal moral guidance, and the religious belief that each was placed by God in a particular social rank, however, meant that the reformers did not address the class inequities, cultural gulfs, or imbalance in sexual power that women encountered as domestic servants. Many of the women seeking admission to the refuge would have been more aware than their benefactors of the potential hazards of domestic service. Their motives in voluntarily entering the asylum are not so clearly revealed in the records. Undoubtedly, for those leaving jail or others who had no home, the food, lodging, and clothing provided by the refuge would have seemed attractive. Irish women may already have been acquainted with Magdalene asylums. In the nineteenth century, at least twenty-three asylums or refuges were established in Ireland and these asylums seem to have been considered preferable to workhouses by at least some needy women …48 The willingness to submit to the isolation and rigid discipline of the refuge for months or years may in part be evidence of a penitent desire for reformation but definitely reveals the harsh conditions of the city for migrant women without sufficient personal or family resources. Conclusion The court and asylum records allow us to examine some of the problems encountered and even some of the strategies employed by Irish immigrant servants. Domestic service was the main paid occupation for Irish immigrant women, whether they came to Ontario with family, with friends, with a workhouse group, or on their own. The gendered nature of work that created a continuous demand for female migrants to meet the need for servants, allowed large numbers of Irish women to join the movement across the Atlantic. The conditions of live-in domestic service, however, placed Irish women, far more than Irish men, in situations of isolation and potential loneliness. Ethnic and religious prejudice could create stressful relations with employers for Irish, and especially Irish Catholic, servants. Though Grace Marks, and women like her, were white and members of what a hundred years later would be viewed as a “preferred” immigrant group, in the mid-nineteenth century, their working-class and ethno-religious identity placed them near the bottom of the social ranks.

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The cultural gulf between employee and employer created problems, especially for recently dislocated women with few community supports. Not surprisingly, not all Irish immigrant women were able to overcome these challenges and adapt successfully to the new society. Jail and asylum records provide a glimpse into the lives of Irish immigrant servants who were deemed a threat to public morality or the safety of society because of drunkenness, vagrancy, larceny, or insanity. In some cases, Irish servants, who were out of both work and home, actively sought admission to jail as a means of obtaining food and lodging. Undoubtedly for similar reasons, others agreed to enter the Toronto Magdalene Asylum either on leaving jail or as an alternative to jail. More often, though, Irish immigrant domestics were committed to jail or to an insane asylum such as Rockwood because they did not conform to socially approved female behaviour. A double moral standard made public drunkenness, the crime for which most Irish women were jailed, an even greater evil for women than for men. The decisions of state officials also were constructed within a context of ethnic and religious prejudgments. Stereotyped constructions of both gender and ethnicity thus conspired to limit opportunities for security and social advancement for many Irish immigrant women like Grace Marks. Immigration to Canada offered comfort and independence to many individuals, but for some hopeful women, discriminatory attitudes and unpleasant work situations made them feel like strangers, more than sisters, in the new world.

NOTES 1 Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996). For consistency we use the term Ontario throughout the nineteenth century. 2 Susan E. Houston, “The Role of the Criminal Law in Redefining ‘Youth’ in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada,” Historical Studies in Education, Special Issue 6, 3 (1994): 39–55. 3 Susanna Moodie, Life in the Clearings (Toronto: Macmillan, 1959), originally published in England in 1853 and in New York in 1854. Moodie describes Grace Marks, “the celebrated murderess” in chapter 10, “Grace Marks,” and chapter 15, “Lunatic Asylum.” 4 Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace,” Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies, 21 November 1996 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press), 7–9.

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5 Patrick O’Sullivan, “Introduction” to Irish Women and Irish Migration, vol. 4, The Irish World Wide (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 1, states that “certainly for the period 1871–1971 greater female emigration is the Irish norm.” 6 Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1989). 7 D.H. Akenson, “Ontario: Whatever Happened to the Irish?” Canadian Papers in Rural History 3 (1982); D.H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984); Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988); C.J. Houston and W.J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 8 Susan Jenkins, “Irish Women Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Ontario” (honours research essay, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1989); N.H. Carrier and J.R. Jeffery, External Migration: A Study of the Available Statistics, 1815– 1950 (London: Great Britain – General Register Office, 1953); Province of Canada, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1854–8; Province of Canada, Sessional Papers, 1859–65; Canada, Annual Reports of the Minister of Agriculture, Sessional Papers, 1868–77. 9 Dympna McLoughlin, “Superfluous and Unwanted Deadweight: The Emigration of Nineteenth-Century Irish Pauper Women,” in O’Sullivan, Irish Women and Irish Migration, 66–88. 10 Ontario, “Annual Report of the Department of Immigration,” Sessional Papers, 1869–89. See especially report of Sheil, agent in Southern Ireland, and J. Murphy, the Cork agent. 11 Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 289; Claudette Lacelle, Urban Domestic Servants in 19th-Century Canada (Ottawa: Environment Canada, Parks, 1987), 76–9. 12 Canadian Illustrated News 25, 7 (January 1882), 16. 13 Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 10. 14 For an elaboration of sources for research on Irish female domestics, see L. McLean and M. Barber, “Making Colonial Homes: Sources on Irish, Female Domestics in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” in Françoise Le Jeune, ed., Contribution and Legacy of European Female Emigrants to Canada (Nantes: Centre for Research in Canadian Studies, Université de Nantes, Peter Lang, 2003).

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15 This study is based on a random sample of four jail registers, except in the case of Perth and Grey counties, where all committals were recorded because of the limited number of women. The results are accurate within a range of plus or minus 5 per cent. 16 For the earlier period, see M.A. Garland and J.J. Talman, “Pioneer Drinking Habits and the Rise of the Temperance Agitation in Upper Canada Prior to 1840,” in F. Armstrong, H.A. Stevenson, and J.D. Wilson, eds., Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 171–93. On Leeds/Grenville and Lanark counties, see Glenn J. Lockwood, “Temperance in Upper Canada as Ethnic Subterfuge,” in Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ed., Drink in Canada: Historical Essays (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 43–69. On the temperance movement in Canada prior to Confederation, see Janet Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). On the later women’s temperance movement, see Sharon Cook, “Through Sunshine and Shadow”: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). 17 Warsh, Drink in Canada. 18 Ibid.; Jim Baumohl, “Inebriate Institutions,” 99. 19 On the public role of women in another large city during a similar time period, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986). For the classic study on Victorian ideology of spatial and psychological separation, and the creation of the public world of men and the private world of women, see Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 150–74. 20 This trend resembles a national pattern of female incarceration. Studies in other parts of British North America report the highest level of committals for women between 1851 and 1861 (Hamilton) and 1865 and 1866 (Halifax). Michael Katz et al., The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 240; Judith Fingard, The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax (Porters Lake, NS: Pottersfield Press, 1989), 23 (Table 2); and Jane B. Price, “‘Raised in Rockhead. Died in the Poor House’: Female Petty Criminals in Halifax, 1864–1890,” in Philip Girard and Jim Phillips, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 3, Nova Scotia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 205 (Table 1). For the period following 1880, see Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

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21 See Toronto By-law No. 322, “By-law to Provide for the Maintenance and Care of Public Parks, Squares and Grounds”: Sec. 2, Toronto Metropolitan Archives (hereafter TMA), By-Laws of the City of Toronto, 30 July 1860. 22 TMA, Toronto City Council Minutes Report No. 7, “The Board of Commissioners of Police for the City of Toronto,” 1 February 1859. 23 TMA, Toronto City Council Minutes, Appendix, 6 March 1863. 24 Globe, 29 May 1865. 25 Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 194–201. 26 Library and Archives Canada, CO 42/651, 182–3 cited in Turner, “80 Stout and Healthy Girls,” Canada: An Historical Magazine 3, 2 (December 1975): 48–9. 27 Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO), RG 20, F-40, Copies of Council Minutes Pertaining to the Jail, “Report of the Committee on County property and gaol management,” 7 June 1870. 28 AO, RG 20, F-40, Copies of Council Minutes Pertaining to the Jail, “Report of Jail Committee,” 29 January 1869. 29 For a fuller discussion of this practice, see Lorna McLean, “‘Common Criminals, Simple Justice’: The Social Construction of Crime in NineteenthCentury Ontario, 1840–1881” (doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1996), 97–136. 30 On nineteenth-century perceptions of “the criminal servant,” see Lacelle, Urban Domestic Servants, 120–30. 31 Ibid., 89–104, 130–2. On the contractual obligations between master and servant, see Paul Craven, “The Law of Master and Servant in MidNineteenth-Century Ontario,” in David Flaherty, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 175–211. 32 See also Lacelle, Urban Domestic Servants, 130. 33 AO, RG 22, series 390, Judge Richards, York and Peel Counties, 1860, The Queen v. Mary Jane Borland, 227–31. Jail registers for this year are only summary and do not list the country of birth. 34 Wendy Mitchinson, “Gender and Insanity as Characteristics of the Insane: A Nineteenth-Century Case,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 4 (1987): 102. 35 Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, “‘In Charge of the Loons’: A Portrait of the London, Ontario Asylum for the Insane in the Nineteenth Century,” Ontario History 74, 3 (September 1982): 140. 36 AO, RG 10-20-B-1, Admission Orders Nos. 1182 and 1183, Grace Marks and Bridget Maloney. 37 Moodie, Life in the Clearings, 224.

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38 Most literature on insane asylums focuses on the purpose of the asylums. Wendy Mitchinson, “Reasons for Committal to a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Ontario Insane Asylum: The Case of Toronto,” in W. Mitchinson and J.D. McGinnis, eds., Essays in the History of Canadian Medicine (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988), 88–109, is one article that provides comparative information on reasons for committal. 39 AO, RG 10-20-F-1–1, Kingston Psychiatric Hospital, Casebook, Female, 7 May 1857–25 June 1885, 59, Registration Number 660. 40 Ibid., 176, Registration Number 1163. 41 Ibid., 28, Registration Number 455. 42 Mitchinson, “Reasons for Committal,” 94, notes that because of their poverty Irish Canadian families could not afford to take care of their insane and sent them to the asylum. 43 AO, RG 10-20-F-1-1, Casebook, Female, 1857–1885, 28, Registration Number 455. 44 AO, Toronto Industrial Refuge and Aged Men’s and Women’s Homes 1854–1890, Annual Report of the Toronto Magdalene Asylum or Female House of Refuge, 1855; 1874, 5. 45 Ibid., 1854, 6. 46 Ibid., 1854, 7; 1858. 47 Ibid., 1880. 48 Maria Luddy, “Prostitution and Rescue Work in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy, eds., Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1990), 61.

Taming and Training Greek “Peasant Girls” and the Gendered Politics of Whiteness in Postwar Canada: Canadian Bureaucrats and Immigrant Domestics, 1950s–1960s N o u la Mina

Introduction Even before Penelope’s ship, the Queen Frederica, landed at Pier 21 in Halifax after sailing from Greece in July 1963, her job and living arrangements were made. Canadian officials with the National Employment Service (NES) met the ship and escorted Penelope and her group to Toronto or Montreal to begin a one-year contract as live-in domestic workers.1 Recruited … to help meet the continuing demand among middle-class Canadians for maids, these so-called peasant girls had taken a training course in “modern” housekeeping that also promised to prepare them for a future role as mothers. One of the overseas training staff had even suggested calling it “Operation My Fair Lady,” in reference to the musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s play about the remaking of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a respectable English lady. In her opinion, there was “something magical about the transformation of a young woman of almost primitive background and bleak future” into one “equipped for a brand new life at a well-paying job” that “assures her more dignity.”2 … Upon arrival in Toronto, however, Penelope and another recruit, Petroula, left Union Station in the company of other compatriots – Petroula with a brother-in-law’s employer, a Greek restaurant owner, and Penelope with her friend Voula, an earlier arrival now working at a restaurant with other Greeks. When informed that Penelope had to fulfil her contract, Voula reportedly quipped to the NES officer that This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version from Canadian Historical Review 94, 4 (December 2013): 514–39.

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“she had taken women before right from the train and would continue to do so” because “saying they would do household work” was “the only way Greek women could get into Canada.”3 And off they went without further comment. The main details of Penelope’s case were frustratingly familiar to the immigration and labour officials who coordinated this labour scheme, which brought more than 10,500 Greek women into Canada as domestics between 1951 and 1963.4 Before Ottawa liberalized Canadian immigration policy in 1962, this scheme offered one of the few avenues by which Greek women could enter Canada as independent immigrants. A majority of them fulfilled their contracts, but a sizeable number abandoned them … usually for jobs in the service industries of Toronto’s and Montreal’s burgeoning Greek communities. The bureaucrats who oversaw these Greek domestics portrayed them in contradictory ways, as pawns of their patriarchal families and communities and as manipulators of Canadian immigration policy … who went “rushing into the shelter of the nearest Greek community.”5 But if Penelope and others like her were simply manipulators or pawns of family or kin who helped them break their contracts, why did the Greek domestic scheme endure for more than a decade? The question is important, given that Ottawa discontinued other live-in domestic schemes initiated in southern Europe (Italy and Spain) after only a year. Comparing it with the well-studied programs that came before and after it also provides a women-centred analysis … to the heavily male-focused scholarship on … the “in-between” racial status of white ethnics such as southern Europeans in North America.6 … This study brings to light the contradictions or paradoxes along with the gendered assumptions of modernity and morality underpinning the … program … [and] highlights the shifting racial-ethnic hierarchies … during the first two decades following the Second World War, [when] the once-maligned Greeks were reconsidered a malleable and even a preferred white immigrant labour source, especially in comparison with the non-white workers Canada was starting to recruit by the late 1950s.7 The government’s Greek domestic scheme generated a voluminous collection of documents but by also making use of oral histories it is possible to contextualize the domestics’ narratives and their motives for emigration. More specifically, this study draws upon a set of five oral interviews with three former domestics and two of their family members, a database of fifty in-depth interviews, of which thirty-five are with working-class women and men, as well as a collection of over

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eighty interviews with post–Second World War Greek immigrants housed in the Multicultural History Society of Ontario archives …8 Scholars and Contexts Following the Second World War, domestic work’s exploitative features made it unattractive to women from Britain and northern Europe, who, as racially desirable immigrants, increasingly found jobs elsewhere. As the shortages of domestics from traditionally preferred countries forced the Canadian government to seek new sources of foreign workers, beginning with the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Europe, immigration and labour officials constructed crude typologies of preferred immigrant labour. Milda Danys and Christiane Harzig have documented the preference among selection agents in the DP camps for Baltic women of “good average intelligence and emotional stability,” considering them racially superior to others, such as Polish Jews. They also documented the degradation the women experienced during screening, which involved being subjected to venereal disease tests and fielding leading questions meant to expose dubious sexual histories.9 As the sources of cheap DP contract labour for various industries dried up and many finished or broke their contracts, Ottawa began looking elsewhere, including at traditionally non-preferred countries in southern Europe, such as Italy, a historically important source of mostly male low-wage migrant labour.10 Franca Iacovetta’s analysis of the 1950–1 Italian live-in domestic scheme highlights the officials’ biases against “backward” rural girls … She argues that its abrupt termination can best be explained by the refusal of so many to honour their contracts. The Italians represented a sharp contrast to the many Lithuanian domestics who … earlier had completed their contracts …11 Scholarship on the non-white domestics entering Canada in increasing numbers beginning in the late 1950s, but especially since the late 1960s, has brought out the racial and gender biases of policies affecting them. As Sedef Arat-Koc notes, whereas earlier waves of British and (mostly) European women arriving as landed immigrants were viewed as potential “mothers of the [Canadian] nation,” women of colour recruited beginning in the 1950s from the Caribbean, and by the 1970s from the Philippines, were considered “disposable, non- members.”12 The shift in racial composition, she adds, led to the deterioration of their legal status and working conditions. Studies of Canadian temporary guest worker schemes adopted after the end of the Greek domestic

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scheme … have exposed the racist legislative restrictions prohibiting these women from entering as independent immigrants through the allegedly non-racist points system …13 … More focused on celebrating women’s agency, Evangelia Tastsoglou’s assessment of the Greek domestic scheme documents how the shifting gender dynamics in the women’s families, and the regulatory measures imposed to police the morality of single women, mediated the women’s experiences.14 Mindful of the persistent structures and relations of domination that circumscribed the women’s complex lives in Greece and Canada, and the choices made in an effort to improve their situation, this study emphasizes the uneven relations and gaps in perception between the recruits and the Canadian and overseas bureaucrats trying to refashion them into respectable immigrants.15 … Importing Greek Labour Greek migration to Canada dates back to the late nineteenth century, when small numbers of mostly male sojourners arrived as labourers, later gravitating to the service and restaurant industries, which became a niche for Greeks in cities like Montreal and Toronto. It was only in the early twentieth century that wives joined men and families arrived, and that more sizeable communities of Greeks slowly developed, especially in Ontario and Quebec, but the outbreak of war closed Canada’s doors to all immigrants.16 The Greek domestics who came to Canada during the 1950s arrived at the beginning of the largest influx of Greek migration to Canada and were typically the first of their families to emigrate. In response to various pressures, including Canadian employers’ demand for low-wage workers, refugee lobbies [and] the Cold War … the Canadian government gradually reopened its doors to immigrants after the war. But while it widened the category of admissible immigrants, racial selection and the domestic economy’s so-called absorptive capacity would still put limits on the influx of immigrants.17 The initial reluctance of the new Department of Citizenship and Immigration (DCI) to support large-scale migration was reflected in the Immigration Act of 1952, which gave the minister wide discretionary powers to exclude individuals on the basis of nationality, education, and “probable inability to become readily assimilated,” among other reasons.18 As Europeans, Greeks were not prohibited from immigrating to Canada … but … they were not automatically considered ideally suited for

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Canadian work and society … One bureaucrat ranked Greeks below Italians, calling the latter “a hardier type” … than the average “pain in the neck” Greek …19 Given the low regard Canadian bureaucrats held of Italian contract workers, such comments underscore selection agents’ propensity to invoke crude racial stereotypes.20 Nevertheless, persistent labour shortages and other factors, including Greek lobbies bolstered by Cold War concerns, led Ottawa to revise its stance.21 … As elsewhere, the DCI decision to begin recruitment from Greece began with very low-scale trial movements of Greeks whose skills or trades were in short supply in Canada. Such schemes commodified those from peripheral Europe, but since contract workers arrived in Canada with landed status and thus could sponsor close relatives, the decision was met with approval in Greece. Furthermore, as Canadian officials faced continuing pressures to be more proactive, they began expressing more confidence in Greeks’ capacity to assimilate to Canadian social and economic life. In explaining his support for a more ambitious Greek domestic scheme in late summer 1951, Deputy Minister of Immigration Laval Fortier cited as factors the continuing labour demand as well as the “serious over-population problem in Greece” and the Greeks’ brave fight “against Communist domination,” a reference to the 1946 Civil War triggered by Communist rebel attacks on the pro-West Athens government … By increasing the flow of Greek domestics, Fortier added, they could also better “ascertain” Greek “suitability” overall for “Canadian conditions.”22 Although the deputy minister of labour considered Fortier’s initial recommendation of five hundred domestics too high, by October 1951 the director of immigration, C.E.S. Smith, optimistically declared that “appropriate type[s] of Greek immigrants,” namely, “hard workers, clean and of good appearance,” would be found for domestic service …23 Over the next few years, Canadian support for the Greek domestics … continued, despite reports of contract-breaking among a growing percentage of arrivals. Early estimates hovered around 20 per cent, later increasing to 42 and 45 per cent in the early 1960s.24 This is because Ottawa saw few alternatives to Greece as a source of white women workers. With the failure of the Italian – and even shorter Spanish – domestic scheme (about which very little is known) by 1952, Ottawa became anxious about the European pool of domestics drying up altogether. This seemed all the more likely to them, following the failure in 1953 to launch a live-in domestic scheme in Portugal, due largely to President Salazar’s opposition to the emigration of the country’s single

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women.25 To be sure, Portuguese immigrant women would eventually become heavily associated with cleaning jobs in Canada, but it took place much later [and] involved live-out work …26 And although Italian migration to Canada continued to grow after the end of the Italian domestic scheme … those who [entered domestic work] were also liveout cleaners.27 But none of this was apparent in 1955, when a continuing demand for cheap live-in domestics, combined with dwindling European supplies, prompted anxious bureaucrats to begin to experiment with small numbers of Caribbean domestics from Jamaica and Barbados, having done so only once before with the short-lived 1910–11 scheme involving women from Guadeloupe.28 But white women workers were clearly preferred. Canadian racial anxieties arguably turned the Greek “village girls” … into desirable white women [though it] did not protect them from harsh or condescending commentary. With enticements in place – assisted passage and interest-free travel loans to be paid back in small monthly amounts – more than ten thousand Greek women ultimately responded to the scheme. Arriving as landed immigrants who could sponsor family members to Canada, provided they showed means of support, several thousand of them did so. Only “Quality” Girls The involvement of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), an international organization founded in 1951 initially to assist in the relocation of European refugees, was also instrumental in the success of Greek migration, largely because it significantly reduced Ottawa’s operational costs. Its staff included European and US home economists and social workers responsible for facilitating the resettlement of refugees from countries including West Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Greece, by assisting in selection, recruitment, and training.29 A key staff person was American Jane Moody, deputy for operations for the ICEM in Athens … US newspapers described Moody, in Athens because her investment-broker husband was based there, as “an American homemaker born on an Indiana farm” and “mother of three” who was helping to “prepare Greek women for lives in new homelands” by “teaching them how to use soap, hot and cold running water, to percolate coffee and make toast.”30 Letters of application were sent to the Canadian visa office in Athens and screened by ICEM personnel, who selected women on the basis of

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age, appearance, and education. Predictably, preference was given to single women, twenty-one to thirty-five years of age, of “good physical condition, acceptable appearance and a certain level of education,” all this meant to exclude illiterates.31 As with the DP recruits, Greek women’s bodies and intimate lives were scrutinized during selection. Besides the medical exams, they had to take a psychiatric test to rule out “emotional instability,” a worrying matter for some, given the stresses of having endured two consecutive wars. During screening, ICEM personnel collected “social histories” of applicants, including a family history with a focus on “character, and social behaviour,” indicating that aptitude and moral as well as physical fitness mattered.32 Selection officers were instructed to “reject girls whose appearance, intelligence or social background is either too high or too low to make them suitable for domestic service in Canada.”33 Acknowledging they would also become future Canadians, staff also sought out “quality” girls. Expressly designed to teach the recruits how to “keep a modern home,” the intensive two- and later four-month training course involved daily instruction in household work and English.34 Since many of the women hailed from small villages, the city-based training programs were considered a transitional space where each could learn about modern household work and urban living.35 The vocational training centre in Athens included a rented apartment where women would learn “modern housekeeping techniques”’ with “the latest equipment available in Greece”36 … Since housing was not provided, the women stayed with relatives or found places in Athens where they lived “crowd[ed] together 3–4 of them in a cheap rented room.”37 While focused on “preparation for domestic placement,” the ICEM Athens staff also envisaged the program as … “helping these young women to be better homemakers, that is, wives and mothers, and more easily assimilable into community life in Canada.”38 ICEM personnel were clearly enthusiastic about their progress with the Greek girls; the official who had proposed calling the program “Operation My Fair Lady” made her remarks after visiting the Athens centre and declaring it a veritable scientific and moral laboratory of modernity.39 … At more than two hundred pages, the domestic training manual offers striking evidence of this mandate …40 The manual was composed by Rachel Barbatsi, home economics adviser to the ICEM in Athens for Greek domestics destined for Canada or Australia. Canadian personnel also made some suggestions, such as more information on Canadian

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winters and … automatic dishwashers, ready-mix cakes, and basements in Canadian homes.41 The bulk of the manual was devoted to domestic labour, with lessons on cleaning, cooking, and child care, but it also considered personal hygiene, etiquette, and courtship. An unmistakable undertone of condescension and paternalism is evident … Women were told to be “pleasant and cheerful during meals” and to demonstrate proper table manners: “chew food with the mouth closed” and “no noise should be made in drinking or eating.” They were also to “look and be clean, well groomed and dressed for the type of work you will do.”42 … Furthermore, the manual provided contradictory information on class structure and differing social customs. Among other things, it claimed that in Canada and Australia, “only high income professional business or industrial men’s families can afford a maid,” but later pointed out that, unlike in Greece, Canada or Australia had “very little, if any, class distinction.” It emphasized the egalitarian nature of marriage and supposedly superior Canadian democratic family structure, stating that “boys and girls are considered equally important.”43 To underscore Canadian women’s freedom, it noted that whereas Greek marriages required dowries, marriage in Canada (and Australia) should “be based on love without commercial or material consideration.”44 Such advice … was likely informed by these gatekeepers’ stereotypes of overbearing immigrant men. Never, of course, would they recognize that patriarchy was deeply embedded in bourgeois models of the egalitarian Canadian family, with its male breadwinner and female homemaker.45 The manual explained the possibilities and limits of homosocial recreation and heterosexual courtship. The YWCA and church were listed as good places to meet friends. It spoke of the personal freedoms women would enjoy, noting, “You will be able to make friends and go to movies … with a young man without being gossiped about, provided your conduct is good.” Proper dating etiquette was discussed at length: boyfriends should “come to your house to fetch you to go out for the evening,” since “it is not considered good for a young woman to meet her boyfriend (a good meaning in English) on the corner of down-town, as nice girls do not do it.”46 Placed within the context of Cold War anxiety over female delinquency, such advice was typical of the prescriptive literature at the time.47 But for Europeans who had survived the horrors of war, especially sexual violence, such advice was offensive.48 Still, the inclusion of dating advice suggests officials could imagine Greek domestics as future wives and mothers … “No doubt you have thought of

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marriage as a happy ending for your migration,” the manual stated, adding, “Your new country also hopes you will marry and establish a home of your own.”49 While no doubt Canada’s gatekeepers were concerned about immigrant men’s sexuality, male recruits were not subjected to the same degree of moral scrutiny or regulation.50 Ultimately, the training manual, like the bureaucrats’ correspondence, infantilized Greek domestics and imparted contradictory advice. It urged them to aspire to middle-class conceptions of marriage and motherhood but told them not to forget their role as workers. It stressed the benefits of domestic work (free room and board) and urged them to complete their contracts … [and] work quietly and efficiently … (“Sure you have trouble, every-one else does too. Practice smiling and talking about pleasant things.”51) Bureaucratic Jitters ICEM personnel were generally positive about the outcome of their training efforts, but Canadian bureaucrats, fielding complaints from employers, were more critical. Told the women were stubborn and unreliable, they blamed it on lives led entirely in primitive villages …52 The most common complaint, however, was about women not honouring their contracts … This prompted some calls to raise the minimal education level, but within limits, as high school graduates were deemed even more likely to abandon domestic work for better jobs …53 The bureaucrats also singled out the patriarchal nature of Greek culture, claiming that rural girls were “more … susceptible to the blandishments of members of the Greek community in Canada” …54 Indeed, the most frequently cited reason for breaking the contract was “interference” by Greek Canadian communities … and … Greek Canadian employers …55 Canadian employers also complained …: wrote one female employer, “They all seem to have relations … and away they go.”56 Attributing the problem to the patriarchal Greek family, Fortin reminded his agents that Greek men still viewed their daughters as “second rate children” who “are not allowed to have a will or a say of their own.”…57 … Paradoxically, the same officials also accused the Greek domestics of manipulating immigration policies to their own advantage. Annoyed with a group who had initially agreed to go to western Canada but later insisted on working in Montreal or Toronto, Fortin quipped, “The girls

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were well aware that Winnipeg was more than a ‘street car ride’ from Montreal” and “are just being smart.” In Greece, he added, “they are as meek as lambs,” but once in Canada “they can be as deceptive, stubborn and insolent as possible.”58 … Women’s Negotiations Were the bureaucrats right to portray Greek women as village girls victimized by a patriarchal culture and as manipulators of Canadian generosity? … [T]heir depictions of these women’s impoverished condition was, in many respects, accurate. Like many other Greek immigrants, including a majority of my informants,59 the three domestics I interviewed had come originally from villages without electricity or indoor plumbing. They included Despina, who arrived in 1957 as the first from her village of Louka to leave for Canada. The daughter of small-scale farmers, she wanted to escape rural life, where clean water had to be procured from the communal spring and routine domestic chores involved backbreaking labour. “I came because I was poor,” … [and]… after living in the nearby city of Tripoli for a few years to attend school … “I couldn’t stay in Louka.”60 If many of the recruits were of rural origin, they were not the country bumpkins depicted by some officials … Many had lived in big cities like Tripoli, Athens, or Patra to go to school, work, or learn a skill. One scenario saw rural families sending the eldest daughter to the nearest city to apprentice as a seamstress or learn another trade …61 Since the domestics who entered Canada had first lived in Athens for several months for their training, all of them had some familiarity with city living … Canadian portraits of the domestics’ uncomplicated lives in Greece also ignored the harsh realities of women who, as girls growing up during the wars, had endured scarcity and trauma. In explaining why she chose to go to Canada as a maid, a former Greek domestic interviewed by Tastsoglou stressed the exhausting daily grind and a traumatic night when Communist rebels invaded her home and took away her handicapped father.62 Poverty and fear were similarly invoked by all of my informants old enough to remember the war, including middle-class men and women who spoke in emotional terms about perpetual hunger.63 Former domestic Stavroula put it bluntly, “Poor, poor. That’s why I came” …64

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Were Greek domestics as manipulative and manipulated as officials insisted? … The complaints were not entirely unfounded. Having signed contracts in Greece, many did fail to report to the NES office in Canada and instead married or found jobs with compatriots … “Some girls had families here and their relatives take them,” recalled Despina, whose explanation applied to her own experience. But pride was also a motivating factor for Despina, who explained that her employer, “a nice Jewish lady,” had liked her (“I was so good with her kids”), but she refused to stay after catching her boss searching her suitcase on suspicion of theft. Angry and lonely, Despina reconnected with her uncle’s koumbaro (best man) who had immigrated to Toronto a few years earlier. After just four months of domestic work, Despina’s extended family found her a waitressing job in a Greek-owned restaurant and offered her a room at their house.65 In taking it, she joined the large influx of post-1945 immigrants, women and men, who enlarged an older Greek niche in family-owned restaurants.66 Certainly, some Greek women used the scheme solely to gain entry into Canada and sponsor family members, but such manipulation was hardly unique to Greeks. Desperate to rebuild war-torn lives, Lithuanian and other DP domestics had lied about their health and marital status, while Italians were considered the most frequent contract breakers.67 As contract breakers, Greek women fell somewhere between DP and Italian groups. Moreover, the steady growth in Greek abandonment of contracts, which reached 45 per cent only in 1960,68 no doubt also reflected a spreading awareness that, contrary to the menacing threats of bureaucrats, Ottawa was tolerating the practice [because of] “manpower needs [and] our sympathy for the Greeks who had suffered so much and our admiration for their struggles against various types of oppression.”69 … [T]he minister of citizenship and immigration, Walter Harris, [said] that Ottawa avoided using deportation to force such immigrants to comply with their labour contracts because doing so would violate the Canadian ideal of individual freedom, a reference to Canada’s emerging status as a middle power and a refashioning of itself as humanitarian and progressive.70 The domestic scheme offered thousands of Greek women a rare opportunity to migrate independently to Canada, rather than as sponsored family dependants, and then sponsor their kin – a reversal of the usual gender pattern of migration that took on even greater significance in the particular years in the 1950s when Greek men of military age could not emigrate.71 The pride with which my domestic interviewees

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remember their pioneering status as the family’s first migrant and sponsor is well-captured by Despina, who entreated me to understand just how much her “sacrifices” had given her family opportunities unavailable in Greece … [and] … allowed kin who remained behind in Greece “to survive” because of fewer mouths to feed and larger property inheritances.72 … Stavroula’s adult daughter said, “I grew up knowing the story of my mom and I was proud of her. One of eight kids and she was the first one to come to Canada.”73 Attributing power or influence to women’s pioneering role is complicated, however, given that … many of the sponsoring domestics were carrying out a family strategy of sending young women to Canada to sponsor parents, siblings, and fiancés. Moreover, at the community level, these pioneers have been largely forgotten. No mention is made of them in the many Greek newspapers, club newsletters, and church and community yearbooks …74 By contrast, these sources celebrate women who, like the ladies of the Philoptoho, a benevolent church association, conformed to conventional notions of femininity.75 Such silences reflect, in part, the biases of the male elites who shaped community political and cultural mandates, but it may also indicate a silencing of women’s stories in their own family on account of men’s narratives enjoying more attention. Indeed, the two husbands of former domestics acknowledged their wives’ pioneering role only when probed. It should be noted … that, even at the time, not all Canadians viewed Greek domestics negatively. There were placement officers who considered them “good, conscientious workers with a fondness for children.”76 On at least one occasion, a local NES officer counselled a badly treated maid to leave her placement and get reposted. This happened to one of my informants, Anna, who arrived in Canada in 1959 at the age of twenty-one and complained repeatedly about her first employer (“a disgusting woman,” who had made her sleep in the basement “next to the furnace going all night”) until a helpful NES officer placed her with a “nice” family who encouraged her to go to English night school and earn a certificate as a personal support worker.77 Moreover, large numbers of Greek women did complete their contracts, including Stavroula, a 1961 arrival who explained to me that she found nothing objectionable about domestic work and had even chosen to stay with her employer for a second year until she married. Stavroula also recalled that friendships with other Greek domestics in her mostly Jewish neighbourhood made her early years in Canada bearable.78 Both Stavroula

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and Anna had fond memories of their employers, whom they later invited to their weddings and children’s baptisms. The bureaucrats’ theory of how the patriarchal burden of the dowry encouraged Greek women’s migration – fathers sending daughters away freed up brothers to marry – also requires a more nuanced interpretation.79 … The impetus for migration was not always the result of male decision-making.80 All three former domestics I interviewed said their father objected to their emigrating as domestics. Stressing that her decision to come as a domestic was hers alone, Despina said she did it “to save myself” from the poverty and manual labour that had made life in her village unbearable. Her father, a poor farmer, could not provide her with a sufficient dowry but also expressly forbade her to apply for Canada, but, with the help of an uncle, she defied him.81 … One of eight children, Despina wished to relieve her elder brothers – who already had worked hard and delayed marriage to set up her older sister with a dowry – of delaying further their own marriage plans by “making” the papers “to come to Canada as a housekeeper.”82 The ways my informants construct their narrative of migration … reveal important insights into how these women remember and interpret their pasts.83 Both Despina and Stavroula insist they were being good daughters and sisters by emigrating, and then bringing others. But not all women viewed their migration as a selfless act to assist the family. My third domestic informant, Anna, came from a family of seven daughters, and though her father owned olive groves near Kalamata, he, too, likely struggled to provide his daughters with dowries. Yet, as Anna explained in our interview, she chose to emigrate because she refused to marry a man she felt was interested only in her dowry. Against her father’s demands and her mother’s tearful pleading, Anna took the train to Athens for the training course and several months later sailed to Canada.84 … The officials’ depictions of Greek domestics as docile victims of the Greek communities were also short-sighted. Patriarchy and unequal gender relations limited women’s lives, but these women also sought to carve out some autonomy for themselves within the hierarchies that marginalized them to the lowest echelons of the labour force. As the bureaucrats themselves admitted, most domestics who abandoned their contracts typically found work in waitressing, hairdressing, and factory work. The large number of Greek-owned businesses in the service industry created a demand for female labour in Greek

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communities, offering wages comparable to domestic work.85 That some women chose waitressing in Greek restaurants over domestic work was a pragmatic decision made sometimes by the women themselves and other times by their family. Certainly, some domestics were exploited by other Greeks; as newcomers with little English and few marketable skills, they were vulnerable to Greek Canadians from pre1945 migrations keen to exploit greenhorns from their country.86 A particularly striking case … is [that of] an alleged prostitution ring in 1954 Montreal involving former Greek domestics. The case was referred to the RCMP after several Greek girls abandoned their contracts to work as waitresses in diners owned by Mrs Z, a pre-war Greek immigrant. Mrs Z denied any role in “procuring and inciting her waitresses into prostitution,” insisting she was simply helping out girls from her hometown, but three undercover officers testified that she had approached them separately to ask if they were “interested” in her waitresses. Dressed as stevedores, each of them reportedly paid eight dollars and drove the girl to a rooming house. One of the officers had sex with the girl, but it was not reported (to protect the officer’s job) and the charges were eventually dropped.87 … Even if the women “were not entirely innocent girls vulnerable to predators,” they still did not, as Iacovetta observes, “completely fit the profile of wily European girls on the make.”88 … By the end of 1963, Canada, having withdrawn its membership from the ICEM a year earlier, ended the Greek domestic scheme.89 Some might be tempted to account for its termination by invoking the introduction in 1962 of the point system and the dismantling of explicitly racist criteria in Canadian immigration policy.90 Certainly, contemporary officials and bureaucrats adopted this view, proclaiming that now that skills, education, and training were the criteria for selection, special labour movements … no longer served a purpose.91 However, the introduction of temporary guest worker systems in this supposed liberal era of immigration, whether for Caribbean women, Mexican farm labourers, or Filipina domestics, belies such arguments.92 Conclusion In her examination of the Greek domestic scheme, Tastsoglou compares these women with the recent domestics arriving in Canada from the Philippines. While acknowledging one key difference, that the Greek domestics, unlike Filipina nannies on work permits, entered Canada

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with landed immigrant status, she views the groups as having comparable experiences. The requirement “to remain in domestic service for a pre-defined period of time,” she asserts, similarly restricted the rights and freedom of both groups, making both a case of “partial” citizenship.93 My analysis stresses the differences. Greeks, like other southern Europeans, had been ascribed an in-between racial status, but their whiteness was assured by the migration of people of colour … Greek immigrant domestics had enjoyed comparatively more freedom and mobility than later-arriving migrant Caribbean and Philippine domestics on work contracts who could be deported for not complying with them.94 Greek women routinely abandoned their contracts, but no one faced deportation or even fines. Many of them sponsored family members to Canada even before paying back their assisted passage loan. And frustrated officials understood why: the women knew … the authorities “will not force them to remain in domestic employment,95 or return them to Greece.”96 … If, historically, Greeks occupied a racially in-between status between northern white immigrants and immigrants of colour, in practice the Greek domestics recruited in the 1950s and 1960s were hardly semiindentured servants … Penelope and the other Greek domestics who came to Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s … did not completely fit the stereotypes … [of] primitive village girls under the thumb of fathers or Greek employers and as conniving manipulators of Canadian generosity. And even while [Canadian officials] sometimes failed to recognize the harsh or complex realities that prompted Greek women to sign up for Canada and then refuse or abandon domestic work, they clearly tolerated the (growing) practice. Having initially viewed the Greek domestics as less-than-ideal recruits … the bureaucrats expressed concern that Greece might be the last pool of white live-in domestics and encouraged a more positive portrayal of the Greek women. A privilege denied black Caribbean domestics recruited as temporary guest workers beginning in the latter half of the Greek scheme, the Greek domestics’ status as white landed immigrants, and other factors – namely, labour demands and Cold War priorities – also help explain Ottawa’s tolerance of their delinquencies. Ironically, the officials, though emphatic about training rural village girls to become modern domestics, and also preparing them for eventual mobility into middle-class domesticity, never actually tried to help them move beyond their workingclass status, or in other words, become a “fair lady.” …

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NOTES 1 W. Thomson, director of employment service to director of immigration, 20 Aug. 1963, file 553-33-552, pt. 5, vol. 837, RG 76, Movement of Household Service Workers from Greece, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). 2 Kathleen Teltsch, “Poor Greek Girls Receive Training,” New York Times, 15 November 1959. The musical was based on Pygmalion (London: Constable, 1914). 3 Thomson to director, 20 Aug. 1963. 4 Peter Chimbos, “The Greeks in Canada: An Historical and Sociological Perspective,” in Richard Clogg, ed., The Greek Diaspora in the Twentieth Century (New York: St Martin’s, 1999), 91. 5 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006). Quotation is from Jane Moody, deputy of operations, ICEM, “Comments and Observations Concerning Greek Migration to Canada,” 1957, file 553-33-552, pt. 1, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC. 6 James Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997): 3–44; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Jennifer Guglielmo’s Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 79–109, stands as one of the rare ones to consider women. 7 Peter Chimbos, The Canadian Odyssey: The Greek Experience in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980); Lia Douramakou-Petroleka, “The Elusive Community: Greek Settlement in Toronto, 1900–1940,” in Robert Harney, ed., Gathering Place: Peoples and Neighbourhoods of Toronto, 1834–1945 (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1985), 257–78. 8 Compiled for my doctoral dissertation … my interview base is roughly 60 per cent female, 40 per cent male … Most of the non-working-class intervewees were male elites and activists of middle-class background … 9 Milda Danys, DP: Lithuanian Immigration to Canada after the Second World War (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986), 130, 133; Christine Harzig, “MacNamara’s DP Domestics: Immigration Policy Makers Negotiate Class, Race, and Gender in the Aftermath of World War II,” Social Politics 10, 1 (2004): 23–48. 10 Donald Avery, Reluctant Host: Canada’s Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896– 1994 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995); Franca Iacovetta, Such

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12

13

14

15 16

17 18 19

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Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992). Franca Iacovetta, “‘Primitive Villagers and Uneducated Girls’: Canada Recruits Domestics from Italy, 1951–52,” Canadian Woman Studies 7, 4 (1986): 14–18; Danys, DP, 152. Sedef Arat-Koc, “From ‘Mothers of the Nation’ to Migrant Workers,” in Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, eds., Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 78–99. On the earlier short-lived scheme involving women from Guadeloupe, see Agnes Calliste, “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900–1932,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, 4 (Winter, 1993): 131–48. Daiva Stasiulis and Abigail Bakan, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Patricia Daenzer, Regulating Class Privilege: Immigrant Servants in Canada, 1940s–1990 (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1993); Wenona Giles and Sedef Arat-Koc, eds., Maid in the Market: Women’s Paid Domestic Labour (Halifax: Fernwood, 1994); Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Evangelia Tastsoglou, “‘The Temptations of New Surroundings’: Family, State, and Transnational Gender Politics in the Movement of Greek Domestic Workers to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Evangelia Tastsoglou, ed., Women, Gender, and Diasporic Lives: Labor, Community, and Identity in Greek Migrations (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 81–114. … Shirley Tillotson, “On the Case: Explorations in Social History: A Roundtable Discussion,” Canadian Historical Review 81, 2 (June 2000): 285–90. The 1941 census notes a total of 11,742 Greek-born persons in Canada: Statistics Canada, census of population 1941, origins Greek; Chimbos, Canadian Odyssey, 30. Howard Palmer, ed., Immigration and the Rise of Multiculturalism (Vancouver: Copp Clark, 1975), 58–61; Avery, Reluctant Host, 170–5. Avery, Reluctant Host, 173. R.N. Munroe, district superintendent, to C.E.S. Smith, director of immigration, 16 Sept. 1954, file 998358, pt. 3, vol. 645, RG 76, Immigration Branch, LAC. Franca Iacovetta, “Ordering in Bulk: Canada’s Postwar Immigration Policy and the Recruitment of Contract Workers from Italy,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, 1 (1991): 52.

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21 Ahepa Resolution, 6 Aug. 1947; Report from Department of External Affairs, 22 Dec. 1949; director to deputy minister, 6 Dec. 1957, all in file 3-33-14, vol. 127, RG 26, Admission to Canada of Immigrants from Greece, LAC. 22 Fortier to MacNamara, deputy minister of labour, 23 Aug. 1951, pt. 2, vol. 645, RG 76, LAC. On the Greek Civil War, Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lars Baerentzen, John O. Iatrides, and Ole L. Smith, eds., Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War, 1945–1949 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1987). On Canadian security concerns about Greece, see Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1987). 23 A.H. Brown for deputy minister of labour to Fortier, 4 Sept. 1951; C.E.S. Smith to Laval Fortier, 22 Oct. 1951, both in pt. 2, vol. 645, RG 76, LAC. For more information on the bureaucrats, see Valerie Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–2006 (Toronto: Dundurn, 2007). 24 Memorandum to acting minister, 6 Jan. 1958, pt. 2, vol. 836; Thomson to L.M. Hunter, 28 Jan. 1960, pt. 3, vol. 837; Thomson to Baskerville, 6 July 1961, pt. 4, vol. 837, all in RG 76, Movement of Domestics from Greece, LAC. Percentages are approximate, as there were inconsistencies in recordkeeping. 25 Susana Miranda, “Not Ashamed or Afraid: Portuguese Immigrant Women in Toronto’s Cleaning Industry, 1950s–1995” (doctoral dissertation, York University, 2010), 132. 26 Ibid., chapter 3; Wenona Giles, Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), chapter 4. 27 Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People, chapter 2. 28 Agnes Calliste, “Canada’s Immigration Policy and Domestics from the Caribbean: The Second Domestic Scheme,” in Jesse Vorst, ed., Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers (Toronto: Society for Socialist Studies, 1991), 136–68. 29 Louise Holborn, “Canada and the ICEM,” International Journal 18, 2 (Spring 1963): 211–14; Richard Perruchoud, “From the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to the International Organization for Migration,” International Journal of Refugee Law 1, 4 (1989): 501–17; Louise Holborn, “Intergovernmental Partnerships for Planned Migration,” Migracion 1, 2 (April–June 1961): 5–17. … 30 “Migrating Women of Greece Study American Homemaking,” Milwaukee Journal, 28 Nov. 1957.

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31 ICEM, “Training Programme for Household Service Workers,” 1961, Athens, pt. 6, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 32 Ibid. 33 P. Jacobsen, ICEM deputy director, to Baskerville, 22 May 1957, pt. 1, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC. 34 C.E.S. Smith, “‘Greek Domestics Selected by ICEM,”’ 19 Oct. 1956, vol. 127, RG 26, LAC. 35 “Memorandum Concerning the YWCA,” (n.d.), pt. 4, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 36 Jacobsen to Baskerville, 22 May 1957. 37 “Memorandum Concerning the YWCA.” 38 Charles Wending, chief of mission, to F.G. Rogers, 5 Dec. 1960, pt. 4, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 39 Ibid. 40 No other Canadian historian of postwar domestic schemes has described such a manual. 41 D.K. Ebbens, “Training of Greek Domestic Workers,” 9 Oct. 1959, pt. 3, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 42 ICEM Manual, 2, 3, pt. 6, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 43 Ibid., 1, 3, 5. On fatherhood, see Robert Rutherdale, “Fatherhood and Masculine Domesticity during the Baby Boom: Consumption and Leisure in Advertising and Life Stories,” in Lori Chambers and Edgar-Andre Montigny, eds., Family Matters: Papers in Post-Confederation Canadian Family History (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1998), 309–33. 44 ICEM Manual, 4–5. 45 Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, chapters 7, 8. 46 ICEM Manual, 18. 47 Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 48 Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 49 ICEM Manual, 18. 50 Franca Iacovetta, “The Sexual Politics of Moral Citizenship and Containing ‘Dangerous’ Foreign Men in Cold War Canada, 1950s–1960s,” Histoire sociale/ Social History 33, 66 (November 2000): 361–89. 51 ICEM Manual, 214; Katherine Arnup, Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, chapter 7.

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52 Paul Fortin, “Greek Domestics Vocationally Trained by ICEM,” 30 May 1957, pt. 1, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC; see also “Immigrants from Greece,” 18 Oct. 1954, pt. 3, vol. 645, RG 76, LAC. 53 Wending to Rogers, 5 Dec. 1960; chief to director, 25 Jan. 1961; Marsh to Hunter, 16 Oct. 1962, pt. 5, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 54 Chief to director, 25 Jan. 1961, pt. 4, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 55 Thomson to Baskerville, 6 July 1961. 56 Letter from Mrs H.M. Patashen, 11 Sept. 1959, pt. 2, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC … 57 Fortin, “Greek Domestics Vocationally Trained by ICEM.” 58 Fortin to chief, 10 Feb. 1958, pt. 2, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC. 59 Approximately 80 per cent of my fifty interviewees came from rural villages. Poverty was the most common reason given … for seeking migration … 60 Interview with Despina, former domestic (pseudonyms used for all interviewees), 15 Jan. 2009. 61 Interviews with Angela and Marianna, both post–Second World War migrants, 29 Mar. 2009, 14 Oct. 2009. 62 Tastsoglou, Women, Gender and Diasporic Lives, 88. Tastsoglou … does not comment on the war’s impact on women’s decision to leave Greece. 63 Interview with Theodora, post–Second World War migrant, 12 Feb. 2009. 64 Interview with Stavroula, 24 Feb. 2009. 65 Interview with Despina. 66 Judith Nagata, “Adaptation and Integration of Greek Working-Class Immigrants in the City of Toronto, Canada: A Situational Approach,” International Migration Review 4, 1 (1969): 44–69. 67 Danys, DP, 138; Iacovetta, “Primitive Villagers,” 17. 68 W. Thomson to Baskerville, 6 July 1961, file 553-33-552, pt. 4, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 69 Memorandum [Smith] to acting minister, Re: Immigration from Greece, 12 Sept. 1957, file 3-33-14, vol. 127, RG 26, LAC; director to deputy minister, 6 Dec. 1957, file 3-33-14, vol. 127, RG 26, LAC; Iacovetta, Gatekeepers. 70 Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 335. 71 “Immigration from Greece,” file 552-1-552, vol. 822, RG 76, LAC. 72 Interviews with Despina and Angela (Despina’s cousin). 73 Interview with Ioanna, 24 Feb. 2009; and in conversation with two husbands of former domestics, both acknowledged their wives’ pioneering role. 74 Discussed in my dissertation, “Transnational Activism and Public Spectacle: Greek Immigrants in Canada,” [University of Toronto, 2015].

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75 See Eleoussa Polyzoi, “Greek Immigrant Women from Asia Minor: Philoptoho and Language Schools,” in Polyphony 11 (1989): 28–36. 76 Thomson to Reid, 21 Feb. 1957, pt. 1, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC. 77 Interview with Anna, former domestic, 28 Oct. 2009. 78 Interview with Stavroula. 79 Fortin, “Greek Domestics Vocationally Trained by ICEM.” 80 Juliet du Boulay, “The Meaning of Dowry: Changing Values in Rural Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1, 1 (May 1983): 243–70. 81 Interview with Despina. 82 Interview with Stavroula. 83 Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” Women’s History Review 3, 1 (1994): 5–28; Caroline Daley, “‘He Would Know, but I Just Have a Feeling’: Gender and Oral History,” Women’s History Review 7, 3 (1998): 343–59. 84 Interview with Anna. 85 Acting chief to attache, 9 Dec. 1960, pt. 2, vol. 822, RG 76, LAC; “Greece: Settlement Arrangements,” 24 Nov. 1959, vol. 808, RG 76, LAC. 86 The 80 Goes to Sparta, National Film Board of Canada, directed by Bill Davies, 1969. 87 “Report of Investigation Re: Mrs George Z. – Alleged Inciting Prostitution of Greek Girls,” 31 March 1955, pt. 2, file 1-37-8, vol. 85, RG 26, LAC. 88 Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, 269. 89 Deputy minister to ICEM, 3 Jan. 1964; Holborn, “Canada and the ICEM,” 211. 90 Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates, 187. 91 “Special Movement,” 9 Dec. 1963, pt. 6, vol. 837, RG 76, LAC. 92 Makeda Silvera, Silenced (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1989); Vic Satzewich, “The Canadian State and the Racialization of Caribbean Migrant Farm Labour, 1947–1966,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 11, 3 (1988): 282–304. 93 Tastsoglou, Women, Gender and Diasporic Lives, 83. 94 Bakan and Stasiulis, Not One of the Family, 33. 95 Martineau to chief, 19 Sept. 1958, pt. 2, vol. 836, RG 76, LAC. 96 Fortin to chief, 10 Feb. 1958.

I Care for You, Who Cares for Me? Transitional Services of Filipino Live-in Caregivers in Canada Glenda Ti be B on ifacio

Introduction Immigration policies structurally design the temporary admission and possible retention of foreign workers. States exercise sovereign acts of controlling and regulating persons eligible for entry into their territory and the ways in which the designated settlement agencies deal with them. Policy implementation and practices shape the resulting experience of settlement, of inclusion or exclusion, of foreign workers in host societies. In Canada, the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) is a classic example of an immigration policy that is especially designed to allow temporary migrant workers to become permanent residents under certain conditions like completion of two years’ live-in work within [four] years. The type of work specified by the LCP usually attracts female migrant workers, and since its inception in 1992, is predominantly participated in by Filipino women. A highly gendered immigration scheme like the LCP requires a careful examination of the services provided to and accessed by live-in caregivers in their transition from temporary status to permanent residents. This chapter examines the nature of settlement services provided to newcomers and its relevance in the lives of Filipino women working as live-in caregivers in Canada. Services loosely encompass any assistance provided to Filipino live-in caregivers from both sides of the migration spectrum – the sending and the receiving states, between Canada and This chapter is reprinted and shortened with permission from Asian Women 24, 1 (2008), 24–50.

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the Philippines – in the interim period of becoming permanent residents in Canada. The discussion is divided into three sections. First, it outlines the participation of Filipino women in the LCP. Second, it presents the services provided to immigrants in Canada by settlement agencies and their relevance in the lives of Filipino women under the LCP and beyond. Third, a discussion follows on the services accorded to overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) like live-in caregivers in Canada by the Philippine government. Data are based on fieldwork in southern Alberta involving thirty Filipino women participants of the LCP, four immigrant-serving organizations, and one Philippine consular official based in Calgary. A total of ten focus group discussions with Filipino women were conducted in Calgary, Cardston, High River, Lethbridge, and Picture Butte, Alberta, from September 2006 to January 2007 through the Filipino community networks … The study group of thirty Filipino caregivers represents two types of immigration status: fifteen women were currently under the terms of the LCP or are temporary residents and the other fifteen were considered “graduates” of the LCP with permanent residency status. The ages range from 25 to 58 years and participants came from different regions in the Philippines, the majority from Luzon. Five Filipino women came directly from the Philippines while the rest came from another, third country such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, or Malaysia. Twenty-nine of them completed college education in the Philippines. More than half of the women were unmarried at the time of the focus group discussion. Using a feminist framework to give voice to women’s experiential knowledge,1 the narratives of Filipino caregivers are presented in italics and form their own space as separate quotations in the discussion. Personal interviews with representatives of immigrant-serving agencies in Brooks, Calgary, Medicine Hat, and Lethbridge were conducted during the same period … Filipino Women and the Live-in Caregiver Program Since the 1980s the Philippines is consistently one of the top ten source countries for foreign domestic workers in Canada.2 The number of Filipinos granted temporary work visas every year more than doubled in less than ten years, from 2,010 in 1995 to 5,672 in 2004. OFWs in Canada increased by 11.16 per cent between 2003 and 2004 alone. In 2006, the

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Philippines ranked fourth of the source countries for foreign workers with 8,529 or 7.6 per cent.3 Of this number, the majority are women. Filipino women comprise 88 per cent of Filipinos with temporary work visas and 16.5 per cent of the total number of female foreign workers in 2004, making the Philippines the number one source of female foreign workers in Canada.4 … Canada admitted the second largest deployment of 1,811 Filipino live-in caregivers in the world next to Taiwan in 2003.5 A successor of the Foreign Domestic Movement (FDM) program in the 1980s, the LCP is a special immigration program designed in 1992 to augment the labour shortage for live-in care work. Labour shortage in this type of work correlates with the absence of a national child care policy as well as the reduction in institutionalized aged care. The LCP and the neo-liberal approach of Canadian governments to these basic, but waning, social services exacerbated the flow of Filipino women into the unregulated “house-bound” industry where the conditions of work in private homes are outside the purview of the government. Consisting of [over] 90 per cent of LCP participants, Filipino women now constitute the phenotype of live-in caregivers. The exodus of Filipino women as live-in caregivers in Canada is reflective of the labour-for-export development strategy of the Philippine government since the 1970s, resulting in the global phenomenon of eight million migrant Filipino workers in over 168 countries. In 2006, OFWs remitted $12.8 billion to the country, equivalent to over 10 per cent of its gross domestic product.6 The labour export policy is an institutionalized development paradigm in the Philippines to keep its ailing economy afloat. Receiving states mostly require different aspects of service provision from child care, domestic work to hospital services, and Filipino women now comprise one of the largest contingents of mobile workers for international exchange in the global capitalist economy. For their contribution to the nation-state, migrant workers are acclaimed as bagong bayani (new heroes). As the most important resource of its country, Filipino migrant workers, especially women, are faced with insurmountable challenges. Studies have shown the magnitude of problems facing live-in caregivers, a euphemism for domestic workers, in Canada such as human rights violations and exploitative working conditions that include long working hours, non-payment of overtime, sexual harassment, and abusive employers. Despite their vulnerable migration status and uncertain working conditions as live-in caregivers, the entry of Filipino women remains unabated.

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The LCP is viewed as a means to achieve an end, an opportunity to chart a new life course for Filipino women and their families. In various focus group sessions in southern Alberta, Filipino live-in caregivers expressed that, I do not want to work as a caregiver. I am an Accounting graduate but my skills are not high enough to meet the points required for independent landed immigrant status. Through the LCP, I have no choice but to work as a caregiver and look for a bright future for me and my family. caregiver in Lethbridge I believe this is the easy way for many of us. Okay, you can come to Canada if you have money, you’re rich. If you belong to the lower status you cannot come to Canada. Then to be a caregiver is the true way to come here. This is your bridge. caregiver in Calgary

Working under the LCP translates into sending money back to the Philippines to construct or renovate houses, for education and medical expenses, for desired investment, and ultimately working for the migration of family members left in the Philippines. With unceasing economic woes and political instability in the Philippines, the LCP is an immigration policy that heeds the aspirations of many families for a better future, sadly, outside of their own country. The temporary nature of most labour migration schemes in Singapore, Hong Kong, and elsewhere made the LCP an attractive policy for Filipino women willing to venture into the cold North. Canada appears to offer the best potential of becoming a permanent resident and, eventually, a citizen. LCP creates a pool of labour gradually moving between two opposing streams of membership in the Canadian polity, from non-citizens to citizens. This movement of status necessarily requires a transitory phase fulfilled by the provision of services by different agents of the state and civil society. As productive contributors to the economies of host societies, states have the moral obligation to assist foreign resident workers to be, according to Daniel Bell, “put on the road to citizenship.”7 Temporary to Permanent Status: Canadian Service Galore? Services form an integral aspect in the settlement and integration of newcomers to Canada and elsewhere. With its long history of immigration, the provision of services to newcomers in Canada by a corpus of government and non-government organizations is an essential program that aims to fully enhance the productive capacities of immigrants. In

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the 1970s, the immigrant service organizations based in different communities across Canada became designated front-line agencies to respond to the challenges of a growing multicultural society. In Canadian practice, services provided to immigrants fall under settlement and integration services which “encompass activities that are specifically designed to facilitate the early economic and social integration of newcomers to Canada.”8 Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) offers four main settlement programs, namely, the Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program (ISAP), Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC), Host Program, and the Resettlement Assistance Program (RAP) for refugees. Services may include the following: orientation, reception, adult language training, settlement counseling, community bridging, referral to other services, labour market preparation, business activity preparation, temporary or one-time intervention to facilitate service adaptation in mainstream public services in light of newcomer settlement needs, immigrant sectoral supports and activities which help to develop a more informed and welcoming environment for newcomers to Canada.9

In most provinces and territories, except Manitoba, British Columbia, and Quebec, the settlement programs are basically delivered by community organizations under the supervision of regional CIC branches. The location and types of services offered by settlement organizations contribute to their effective utilization by immigrants. Marie Truelove maps the geographical location of immigrant services in Toronto and notes that these agencies are highly concentrated near transportation routes.10 While social services to newcomers are quite established in census metropolitan centres and in medium-sized cities in Canada, studies indicate that barriers such as language, cultural insensitivity in the delivery of services, lack of information, and financial constraints still exist, preventing many immigrants from accessing these resources in their communities.11 As a result, ethnic-based organizations mediate the service gap through the provision of culturally specific programs. Service providers also encounter a number of challenges which impact on their delivery of services to immigrants. These include the financial resources available at the disposal of immigrant settlement agencies and lack of policy and program coordination as well as limited service mandates.12 Community services for immigrants in Canada,

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according to Roxana Ng, often are a conduit through which the state reproduces power relations, particularly in “how people relate to one another.”13 The types of services available to immigrants represent the positioning of this group of people into certain modes of activities; those outside of these set program structures, like temporary migrant workers or live-in caregivers, remain invisible agents of change in their migration experience. Live-in caregivers belong to a special class of migrant workers who are mandated to be part of settlement services and, according to the representative of Lethbridge Immigrant Services, are “eligible for all the services that any other newcomer in Canada including an entire suite of integrated service programming, information and orientation services on virtually any aspect of living within the community.”14 However, she adds that, “some of the stuff we offer obviously would not apply to the live-in caregiver.” Participants of the LCP … meet the English language requirements and are, therefore, not eligible for language skills development. While live-in caregivers are qualified to access services offered by the Saamis Immigration Services Association (SAAMIS) in Medicine Hat, Filipino women have not used these services except for mediating contact with the Filipino community in the area. According to the SAAMIS representative, “We get calls from employers saying, I have a live-in caregiver and she’s very lonely, and she’s looking for somebody from the Philippines.”15 She further claims that this is “the only thing that has been accessed, when they hook up for contact of that community.” The same pattern emerged in the small city of Brooks where Filipino caregivers rarely go to the immigrant centre mainly servicing African refugees. In the metropolitan city of Calgary, the number of Filipinos who utilize the programs and services of the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS), according to one of its program managers, is “fairly low.”16 Filipino caregivers usually seek their services after the live-in work requirement is completed and they have attained permanent residency, but not during the transition phase. The low turnout of Filipinos, in general, and live-in caregivers in particular, raises the issue of relevant programming and services at the time of the two-year live-in work period and prior to the attainment of permanent residency. Furthermore, the access to settlement services is limited by the number of years after arrival in Canada and the type of clientele. According to the CCIS representative, “The rule for this is, we can serve people in their first two years in Canada and we have to keep the percentage of

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people who are non-permanent residents down.”17 From this practice, the live-in caregiver who has spent the first two years of arrival in Canada under constraining work situations would not be able to qualify. There are issues that particularly affect the Filipino caregiver population in Calgary. Aside from abuse, isolation, and exploitation facing live-in caregivers, the CCIS representative observably points to “stress and mental health issues of prolonged separation from their families.”18 He adds that “they work here two to three years, you’ve got to get permanent residency and file sponsorship, and you see mothers separated from their children for five to seven years.” Rhacel Salazar Parreñas emphatically addresses “mothering from a distance” which causes “helplessness, regret, and guilt for mothers and loneliness, vulnerability, and insecurity for children.”19 As Filipino live-in caregivers financially work out the process of filing for family sponsorship, the emotional aspect of waiting for reunification takes its toll for themselves and their families. A two-pronged isolation is experienced by Filipino live-in caregivers: isolation brought about by the live-in situation and isolation from their own children or families. Who Cares for Me? Filipino Live-in Caregivers and Transitional Services Instead of government-funded settlement agencies, Filipino caregivers seek the assistance of their friends or families, Filipino associations, faith-based communities, and, to some extent, the recruitment agencies in times of distress. These are considered informal sources in accessing services and are outside the regulated scheme of programming. Personal agency is also an important aspect in seeking initial support from government authorities in Canada. While most cities have settlement agencies, Filipino live-in caregivers in southern Alberta are widely spread in nearby small towns and hamlets with the vast prairie lands in between houses. Many of them were directly sent to these places upon arrival in Canada. To be able to venture out and explore the city limits depends on the generosity of their employers to give them a ride during their days off or somebody else. Filipino live-in caregivers claim that, I don’t even know that these organizations have services for us. caregiver in Cardston area

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I am not aware that there are organizations supporting us. Sad to say that there was no help that we receive from the government or from any other organizations. caregivers in Lethbridge I have not heard of any immigrant serving agencies providing assistance to live-in caregivers. caregiver in High River

These responses indicate that there is a lack of awareness among Filipino live-in caregivers about existing services provided by settlement agencies in their communities. The relative isolation from the community brought about by the nature of their work contributes to the non-utilization of services. For example, live-in caregivers are usually at work during regular hours from Monday to Friday which coincide with the business hours of many settlement agencies. How could we go there [to the office]? … our work is Monday to Friday and the same time that these offices are open we are at work … and we don’t have the time to go there if they are close because it’s our off, too. caregiver in Lethbridge

The programs and services available to immigrants and newcomers in Canada are not considered relevant to the needs of live-in caregivers based on a number of factors. First, participants of LCP must demonstrate proficiency in the English language prior to arriving in Canada. Building language skills is, consequently, the banner program of many settlement agencies. Second, programs and services construct a type of  immigrant who has limited knowledge to navigate the Canadian system and does not necessarily reflect the particular needs of live-in caregivers. In Medicine Hat, for example, settlement workers assist newcomers getting to their appointments in the community, providing interpretation and other facilitative services. Third, the high number of refugees supported by settlement agencies shapes the perception among Filipino live-in caregivers about their services. Foremost needs of the Filipino live-in caregivers include shelter in case of termination of employment, accessible information services for job-related enquiries, protection of their rights and welfare, medical services, and recognition of professional qualification obtained overseas. These concerns were directed to non-settlement agencies, relying on the social and cultural capital of families, friends, and ethnic associations.

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Families and Friends Friends refer to other Filipino live-in caregivers whom they meet in public places like shopping malls, parks, schools, and churches; or, another Filipino whose name and contact information is provided to them while in the Philippines or in another country as well as those they meet during social gatherings of the Filipino associations. The extended kinship network of the Filipinos, to include blood relatives or fictive relations, suggests a person in Canada with whom they would be able to get in contact for assistance. They share that, I have a sister here. She told me everything. My family. Most of them know the process of being an immigrant. They help us. My friend gave me information about immigration rules and I often stay with them during weekends. They happened to be a friend of my husband in the Philippines. The Filipino residents whom we meet here also helped us. caregivers in Calgary I just ask my friends about anything. They came before me and I followed their ways. Oh, this is it. caregiver in High River

The informal social network of friends and family seems to be the “common way” in which immigrant women connect with services available in the community.20 Filipino live-in caregivers resort to the informal sources of getting the needed information about living in Canada similar to their conventional practices in the Philippines. The palakasan (contest of force or power)21 system prevalent in Philippine political processes is also manifest in seeking assistance directly for family members, fictive and associational relations employed in agencies to gain favourable treatment instead of following certain protocols. While not of the same context in their own country, the informal network of friends and relatives form the core group in adjusting to a new life upon migration to Canada, seemingly replacing governmentdesignated settlement services. Filipino live-in caregivers in need of immediate housing and financial support brought about by sudden termination of contracts or waiting for the issuance of another work permit resort primarily to their small circle of friends in the community for assistance. Work permits

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are issued for each contracted employer and commencing work with another violates the terms of the LCP. Processing time for a new work permit takes about three months and during this critical phase, the caregiver transfers from one house to another. The following narrative reflects the utter desperation of live-in caregivers in seeking immediate shelter and support from the government and in the community: The employer said, pack your things. You’re terminated. But before I drive you to Calgary airport, clean the house first. It’s difficult to contact HRSDC. So I called up my friend [another live-in caregiver] to come to the house and help me. caregiver in Lethbridge

Filipinos adhere to the fundamental personality trait or value called kapwa (fellow being) which defines their social relationship.22 This appears to be most visible among Filipinos in diaspora who extend goodwill or pakikipagkapwa to other Filipinos in dire need of assistance. Filipino collectivist orientation shapes the creation of a new set of alliances and network system based on the shared experience of migration.

Filipino Associations As a growing immigrant community in Canada, Filipino associations are found in major cities and localities and are loosely organized according to region, religion, dialect, business, and sports interests, to name a few … There is only one Filipino association in the mediumsized city of Lethbridge and area: I know of a Filipino lady here whose employer died after five months. The children of her employer want to deport her and the Filipino society helped raise money to get her papers done. caregiver in Calgary

Filipino community associations, like other ethnic organizations in  Canada, significantly contribute to the integration of immigrants through the provision of “culturally sensitive services and support systems.”23 The Filipino associations in Calgary and Lethbridge, however, do not offer formalized services to live-in caregivers. Most are venues for social events from which other Filipinos establish new friendship and recreate those that they left behind in the Philippines.

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Recruitment Agencies The recruitment agencies in southern Alberta provided some form of assistance in finding another employer in cases where the first employment arrangement fails due to death, termination, abuse, or other circumstances. In some cases, the agencies responsible for bringing the Filipino live-in caregivers from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and parts of the Middle East arranged for a second employer if the contracted first employment did not materialize upon arrival in Canada: Those who came here through the agencies are sort of protected because you can approach them for whatever problems you have. But not all. It depends with the agency. caregiver in Calgary

However, these agencies do not provide any form of assistance for problems encountered in the course of their employment for the next two years. Still, Filipino live-in caregivers rely on the social network of friends and relatives to help them out in times of need: Like for instance my agency, they told me they will follow up. When I arrived, they will call once a week. But after a month, they called me once. caregiver in Calgary I live with another Filipina. Her employment was terminated after three weeks of  working as live-in caregiver. According to the agency that brought her in Lethbridge, it’s not their responsibility to provide housing. Her employer is Chinese and wants her to be sent to the airport like what they do in Hong Kong. So she called us. We met in the church before. caregiver in Lethbridge

Employment agencies specializing in recruiting live-in caregivers exact exorbitant placement fees that are often undeclared or made secret among their Filipino clients to circumvent the Fair Trading Act in Alberta. In many cases, it is alleged that recruitment agencies in host countries like Hong Kong or Taiwan demand fees that link them to employment agencies in Canada. More often than not, the advice and course of action suggested by these employment agencies for problems encountered in the privatized workplace are not in the interest of the caregiver. For example, caregivers are advised to endure the harassment committed by their employers for two years or risk deportation. Withholding assistance to seek another employer is an effective measure to quell complaints among live-in caregivers.

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Faith-Based Communities The majority of Filipinos in Canada are Catholics.24 Among this group the church is a symbol of continuity of cultural habits like going to Sunday mass. The church becomes the venue to meet a kababayan (Filipino compatriot) in a foreign land and is a meeting ground for connecting with other Filipinos seemingly displaced by migration: El Shaddai25 sort of adopted us. The members of this religious group, sometimes the big shot, will find ways to accommodate us, sometimes assisting us in looking for another employer because of abuse. El Shaddai really gives you attention in times of difficulty, especially if you are a member. caregiver in Calgary In the community of the Couples for Christ,26 we try to help family adjust to the new environment by being there for them like chauffeuring, sharing or giving of household appliances. caregiver in Lethbridge My local parish helped me a lot. They are very kind to me. caregiver in Picture Butte

Shared religious beliefs facilitate the initial step in making connections in the church premises with other Filipinos in Canada. Roman Catholic churches become centres of social interaction among Filipino immigrants, while religion is a “source of much civic engagement.”27 In places where there is no Catholic church, some Filipino women residing in rural communities disclosed that they recognize the Christian cross as a welcoming symbol to meet other Canadians. The church is also another public space, aside from shopping malls and libraries, open during their weekend days off. Religion is inextricably linked with migration in the lives of Filipino live-in caregivers in southern Alberta. In fact, going to church gives them a sense of belonging and cultural familiarity of similar institutions found in the Philippines: I need to go to church once a week. If I don’t there is something missing. caregiver in Lethbridge

Filipino spirituality forms a significant aspect in coping with the uncertainties of life in Canada. Shimabukuro, Daniels, and D’Andrea examine the ways in which spiritual beliefs and traditions impact on the

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psychological development of people from ethnic communities.28 In the case of Filipino live-in caregivers, spiritual expressions like attending mass create a strong connection with the cultural and the familiar.

Personal Agency While the Filipino caregivers in this study primarily sought the support of friends and families during their transition from temporary workers to permanent residents including problems they encountered under the LCP, more than half of these women reported that they relied on the information provided to them at their port of entry in Canada. Those who arrived in Vancouver and Toronto received a package of materials about settlement in Canada with a list of government agencies and contact telephone numbers for different kinds of services (e.g., health, taxation): When I arrived I know lots of government agencies here in Canada … There is a website and telephone number, and toll free, which you can call … I was given a booklet from the immigration when I received my visa [in Canada] … There is a list of government agency at the back of the booklet. caregiver in Cardston All over Canada there is a toll free number. Every time I call the immigration and CIC. I just call and talked to the agent. That’s all. caregiver in Lethbridge

The SAAMIS representative remarks that “we ship our brochure to Vancouver airport” for people going to Alberta.29 Some participants in the study claimed that these materials are not regularly handed out in other airports in Canada. Those with information packages about settlement services share the information with other live-in caregivers they come in contact with. Others rely on the information gathered from different government websites through accessing Internet stations in public libraries. Knowledge appears to be different in practice. A number of the Filipino caregivers expressed their disappointment with the delayed responses from government toll free numbers, and of waiting for more than five minutes figuring out the selections provided by an automated voice instead of a person. Desperation made them rely on their friends and associates in the community to appease their concerns. Those with no family relations to contact have to seek their own social groups to provide solutions to their problems, especially in dealing with abusive

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employers or finding themselves with no employer while under the tenancy of the LCP. There is a prevailing belief that government agencies cannot provide immediate assistance for shelter and income support in the case of terminated employment. The Role of the Philippine Government Filipino live-in caregivers contracted to work in Canada under the LCP are, obviously, Filipino citizens. By extension of this citizenship, the Philippine government has responsibility to ensure their protection and welfare in host societies. In response to the execution of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic worker in Singapore, and other celebrated cases of murder, abuse, and exploitation, the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act (Republic Act 8042) became law in 1995.30 It stipulates that the deployment of OFWs is contingent upon the guarantees of their rights in receiving countries, to which: a. It [the government of the receiving country] has existing labour and social laws protecting the rights of migrant workers; b. It is a signatory to multilateral conventions, declarations or resolutions relating to the protection of migrant workers; c. It has concluded a bilateral agreement or arrangement with the government protecting the rights of overseas Filipino workers; and d. It is taking positive, concrete measures to protect the rights of migrant workers.31 Under this legislative regime, what are the services provided by the Philippine government to Filipino caregivers before departure, during the tenancy of the contract, and reunification with sponsored families after attaining permanent residency status in Canada? In the Philippines, a compulsory Pre-Departure Orientation Seminar (PDOS) for OFWs ensures that all deployed individuals have understanding of the culture, living and work conditions of destination countries, including Canada … : I paid 5,000 plus pesos to PDOS training in the Philippines. The work permit is $150 Canadian dollars, medical fee is 3,000 pesos, and then more than 8,000 pesos to PDOS. caregivers in Lethbridge

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Attendance at PDOS or the Peer Counselling Program are required of those leaving the Philippines permanently, including the sponsored children and spouses of Filipino live-in caregivers in Canada, albeit exceptions apply to the elderly and young children below 12 years old … These compulsory fee-for-services aim to “prepare emigrants for settlement overseas.”32 … Filipino caregivers are provided the basic information on the living and working conditions in countries of destination. PDOS appears to be general in perspective, although a few private agencies offer countryspecific programs, and focus on the behavioural attributes of Filipino workers particularly “disciplining Filipinas” in foreign countries.33 During the tenancy of overseas deployment, Filipino migrant workers in Canada and elsewhere are primarily under the protective mantle of the Overseas Worker Welfare Administration (OWWA) through its “backbone” services, the repatriation program and workers protection.34 An on-site legal assistance to OFWs became available in 2006. No office is, however, based in North America. The international offices are mainly located in Asia and the Middle East with a few based in Europe. Locations of these on-site offices are found in temporary labour-receiving states in these regions. Canada is, in contrast, a traditional immigrant-receiving country for Filipinos. The extension of services to live-in caregivers in Canada is dependent on their official registration with appropriate Philippine agencies. In the case of the murder of Jocelyn Dulnuan in a Mississauga mansion on 1 October 2007, the Philippine consulate in Toronto refused to repatriate her remains because she was an “unregistered worker” who came to Canada from Hong Kong.35 The same happened to Elenita Pailanan who died after an emergency operation in Ontario in July 2007.36 This action demonstrates the vulnerability of many Filipino live-in caregivers who entered Canada through a third country like Singapore or Taiwan who were unable to register their secondary migration to Canada after leaving the Philippines. Even those registered find themselves in a quandary over what services to expect from the Philippine government. Piyasiri Wickramasekera notes that labour-sending countries “can do little in helping its workers in foreign countries.”37 For OFWs, the Philippine government is ineffective in defending the rights of its citizens overseas.38 By far the main services provided to live-in caregivers in Canada consist of the administration of passports and facilitation of other bureaucratic requirements for Filipino citizens. In an interview with the

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honorary consul general in Calgary on 17 November 2006, I was told that live-in caregivers are assisted with the submission of and authentication of documents. However, according to the honorary consul general, the office assisted cases of live-in caregivers who violated the terms of the LCP and were eventually deported. Because the Philippine government lacks the financial resources to hire lawyers to defend livein caregivers with brushes with the law in southern Alberta, the Calgary consul general simply recommends a lawyer. At the time of the interview, the consular office in Calgary was coordinated by a private firm owned by the honorary consul general whose staff provides administrative services to Filipinos on an appointment basis only. Conclusion Migration is an interlocking phenomenon; it facilitates the movement of people from different countries to settle in certain localities dictated by work. The LCP is a federally enacted policy that has become “mainstreamed” in Canadian society as the source of cheap care workers for children, the physically challenged, and the elderly. As the program responds to labour shortages in the area of live-in work, it also is, expectedly, allied with appropriate transitional services that would enable those under the LCP to attain permanent residency status. However, standard settlement and integration programs provided by immigrant serving agencies mostly concerned with English language proficiency and community referrals are deemed irrelevant in the lives of Filipino live-in caregivers in Canada. Under exploitative conditions and uncertain work arrangements, the LCP creates a number of “what if” situations such as the sudden termination of employment, thus making the live-in caregiver homeless while looking for a new employer or waiting for the issuance of a new work permit. Friends and families, if available, are the main source of support for these hapless women in need of assistance. Other sources of services come from Filipino associations, recruitment agencies, and faith communities. Many women rely on their own knowledge and understanding to negotiate their way through a myriad of government agencies. Meanwhile, the Philippine government, with its vast number of overseas working citizens, is unable to protect its citizens’ rights in Western democratic countries like Canada. As such, Filipino women extend carework to both sides of the migration spectrum, Canada and the Philippines, yet their particular needs are not fully addressed.

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NOTES 1 Gayle Letherby, Feminist Research in Theory and Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). 2 Louise Langevin and Marie-Claire Belleau, Trafficking in Women in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live-in Caregivers and Mail-Order Brides (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 2000). 3 Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), Facts and Figures 2006, Immigration Overview: Temporary Residents, http://www.cic.gc.ca/ english/resources/statistics/facts2006/temporary/03.asp (retrieved 11 Nov. 2007); CIC, Facts and Figures, Immigration Overview, Permanent and Temporary Residents 2004; Department of Labor and Employment, “POLO Works with Filipino-Canadians to Improve Welfare of Pinoy Caregivers in Canada,” News (Republic of the Philippines, Bureau of Working Conditions, 2005) http://www.bwc.dole.gov.ph/news/default .asp?id=N000000487 (retrieved 8 Oct. 2007). 4 CIC, Facts and Figures, Immigration Overview, Permanent and Temporary Residents 2004. 5 Edwin Mercurio, “‘Filipino Caregivers Ask Canadian Government’: Stop Treating Us Like Slaves,” Bulatlat 2–8 Jan. 2005, http://www.bulatlat .com/news/4-48/4-48caregivers.html (retrieved 10 July 2006). 6 Ernesto Pernia, “Is Labor Export Policy Good for RP’s Development?” Inquirer, 30 Apr. 2007, http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/ columns/view_article.php?article_id=63189 (retrieved 2 Oct. 2007). 7 Daniel Bell, “Equal Rights for Foreign Resident Workers? The Case of Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong and Singapore,” Dissent 48, 4 (2001): 26–34, http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=899 (retrieved 5 Sept. 2006). 8 CIC, Agreement for Canada-British Columbia Cooperation on Immigration, Annex B: Responsibilities for Immigrant Settlement Services, 2004, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/about/laws-policy/agreements/bc/ bc-2004-annex-b.asp (retrieved 3 Nov. 2007). 9 Ibid. 10 Marie Truelove, “Services for Immigrant Women: An Evaluation of Locations,” Canadian Geographer 44, 2 (2000): 135–51. 11 Shibao Guo, “Bridging the Gap in Social Services for Immigrants: A Community-Based Holistic Approach,” Vancouver Centre of Excellence Research on Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis, http://www .riim.metropolis.net/Virtual%20Library/2006/WP06-04.pdf (retrieved 2 Aug. 2007).

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12 Laura Simich, Morton Beiser, Mirriam Stewart, and Edward Mwkarimba, “Providing Social Support for Immigrants and Refugees in Canada: Challenges and Direction,” Journal of Immigrant Health 7, 4 (2005): 259–68. 13 Roxana Ng, The Politics of Community Services: Immigrant Women, Class and the State (Toronto: Garamond, 1988), 89. 14 Interview by the author, Lethbridge, AB, 25 Sept. 2006. 15 Interview by the author, Medicine Hat, AB, 18 Sept. 2006. 16 Interview by the author, Calgary, AB, 17 Nov. 2006. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families,” Feminist Studies 27, 2 (2001): 361. 20 Anne Neufeld, Margaret Harrison, Miriam Stewart, Karen D. Hughes, and Denise Spitzer, Immigrant Women’s Experience as Family Caregivers: Support and Barriers (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2001), 13. 21 Alejo Jose Sison, “The Public and the Private in Contemporary Philippine Society: A Study on Political Dynasties,” Instituto Empresa Y Humanismo, Universidad de Navarra, 2006, 4, www.unav.es/filosofia/ajsison/ publications/journal/18.pdf (retrieved 9 Sept. 2007). 22 Elizabeth Protacio Marcelino, “Towards Understanding the Psychology of the Filipino,” in Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, eds., Diversity and Complexity in Feminist Therapy (New York: Haworth, 1990), 105–28. 23 Dan Chekki, “Immigrant and Refugee Serving Organizations in a Canadian City: An Exploratory Study,” PCERII Working Paper Series No. WPOI-06 (2006), 2, http://pcerii.metropolis.net/frameset_e.html (retrieved 15 Oct. 2007). 24 Terence Fay, “From the Tropics to the Freezer: Filipino Catholics Acclimatize to Canada, 1972–2002,” Historical Studies 71 (2005): 21–59. 25 El Shaddai is a mass-based religious movement led by Brother Mike Velarde and forms the core of popular Catholicism in the Philippines. 26 The Couples for Christ is a gospel-based Filipino Catholic charismatic lay movement in the Philippines since 1981 and has grown into a worldwide ministry in more than 100 countries. 27 Eric Uslaner, “Religion and Civic Engagement in Canada and the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, 2 (2002): 239. 28 Kathryn Shimabukuro, Judy Daniels, and Michael D’Andrea, “Addressing Spiritual Issues from a Cultural Perspective: The Case of the Grieving Filipino Boy,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 27, 4 (1999): 221–39.

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29 Interview by the author, Medicine Hat, AB, 18 Sept. 2006. 30 Dovelyn Agunias and Neil Ruiz, “Protecting Overseas Workers: Lessons and Cautions from the Philippines,” Insight (Sept. 2007), Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/MigDevInsight_091807. pdf (retrieved 11 Nov. 2007). 31 Republic Act No. 8042, Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995. 32 Commission on Filipinos Overseas, “Pre-Departure Registration and PreDeparture Orientation Seminar/Peer Counseling,” http://vancouverpcg .net/pcg/images/stories/food/microsoft%20word%20-%20new% 20pdos%20flyer.pdf (retrieved 11 Nov. 2007). 33 Robyn Rodriguez, “Domestic Insecurities: Female Migration from the Philippines, Development and National Subject-Status” (San Diego: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2005), 20. http://www.ccis-ucsd.org/publications/wrkg114.pdf (retrieved 11 Nov. 2007). 34 Dovelyn Agunias and Neil Ruiz, “Protecting Overseas Workers: Lessons and Cautions from the Philippines,” Insight (Sept. 2007), 14, Migration Policy Institute. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/MigDevInsight_ 091807.pdf (retrieved 11 Nov. 2007). 35 Perry Diaz, “Jocelyn Dulnuan: Shattered Dreams,” Inquirer, 31 Oct. 2007. http://services.inquirer.net/express/07/11/04/html_output/xmlhtml/ 20071031-97893-xml.html (retrieved 9 Nov. 2007). 36 Aubrey Makilan, “Gov’t Refused to Help Dead OFW, Filipino Groups in Canada Rush to Raise Funds,” Migrant Watch, Bulatlat 7, 2 (22–8 July 2007). http://information-hub.ofw-connect.com/OFW_Articles/OFW_Denied_ Services (retrieved 20 Nov. 2007). 37 Piyasiri Wickramasekera, Asian Labour Migration: Issues and Challenges in an Era of Globalization (Geneva: International Migration Programme, International Labour Office, 2002), 28. http://www.ilo.org/public/ english/protection/migrant/download/imp/imp57e.pdf (retrieved 6 Oct. 2006). 38 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Transgressing the Nation-State: The Partial Citizenship and ‘Imagined (Global) Community’ of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers,” Signs 26, 4 (2001): 1129–54.

PART FIVE Constructing Symbols and Bodies

Understanding the lives of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women in the Canadian past is not just about learning about “what they did” or “what was done to them.” One can interpret their past lives and experiences also by exploring how their gender and ethnic identities were represented in public settings and also within their own communities. As well, one can “read” the discourse within various sources to understand how material and ideological symbols were used to convey meaning about those identities, which also included their physical bodies. The chapters in this section draw on the analytical tools of material history, the use of artefacts – non-textual and non-oral sources – as well as the history of the “body” to inform new work on immigrant women. They also collectively reveal the activism and agency of immigrant women as they either promoted or protested the customs and values of their ethnic group in the context of varying political environments in Canada and abroad. The methodology of material history is central to the chapter by Laurie K. Bertram. Focusing on Icelanders in western Canada and the United States from 1874 to 1933, Bertram’s study uses hair, clothing, and other artefacts to explore the rise, ebbs, flows, and resurgence of a hybrid ethnic culture. These gendered symbols of ethnicity responded to Anglo–North American demands for both assimilation and the public performance of difference. Her analysis shifts our stereotypical understanding of “ethnic” clothing as simply a quaint way of preserving cultural identity, and instead reveals fashion to be a complex communicator of meaning. In this “fibre-focused” study, hair and clothing styles became a site of conflict between women and male leaders in the midst of negotiating transnational identities that emerged in relation to

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Icelandic nationalist movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In this study, fashion was used to try to control women but, in response, was used by women as a means of rebellion against authority. The history of the body has witnessed considerable theoretical debate as well as much recent historical research, and is a theme in Bertram’s chapter, but it is the central focus of Ashleigh Androsoff’s chapter on Doukhobor women in western Canada. Doukhobors, a distinct group with both ethnic and religious characteristics, first migrated to Canada from the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, in response to persecution at home and agricultural settlement opportunities in Canada. The body, it has been argued, can act as a signifier or metaphor of the nation, and, like the other ideological aspects of nation-building, can exclude as much as it includes. In her analysis of the media portrayals of and public attitudes towards Doukhobor women who disrobed in protest over government treatment of their ethno-religious community, Androsoff documents how the image of the naked Doukhobor woman standing before her flame-engulfed home was used repeatedly to embody the Doukhobors’ “stranger” status within Canadian society. She analyses the intense public scrutiny of these women’s bodies, showing that among the different portrayals that emerged, it was the preoccupation with the women’s physical characteristics – and the unfeminine labour they performed – that shaped public opinion of them as illadjusted strangers who could never become sisters to Canadian women. Photographs published in the media are important sources in Androsoff’s analysis, and this is true also in the third chapter of the section. While Bertram and Androsoff are newer scholars in the field of immigrant and ethnic history, the late (2012) Varpu Lindström was a pioneer whose prolific work on Finnish immigrants in Canada guided much of the scholarship on immigrant women from the 1980s onward. In particular, her 1988 book Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada became a model for its use of oral history and its stereotype-challenging analysis. Her chapter in this book focuses on photographs to understand how specific political goals influenced how immigrant women were represented and perceived. In her examination of newspaper images, Lindström demonstrates the way in which media propaganda created an idealized Finnish Canadian woman based on the activities of women in Finland during the Winter War with the Soviet Union in 1939–40. This was a conflict in the homeland that had significant impact on Finns in Canada, in part because of the close attention it received in Canadian media. In this analysis,

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which offers yet another way in which a transnational framework can be used, events in the “homeland” had a significant impact on how a hitherto marginalized ethnic group was perceived by Anglo-Canadians and how Finnish Canadian women were temporarily transformed into familiar “sisters.” Do you see any parallels between public attitudes towards immigrant women one hundred years ago and in the present? How do the media represent immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women – past and present? In what ways do women represent their ethnic group differently from men? Can you identify gendered symbols in your own cultural background(s)?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Bates, Christina. “How to Dress the Children? A Comparison of Prescription and Practice in Late-Nineteenth-Century North America.” Dress 24, 1 (1997): 43–54. Dossa, Parin. Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Epp, Marlene. “Quilters, Canners, and Writers: Women in the Material World.” Chapter 5 in her Mennonite Women in Canada: A History. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008. Gentiles, Patrizia, and Jane Nicholas, eds. Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Helps, Lisa. “Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History.” Journal of Canadian Studies 41, 1 (Winter 2007): 126–50. Iacovetta, Franca. “Immigrant Gifts, Canadian Treasures, and Spectacles of Pluralism: The International Institute of Toronto in North American Context, 1950s–70s.” Journal of American Ethnic History 31, 1 (Fall 2011): 34–73. Lindström, Varpu. I Won’t Be a Slave! Selected Articles in Finnish Canadian Women’s History. Beaverton: Aspasia Books, 2010. Palmer, Alexandra, ed. Fashion: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Swyripa, Frances. Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identities and the Canadian Prairies Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010.

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Fashioning Conflicts: Gender, Power, and Icelandic Immigrant Hair and Clothing in North America, 1874–1933 Lau r i e K . Ber t ram

Introduction This chapter uses histories of fibre, specifically hair and cloth, to examine how Icelandic North American women expressed their class and racial-ethnic-gendered identities in varied workplace and public contexts during the period 1874–1933. As a contribution to feminist efforts to more thoroughly gender ethnic histories and expand, rethink, and transnationalize immigrant women’s history in Canada, this study argues that fibre-focused inquiries offer critical insight into women’s role in ethnic identity formation and clashes. By way of illustration, it highlights several fashion conflicts in the history of the Icelandic North American community, including women’s adoption and alteration of the fashion of the Icelandic independence movement (against Danish foreign rule); the adaptation to and subversion of Icelandic and North American ethno-racial and class categories involved in their pursuit of better status, pay, and labour conditions; and the controversial inclusion of androgynous women’s hairstyles into the twentieth-century costume of the Icelandic nationalist pageant queen known as the Fjallkona. Such episodes in immigrant women’s fashion history illuminate fibre as both a tool of reform and regulation, used by male leaders to attempt to anchor women to public political campaigns, and as a more subversive tool of female expression and rebellion, over which ethnic women exercised considerable control. This chapter argues that hair and cloth were highly public and versatile female media capable of undermining the authority of male immigrant leaders in visible and significant ways.

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Clothing and Power Since the 1960s scholars have increasingly questioned the privileging of language over other systems of communication, leading to larger, international growth in fibre and fashion scholarship that has intensified since the 1990s. As part of “a larger academic trend to instate fashion and dress as fundamental to social, cultural, and psychological existence,”1 fibre-based inquiry has expanded into a range of disciplines. Revisiting dress collections through the lenses of gender and postcolonial theory, recent scholarship resituates clothing data as large “alternative archives” capable of unsettling histories that relegate public politics to dominant, white, often men-only spaces. As Jean Allman notes, “The archives of dress and clothing often locate women at center stage.”2 Approaches to dress history are diverse. In Canada, Aboriginal scholarship has perhaps benefited the most from interdisciplinary developments in dress and material culture research,3 garnering key insights into women’s economic and labour histories not obtainable when scribal evidence is scarce. As indicated by the contributions to Alexandra Palmer’s pioneering anthology, Fashion: A Canadian Perspective, other Canadian scholars have used fibre-centred investigations to illuminate a range of economic, cultural, technological, and labour histories.4 Transnational scholarship on ethnic and racialized dress and cloth has been particularly attuned to fibre’s relationship to the radical possibilities of “fashioning,” or dressing, as part of “a mindful effort to construct an identity” and, more subversively, “to ‘lie.’”5 This approach has benefited broader analyses of the role played by discourses of hair, cloth, and fashion in the establishment and subversion of race, class, and gender-based identities, as evident in influential work on gendered and racialized cross-dressing.6 As these and other studies show, wardrobes were instruments of power through which people constructed specific public images of themselves while adopting, revising, or rejecting dominant styles and identities. Immigration historians such as Marlene Epp and Varpu Lindström illustrate the importance of hair and clothing to ethnic women’s history through studies of conflicts involving dress, while labour historians have well illustrated the role of needle trades economies in fuelling ethnic women’s radicalism.7 For many immigrant women, clothing was integral to expression. Clifford Sifton’s oft-invoked description of the desirable settler as “a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat … with a stout wife and a half-dozen children”8 also suggests the central role of

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clothing in external constructions and appraisals of migrant communities. Yet, with a few exceptions,9 most of the political histories of immigrant clothing and clothing spectacles still often focus on nationalist and conservative uses that enshrined traditional gender roles for women. In some respects, the sheepskin coat and other folkloric displays of clothing are important embodiments of popular historical expectations of immigrant women’s simplicity, conservatism, and labour. However, they must also be understood as the complex products of immigrant women’s own personal, cultural, and intellectual expression. Feminist material culturalists have long been critical of older Marxist assertions that clothing is somehow an anti-intellectual, innately conservative or limited form of cultural expression prone to manipulation by the elite.10 As Wendy Parkins argues, the neglect of clothing and other forms of display privileges speech in histories of political expression and “overlooks the multi-accentuality of dress in political contexts” and the “capacity of dress to be articulated to a variety of causes.”11 As much as male leaders may have tried to deploy dress as a means to establish or solidify specific notions of ethnicity, loyalty, and authenticity, women’s clothing practices could also signify resistance and relative autonomy in fibre-based forums. Migration, Clothing, and Nineteenth-Century Iceland Approximately fifteen thousand Icelanders, comprising about twenty per cent of the whole population of Iceland,12 migrated to North America between 1870 and 1914, many fleeing poor climate conditions and poverty. Many flocked to “New Iceland,” an Icelandic bloc settlement in what became Manitoba, along the shore of Lake Winnipeg in 1875. However, poor living conditions in the colony meant many resettled, often moving to Winnipeg and other centres in the Canadian and American West. Despite this dispersal, a new transnational Icelandic migrant identity, known as Vestur-Íslensk (translated as “Western Icelandic,” but known in English as Icelandic Canadian or Icelandic American), emerged in the West during this period. Bound together by language and familial ties, this culture was characterized by a blend of nineteenth-century Icelandic culture and new North American influences. For emigrants leaving Iceland in the late nineteenth century, clothing was an intensely political form of expression that signalled their connection to the country’s movement for independence from Denmark. Influenced by the external growth of mid-century European nationalism,

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supporters of Iceland’s independence sought to end approximately five centuries of Danish foreign rule. The campaign to reduce and remove Danish political, economic, and cultural influence from the island had a dramatic effect on the ways in which Icelandic women clothed themselves. Sigurður Málari [the Painter] Guðmundsson spearheaded the independence movement’s attempt to reinstate “traditional” Icelandic styles based on a blend of regional and historic clothing customs. In making their clothing, Icelanders commonly chose between homegrown wool and more expensive imported materials available from Danish merchants. A preference for homegrown woollen cloth replaced imported fabric in the mid-nineteenth century, making wool the cornerstone of respectable Icelandic women’s fashion. Reformers accused those who preferred Danish styles and imported cloth of frivolity and of sabotaging Icelandic economic growth.13 Independence politics did not necessarily benefit Icelandic women. According to Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, reformers pursued a hegemonic, conservative, anti-cosmopolitan agenda and rigid economic system.14 For widows and unmarried mothers, the protection of an old order strictly divided by class and gender meant poor legal status, cycles of grinding poverty, and the dispersal of their children.15 Still, by the 1860s, many Icelandic women supported the independence movement and adopted its styles. One of the most popular was the peysuföt, named for its tight, often black, woollen jacket (peysa) that opened slightly at the chest (figure 13.1a) The bulk of the costume, including its skirt, was made from dark Icelandic wool that reflected the demands of the regional climate, though women often wore a brightly coloured apron for formal occasions. Essential to this outfit was a dark knitted skullcap with a long tassel known as the skotthúfa (tail hat), which was worn by women from an array of class backgrounds well into the twentieth century.16 As much as Sigurður “Málari” sought to “encode” certain items of clothing with a cohesive nationalist narrative, female users and producers of the garments understood them in a range of ways. Indeed, “fashioning” offered Icelandic women a semi-public forum for political expression and resistance. As Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir documents in her work on Icelandic portraiture, some mid-century Icelanders complained that nationalist fashions were “ljót” (ugly) and some women refused to adopt the new styles.17 Other women altered parts of the new outfit according to their own notions of style and beauty. Sigurður Málari’s small neckerchief design of 1854, for instance, morphed into

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13.1. Left: The peysuföt costume worn with the long tasselled cap known as the skotthúfa. Portrait of Guðrún Thomsen (ca. 1887). J.A. Brock & Co. Collection of Eyrarbakki Icelandic Heritage Centre, Hnausa, Manitoba. Right: Halldóra Bjarnadóttir altered a traditional skautbúningur for a North American–style portrait with her family (ca. 1901). Collection of Eyrarbakki Icelandic Heritage Centre, Hnausa, Manitoba.

an oversized bow made of imported silk that, by 1890, was often accented with a heavy fringe and broach. The meaning of clothing like the skotthúfa, originally intended to designate a devotion to Icelandic independence, protest, and/or conservatism, also changed, particularly for the many Icelandic emigrant women departing for North America at the end of the nineteenth century. Icelandic women generally departed for North America dressed in the commonly worn symbols of the independence movement, including the widely used peysuföt, but they sometimes also brought its more

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formal counterpart, the skautbúningur, a national dress used for festive occasions.18 Some immigrant women continued to wear altered Icelandic clothing after arrival in North America, particularly poorer women who could not afford to buy fabric for new dresses. Immigrant women’s letters home were an important source of information about suitable clothing and advice on alteration for others contemplating migration to North America. From Ontario in 1874, Friðríka Baldvinsdóttir reported that Icelandic clothing could often pass in public in North America. “You mustn’t part with much of your clothing since you can use it here,” she told relatives in 1874, and continued, “it is good to bring dark-coloured cloth and dresses which are very much customary.”19 Poorer women also altered Icelandic dresses to better resemble North American fashions. As Nelson Gerrard writes in his work on Icelandic North American portraiture, working-class and impoverished women who left Iceland on parish relief, including Halldóra Bjarnadóttir, sometimes modified existing clothing to fit into AngloCanadian styles instead of purchasing new formal dresses in Canada. Bjarnadóttir transformed the jacket of a beautifully embroidered skautbúningur into a Victorian waistcoat for a 1901 Winnipeg family portrait, by simply leaving the collar open and wearing a blouse beneath20 (figure 13.1b). Despite evidence that some pieces endured, the clothing of many Icelandic women arriving in North America in the 1870s and 1880s was generally quickly transformed. Most evident is the sudden mass abandonment of the skotthúfa (dark tasselled cap). Images captured during migration indicate that women did not initially anticipate a public reaction to this aspect of their traditional clothing – they wore their hats en route to “Ameríka” – while written records suggest they may have decided to abandon it after encounters with North American women. North Dakota historian Thorstina Walters, who was the child of Icelandic immigrants, recalled a group of curious Anglo-American women judged harshly her mother’s skotthúfa when she arrived in Glyndon, Minnesota, in 1881. They “greatly admired” the “Icelander costume of black wool, with its tight fitting skillfully embroidered bodice full skirt, and multi-coloured silk apron,” but disliked her tasselled cap. In fact, they advised her “to keep the costume and send the cap back to Iceland.”21 As the prominent author and editor Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran explained to his compatriots in Iceland in 1895, “The women could not go on with the skotthúfa if they wanted to avoid becoming a laughing stock” in North America.22

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“Eskimo” Immigrants Migrant dress figured prominently in initial assessments of immigrant character, and Anglo–North Americans were often interested in the physical and material appearances of newcomers, particularly the “exotic” and/or racially ambiguous. Unlike well-read and widely travelled state officials such as Canadian Governor General Lord Dufferin, who had visited Iceland in 1856 and subsequently supported Icelandic settlement in Manitoba, many mid- and late-twentieth-century North Americans believed that Icelanders were of “Eskimo” rather than European extraction.23 “Even the most educated people,” Dufferin noted, “believe the Icelanders to be a ‘Squawmuck,’ blubber-eating, sealskin clad race.”24 Popular references to Icelanders as “wearers of skins” well illustrates the concept of “cross-dressing the colour line,”25 that is, the power of clothing to stand in for physical racial characteristics which, in this case, situated them below Christian white European wearers of cloth. Such notions fuelled voyeurism and demands for formal and informal displays of immigrant difference in public. When, in 1875, a crowd of curious Winnipeggers gathered to see the disembarking Icelanders, and were directed to the group by the accompanying Icelandic agent, they reportedly “didn’t believe him” because they expected people “short of stature, about four feet high” with “long jetblack hair, a good deal like Eskimos!” “These are not Icelanders,” they reportedly declared, but “white people.”26 Following the arrival of the “Large Group” of Icelandic immigrants in Manitoba in 1876, a smallpox epidemic in New Iceland further fuelled speculation about the racial character and physiological suitability of Icelanders as white settlers. By mid-November of 1876, the Manitoba Free Press confirmed that “a most virulent type” of smallpox was raging in Icelandic and Aboriginal homes around Sandy Bar in New Iceland.27 Reports of the epidemic drew national attention to the “primitive” cramped living conditions of newly arrived Icelanders, who were underclothed, underfed, and ill-equipped to handle the severe cold around Lake Winnipeg.28 As Ryan Eyford argues, some Canadian officials interpreted the impoverished condition of the Icelanders and their susceptibility to the disease as a sign of inferiority.29 Their virus-contaminated homes, described in reports as dank, dirty, and “most squalid,”30 and infected clothing, families, and bodies were viewed as a sign of much deeper physiological and cultural degradation. One damning report that appeared in the Globe attributed it to “centuries of

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isolation from the rest of the world and constant intermarriage” and quoted an attending physician, Dr J.S. Lynch, who argued that the Icelanders’ only chance “to be successful in the rude contest with western pioneers” and become successful colonists was to “mix with the outside world” and take “wives and husbands from the lusty bone and sinew of young Canada.”31 In the wake of the epidemic, male Icelandic leaders contended that young people should immerse themselves in Anglo–North American society and adopt its standards of hygiene, nutrition, and housing. In 1878, Halldór Briem, editor of the early Icelandic newspaper Framfari, advised that “our boys and girls … spend … time in the service or employ of Canadians” and “pay careful attention” to them as “we can learn so infinitely much from them.”32 He and other community leaders viewed migration and acculturation as productive forces that could counteract the ill-effects of stagnation and poverty at home and allow Icelanders to “rise up in a revised version, more vital and influential than ever before.”33 Such a model might serve some young, able-bodied women, but the low wages and physical demands of domestic labour made it a poor option for others. Ólöf Sólvadóttir, an ambitious working-class immigrant born with dwarfism, migrated to North America in 1876, in search of better prospects.34 Dissatisfied with work as a domestic in Winnipeg, she outraged many in the community when she built a spectacular performance career on the basis of popular racial stereotypes that contravened the Icelandic community’s attempts to forge an external image of themselves as a white, “sober, industrious … and serious minded race.”35 According to Icelandic Arctic anthropologist Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, Ólöf worked as a waitress in a Dakota Territory hotel in the 1880s, but grew “bored, annoyed, and outraged” by frequent customer comments about never before having seen an “Eskimo.”36 She turned these stereotypes into a profession after being offered five dollars to lecture on Eskimo culture. She then began to lecture and publish under the pseudonym “Olof Krarer,” member of a race of Greenlandic miniature people. Donning a custom-made white fur parka, she told invented tales of living in snow houses, riding on sleds made from giant frozen fish, and drinking polar bear blood.37 Scholar Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir estimates that throughout Ólöf’s prolific career, she delivered as many as 2,500 lectures in popular and academic forums. Ólöf’s widely accepted claims even appeared in American school textbooks.38

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Krarer based her performance on costume and invented sociocultural rather than physical traits. She claimed that the darkness of Inuit Greenlanders’ skin and hair was not a racial characteristic, but simply the result of constant application of animal grease and not bathing.39 Her “clothing acts,”40 such as donning a fur parka, illustrate the ability of garments to transform and obscure the physical appearance of the wearers. Icelanders condemned her lectures,41 but she evidently cared little about what other Icelanders thought. Stefánsson argued Ólöf was an ambitious woman who resented the patronizing treatment she had received prior to her stage career.42 Rather than remaining within a community that provided so few opportunities, she built a lucrative career by manipulating the permeable categories of race in the North and her audiences’ hazy image of the geographical and cultural differences between Greenland and Iceland. Working Dress: Clothing, Employment, and Upward Mobility For many immigrant women, embracing opportunities for waged labour in Canada meant new money, new clothing, and new identities. In 1876, just one year following the founding of New Iceland, Icelandic businessman Friðjón Friðriksson established an employment agency for Icelandic immigrant domestics to meet growing demands in Winnipeg.43 Opportunities for work in clothing-based industries, including laundries, sewing factories, and shops, grew with the city’s population in the 1880s. As conditions worsened in New Iceland, even married women with children made the 90 kilometre trek to Winnipeg, sometimes in winter, to seek urban work to supplement family incomes.44 Letters between Iceland and North America often highlighted the salaries and more plentiful job opportunities for women in Winnipeg. Encouraging female relatives at home to come to Winnipeg to work, fourteen-year-old Kristín Arnadóttir wrote that “we have it much better here … respectable, temperate women can make a profit here,” adding that city wages had helped her mother save for an impressive new sewing machine.45 There were limits to these “prosperous economies,” however, as letter writer Ingveldur Jónsdóttir warned in 1892: there was no shortage of work, “but few girls get rich.”46 Still, modern goods like sewing machines and clothing offered some of the most visible signs not only of increased opportunities outside of Iceland’s rigid social order, but also of new identities in formation. New

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wages meant that working women, many of whom had never possessed hard currency47 in Iceland, could spend their money on clothing and styles previously reserved for the wives of the elite in their homeland. “It is said they spend their earnings on finery,” reported Björn Andrésson in 1877, “and I have seen several here with whom the finest in Reykjavík could not compare.”48 Contrasting the stagnant class system that bound Icelandic women to virtual indentured servitude and poverty at home and provided few opportunities for advancement, Icelandic writer Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran announced that in North America, some immigrant women fetched their own water in silk dresses. “Manual labour in the New World is an honourable occupation,” he reported, “and to honour work is the same as honouring the person doing it.” The “disdainful” treatment of female domestic workers in Reykjavík, he continued, “would be considered a disgrace” in North America.49 As historians such as Mariana Valverde observe, reformers in Victorian England feared the class confusion that accompanied working-class women’s taste for fashion “beyond their station,” arguing it caused “moral and financial ruin” and prostitution.50 In the Icelandic community, the moral implications of fashion also reflected critiques of women’s assimilation and exploitation. For literary figures such as Halldór Laxness, Stephan G. Stephansson, and Laura Goodman Salverson the adoption of North American fashion by working immigrant girls also symbolized the emotional and cultural sacrifices made for money and the bitterness, isolation, and alienation that North American society offered women. For these writers, however, women selling their physical or cultural selves for North American material gain more so represented the ultimate tragedy of assimilation and alienation.51 A fashionable Icelandic immigrant domestic who turns to prostitution is the subject of Stephansson’s epic poem Á Ferð of Flugi (En Route). Published in 1900, the poem describes a young working woman, Ragnheiður, who acquires a taste for luxury and fashion in town and eventually disappears into Anglo society. Years later, the narrator encounters her as a well-dressed courtesan on a train, going by the name “Sally O’Hara.” Her new façade disguised both her lonely life and her harsh exclusion from the community, since the other Icelanders on the train recognize and shun her. When Ragnheiður heroically dies while saving the life of a little girl during a train accident, the Icelandic minister onboard initially refuses to preside over her funeral. Stripped of her Icelandic identity,

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she is seemingly lost to her people and to history and is buried beneath a tombstone that simply reads “Sally O’Hara.”52 In spite of concerns about Icelandic women’s assimilation, such makeovers were critical to their material survival in Anglo economies. Wages for immigrant women ranged according to their skills and ability to fit in with middle- and upper-class English-speaking employers, and the financial compensation for these adjustments could be considerable. In 1876 Icelandic women who could speak English received up to eight dollars a month, double the wages of those who could not.53 Employers also tended to shun outward markers of poverty and ethnic difference, such as worn-out shoes or “outmoded” clothing, prompting immigrant girls to adopt styles that may have clashed with those of their parents’ generation. When Laura Salverson’s mother, Ingibjörg Guðmundsdóttir, needed her daughter to seek outside work to supplement the family income around the turn of the century, she gave her two dollars, all of her savings, and her best black woollen skirt. For Ingibjörg’s Icelandic-born generation, black was a customary colour for women. She also thought the skirt would work well because “it would make [her daughter] look older … no one wanted the services of an inexperienced youngster.”54 Yet, Salverson’s employer rejected the skirt and told her that she “would look so nice in blue” and that she “was much too young to go about in a black skirt and blouse.” Her employer’s aesthetic demands consumed much of her three dollars per week wage, sabotaging her plans to send her mother money for a stove. “Out of my first week’s salary (bless the word!) I had to pay the employment bureau and buy blue percale for two dresses,” she wrote; “a pair of shoes ate up the next week’s earnings, then I paid my debt, and now I had only to wait six weeks to get a spring coat.”55 Stores that provided affordable cloth, notions, and clothing for work were critical to women’s economic survival and might also allow them to pursue middle-class respectability and a sense of Anglo cultural belonging. This dynamic has been the focus of department store histories that discuss both the higher degrees of economic authority and autonomy women enjoyed in the department store space and the discrimination that ethnic and working-class women sometimes faced inside its doors.56 Prior to the opening of the first Eaton’s store in Winnipeg in 1905, popular dry goods stores like Cheapside and Carley Brothers Clothing Store competed for the attention of immigrant women and offered them their first sustained exposure to Anglo consumer markets.

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Owners hired Icelandic staff and Icelandic language services to create an image of special treatment for Icelandic patrons. “Sigurbjörg Stefansdóttir works for us and will speak to you in your own language,”57 declared Cheapside in an 1889 advertisement in the Icelandic newspaper Lögberg. Carley Brothers similarly declared that their storeroom was filled with the best deals in town on “all kinds of fancy and fashionable clothing” with “Icelanders in the store especially for Icelanders.”58 Eaton’s gradually captured a large share of the Icelandic market, beginning in 1887 with the publication of its first illustrated catalogues, which were more accessible for non-Anglo immigrants. The opening of Eaton’s enormous Winnipeg department store in 1905 cemented its place in the city’s consumer culture, and Icelanders increasingly viewed Eaton’s as an Icelandic store because so many Icelanders worked at the Winnipeg location. This notion became reality in 1933 when John David Eaton married Signy Hildur Stephenson, an Icelandic Canadian from Winnipeg’s West End.59 Stephenson’s marriage into one of Canada’s most prestigious families was a remarkable moment that epitomized the massive shift in the status of earlier Icelandic generations and their Canadian-born offspring. Signy’s parents were child survivors of New Iceland’s 1876–77 smallpox epidemic and went from one of the most feared classes of immigrants to honoured guests at the table of one of Canada’s most prestigious families. Canadian newspaper references to their daughter Signy’s “blond Nordic beauty”60 virtually erased memories of the earlier disparaging descriptions of her parents’ more ambiguous, quarantined generation. News of the wedding preparations gripped the Winnipeg press during the summer of 1933, including the picturesque references to the bride’s ethnicity that peppered the service and reception. Signy wore a “Viking” headress, there were Icelandic songs, and alongside the Union Jacks “Iceland’s flag fl[ew] for Winnipeg’s little bride.”61 Loyal Immigrants from the “Land of the Vikings” The popular Anglicization of their appearance, dress, and speech was critical to Icelanders’ emergence as respectable white Protestants in North America.62 Yet, as the Icelandic clothing, songs, and flags at the Eaton-Stephenson wedding in 1933 illustrate, ethnic spectacles featuring Icelandic costumes were also integral to their changing status. Evident in Signy’s own wedding headdress, this transformation was enmeshed in the proliferation of “Viking”63 imagery in Icelandic and

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Scandinavian ethnic public spectacles. While distancing themselves from earlier rumours of an “Eskimo” lineage, Icelandic immigrant leaders and businesses often used Viking imagery to promote their devotion to North American values, including independence, democracy, and “adventure” or the private entrepreneurial spirit. For example, during the First World War, Icelanders joined Scandinavian Canadian battalions like the 197th Vikings of Canada, whose insignia was a Viking ship emblazoned with the number “197.” Viking ship monuments and parade floats were also a favourite vehicle for community expressions of Icelandic ethnicity. During the fiftieth anniversary celebrations for the City of Winnipeg in 1922, a Viking ship with Icelanders in ethnic dress sailed on wheels down Main Street with a sign reminding Canadians that “Leifur Eiríkson, an Icelandic man, discovered North America.”64 These spectacles were influenced by a larger growth of Anglo interest in the Sagas and similar campaigns launched by Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. These groups promoted their historic affiliations with the Vikings to assert claims to North American settlement that predated those from Britain and mainland Europe. As Sigríður Matthíasdottír observes, revisiting Leifur Eiríksson and the “Viking discovery of North America” around the year 1000 (also known as the Vinland Voyages) cast Iceland as a “centre of high culture” and offered a way of gaining external legitimacy.65 Conversely, Geraldine Barnes argues that they also offered Anglo-Protestants a founding father that could unseat Christopher Columbus, much adored and commemorated by Catholic migrants.66 Icelandic leaders often employed an image of a muscle-bound, blondehaired, Leifur Eiríksson–like Viking to support claims to prestige and hardy white settler identities. Yet the gendered implications of Viking imagery, based on selective reinterpretation of the Icelandic Sagas, also dramatically shaped women’s ethnic performances. Beyond Leifur, the Icelandic Sagas report that several women also journeyed to North America, including Freydís Eiríksdóttir, Leifur’s sister.67 These stories offer relatively detailed descriptions of both Freydís and a woman named Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, a devout Christian convert who gave birth to a son in North America and has since received numerous twentieth-century tributes as the continent’s “First White Mother.”68 Conversely, the character of the violent, overbearing Freydís, used to condemn women who flaunted Christian gender conventions, was largely suppressed in Vinland commemoration. Freydís was a strongwilled figure who dominated her male partners in both marriage and business and “transgress[ed] the traditional boundaries of gender”69 by

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taking up sword and axe against both male and female enemies, even during pregnancy. In ethnic North American pageantry, the transgendered connotations of Freydís – and “Viking women”70 more broadly – conflicted with the less ambiguous and politically narrower image of women as mothers and peaceful cultural carriers, preferred by leaders and audiences. The Bald Fjallkona (Mountain Woman) Some Icelandic Canadian women activists clearly appreciated the unsettling connotations of Saga-era female figures and employed them in Icelandic-language political campaigns. Manitoba politician Salome Halldorson (MLA 1936–41) and feminist editor Margret Benedictsson both used references to Saga-era women’s participation in violent acts and war in speeches and editorials meant to radicalize Icelandic women.71 Such allusions, however, were hidden by language and were inaccessible to the non-Icelandic public. Instead, Icelandic Canadian public spectacles generally employed nineteenth-century romantic nationalist visual culture, most notably a figure known as the Fjallkona (Mountain Woman), to depict women as more passive symbols and cultural carriers. The Fjallkona emerged as the female embodiment of the Icelandic nation within the nineteenth-century independence movement and the “collective mother of the Icelandic people” in twentieth-century immigrant spectacles.72 Previously only invoked in literary form, an etching of the Fjallkona first appeared in a volume of Icelandic folk tales published in 1866.73 This often-reproduced image of the Fjallkona appears in the style of broader European romantic nationalist iconography, but surrounded with specific references to Icelandic history, culture, and landscape. Her fiery crown and a snowy veil signified volcanoes, glaciers, and the “purity” of Icelandic women. Apart from illustrations, the Fjallkona largely existed as a literary symbol until immigrant community leaders decided to merge the figure with North American–style pageantry in the early twentieth century. In an attempt to draw larger crowds to Winnipeg’s declining Icelandic festival, local organizers planned a “Fjallkona contest” in 1924, and organizers in Blaine, Washington, and Winnipegosis also planned pageants. Part nationalist display, part beauty pageant, the Winnipeg contest used the newspaper Lögberg to circulate photographs of the contestants and encouraged readers, friends, and family to cast their votes. The winner, Sigrún Lindal, then performed the role of Fjallkona

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that August. The pageant format proved popular and remains a cornerstone of the annual festival, now held in Gimli, Manitoba. In research on Icelandic spectacles in the twentieth century, historians Anne Brydon and Frances Swyripa discuss the development of the Fjallkona into a passive maternal figure and (albeit contested) instrument of male ethnic leaders.74 Though women over sixty now typically play the role of the Fjallkona, the early history of the pageant reveals the pageant initially sparked a public conflict over the gendered identities of younger Icelandic migrant women. These debates were focused not only on speeches and ceremonies, but on the bodies and clothing of performers. Older generations of male leaders praised Icelandic women who adhered to nineteenth-century romantic nationalist style. That year in Blaine, Washington, a traditionally costumed Matthildur Sveinsson, who appeared with long dark flowing hair, was called an “excellent” and “moving” Fjallkona.75 In Winnipegosis, Manitoba, Petronella Björnsdóttir Crawford also stuck to tradition and presented as a close imitation of the original 1866 Fjallkona engraving, complete with long flowing hair, fake halo of light, scroll, and sword.76 In Winnipeg, however, Sigrún Lindal’s version of the Fjallkona planned for Winnipeg’s 1924 summer festival drew the ire of older male community members. It was not her costume that irked, but her hair. Lindal was one of many fashion-conscious Icelandic Canadian women who had cut her long hair into a short, stylish bob. As the flurry of editorials, articles, and letters printed in both Lögberg and Heimskringla illustrates, many male organizers and community leaders were angered at the prospect of Lindal’s bobbed hair appearing in the performance. The Icelandic Day planning committee in Hnausa, Manitoba, passed a protest resolution “regarding the Fjallkona reproaching her castration by cutting her hair,” adding, “her beauty and nobility will be reduced if it doesn’t get to her waistline.”77 Heimskringla printed a protest ríma (a short verse) on the subject. The brides are bobbing their hair, Robbing themselves of their beauty, Because, the greedy ones boast, It makes them terribly fancy.

Hárið “bobba” brúðurnar Beauty “robba” sína Af því grobba gírugar Gera sig “obboð” fína.78

This ríma was the first of many jokes and assaults against what editor Jón Bildfell called a “nationwide epidemic of bald women.” In their progress towards equality in the industrial world, he wrote, women

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were simply mimicking men, without consideration for older cultural values. “Combs are for the hair as ploughs are for the earth,” he argued; hair was a symbol of cultural cultivation, and its loss represented the destruction of ancient cultural values by modern “fashion blind and unmarried” women who wanted to work outside of the home.79 Illuminating the power of hair in establishing and undermining gendered divisions, Heimskringla published the findings of a German doctor who claimed the haircut caused beard growth in women. More seriously, he added, mothers with short hair passed on a more virulent strain of the beard growth gene to their daughters.80 Lampoons on short hair were a late response to a style that already had a firm grasp on the heads of North American women. Bobbed haircuts began to spread across Europe in 1917 and by 1924 this hairstyle dominated women’s fashion in the Canadian West. The bob characterized most public images of women in Winnipeg that year, from movie posters and catalogues to advertisements for insect repellent. Moreover, North American–born women viewed short hair as a hallmark of cleanliness and modernity, and long hair became a symbol of outdated and archaic femininity and hygiene practices that immigrant women needed to shed to become “modern” North Americans.81 The popularity of bobbed hair in the Icelandic community is evident in period portraits as well as advertisements in Icelandic newspapers. In 1924, all of the female students in the graduating class of Winnipeg’s Icelandic high school, the Jón Bjarnason Academy, sported bobs. That summer, the Parisian Hairdressing and Beauty Parlour in Winnipeg even published an Icelandic-language notice that told the recently bobbed female readers of Heimskringla: “Don’t throw out your hair! We will make elegant hair pieces for you!”82 Icelandic opponents of the “bald women epidemic,” succeeded in influencing Sigrún Lindal’s performance at the Icelandic Festival in 1924. Though she retained a copy of a portrait of her initial short-haired version of the Fjallkona, Lindal appeared with a wig in both Heimskringla and Lögberg (figure 13.2). These newspaper images presented a more sedate copy of the 1866 engraving of the independence symbol: seated, eyes lowered, with an unconvincing wig of long wavy hair sitting uneasily over Lindal’s own. Yet Lindal’s initial construction and presentation of the incarnate Fjallkona (and the image adopted by her successors) highlighted the limitations of male leaders in their attempts to control how the female image was presented. While the pageant was, for decades, defined by male leaders and speechwriters who favoured an

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13.2. The “bald” Fjallkona, Sigrún Lindal, 1924. As reproduced in Elva Simundsson, Fjallkonas of Íslendingadagurinn, 1924–1989 (Winnipeg: Icelandic National League, 1989), 10.

older, more maternal Fjallkona, “chosen for her husband’s prominence as much as her own,”83 community elites had less luck controlling women’s aesthetic expression in the pageant, particularly with respect to styles that women viewed as archaic and outdated. In 1925, Stefanía Magnússon appeared in the pageant with her own cropped hair, as did many of the women who followed her, and the debate over the “bald women epidemic” and the long hair requirement was promptly dropped from the Fjallkona pageant. In the continuing tradition at Gimli, Manitoba, the Fjallkona continue to wear the same crown that Sigrun

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Lindal first donned in 1924, and almost always atop their own, often short, often permed hair. Conclusion Whether cloth, fur, or even hair, fibre was an essential medium in the public façade of immigrant communities and their mediation of dual North American demands for both ethnic performance and assimilation. Yet, as the speedy demise of the skotthúfa, Ólöf Krarer’s fur parka, and the “bald” head of the Fjallkona illustrate, fibre was a medium through which female producers, wearers, and performers exercised considerable control. Male migrant leaders hoped to anchor women’s labour, clothing, and bodies to a range of larger projects, from anticosmopolitan dress reform campaigns in Iceland to public immigrant spectacles of Icelandic whiteness and respectability in the New World. Leaders imagined that through reform, regulation, and spectacle, fibre could contain and transmit specific, static ideas about femininity, independence, and Icelandic culture. Yet this history reveals that the meaning of clothing was never singular or static, but complex and shifting according to the rapidly changing circumstances of female migrants’ lives and tastes. Rather than revealing a history of control and reform, the rich history of immigrant fibre illuminates a diverse range of women’s agendas that strayed from those set forth by Anglo and Icelandic male leaders. Icelandic women initially felt the xenophobic scorn of North America through fashion and fabric, particularly their “peculiar headdresses.” Yet clothing was also a medium through which they established new social, commercial, and aesthetic frameworks that reflected the immense new socio-economic opportunities open to those who left the confines of rural nineteenth-century Icelandic society. Here the details of everyday practices and strategies reveal the complexity of what initially appears to be a simple shift towards Anglo clothing. As the multiple fashion conflicts between generations, classes, and sexes within the Icelandic community reveal, fibre was not a simple or antiintellectual medium, and fibre workers and wearers were not passive vessels in the public construction of images of gender, class, and ethnicity. Instead immigrant women’s engagement with fibre-based media must be understood as a popular, highly visible, and sometimes controversial gendered form of expression that could lay bare the limits of male leaders’ control.

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NOTES 1 Sophie Woodward, “Making Fashion Material,” Journal of Material Culture 7, 3 (2002): 345. 2 Jean Marie Allman, ed., Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 4–5. 3 For example, Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). 4 Alexandra Palmer, ed., Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 5 Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson, “Introduction,” in Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2007), 3. 6 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); Graham White and Shane White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Monica J. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 7 Marlene Epp, Mennonite Women in Canada: A History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008), 180; and Varpu Lindström, “Propaganda and Identity Construction: Media Representation in Canada of Finnish and Finnish-Canadian Women during the Winter War of 1939– 1940,” in Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds., Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 287–313; Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 8 Sir Clifford Sifton, “The Immigrants Canada Wants,” as reprinted in Maclean’s 16 (1 April 1922), 32–4. 9 See, for example, Frances Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 175–8; Rhonda L. Hinther, “Raised in the Spirit of the Class Struggle: Children, Youth, and the Interwar Ukrainian Left in Canada,” Labour/ Le Travail (2007): 43–76, 57–9. 10 Beverly Lemire, “Fashion and the Practice of History,” in Beverly Lemire, ed., The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 2–3. 11 “Introduction,” in Wendy Parkins, ed., Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship (London: Berg, 2002), 4.

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12 Sveinbjörn Rafnsson, “Formáli,” in Júníus Kristinsson, Vesturfaraskrá 1870– 1914 (Reykjavík: Háskóla Íslands, 1983), ix. 13 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland (London: Reaktion, 2010), 32. 14 Guðmundur Háldanarson, “Social Distinctions and National Unity: On Politics of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Iceland,” Journal of European Ideas 21, 6 (1995): 772. 15 Gísli Ágúst Gunnlaugsson, “‘Everyone’s Been Good to Me, Especially the Dogs’: Foster-Children and Young Paupers in Nineteenth-Century Southern Iceland,” Journal of Social History 27, 2 (Winter 1993): 345. 16 Elsa E. Guðjónsson, The National Costume of Women in Iceland (Reykjavík: Litbrá, 1970), 3. 17 Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, Til gagns og fegurðar: Sjálfsmyndir í ljósmundum og klæðnaði á Íslandi 1860–1960 (Reykjavík: Þjóðminjasafn Íslands, 2008), 44. 18 Fewer Icelandic immigrant women brought the now-popular upphlutur costume to North America. Guðjónsson, “The National Costume of Women in Iceland,” 6. 19 Letter from Friðrika Baldvinsdóttir to Baldvin Helgason, 10 January 1874. As reprinted in Böðvar Guðmundsson, Bréf Vestur-Íslendinga [Letters of Western Icelanders], vol. 1 (Reykjavík: Mál og Menning, 2001), 60–1. 20 Nelson Gerrard, “Þögul Leifurtur” [Silent Flashes] (unpublished manuscript), 5. 21 Thorstina Walters, Modern Sagas: The Story of the Icelanders in North America (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1953), 11. 22 Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran, Vestur-Íslendingar (Reykjavík: Prentsmíðja Ísafoldar, 1895), 28–9. 23 See, for example, “Iceland: Nobody’s Baby,” Time 35 (June 1940): 31. 24 Lord Dufferin, Letters from High Latitudes (London: John Murray, 1856), ii. 25 Garber, Vested Interests, 267. See also Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 32, 69. 26 Rev. Friðrik J. Bergmann as translated in W.J. Lindal, The Icelanders in Canada (Winnipeg: Viking, 1967), 116. 27 “City and Provincial News,” Manitoba Daily Free Press, 15 November 1876, 3. 28 Jóhann Briem, “Occupations and Household Matters,” Framfari, translated by George Houser, 22 December 1877, 1. 29 Ryan Eyford, “An Experiment in Immigrant Colonization: Canada and the Icelandic Reserve, 1875–1897” (doctoral dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2010), 181–3.

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30 “With the Governor General,” Globe, 26 September 1877, 2; Letter from Augustus Baldwin to Phoebe (Baldwin), 13 March 1877, Provincial Archives of Manitoba (PAM), MG 8, A6-3. 31 “With the Governor General,” 2. 32 Halldór Briem, “My Good Countrymen!” Framfari, 24 January 1878, 88. 33 Ibid., 89. See also letter from Friðjón Friðriksson to Jón Bjarnason, 11 August 1881, Correspondence of Friðjón Friðriksson, PAM, MG 8, A6-7, 1874–85, letter 23, 2. 34 Inga Björnsdóttir, Ólöf the Eskimo Lady: A Biography of an Icelandic Dwarf in North America, translated by María Helga Guðmundsdóttir (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 30. 35 J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers at Our Gates, or Coming Canadians (Toronto: Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 95. 36 Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, Adventures in Error (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1936), 247. 37 Olof Krarer, The Esquimaux lady: A Story of her Native Home, edited by Albert S. Post (Ottawa, IL: Press of W. Osmon and Sons, 1887). 38 Björnsdóttir, Ólöf the Eskimo Lady, 116. 39 Krarer, The Esquimaux Lady, 13. 40 See, for example, Rebecca Earle, “Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes! Race, Clothing and Identity in the Americas,” History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 177. 41 “Íslenskur Eskimói,” Lögberg, 24 March 1898, 7. See also Gísli Pálsson’s discussion of Ólöf and her relationship to Stefánsson and the Icelandic community in Gísli Pálsson, Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2003), 202–8. 42 Stefánsson, Adventures in Error, 263, 265–6. 43 Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 149–50. 44 See, for example, Simon Simonson, Icelandic Pioneers of 1874, from the Reminiscences of Simon Simonson, translated by Wilhelm Kristjanson (Winnipeg: s.n., 1904), 10, 12. 45 Letter from Kristín Árnadóttir to Guðrún Jónsdóttir, 11 February 1889. Letter reprinted in Guðmundsson, Bréf Vestur-Íslendinga [Letters of Western Icelanders], vol. 2, 106. 46 Letter from Ingveldur Jónsdóttir to Þorleifur Jónsson, 20 March 1892. Letter reprinted in Guðmundsson, Bréf Vestur-Íslendinga, vol. 2, 350. 47 Magnússon, Wasteland with Words, 32. 48 Björn Andrésson, letter to his father, 30 July 1877, as translated by and reproduced in Nelson Gerrard, Icelandic River Saga (Arborg: Saga Publications, 1985), 40.

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49 Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran, as translated by and reproduced by Guðjón Arngrímsson in Nýja Ísland: Saga of the Journey to New Iceland (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1997), 299, 300. 50 Mariana Valverde, “The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse,” Victorian Studies 32, 2 (Winter 1989): 168–88. 51 Halldór Laxness, “New Iceland,” in Seven Icelandic Stories, translated by Axel Eyberg and John Watkins (Reykjavík: Ríkisprentsmiðjan, 1961), 159. 52 Viðar Hreinsson, Wakeful Nights: Stephan G. Stephansson, Icelandic-Canadian Poet (Calgary: Benson Ranch, 2012): 304–10. 53 Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 150. 54 Laura Goodman Salverson, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 317–18. 55 Ibid., 330. 56 See, for example, Donica Belisle, Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 11–12. 57 “P.S.,” advertisement, Lögberg, 24 December 1889, 1. 58 “Carley Bro’s,” advertisement, Heimskringla, 20 August 1892, 1. 59 “Mr and Mrs John David Eaton,” Lögberg, 17 August 1933, 1. 60 “John David Eaton and Signy Stevenson Wed at Lovely ‘Kawandag,’” Winnipeg Free Press, 10 August 1933, 10. 61 Ibid., 10. 62 John Taylor cited in Kristjanson, The Icelandic People in Manitoba, 104. 63 Víking originally referred to medieval practices of raiding and exploring, but English usages of the word often refer to Nordic people from the late eighth to eleventh centuries. 64 For more details, see Frances Swyripa, Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identities and the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010), 227. 65 Sigríður Matthíasdottír, “The Renovation of Native Pasts: A Comparison between Aspects of Icelandic and Czech Nationalist Ideology,” Slavonic and East European Review 78, 4 (October 2000): 690, 694. 66 Ibid., 694; Geraldine Barnes, Viking America: The First Millennium (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 44. 67 Magnús Magnússon and Hermann Pálsson, translators, The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (New York: Penguin, 1970), 67. 68 Tinna Grétarsdóttir, “‘Art Is in Our Heart’: Transnational Complexities of Art Projects and Neoliberal Governmentality” (doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 2010), 148–58. 69 Barnes, Viking America, 29.

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70 Judith Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1991): 185, as referenced in Kirsten Wolf, “Amazons in Vínland,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95, 4 (October 1996): 475. 71 Halldorson’s references to Auður from Gisli’s Saga in Salome Halldorson, Untitled Speech, n.d., PAM, MG 14, B3; Ryan Eyford, “Lucifer Comes to New Iceland: Margret Benedictsson’s Radical Critique of Marriage and the Family,” paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, May 2007. 72 Anne Brydon, “Mother to Her Distant Children: The Icelandic Fjallkona in Canada,” in Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, eds., Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 87–100. 73 Jónas Thor, Islendingadagurinn: An Illustrated History (Gimli: Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, 1988), 38. 74 Swyripa, Storied Landscapes, 234; Brydon, “Mother to Her Distant Children,” 95–6. 75 “Fjallkonan í Blaine,” Lögberg, 25 September 1924, 1. 76 “Fjallkonan í Winnipegosis,” Lögberg, 25 September 1924, 1. 77 “Íslendingadagsnefndarfundur að Árborg” [Icelandic Day Planning Meeting in Arborg], Heimskringla, 11 June 1924, 1. 78 “Frá Winnipeg og nærsveitunum” [From Winnipeg and the surrounding areas], Heimskringla, 4 June 1924, 8. (Translated by Nelson Gerrard.) 79 Jón Bildfell, “Sköllóttar konur” [Bald women], Lögberg, 10 July 1924, 4. 80 “Fróðleikur og forvitni” [Knowledge and curiosity], Heimskringla, 22 October 1924, 1. 81 Other ethnic leaders in the Canadian West during this period rallied against the spread of short hair among women, including Manitoba Mennonites, who challenged the style on cultural and spiritual grounds. Epp, Mennonite Women in Canada, 197–200. 82 “Fleygðu ekki burtu hárinu sem kembist af þér” [Don’t throw out your hair], advertisement, Heimskringla, 6 February 1924, 5. 83 Swyripa, Storied Landscapes, 234.

A Larger Frame: “Redressing” the Image of Doukhobor Canadian Women in the Twentieth Century A s hleig h And ros of f

Introduction Throughout the twentieth century, the Doukhobors attracted significant public attention in Canada and abroad … Given the modest size of this group (fewer than 8,000 upon immigration in 1899) and their limited dispersal (all settled in small, isolated pockets in remote rural areas of western Canada), the disproportionate national and international media attention paid to the Doukhobors is noteworthy. Of all images used by journalists in their coverage of the Doukhobors’ adjustment to life in Canada, one predominates: that of a naked, overweight Sons of Freedom Doukhobor woman standing before her flameengulfed home.1 Members of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobor sect, a minority representing less than 10 per cent of the Doukhobor population, periodically removed their clothing or set fire to their own or others’ possessions to protest real or perceived mistreatment at the hands of government and law enforcement officials, to express their rejection of materialism, or to signify spiritual purity. The Sons of Freedom considered themselves the protectorate of the true Doukhobor faith and the vanguard against Canadian assimilation. They sought to ensure that the Doukhobors who suffered so extensively in Russia for the sake of their religion did not compromise their religious principles in Canada. These religious principles were broadly interpreted. The Doukhobors are Christians who believe that the spirit of God resides in each person.

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version, from Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 18, 1 (2007): 81–105.

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A Freedomite Doukhobor woman observes a burning building after removing her clothing. An earlier photo of the same scene was featured as the cover of Simma Holt’s Terror in the Name of God (1964). George Diack (photographer), Vancouver Sun, ca. 1962.

This conviction led the Doukhobors to adopt pacifism and communalism, and to reject materialism. These ideals, at times, led to conflict with government authorities. Negative experiences with government representatives in Russia had made the Doukhobors wary of state interference in their private affairs. Some Doukhobors could not see any justification for the Canadian government’s insistence that births, marriages, and deaths be registered, and feared that the government collected such statistics in order to maintain registries of potential

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conscripts. Many Doukhobors also feared that state-imposed education would strip Doukhobor children of their religious sensibilities, and suspected that the lessons taught in Canadian schools would prime their children for military service and inspire the spirit of competition and materialism. Many Doukhobors protested what they perceived as pressure to compromise on their religious principles, especially during the first decades of the twentieth century as the Doukhobors adjusted to life in Canada. Most Doukhobors protested simply by refusing to comply with the government’s demands, if the demands could not be reconciled with their beliefs. Sons of Freedom Doukhobors took their protest activities to greater extremes … Though both men and women removed their clothing as a form of protest, images of nude or partially nude women were printed far more frequently in the Canadian press. … Given the prevalence of this image, a corresponding amount of historiographical attention to the experience of Doukhobor Canadian women in the twentieth century might be expected. No such correspondence exists. There are few scholarly studies of the history of the Doukhobors in Canada and fewer still of the history of Doukhobor Canadian women.2 That the image of Doukhobor Canadian peculiarity was predominantly female merits scholarly examination. An attempt to “redress” the image of Doukhobor Canadian women is overdue. Framing Doukhobor Women’s Bodies A review of reports printed in newspapers, magazines, and popular literature reveals that Doukhobor women’s bodies were subjected to considerable public scrutiny throughout the twentieth century. Descriptions of the women’s physical characteristics frequently overshadowed descriptions of their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual dimensions, even before the widespread publication of nude photographs.3 The women’s size and shape, their physical strength, their capacity for hard labour as well as fine handiwork, and their apparent lack of modesty interested Canadian journalists and they presented Doukhobor women’s bodies as unusual: unusually powerful, unusually large, and unusually naked. In short, the Canadian media framed the Doukhobor Canadian woman’s image around the image of her large frame. …

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Reporters’ portrayals of Doukhobor Canadian women can be classified by type and by tone. Four types of portrayals of Doukhobor Canadian women prevailed in the Canadian press: the labourer, the artisan, the peasant, and the radical. Two tones are evident in reporters’ portrayals of the Doukhobors: sympathy and criticism. Reporters who viewed Doukhobor women sympathetically portrayed them as strong, capable, feminine “sisters” to Canadian women; critical portrayals framed them as peculiar and unassimilable “strangers.” Journalists rarely portrayed Doukhobor Canadian women as “sisters” to Canadian women; even then, their “sisterhood” was more as “distant female cousins” than close kin. Most often, Doukhobor Canadian women were portrayed as “strangers.” This predominance is not entirely unexpected since the media is predisposed to select stories about that which is unusual and anomalous.4 With this predisposition in mind, the existence of reports which framed Doukhobor Canadian women as “sisters” suggests that their similarity to Canadian women is actually what journalists expected readers to find surprising. … Public Reception and Perception It is difficult to measure readers’ interpretations of newspaper stories and the images that accompanied them. One can, however, examine the way in which images and news stories were presented to the public and infer from the content or tone of media portrayals what interpretation journalists may have intended their audience to make. Though an evaluation of the images presented in the news does not yield a perfect reflection of public opinion of the Doukhobors, it does yield important clues concerning the information on which public opinion was based. The en masse immigration of nearly eight thousand Doukhobors to Canada in 1899 was newsworthy. Canada’s adoption of these Russian sectarians, whose nonconformist religious beliefs and practices had put them at odds with Russian authorities and forced them to seek refuge in a country that would permit them greater religious and political freedom, was both controversial and exciting. Accounts of the Doukhobors’ difficulties in Russia, of their unusual characteristics, and of their suitability as immigrant settlers had been vigorously debated in government and in the press prior to their migration … Canadians sought hearty, healthy, self-sufficient immigrants to settle the Northwest at the turn of the century; some feared that the Doukhobors would prove less

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than desirable settlers, given rumours of their troubles in Russia and the stresses of their long journey from Russia to Canada.5 Certain aspects of the Doukhobors’ appearance impressed those who first greeted them on the docks of Saint John, NB, and Halifax, NS, in January of 1899. The Doukhobors were described in glowing tones to the Canadian public who could not see the Doukhobors first-hand. Sympathetic reporters emphasized the Doukhobors’ fitness for labour, hearty build, cleanliness, good health, religious piety, the courteous conduct of both adults and children, the effects of their hardships in Russia, and their potential for full Canadianization.6 … Doukhobor men and women alike were described in the press as “handsome,” “healthy-looking,” a “fine-looking lot of people, with honest faces and stalwart frames,” who were likely to become “a credit to the Dominion.”7 … Those who wished to frame the Doukhobors in a favourable light in 1899 had to demonstrate that they were physically capable and experienced farmers, worthy of the charity that had been extended to them. They also had to demonstrate that the Doukhobors had the potential to integrate with their Canadian neighbours by framing their activities and attributes as compatible with Canadian habits and values. If sympathizers wanted to elicit public support for the Doukhobor immigration, they had to account for the newcomers’ unusual characteristics while showing how the Doukhobors fit into the Canadian way of life. Feminizing Female Doukhobors’ Physical Labour The Doukhobors brought few assets with them from Russia, and their modest savings went towards funding their transatlantic passage.8 Once established on their land, the Doukhobors worked hard to become financially self-sufficient. As young, able-bodied Doukhobor men went out in search of waged labour, Doukhobor women took responsibility for homemaking. During their first year in Canada, this meant, quite literally, building their families’ homes and setting up village infrastructure. While their male counterparts worked for local farmers or as labourers on the railway, the Doukhobor women constructed over ninety separate villages.9 … Doukhobor women’s fitness for hard work attracted the attention of Globe correspondent “Lally Bernard” (Mary Agnes FitzGibbon).10 … As a special correspondent to the Globe, FitzGibbon published at least

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thirteen articles describing her visits to Doukhobor communities in Saskatchewan, which commented on the Doukhobors’ progress in western Canada between 1899 and 1901 … In her reports, FitzGibbon highlighted the women’s physical strength, resourcefulness, and attention to aesthetic quality. During her first visits to the Doukhobor settlements in 1899, FitzGibbon had an opportunity to assess their construction skills, as the women worked to set up their homes. She explained that the women hauled the large logs needed for construction themselves, using a simple cart with two wooden wheels. Where large logs could not be found, the women wove willow branches together as a replacement. FitzGibbon reported that the women plastered the walls of their homes using their hands instead of tools, producing a result that was “as smooth a surface as if the trowel of a first-rate plasterer had been at work.” The deftness of the women’s construction impressed FitzGibbon, who felt that the Doukhobors had “already proved their adaptability in utilizing to the best advantage the raw products of the earth as no Anglo-Saxon could attempt to do.”11 Journalists who admired the Doukhobor women’s efforts attempted to put a feminine spin on their unusual demonstration of physical prowess. FitzGibbon, for example, suggested that since the Doukhobors women had “already proved themselves ‘home makers’ in the truest sense of the word” they were “especially adapted to act as pioneers of civilization in our far western country.”12 It was more difficult for sympathizers to characterize Doukhobor women as “pioneers of civilization” when, having completed the construction of their homes, they harnessed themselves to their ploughs in the spring of 1899. Harvesting a crop in the fall would help to support their families through their first full winter in Canada. The main handicap to this enterprise was that they lacked livestock. A village of over a hundred people owned, if lucky, a pair of oxen or a team of horses.13 Overtaxed by the labour required for hauling and transportation, the animals could not also be used to plough the fields. In a remarkable demonstration of their physical strength, personal determination, and cooperative spirit, some of the women decided to pull the ploughs themselves. … The women’s efforts greatly boosted the welfare of the entire Doukhobor group. While the men undertook waged jobs to build equity, women built homes and provided food. Because the women were able to feed their families, the money the men earned could be applied to other needs. The women’s effort also served to define and reinforce

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Doukhobor women are shown breaking the prairie sod by pulling a plough themselves, Thunder Hill Colony, Manitoba, ca. 1899. Library and Archives Canada/Doukhobors collection/C-000681.

the  Doukhobors’ unique identity, and thus had a significant psychological impact on the group. Working together to construct their homes and plough their fields demonstrated the efficacy and practicality of two Doukhobor precepts: cooperation and hard work.14 … The image of Doukhobor women harnessed to ploughs was, however, problematic at the end of the nineteenth century. Some outsiders may have been impressed by their strength and determination, and Canadians who wondered whether the Doukhobors would be able to make unbroken soil productive had their fears allayed on viewing the lengths to which the Doukhobor women would go to put the land to seed. But the image of women harnessed to ploughs “horrified” those who believed that Canadian women belonged in the home, not in the harness.15 … Anecdotes and photographs of Doukhobor women replacing oxen or horses portrayed them as backward, unfeminine, and, ultimately, un-Canadian.16

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Doukhobor sympathizers sensitive to Canadians’ call for immigrants who were more than “beasts of burden”17 had to find a way to reconcile the women’s unusual physical activity with Canadian expectations for feminine conduct. FitzGibbon attempted to soften the image by crediting their “innate dignity” and “uncomplaining, untiring patience” for giving them the strength “to endure to the end trials that their magnificent physique could not alone have enabled them to withstand.”18 FitzGibbon explained that Doukhobor women “are not in the habit of drawing ploughs or of building houses, but, like many others of their sex, they are capable of rising to the occasion, and this was one of the occasions when they distinguished themselves.”19 FitzGibbon argued that the women believed their families’ welfare depended on their willingness to perform this difficult labour. The women pulled the plough in order to feed their families and built their homes in order to ensure their families’ comfort. Framing these activities as the desire to nurture their families and highlighting the women’s “dignity” and “patience” made it easier to reconcile their unusual physical activities with late nineteenth-century Canadian definitions of femininity. … Those who sought to frame Doukhobor women in a more “feminine” light also took advantage of the fact that the women were able to do very delicate work with their hands. Their handiwork was admired for its use of colour, attention to detail, superb skill, and ingenuity.20 “The women are all capital tailoresses,” FitzGibbon reported, and their handiwork impressed Canadian women who hired them as seamstresses.21 Doukhobor women were also lauded as proficient knitters and weavers.22 The needlework served a practical purpose, as Doukhobor women produced their families’ clothing and linens with their own hands. Sewing, knitting, weaving, and needlepoint also constituted an important form of entertainment. Having completed farm and housework, Doukhobor women gathered together to work on their projects, telling stories, singing hymns, or making a game of their work by competing to see who could knit the fastest.23 Their handiwork also generated income, as Doukhobor seamstresses hired out or brought work home for pay.24 … Doukhobor women’s ability with needle and textile provided sympathizers with a marketable image: the image of Doukhobor women using their hands to produce clothing, linens, or colourful rugs was feminine and practical; it fit in with Canadians’ understanding of appropriate “women’s work”; it was an image with which many middleclass Canadian women identified. As Doukhobor sympathizer Victoria

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Hayward put it, “There is great sisterhood in spinning and weaving, in embroidery, in rug-making, and in home-making everywhere.”25 The women pulling the plough were “strangers”; the women weaving, sewing, embroidering, and knitting were potential “sisters.” In the Doukhobors’ case, however, “women’s work” was as much in the fields as it was in the home. The collectivization of labour in Doukhobor villages, such that individuals worked for the welfare of the whole community rather than for the welfare of their family alone, along with the division of labour – both between the genders and among the women – meant that while women had dominion over the household, they were also able to contribute significantly to the community’s welfare in the fields. The women divided household chores on a rotational basis, such that a few women were assigned each week to the tasks of cooking and cleaning in the home, freeing the rest of the women to garden or perform fieldwork.26 To some observers, the Doukhobor woman’s life seemed liked drudgery.27 Others painted a rosier picture of women laughing and singing on their way to work as though they were on their way to “a frolic.”28 … As photojournalist Victoria Hayward explained, the women’s approach to life was disciplined, yet carefree. Doukhobor women had “none of the accessories of dress which the average woman deems necessary if she is to feel and act at ease.”29 Rather, the Doukhobor woman, with her “closely cropped head and bare feet,” took a greater interest in her domestic chores and garden: “she is a product of nature, she takes it for granted you love the things of the earth as every true woman should.”30 As Hayward explained, The moment you meet the Doukhobor woman – strapping, athletic, alert and graceful – you find yourself looking at the strong face and hands and you say to yourself, “Here is a life that counts, there is a woman who can do something, not one who plays at it, inquiring of the fashion books what she shall wear when going a-hoeing.”31

Photographs published in the Canadian press in the first quarter of the twentieth century emphasized Doukhobor women’s natural simplicity, and portrayed them as conservative, traditional, and pastoral … Craftsman magazine published a series of photos in 1907 as part of an article concerning “The Doukhobors of Canada.” These images are notable because, while the article is not focused exclusively on Doukhobor women, the accompanying photographs are. They depicted “women,

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the workers” spinning, weaving, embroidering, sifting grain, beating flax, wearing headscarves, and sitting down to breakfast.32 The formula of this montage was repeated in a 1918 article in Canadian Magazine, which showed women with cucumbers, husking beans, beating mustard seed, at dinner time, spinning flax, knitting, and using a spinning wheel.33 Canadian Magazine published a second montage in 1920. These photographs showed women sifting millet, twisting flax, mangling, cutting bread, and drying apples.34 These images portrayed the women in traditional peasant dress, barefoot, working cooperatively, engaged in old-world agricultural pursuits. The tasks were either blatantly feminine, in the case of spinning, knitting, embroidery, food preparation, and gardening, or within the range of what most Canadians could imagine agricultural women – especially stalwart Eastern European women – doing. Where the author or photographer commented on the images, the tone reflects admiration, whimsy, and sympathy. The women in these photographs were “sisters.” … Embodying the Strange and Sensational By the middle of the twentieth century, the images of traditionally clothed women’s bodies harnessed to the plough and engaged in farm and household labour were completely eclipsed by a “stranger” image that was much harder to frame positively: that of the nude. Nudity was practised by a small, zealous sect of the Doukhobor population, the Sons of Freedom. Throughout the twentieth century, Sons of Freedom employed a variety of tactics to draw attention to their cause, including speech making, letter writing, postering, protesting, and parading. The Freedomites also used arson, setting fire to their own possessions as a demonstration of their freedom from material possessions, or setting fire to other Doukhobors’ belongings in an effort to shame those who had, in the Freedomites’ opinion, strayed from the true faith. Some members of the Sons of Freedom sect went so far as to target government and corporate buildings and infrastructure with explosives. Dealing with the depredations perpetrated by this minority cost British Columbian and Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars in legal, reconstructive, and rehabilitative expenses … Beginning in 1903 Freedomite Doukhobors used nudity to express their discontent, to demonstrate their rejection of materialism, to identify themselves with the innocence … of Adam and Eve before their fall

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from grace, and to vent their frustration with government and legal authorities. They stripped during religious services; during political or social meetings hosted by their own community or by non-Freedomite Doukhobors; while their own homes or the homes of their neighbours burned to the ground; while setting fire to other buildings; while on marches and parades; during public protests; when confronted by reporters, government authorities, or law enforcement officers; in court; and in jail. Sons of Freedom defended their use of nudity, explaining that removing one’s clothing indicated sincerity and humility before God.35 Generally, the Canadian press ignored or belittled the religious context for the Freedomites’ nudity, emphasizing instead its use as a form of protest and its ridiculousness.36 … While both male and female Sons of Freedom participated in nude demonstrations, women were pictured and described far more frequently in the Canadian press than men. These images, printed in Canadian and international newspapers, magazines, and books, showed women in partial and full undress from behind, though occasionally profile or frontal images were printed as well. It is possible that images of naked women had more impact than those of naked men. Where top-half photographs were published from a profile or frontal perspective, the topless women were more interesting and provocative than topless men, and, thus, were more marketable.37 This is consistent with broader journalism trends: while images of totally nude women were occasionally printed in the news media in the mid-twentieth century, images portraying male genitalia remained taboo.38 It is also possible that women removed their clothing more frequently than men. Some evidence suggests that male Freedomites were more likely to remove their clothing for a female photographer or reporter, while female Freedomites were more likely to undress in front of a male audience.39 As most photographers, reporters, government officials, and police officers in the middle of the twentieth century were male, it is possible that women simply undressed more frequently than men because the audience was usually male. Sons of Freedom women were seen to be, in general, more “aggressive,” “vocal,” and “radical” than Freedomite men.40 They appeared to provide much of the “emotional power” behind protest demonstrations.41 Harry Hawthorn, chair of the Doukhobor Research Committee, reported in 1952 that Doukhobor women had far fewer contacts with non-Doukhobor society than Doukhobor men. As such, women had

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become “more assertive and aggressive, more hostile to other Canadians and condemnatory in their judgments, and more stubbornly conservative in their opposition to the changes which nevertheless continue to affect their lives.”42 Though Sons of Freedom women used nudity and arson in their protests, there is little evidence to suggest that they participated in the more extreme “black work” allegedly undertaken by some Sons of Freedom.43 This work was, apparently, a job for Freedomite men, who were portrayed in the press as dangerous terrorists because of this activity.44 Though both Freedomite men and woman were portrayed negatively in Canadian newspapers and magazines, the “black work” which was perpetrated by male Sons of Freedom was covert; even the police had difficulty catching the perpetrators in the act. The press could only print photographs of the property that had been destroyed and the men thought to have done it. The connection between the crime and the suspect was implied. Nude protests, which usually involved women, were public by design. Women who participated in nude protests were caught on camera, doing what they were accused of doing. Images of women caught in the act likely had a greater impact on public opinion than images of men juxtaposed with images of the crimes they were accused of committing. Whether because women stripped more frequently than men or because the media preferred to print photographs of Freedomite women, the prevailing image of Doukhobor nudity was female. The photographs printed in the press and published in polemics left little to the imagination: by the middle of the twentieth century, anyone who wished to see what a Sons of Freedom woman looked like beneath her clothes could view the images for himself or herself. As if this photographic evidence was not damning enough, writers also went to great lengths to describe Doukhobor women’s bodies in unflattering detail … Clyde Gilmour informed Maclean’s magazine readers in 1947 that the women’s “contours call to mind an old Doukhobor cradle prayer” which called on God to “send her plumpness and beauty will come of itself.” Not many Doukhobor women “could be called pretty by Canadian standards,” Gilmour concluded.45 One of the … least flattering descriptions of Doukhobor women is found in Doukhobor Daze, former teacher Hazel O’Neail’s 1962 anecdotal account of her work among the Doukhobors in the 1930s. “Nearly all the Doukhobor women are very well upholstered in all sections,” O’Neail writes:

310 Ashleigh Androsoff Obesity seems to be a criterion of beauty, and even the young women make no attempt to control their tendency to fatness, nor even to mould it into curves. They are all soft and ploppy; and everything, fore and aft, jiggles as they walk. Even their full blouses and voluminous skirts do not conceal the quiverings and lurchings of these regions of their anatomies.46

One of these skirts, O’Neail claimed, “spread out, would make a tent almost large enough to shelter a good-sized revival meeting.”47 Equally critical assessments emerged in the descriptions of the Sons of Freedom women who paraded nude. Spokeswoman “Big Fanny” Storgeoff48 was one of the few nude women identified in the press in  articles focused on the Freedomites’ march to and encampment at Agassiz, BC, in 1962. That she was called “Big Fanny” – the latter part of which refers to the English translation and abbreviation of her name (Florence) and not to her backside – should have made the matter clear enough. In case the point was missed, however, some reporters offered clarification. Vancouver Sun reporter Simma Holt explained that Storgeoff was known as “Big Fanny” because of “the two hundred and fifty pounds spread grossly over a five-foot nine-inch body, which she readily exposed in protests.”49 Maclean’s referred to “Big Fanny” as a “280-pound matriarch”; Time labelled her as a “240-lb. stripper.” The Columbian diplomatically described Storgeoff as “buxom.”50 Focusing on the Physical Female Frame That some Doukhobor women were as homely, overweight, or naked as reporters implied is not the point. The point is that descriptions of the Doukhobor women’s size and shape overshadowed other possible descriptions concerning their religiosity, passion, intelligence, capacity for leadership, or role as wives and mothers. The women’s ability to undertake challenging physical tasks, as well as meticulous handiwork, earned them some respect among sympathizers who marvelled at their strength and their attention to detail; and some Canadians may have been prepared to overlook the Doukhobor women’s strangeness in light of their impressive practicality, fitness, and artistry. The image of heavy, unattractive, and unclothed Doukhobor women created, however, a negative impression among Canadians in general, and was embarrassing for the Doukhobor women who suffered ridicule and discrimination as a result of these portrayals.

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Canadians viewed the Doukhobors as “perhaps the most interesting of all the peculiar people we have assembled in Western Canada.”51 The Doukhobors attracted public attention because they were so different from other Canadian immigrants and, especially, different from mainstream Canadian society. Doukhobor men were ethnically distinctive, but their behaviour did not generally contravene Canadian conventions with regard to gender roles. Doukhobor women, however, were both ethnically … and behaviourally distinctive. Much of their behaviour challenged Canadians’ view of a woman’s place in society: the tasks she could perform, the role she could play in her community, and the way she should present herself in public. Doukhobor women, whether simple, strong, capable, hard-working, and artistic or pitiable, pathetic, dour, ugly, fat, stubborn, and backward bore the brunt of public scrutiny. The public’s ability to view the Doukhobor population objectively was limited by the media’s narrow focus. Through a trick of synecdoche, the image of the whole Doukhobor population was defined by the one part which the media chose to amplify. Incidents which occurred briefly or episodically defined Doukhobor identity for the public, while the majority of regular Doukhobor activities received limited coverage. The minority Sons of Freedom Doukhobors came to represent the nonFreedomite Doukhobor majority, because Freedomite activity attracted significant public attention and careless reporters failed to distinguish between the two factions. Images of Doukhobor women prevailed over images of Doukhobor men or of men and women together, because women seemed to differ more dramatically from their Canadian counterparts than men did. Women’s bodies – how they looked and how they performed – served as explanations for who Doukhobor women were, what their role was within the Doukhobor community, and what role they might play in Canadian society if properly assimilated. … Conclusion The public image of Doukhobor Canadian women produced throughout the twentieth century was a one-dimensional portrait based on their three-dimensional frame. Though one could suggest journalists bear much of the responsibility for the creation of this image, the power of the press is limited by what the audience will buy. That the Canadian public was prepared to “buy” the image of heavy-set naked women

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holding their clothes in their hands as they watched their homes burn to the ground says as much about the Canadian citizen as it does about the media. If the predominant image of the Doukhobor Canadian woman in the twentieth century is a negative one, it reflects both what the media was prepared to print and what the Canadian audience was prepared to believe.

NOTES 1 For examples of such images, see “Naked Doukhobors Go on Rampage,” Life 28, 19 (8 May 1950): 29–33; Simma Holt, “Freedomites Explain: Fires a ‘Telegram to God,’” Vancouver Sun, 9 September 1962, 1; “The Vanishing Sons of Freedom and the Tough Reporter Who’s Finally Told Their Story,” Maclean’s 77, 21 (2 November 1962): 40; Pete Mossey, “Fair Play Group Needed for the Non-Doukhobors,” Vancouver Sun, 28 November 1962, 5; Simma Holt, “Protest by Fire,” Canada Month, September 1962, 20–1; Simma Holt, Terror in the Name of God: The Story of the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964); “Toil and Troubled Life: Flesh, Fire and Freedom among the Doukhobors,” Canadian Heritage, August 1980, 35–6; Allison Markin, “Know Me for What I Am, Not Some Distorted Image,” Vancouver Sun, 24 June 1995, D7; Robert Matas, “Meet the Last Radical Doukhobors,” Globe and Mail, 9 March 1998, C2; Kirsten Stolee, “Aged Freedomite Guilty of Arson,” Vancouver Sun, 31 August 2001, A5; Jim Beatty, “Province Extends Its Regrets to Doukhobors,” Vancouver Sun, 5 October 2004, B1, B6. 2 Notable scholarly book-length works on the Doukhobors include Harry Hawthorn, ed., The Doukhobors of British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia and J.M. Dent and Sons, 1955); George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (Ottawa: McClelland and Stewart, 1977); William Janzen, Limits on Liberty: The Experience of Mennonite, Hutterite, and Doukhobor Communities in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Carl J. Tracie, “Toil and Peaceful Life”: Doukhobor Village Settlement in Saskatchewan, 1899–1918 (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, University of Regina, 1996); Julie Rak, Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004); and Gregory J. Cran, Negotiating Buck Naked: Doukhobors, Public Policy, and Conflict Resolution (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). Annie B. Barnes, “Doukhobor Women in the Twentieth Century,” in Koozma J. Tarasoff, ed.,

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Spirit-Wrestlers’ Voices: Honouring Doukhobors on the Centenary of Their Migration to Canada in 1899 (Ottawa: Legas, 1998) provides a retrospective look at the lives and experiences of Doukhobor women. For an analysis of Canadian “body” scholarship, see Lisa Helps, “Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History,” Journal of Canadian Studies 41, 1 (Winter 2007): 126–50. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 345, and Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (New York: Vintage, 1980), 40. L.A. Sulerzhitsky, To America with the Doukhobors, translated by Michael Kalmakoff (Regina: Canadian Research Centre, University of Regina, 1982), 89. See Joseph Elkinton, The Doukhobors: Their History in Russia, Their Migration to Canada (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1903), 190; John Philip Stoochnoff, Doukhobors as They Are (Penticton, BC: n.p., 1961), 67; and Holt, Terror in the Name of God, 25–6. For similar commentary, see “Doukhobors at St John: Landing from the Vessel and Embarking the Trains for the West,” Globe, 24 January 1899, 1–2; “Doukhobors Go West: A Globe Correspondent’s Trip with the Russian Immigrants,” Globe, 28 January 1899, 22; and Sulerzhitsky, To America with the Doukhobors, 88. “Clean Bill of Health: The Doukhobors on the Lake Huron Leave Halifax for St John,” Globe, 23 January 1899, 1, and “The Doukhobors,” Globe, 28 January 1899, 1. The Doukhobors were also financially and materially assisted by Russian author Leo Tolstoy, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and by the Canadian government, which put the sum of money it otherwise paid immigration agents towards providing for the Doukhobors through their first Canadian winter and financing their agricultural start-up. Elkinton, The Doukhobors, 99. The pen name, “Lally Bernard,” is derived from Mary Agnes FitzGibbon’s own and her mother’s maiden names. Henry James Morgan, ed., The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Hand-Book of Canadian Biography of Living Characters, 2nd ed. (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), 399. Bernard, “With the Doukhobors,” Globe, 9 September 1899, 5–6. Bernard, “Work for Doukhobors,” Globe, 22 November 1899, 5. Bernard, “With the Doukhobors,” 5–6. The Doukhobors summarize these concepts with the oft-repeated slogan “Toil and Peaceful Life.” Bernard, “Progress of Doukhobors,” Globe, 24 November 1900, 5, 9.

314 Ashleigh Androsoff 16 Qu’Appelle Progress, 22 June 1899, 1; Elkinton, The Doukhobors, 101; “Yorkton Enterprise,” Edmonton Bulletin, 15 May 1899, 1; “Chez nous et autours de nous,” Le Manitoba (Le Métis), 3 May 1899, 3. 17 Official report of the debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada: fourth session, 8th Parliament … comprising the period for the seventh day of July to the 11th day of August inclusive (Ottawa: S.E. Dawson, 1899). Frank Oliver is quoted, speaking on 26 July 1899 on page 8521. 18 Bernard, “With the Doukhobors.” 19 Bernard, “Doukhobor Men and Women,” Globe, 30 September 1899. 20 Bernard, “Doukhobor Men and Women” and “With the Doukhobors,” Globe, 28 October 1899, 17; Elkinton, The Doukhobors, 102–3. 21 Bernard, “Doukhobor Men and Women”; also “Women’s Art Exhibition,” Globe, 13 October 1903, 5, and “Doukhobor Embroidery,” Globe, 3 September 1906, 5. 22 Bernard, “Work for Doukhobors” and “Story of the Doukhobortsi,” Globe, 6 July 1901, 14. 23 Dorothy K. Burnham, Unlike the Lilies: Doukhobor Textile Traditions in Canada (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1986), 69–70; also, University of British Columbia, Jim Hamm fonds (hereafter Hamm fonds), Ann Popoff, interviewed by Jim Hamm, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 645. 24 See Bernard, “Work for Doukhobors.” 25 Victoria Hayward, Romantic Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1922), 229. 26 Peter Verigin, “The Truth about the Doukhobors,” Independent 75 (3 July 1913): 24; C.B. Sissons, “What Can We Do with the Doukhobors?” Canadian Forum 4 (July 1924): 299; “A Vegetarian Colony,” Literary Digest 67 (20 November 1920): 101. 27 C.I.S., “A Day among the Doukhobors,” Canadian Magazine 26 (January 1906): 282–4. 28 As cited in Murray J. Gibbon, “The Foreign Born,” Queen’s Quarterly 27 (April–June 1920): 344. 29 Victoria Hayward, “The Doukhobors: A Community Race in Canada,” Canadian Magazine 51 (October 1918): 462. 30 Ibid., 462–3. Peter “Lordly” Verigin required that his female followers wear their hair short, believing that short hair was more hygienic and its management less time consuming. University of British Columbia, Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood Papers, 1919–34, d. ms. 24, “Doukhobor Answer to the Veterans Resolution of Feb. 13th 1919” [17 February 1919, Brilliant British Columbia]. 31 Hayward, “The Doukhobors,” 463.

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32 Katherine Louise Smith, “The Doukhobors of Canada,” Craftsman 12 (April 1907): 64–79. 33 Hayward, “The Doukhobors,” 457–6. 34 Edith S. Watson, “Illustrating Homely Industries of Doukhobors Settled in British Columbia,” Canadian Magazine 56 (December 1920): 129–36. See also Hayward, Romantic Canada, 225–34. 35 Eli A. Popoff, compiler, translator, and editor, “Summarized Report: Joint Doukhobor Research Committee, Symposium Meetings, 1974–1982” (Grand Forks, BC: n.p., 1997), 65; Hamm fonds, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 26. 36 “Canada: Taming the Spirit Wrestlers,” Time 87 (11 February 1966): 32; “Strip-Down Strike: By Unclad Tactics, Dukhobortsi Still Worry British Columbia,” Literary Digest 123 (26 June 1937): 31; “Doukhobor Story,” Globe and Mail, 13 October 1953, 6; “Women Strip as Doukhobors Consider Move,” Globe and Mail, 10 March 1958, 14. 37 Simma Holt, author of Terror in the Name of God, suggests that her publisher pressured her to print pictures of young Sons of Freedom women in the nude. Hamm fonds, Simma Holt, interview by Jim Hamm, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 106. 38 Gans, Deciding What’s News, 244. 39 Both Jane Sloan and Simma Holt claim that Doukhobor men stripped when they arrived on the scene. Hamm fonds, Jane Sloan and Simma Holt, interviews by Jim Hamm, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 563 and 109. 40 Hamm fonds, Bob Mullock, interview by Jim Hamm, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 121. 41 Hamm fonds, Hugh Herbison, interview by Jim Hamm, “The Spirit Wrestlers,” transcript, 187. 42 Harry B. Hawthorn, “The Contemporary Picture,” in Harry B. Hawthorn, ed., The Doukhobors of British Columbia, 15; Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Doukhobors, 309. 43 “Black work” refers to the destruction of public property using arson or explosives. 44 For example, see “Over 800 Years in Sentences: ‘Official Bomber’ Sherstobitoff Gets 14 Years; 93 Sentenced; Other Terms Range From 1 ½ to 7 Years for Conspiracy, Arson and Dynamiting,” Nelson Daily News, 7 July 1950, 1. 45 Clyde Gilmour, “Mike’s Paradise,” Maclean’s 60 (1 September 1947): 71. 46 Hazel O’Neail, Doukhobor Daze (Sidney, BC: Gray’s, 1962), 12. 47 Ibid., 12, 34, 107.

316 Ashleigh Androsoff 48 Also spelled Storgoff in some press reports. 49 Holt, Terror in the Name of God, 271. 50 “The Vanishing Sons of Freedom,” Maclean’s 77, 21 (2 November 1964): 49; “Canada: Taming the Spirit Wrestlers,” Time 87 (11 February 1966): 32; and “Big Fanny’s Story Nothing but ‘Bilge,’” Columbian, 5 November 1963. 51 Sissons, “What Can We Do with the Doukhobors?” 298.

Propaganda and Identity Construction: Media Representation in Canada of Finnish and Finnish Canadian Women during the Winter War of 1939–1940 Va rpu Li n dst röm

Introduction Small ethnic groups in Canada have rarely been at the centre of media attention. If they have found their activities described in major Canadian dailies, the news has usually been negative or sensational in nature. During the Depression, the Finns, like many other European immigrants in Canada, grew accustomed to bad press about their community. The media reported on arrests of radical labour leaders, trials of Finnish strikers, demonstrators, communists, newspaper editors, and deportation cases – and they did so in ways that demonized left immigrant workers as “dangerous foreigners.”1 Such lopsided coverage hardly increased Canadians’ understanding of ethnic communities nor did it provide useful information about the countries of origin. Wars inevitably call into question the loyalty of citizens and place immigrants under special scrutiny. Many of those deemed to be a threat to the government’s war efforts – pacifists, left-wing radicals, and enemy nationals – had their civil liberties curtailed.2 If, in addition, they belonged to so-called visible minority groups, they became “objects of scorn.”3 Considering this background, one might well imagine how stunned were Finns in Canada by the overwhelmingly favourable coverage by the Canadian media of Finland and Finnish Canadians during the Winter War, which raged from 30 November 1939 until 13 March 1940. Triggered by a Soviet invasion into Finland and characterized by truly ferocious fighting, the Winter War that pitted Finns against Russians

This chapter is from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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captured the imagination of the media. Almost instantly, the Canadian media was “drenched with sympathy” for the small nation of Finland. Newspapers depicted the war as a battle between David and Goliath, the underdog and the bully, the small “gallant and heroic” nation of law-abiding and civilized people against the “barbarous,” “greedy,” Communist Russians.4 During the more than one hundred days of intense press coverage of the Winter War, the media also discovered the “Finnish woman” and, indeed, actively promoted various constructions of this female ethnic subject. This photo essay explores the media manipulation of the “Finnish woman” and how it served a variety of different propaganda agendas. Such manipulation was a complex and multilayered process: the Finnish woman’s race and the many gendered roles she played made her a malleable role model, an ideal sister to heterosexual AngloCanadian women – at least during a particular historical moment. An understanding of the Canadian media’s glorification of these female strangers requires us to look briefly at the events during the first year of the Second World War. When Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, the initial flurry of wartime activity, recruitment, patriotic speeches, and the creation of new enemy aliens in the country, captured the lion’s share of media attention. But as these early dramatic events soon gave way to what became known as the “phony war” (when little happened on the European battlefront), the lack of action in Europe meant few exciting stories for war correspondents. According to Canadian military historian J.L. Granatstein, early wartime activity had “stagnated, degenerating to a battle of leaflets and loudspeakers across the Rhine.”5 All this changed, however, when the Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939. Suddenly the world became witness to an active theatre of war replete with heroes and enemies, bombed-out cities, suffering civilians, and soldiers ambushed and frozen in the battle between “mighty Russia and the tiny nation of Finns.” The Winter War became front-page news as Finns fought against Canada’s ideological enemy – Communist Russia – for democracy and independence. Canadian war correspondents were dispatched to the Arctic front. Day after day, bold headlines trumpeted the message of the small heroic nation’s dogged determination to defend its borders. The media reported stunning successes of the Finnish Army against formidable odds: “Finns Drive Russians from Petsamo, Soviet ‘Parachute Army’ Wiped Out; Russians’ Losses Soar as Retreat Continues Along Three

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Sectors; Russians Lose 100,000 Men and 300 Tanks; Finns Smash Invader on Four Fronts, Annihilate Flower of Russian Army.” Characteristic of the media coverage of the Winter War was the following depiction: “Pitted against Finn supermen Russians flounder hopelessly in deep drifts of arctic forest.”6 Inspired Canadians flocked to volunteer to fight the Russians alongside the “Finn supermen.” An influential committee, headed by Senator Arthur Meighen, recruited the volunteers and raised funds for the Finnish war effort. Canadian military leader Col. Hunter announced that two thousand Canadian volunteers were ready to leave for Finland on 14 March 1940.7 And then, almost as suddenly, came the announcement that an armistice was declared on 13 March 1940. Canadians were perplexed. What they had read in the newspapers or heard on the radio had not prepared them for an armistice, let alone for the heavy territorial losses suffered by Finland. Furthermore, as the hostilities ceased, the fate of the Finns soon became yesterday’s news. In the spring and summer of 1940, the media attention shifted to the new and disturbing developments in Europe as Hitler’s successful Blitzkrieg began conquering one democratic country after another. On 22 June 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and four days later, Finland, alongside Germany, followed suit. Intent on reclaiming its lost territory, Finland was now a co-belligerent of Germany, which in turn, prompted the Canadian government, on 7 December 1941, to declare Finland an enemy of Canada. Finns in Canada thus became enemy aliens. Thereafter, if the Finns received any press coverage at all, they were depicted as tired, reluctant soldiers fighting on the wrong side. The “barbaric” Russians had now become valuable allies. As this brief summary suggests, the window of opportunity for this study is small indeed. The positive media coverage began during late summer 1939, as war clouds gathered over Europe, followed by a groundswell of coverage during the Winter War, which then waned soon after the armistice was declared. These changing contexts shaped in fundamental ways the portrayal of Finnish people, including women, in Canada and their changing status as sisters or strangers. During the summer of 1939 the government of Finland provided the North American press with photos designed to depict a nation of civilized, healthy, athletic, and beautiful people. Initially, this propaganda was part of an advertising campaign to entice Canadians to travel to the summer Olympics to be hosted by Helsinki in 1940. By the fall, the focus shifted to describing a small, brave nation

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in need of support, and Finnish state propaganda emphasized the role of women in nation-building, their crucial role in preparing Finland’s defences, and later their role in Finland’s war effort.8 Canada recognized the potential need to recruit women to bolster its own war effort. The intense attention given to the activities of the Finnish women at the beginning of the war foreshadowed the later wartime propaganda in Canada intended to recruit women en masse. Finnish sisters were deemed suitable heroines and role models for Canadian women. After all, they were fighting on the “right” side against Canada’s – and democracy’s – ideological enemy, the Communist Soviet Union. Stories of Finnish women served as positive examples of how women became critical contributors to the war effort while still maintaining their “womanhood.”9 At the same time, the Finnish Canadian community, which numbered more than forty-one thousand in 1941, quickly seized on the opportunities offered by this exceptional period of the glorification of everything Finnish. Community members, especially those belonging to nationalist and religious organizations, plotted how best they could get their own message across. They wanted the media to cover their assurances of their continuing loyalty to Canada while raising funds in aid of the Finnish war effort. More significantly, the Winter War presented an unparalleled opportunity for Finnish Canadians to have their voices heard across Canada. Finnish Canadian women were willing participants in the community’s propaganda efforts and in the creation of an idealized “Finnish woman.” It also offers a dramatic illustration of how “ethnic nationalism” can be gendered, a theme that Frances Sywripa also addresses in this volume. The representation of the Finnish woman during this period of crisis had many and seemingly contradictory layers. The mythical Finnish woman who appeared on the pages of the major Toronto and Montreal English-language newspapers was at once objectified as a beautiful woman, an aggressive soldier, a sacrificing “traditional” mother and wife, a strong peasant or construction worker, and an emancipated and independent woman. She was a victim and an initiator, supportive and demanding, weak and powerful. In other words, she represented the underlying ferment of Canadian women’s changing roles in society, the simmering challenges to their sexual identities, and the increasing dissatisfaction with the unequal economic and political power of women. The many different constructs of Finnish women coexisted in harmony and went uncontested on the pages of Canada’s leading newspapers.

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Why, one might ask, were the Finnish women deemed suitable role models? One reason may be that they were distant and strange enough not to pose any immediate threat. So little was known about Finland that fact and fiction about its women could safely mingle. Indeed, erroneous and often sensationalist reports went without protest. Another reason may be that a Eurocentric and often racist press found Finnish women eminently acceptable. They were white and belonged to the northern race; in fact, the press never tired of pointing out just how “fair” or “blonde” they were. They were also Protestant, Western in habits, and relatively well educated. In other words, mainstream AngloCanadian women could conceivably identify with their newly found Finnish heroines who stood beside – not behind – their men. Drawing on the coverage and especially the images of Finnish women that appeared in several English-language Canadian newspapers during the period under review, the following sections examine the seven complex images of Finnish women that emerged in the Canadian media. These were the traditional woman, the beautiful blonde, the worker, the emancipated woman, the woman in the Lotta Svärd auxiliary, the soldier, and the immigrant woman as fundraiser. The Traditional Woman The national costume of Finnish women became an important propaganda weapon and a symbol of the traditional peasant way of life. National costumes caught the attention of the reader, and many of the captions that accompanied the numerous photos had a didactic quality to them. Identifying images of Finnish peasant women at work, for example, were captions that informed the Canadian public that notwithstanding the “peculiar” costumes worn by Finnish women they really were just like Canadian women. In reality, women in Finland never wore national costumes, except on very special holidays or when performing traditional folk dances or songs on stage. Indeed, most women never owned the colourful ceremonial outfit, which was made of wool, cotton, intricate lace, and worn with heavy bronze or silver jewellery. Although hardly an outfit suitable for daily routines, press photographs released by the Finnish government suggested otherwise. They frequently portrayed women in these costumes. Four photographs published in the Toronto Star on 5 December 1939 are emblematic. The first photograph shows a young woman in national costume weaving; the second one has ten women in national costumes surrounding on old

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bearded man who looks like a traditional rune singer of Finnish mythological songs. The third image portrays a Sami woman and the text draws attention to her costume: “Lapland girls have their own peculiar dress.” The fourth is a picture of a stout peasant woman baking, with the explanation: “Peasant women maintain the old-fashioned way of cooking.” In stark contrast to these peaceful, though exotic, photographs of women in their most traditional roles is the bold caption: “Women of Finland Stand Beside Their Men” and “They Live and Fight in Traditional Style.”10 Finland also sent photographs meant to depict the “typical” Finnish women, and some of them also contain images of women wearing a national costume – including one of a young Finnish mother holding her impeccably dressed plump child. The caption reads: “Typical of the hardy, vigorous and purposeful character of the Finns is this peasant mother and child.”11 Similarly, the Montreal Standard carried a large photograph of two young maidens, dressed in the national costume, who were described as “typical of Finland.”12 The Beautiful Blonde The construction of the beautiful, mythical, healthy, and, again, exotic Finnish woman took many forms. One of the first such stories that dwelt on this theme in the Canadian press appeared on 10 November 1939, when Birgit Kansanen, “a pretty Finnish student studying at the University of Toronto” was interviewed for the Toronto Star. This “student” had in fact been supervisor of nursing for the Red Cross in northern Lapland. Her life, which was hardly typical of Finnish women, was described in exciting and daring terms. Her skiing trips through the wilderness and forests of Lapland to reach remote communities are depicted as heroic. Far above the Arctic Circle, in the darkness of the northern winter, she was pulled in sleighs by reindeer and sheltered from blizzards by her St Bernard dog. Far from being a passive female subject, Kansanen assisted the media by providing details of her lonely and brave struggles against the elements. At one point, she described being “caught in a snowstorm without [matches] and I slept beside my St Bernard dog all night to keep from freezing.” Kansanen’s story is exceptional indeed. Most Finnish women would have only seen reindeer in a zoo, and few would have travelled alone in a blizzard through the vast wilderness. This dramatic story was accompanied by a photograph of smiling Birgit Kansanen.13

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On 9 December 1939, the Montreal Standard published in its weekly magazine several pages of photographs of Finland depicting Finnish cultural heroes, Finnish architecture, and the Finnish landscape. Included was also a special section on “Finland’s Women.” One of its captions, referring to a photograph of two blonde girls leaning against a log cabin, tells the reader that “Finnish Girls Are Fair.” It then elaborates further: “Typical of Finland are these happy country girls with their long fair hair, broad foreheads, and strong white teeth.” Another page is dominated by a smiling, saluting Tuulikki Paananen. The caption, while misspelling her name, refers to her as “Finland’s leading screen star.” The popular photograph of Paananen, who spent the war years in Hollywood, was featured again on 30 December 1939 in the

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Toronto Star Weekly. This time her photograph filled the entire page.14 Needless to say, not all Finnish women were fair, strong, or healthy, and only the exceptional few ever became Hollywood stars. The Worker In stark contrast to the smiling beauties in national costumes are the strong women engaged in heavy manual labour. A factory worker included in a special Star Weekly photo coverage, entitled “Finland Resists

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Threat to Her Independence,” was described as “a sturdy girl worker in a paper-board factory.” The woman in the picture, looking directly into the camera, is wearing loose overalls with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and she is carrying a heavy load of paper boards. A picture on the same page shows five stout, elderly women crouching with brushes over a cobblestone street. Described as Finnish women street cleaners, the caption told readers that “their conscientious scrubbing of pavements … and the feminine thoroughness they bring to such jobs in other walks of life have given Finland the reputation of the cleanest country in Europe.” For many readers it undoubtedly required quite a stretch of the imagination to associate these stout, elderly street scrubbers with “feminine” attributes, though they might well have got the message that in Finland women could perform all kinds of heavy labour.15 The large number of women in heavy industries was partially due to Finland’s legislation of compulsory labour laws for all healthy Finns, eighteen to fifty-five years of age, that was enacted in October 1939 in anticipation of the war. Once the war started, the war industries were in desperate need of workers. Indeed, during the war more than half the people working in Finland’s war industries were women.16 Some parallels were drawn with the British women’s war effort as young girls and women were organized to do a variety of jobs “behind the lines.” Two photographs show “a group of girls making window blinds for blackouts at night.” The women “aided by a lone man” are “adept with tools.” Another photograph is of a roomful of women busily at work preparing bandages. The caption states: “Standing By – Women in Finland were as resolute as their men in demanding independence.”17 Canada, too, anticipated the need to recruit housewives into war industries. Many immigrant women who were originally recruited into the low-paying domestic service sector found new employment opportunities in war industries. Finnish Canadian domestics were quick to follow the example set by women in their homeland and changed their aprons to overalls and their small paycheques to “men’s wages.”18 The stories and photo images of Finnish women workers happily doing “men’s work” while maintaining their “femininity” helped set the stage for the later strong recruitment of Canadian women into the war industries. For this purpose the federal government established the Women’s Voluntary Service Division in 1941. As the labour shortage became critical in Canada, the Women’s Division of the Selective Service agency carried out a national registration in 1942 of all women aged twenty to twenty-four.19

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The Emancipated Woman Finnish government propaganda wished to create the image of a modern, emancipated woman who could stand next to the traditional woman. Educational material proudly proclaimed the positive, even enviable, position of women in Finland. And some Canadian newspapers, as the following excerpt shows, quoted it at length: In Finland women take their places alongside their menfolk in every walk and profession from the highest to the lowest. Granted the vote in 1906 when their sisters in other countries were only just beginning to think about such things they have carried on from there and one of their number, a domestic servant named Miina Sillanpää was elected one of the first women deputies and worked her way to a cabinet post.20

First-wave feminist and suffrage leader Nellie McClung joined the chorus of praises of the emancipated Finnish woman, pointing out, for instance, that she had received the right to vote eleven years before her  Canadian sisters. McClung became interested in Finnish women through her own Finnish domestic servant; the protagonist in her novel Painted Fires was a stubborn and independent Finnish maid. In a lengthy article about the war in Finland, McClung reinforced this image of emancipated Finnish women, and also described women’s independent role in the Lotta Svärd “women’s unit of defense.” But she also declared that Finnish women were “just like ourselves,” and, as supporting evidence, noted that “Finnish women have many societies, including the YWCA and the National Council of Women, both affiliated with the international bodies.”21 In short, Canadian press coverage gave the impression that Finnish women enjoyed equality with Finnish men. In reality, of course, they earned much less than men, were less likely to find themselves in leadership positions, and have yet today to reach equal pay or equal representation in the parliament. Women’s Auxiliary: The Lotta Svärd Many references in articles, interviews, and photographs were made to the Lotta Svärd organization and its uniformed women soldiers. The main impression gleaned from the newspaper coverage is of an organization for all Finnish women, that its members were “conscripted,” and

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that they served both as an auxiliary and as a fighting force. The press carried an unusual image of elderly, stern, and important-looking Finnish women in grey military uniforms seated in a meeting, holding documents in their hands, while a large portrait of Marshal Mannerheim hangs behind them, thus presenting an authoritative and respectful image of the women in Finland’s Lotta Svärd. One of the women is identified as Fanni Luukkonen, the head of the 100,000-member organization. These were not young women looking for adventure but mature women with serious wartime business on their hands. Finnish women were portrayed as most eager and willing participants in the activities of the Lotta Svärd. Under the title “Women Rush to Serve,” for example, the Toronto Star Weekly told readers the following: Stenographers whose jobs were wiped out by the war have rushed into Red Cross canteen work in Finland’s splendid auxiliary, the Lotta Svärd. Finnish women are now serving 10 to 15 hours a day for the country’s freedom. This is little Finland, unflinching and undaunted before the mighty Soviet Goliath which threatens its life.22

The text accompanying four pictures of quintessentially “traditional”looking Finnish women in national costumes declares that “Women of  Finland Stand Beside Their Men,” and then offers the following examples: Household Crafts such as the weaving this girl is doing have been forsaken for more active service now that Finland is at war. Girls and women have been trained in the part they must play in defence of their homeland. Like the women of Britain, they are now engaged in air raid precaution and army auxiliary work.23

Yet, the Lotta Svärd organization was far from an inclusive female organization. On the contrary, it was a political auxiliary organization for conservative Finnish women. It had strict screening procedures and only admitted as its members right-wing, mainly middle-class “Christian and moral” women. The organization was founded immediately after Finland’s civil war in 1919, which had pitted “red” Finns against the conservative “white” Finns. It originated as an auxiliary force to the conservative government’s Civil Guard by women who had participated on the side of the “White Guard” against the “Red Guard.” When the Winter War broke out, the Lotta Svärd had an elaborate network of what

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they called “reputable women” ready to serve in auxiliary roles. Decidedly anti-Communist, the organization did not allow left-wing Finnish women to join, and only after the Second World War did it agree to cooperate with women from Social Democratic organizations. It was thus seriously misleading to suggest that “all” Finnish women flocked to join the Lotta Svärd, but an impressive number did. During the Winter War, about 90,000 Lottas were mobilized. About 25,000 of them worked within the war zone, where they served in the field kitchens (11,000), took care of supplies (3,500), stood on guard in some 650 air defence locations (3,000), provided medical services (2,500), and clerical services (2,000). An additional 6,100 nurses worked through the Red Cross in the field hospitals. The example of a well-organized, uniformed, female defence unit engaged in important auxiliary work in aid of Finland’s war effort could serve as an appropriate model for Canadian women.

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The Soldier Some articles and photographs give the impression that Finnish women were not only serving behind the lines or in auxiliary roles but were an integral part of the army, fighting as soldiers on the battlefield. Photographs depict uniformed “female members of Finland’s army on an observation post high in a tree.” Another uniformed woman peers through her binoculars: “She watches and when raiders come the Finns are ready.” The caption assures the reader that “Essential to Finland’s weak air defences are the services of this girl.”24 Finnish women were also described as fierce gun-carrying soldiers. A bizarre article, which went uncontested, gives an image of a fully mobilized army of women. A section of the article, based on an interview with Mary Lehtonen of Toronto, sports the subheading, “Women Better Fighters.” It deserves to be quoted at length: “Wait until the Russian soldiers come face to face with a regiment of determined Finnish women soldiers,” advised Mary Lehtonen today. This 19-year-old girl has just returned from a two-month visit to the homeland and claims, from what she saw of the war preparations, that the women of Finland are more daring than men. “I saw whole regiments of women digging trenches along the Russian-Finland border. They worked sideby-side with the men and are trained to shoulder a gun if necessary. If that does happen, the Russians had better look out,” said Ms Lehtonen grimly. “Our men are good fighters but our women are better” … “From past experience in war,” Ms Lehtonen continued, “we know that our enemies are more afraid of the women than men.”25

The Winter War became famous for the Finnish ski troops which swiftly ambushed the enemy during the exceptionally cold and snowy winter. Canadians were told that women were part of the ski troops. A headline above a uniformed woman on skis says, “Draft Women to Fight Reds.” The Globe and Mail identifies her as “one of [the] Finnish women who has been drafted for army service as ski-troops.” The article continues, “The Finns have reported many successful attacks by their silently gliding ski troops in surprise attacks on the invading Russians.”26 A Finnish Canadian woman, Aili Laatunen, declared, “I think it is the sacred duty of every man and woman to fight for his country when that country is attacked.”27 Despite media reports to the contrary, Finnish women did not carry arms or join the army as soldiers

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during the Winter War. Only at the end of the Second World War in 1944 did the Ministry of Defence actually train 145 women to carry arms.28 Thus, the articles in Canadian newspapers that suggested that Finnish women fought as soldiers were sensationalist fiction misrepresenting the activities of the Lotta Svärd. During the Winter War, hundreds of Finnish Canadian men volunteered to go to Finland where they joined the “American Legion.” Some Finnish Canadian women, eager to heed Finland’s call for help, also travelled to Finland. Their departures were covered with great fanfare. The women were depicted as hoping to join the famous Lotta Svärd organization. For example: “Mrs Lenki Dankar is attractive, blonde and Finnish. She hopes to leave Toronto in a few days for her native land to serve in the front line trenches.” The emphasis on the woman’s looks, combined with the “fact” that she was going to serve in the “front line trenches,” fortified the tantalizing image of beautiful, blonde, Finnish female warriors.29 Another headline declared that Mrs Salonen, “Would sell her furniture to fight again for Finland: Twice decorated by homeland Toronto woman is anxious to return.”30 Although “heroic and attractive” women in battle intrigued the press and offered impressions of role reversals, they were fictitious. Only eleven Finnish Canadian women left with the volunteers to serve in some capacity during the Winter War. Three of them were accepted into the Lotta Svärd auxiliary where they worked as cooks and nurses. All three had been members of the organization before emigrating to Canada. Other emigrant women were rejected and bitterly concluded, “We weren’t good enough.” There were no follow-up articles on the women’s experience in Finland, leaving the reader with the false impression that Finnish Canadian women were “flocking” to serve in the front-line trenches of the Winter War.31 The Fundraiser Throughout the settlement history of Finnish Canadians, women carried the main responsibility for raising funds.32 The fundraising activity intensified just prior to the Winter War. The community issued carefully worded, short news releases designed to solicit funds for Finland while at the same time calming any fears of disloyalty to Canada, such as the following: “Following a mass meeting of Finnish people at the Church of All Nations, at which an expression of loyalty to the Canadian government was passed unanimously, an organizing meeting of captains

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was held.” The article continued to cover all bases by describing how women planned to “do handwork during the winter for the Red Cross of Finland, should the need arise, and to assist enlisted Finnish men in the Canadian army and Canadian soldiers in general.”33 Finns soon discovered what kind of stories would make it into the media. They included interviews with worried Finnish Canadian women with family in Finland but also pictures of Finnish Canadian women in their national costumes. In fact, just scanning the newspapers one gets the impression that Finnish Canadian women routinely wore this outfit. The community learned that young and beautiful women were the ones most likely to be photographed by reporters. Since the object was to raise money it was important to get photographs into the press that would draw attention to their printed message. For example, a photograph of four Finnish Canadian women in national costumes, knitting and sewing, has the caption: “Finnish fighters supported by Toronto kin.” The text below the photograph stated the community’s fundraising message: “While the Finnish army defends its land, relatives in Toronto are working hard to raise money and supply necessities through the Canadian Red Cross. Here are a few members of the ‘Finnish War Aid Auxiliary’ busily knitting and sewing at the Church of All Nations while they think of their beloved homeland.”34 The women are then identified by name and their position in the auxiliary, except for Signe Miettinen who is identified as a “1938 Finnish beauty contest winner.” During the following months the smiling photograph of Signe Miettinen in her national costume was published many times in different poses as the photographers focused their lenses on the “beauty queen.” The treasurer of the Finland Aid organization in Toronto, Elsie Kojola, who still sixty years later values her collection of newspaper clippings of the period, explained in an interview how the Finland Aid organization appointed press secretaries and staged photo opportunities in order to get their fundraising message across: “We discovered that beautiful, young women in national costumes worked the best.”35 Finnish Canadian women were consciously part of image-building for the “Finnish Woman.” The need to raise funds was paramount in their minds and the end justified the means. Thus, images of smiling costumed women proliferated in the papers. The Toronto Star carried two more photographs of Finnish women in Toronto “who donned national costumes.” The women, once again, are sewing. An adjacent picture shows piles of money scattered on the table. Smiling Mrs Lina Aho is donating the funds to a Red Cross Nurse “for their campaign to give help to their homeland.”

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Another two women packing clothes for shipment to Finland were featured the following day.36 Images of the smiling women in traditional costumes continued to be printed regularly throughout, and even for a few months after, the Winter War. Another image which worked well for fundraising purposes was to show women and children who were victims of war. A long-sustained fundraising campaign called “Help for Heroic Finland” in the Montreal Star featured a photograph of a sad and tired looking elderly woman. Her image was designed to evoke the sympathies of Montrealers who may have been able to identify with the plight of this one woman, who reminded people of their mothers and grandmothers. The photograph and the accompanying article brought the human tragedy of Finland to the homes of Montreal: The tragedy that is Finland seems to peer out of the face of this elderly Finnish woman as she sits in a shelter … the face is sorrowful, but there is determination and strength written on it, as it is written all over the little Republic which is fighting for its life against overwhelming odds … Take one more glance at the pitiful, almost beseeching, face of the destitute Finnish woman pictured above, and resolve to send a donation NOW.37

Conclusion In exploring the gendered nature of the iconography of Canadian newspapers’ coverage of Finnish women in Canada during Finland’s Winter War against Russia, this essay explores a little studied topic, namely, the role that the media played in rallying readers to the cause of war by drawing on gendered and ethnic images of foreign women who, though not despised, were not normally seen in heroic terms. At the same time, racialized notions of beauty also mattered, and Finnish women conveniently fit with exotic – but not too exotic – notions of “white goddesses.” Revealed here are the changing and mutable cultural and political meanings that were applied to a normally marginal group of immigrant women in Canada. The media coverage of the Finnish women must be evaluated in its exceptional wartime context. For a few months the insatiable desire of the Canadian media to glorify the events in Finland pre-empted their critical observation skills. So distorted was the media coverage that most Canadians, and Finnish Canadians in particular, were stunned to learn that these heroes in fact lost the Winter War and ultimately, in

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1940, had to make severe concessions to the Soviet Union. The headlines had described one Finnish victory after another and declared the near annihilation of the Russian army as David was defeating Goliath. Russian women and children also suffered but received no sympathy from the Canadians. Russian soldiers were brutally slaughtered by the thousands and many, unable to move with their heavy equipment, froze in the bitterly cold winter. Their slaughter was not necessarily heroic. Similarly, the images of women were designed, largely by the propaganda agencies of Finland, to create a multilayered super woman, attractive to all readers. She was at once sensual and exotic, beautiful and healthy, traditional yet modern and emancipated. This glorification of Finland benefited, even if only briefly, the Finnish Canadians who supported Finland’s war effort. For decades, the Finns had been marginalized and shunned by the media, attracting attention only when they did something that offended Canadian sensibilities. Now, suddenly, they could do no wrong. For a few months the Finnish Canadians, while distraught over the events in their homeland, basked in their hero status and tried to use it to their best advantage. Nationalistic community leaders painted a false picture of a united Finnish Canadian community whose political differences had all but disappeared. The community learned to use its women, frequently described as “girls,” to promote its nationalistic message and to aid in its fundraising. No one tried to correct or contradict the one-sided messages and often erroneous depictions of the role of Finnish women during the Winter War that had been constructed by the various propaganda agencies, the newspapers, and the Finnish Canadian community. The goodwill and attention towards Finland and its women was fleeting. National costumes from enemy nations soon fell out of favour. As the heroes turned into enemies, their community was silenced. No more feminine street cleaners or smiling beauty queens from Finland adorned the newspapers. Stories of Finnish women were replaced by information and intense propaganda about Canadian women’s war efforts and the exotic Finnish woman vanished from the press. The mythical “Finnish Woman” had served her purpose. Her stories and images had sold newspapers, she had created goodwill and sympathy towards Finland’s war effort, she had shown that women could be unified in the support of their homeland, she had provided examples of unusual working situations, her dedication in women’s auxiliary work had served as a model, and she was also depicted as a soldier standing “beside the men.”

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The stranger became a familiar sister, a role model with whom AngloCanadian women could identify. Like them, she was battling cold climates, she was Protestant and white, educated, and her country needed her. This made her a well-suited warm-up act to the publicity campaigns that recruited Canadian housewives into war industries and later into the Canadian army, navy, and air force. For a fleeting moment in history the stranger had a familiar face. She was a Finnish sister peering out of Canada’s major daily newspapers.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Carmela Patrias, “Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression in Crowland, Ontario, 1930–1935,” and Ian Radforth, “Finnish Radicalism and Labour Activism in the Northern Ontario Woods,” in Franca Iacovetta et al., eds., A Nation of Immigrants: Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, 1840s–1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 293–316, 322–58. 2 See, for example, Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe, Enemies Within: Italians and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); Frances Swyripa and John Heard Thompson, eds., Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada during the Great War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1983); Norman Hillmer, Bohdan Kordan, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds., On Guard for Thee: War, Ethnicity and the Canadian State, 1939–1945 (Ottawa: Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, 1988). 3 See, for instance, Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was: A History of Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); Ann Gomer Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981); Barry Broadfoot, Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame: The Story of Japanese Canadians in World War II (Toronto: Double Day Canada, 1972); Patricia Roy, J.L. Granatstein, Masuko Ino, and Hiroko Takamura, eds., Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 4 For information on the wartime experience of Finnish Canadians, see Varpu Lindström, From Heroes to Enemies: Finns in Canada, 1937–1947 (Beaverton, ON: Aspasia Books, 2000). 5 J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977), 135.

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6 Toronto Daily Star, 2 December 1939; Globe and Mail, 25 December 1939; Toronto Daily Star, 30 December 1939; 2 January 1940, and 8 January 1940. 7 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, Finland, package 2, Finnish Consulate General of Montreal archives, Toronto Daily Star, 8 March 1940; Toronto Telegram, 11 March 1940. 8 For example, see multipage photo essays in the Star Weekly, 18 November 1939, and the Montreal Standard, 9 December 1939. 9 On the recruitment and image of Canadian women in the armed forces, see Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986). On women and sexuality during the war, see Marilyn Lake, “Female Desires: The Meaning of World War II,” in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Feminism in History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 429–49. 10 Toronto Star, 5 December 1939. 11 Star Weekly, 16 December 1939. 12 Montreal Standard, 9 December 1939. 13 Toronto Star, 10 November 1939. 14 Montreal Standard, 9 December 1939; Star Weekly, 30 December 1939. 15 Star Weekly, 30 December 1939. 16 Lea Tuiremo, Sota ja Nainen (War and Woman), Snellman Institute Series B/31 (Kuopio, Finland, 1992), 28. 17 Montreal Star, 29 December 1939; Toronto Star, 1 December 1939. 18 Interview with Aune Jokinen, Sault Ste Marie, 1998. See also Lindström, From Heroes to Enemies, 155–6. 19 On recruitment of Canadian women into war industries, see Pierson “They’re Still Women After All.” 20 Montreal Standard, 9 December 1939. 21 Nellie McClung, “Finns Fight for Freedom against Russian Invasion: Finland Is Crowned with Immortality as Russia Attempts to Blot Out Her Independent Little Neighbor.” Unidentified newspaper clipping, 20 January 1940. 22 Star Weekly, 4 December 1939. 23 Toronto Star, 5 December 1939. 24 Montreal Standard, 9 December 1939; Toronto Star, 17 January 1940. 25 Toronto Star, 30 November 1939. 26 Globe and Mail, 1 January 1940. 27 Toronto Star, 8 January 1940. 28 Tuiremo, Sota ja Nainen, 30–4; for a comprehensive treatment of this organization see V. Lukkarinen, Suomen Lotat (Finland’s Lottas) (Jyväskylä, Finland, 1986).

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29 Toronto Star, 2 January 1940. 30 Toronto Star, 1 January 1940. 31 University of Turku Archives SSK no. 81, letters from Anni Korsberg to Finland Society, Vaasa, 19 January 1941; Lempi Tiinus to A. Suomal. Kotiuttamisosasto, Viljakala, 6 November 1940; Laura Virta to Päämajan Vapaaehtoistoimisto, Järvenpää, 28 October 1940; Aili Viita to Päämajanvapaaehtoistoimisto, 14 November 1940; Interview with Helmi Huttunen, Astoria, Oregon, 1992. For further information of Finnish Canadian women in the Winter War of Finland, see Varpu Lindström, From Heroes to Enemies, 98–9. 32 For a history of Finnish immigrant women in Canada, see Varpu LindströmBest, Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada, 1890–1930 (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1988). 33 Toronto Star, 10 November 1939. 34 Toronto Star, 6 December 1939. 35 Interview with Elsie Kojola, Toronto, 1998, and her private collection of newspaper clippings in author’s possession. 36 Toronto Star, 4 January 1940. 37 Montreal Star, newspaper clipping, n.d., in Kojola collection.

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PART SIX Activists and Political Subjects

A dominant stereotype of immigrant women, so often portrayed as “women in the shadows,” is that of cowering women confined to the family or kin-based household, and hence so much more cut off from their adopted society than their husband or father, male siblings or cousins, or children. The stereotype persists even though the association between paid work and immigrant women – initially single women in particular but, especially after 1945, married women, too – is a long one. Their presence in the paid labour force has varied considerably in locales across Canada, but, generally speaking, immigrant, ethnic, and racialized women have become an increasingly significant proportion of Canada’s female labour force. Having earlier abandoned domestic service jobs for factory work, Canadian working-class women in the twentieth century increasingly shunned factories for the expanding white-collar jobs in offices and department stores. Again, immigrant women largely filled the gap, especially in cities like Montreal and Toronto, whose economies included plenty of low- and semi-skilled factory jobs in the garment and other industries, as well as service jobs that hired newcomers at low wages. Especially in the garment industry, immigrant women also earned modest incomes doing piece-work at home. Despite their marginalization in the Canadian economy and wider society, working immigrant women have also displayed an impressive degree of combativeness, militancy, and radicalism in the workplace and on the picket line. This is also true of “housewives” from different immigrant, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, who have engaged in political activism, such as consumer boycotts and anti-racist campaigns. Drawing on radical traditions, certain female groups – such as leftwing Finns, Jews, and Ukrainians and, later, Haitians in Quebec – have

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nurtured their politicized communities through social and cultural as well as political activities. Some also joined multi-ethnic or multiracial campaigns. And, when they took to the streets against hostile employers or the government to declare themselves legitimate political subjects worthy of better wages, safer working conditions, lower food prices, or non-discriminatory housing codes, they often had their children in tow, their presence a fitting reminder of the women’s struggles and desire to build a better future for themselves and their loved ones. All dealing with the post-1945 era, the three chapters in Part Six not only add “new” groups to the scholarship on militant and radical “ethnic” women in Canada, including Haitian feminists and Portuguese cleaners, but also they use a case study to modify or otherwise reflect on the established wisdom in that literature. In a contribution to newer feminist work on the Cold War as well as to older work on left women’s (consumer) activism, Julie Guard delineates the significant presence of “ethnic” women in the Housewives Consumers Association (HCA), which organized numerous protests across Canada against the postwar price hikes in food and other consumer goods. At a time when the official and popular discourses of womanhood emphatically glorified the “stay-at-home mom,” the HCA women were transgressive. But like earlier militant women, they “naturalized” their incursions into the “normatively” male domains of federal Cabinet meetings and picket lines by defining these activities as natural extensions of their roles as “citizen-mothers.” Guard also suggests that the demonization not just of Communists but of anyone who criticized government as “dangerous foreigners” led the HCA to downplay its leftist politics and to present itself as a mainly “WASP” organization. Grace L. Sanders Johnson’s essay on Haitian women in 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s Quebec is a study in transnational feminist activism and the multiple subjectivities of diasporic women. Using oral histories, she documents the women’s changing diasporic ties to families in Haiti. She considers how their politicization as left feminists was informed by the political and social movements of both their homeland – the opposition to the Duvalier dictatorships also incorporated the US civil rights movement and African liberation movements – and of their host-land – Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and women’s and student movements. Johnson also examines the women’s alliances, the racism they faced, their expectations as mothers, and their reflections as feminists. To most everyone’s surprise, argues Susana Miranda, Portuguese immigrant office cleaners with no union experience sustained a lengthy strike in 1984

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against the owners of and the company contracted to clean two large financial towers in downtown Toronto. Drawing on newspaper sources, she sheds light on the motives of the strikers, many of whom, in a reversal of “normal” gender roles, were the “family breadwinner,” supporting husbands and children and other family back in Portugal. She considers how they gained a public presence as well as critical skills, and their resolve in taking on “big capital” and “the state” despite enormous odds. Miranda also details the gendered, ethnic, and cultural features of the picket line, highlighting the unique mix of Portuguese rituals, worker solidarity, and even Catholicism. Did “ethnic” women enjoy equal standing with Anglo-Celtic women in the HCA? Did the HCA accomplish its goals? Why use a rolling pin as your “brand”? How did the Haitian women develop their womancentred consciousness and transnational feminism? Explain the significance of the feminist diasporic lakou. Why did Portuguese women strikers position themselves as immigrants not citizens? What role did their husbands, children, and union play? What does it mean to decentre the WASP woman worker – or activist?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Frager, Ruth. Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Gabaccia, Donna, and Franca Iacovetta, eds. Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Guard, Julie. “Authenticity on the Line: Women Workers, Native ‘Scabs,’ and the Multiethnic Politics of Identity in a Left-Led Strike in Cold War Canada.” Journal of Women’s History 15, 4 (2004): 117–40. Hinther, Rhonda L. “‘They Said the Course Would Be Wasted on Me Because I Was a Girl’: Mothers, Daughters, and Shifting Forms of Female Activism in the Ukrainian Left in Twentieth-Century Canada.” Atlantis 32, 1 (2007): 100–10. Kaplan, Temma. Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Kealey, Linda. Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Sanders Johnson, Grace L. La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women’s Rights, National Politics and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1935–1986. Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013.

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Sangster, Joan. “Robitnytsia, Ukrainian Communists, and the ‘Porcupinism’ Debate: Reassessing Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Early Canadian Communism, 1922–1930.” Labour/ Le Travail 56 (Fall 2005): 51–89. Swyripa, Frances. Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Ventresca, Robert A. “‘Cowering Women, Combative Men?’ Femininity, Masculinity, and Ethnicity on Strike in Two Southern Ontario Towns, 1964–1966.” Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997): 125–58.

Canadian Citizens or Dangerous Foreign Women? Canada’s Radical Consumer Movement, 1947–1950 Ju li e G uar d

Introduction In May 1947, the Housewives Consumers Association (HCA), a group of progressive women from differing political backgrounds, grabbed national attention when it organized a children’s boycott to protest a sudden hike in the price of candy bars. Delivering in dramatic fashion the intended message – inflation hurt children and families – the boycott also garnered support among a wide cross-section of Canadians for the HCA’s demand that the federal Liberal government return wartime price and rent controls and enact other policies to help struggling working-class families. Like earlier rent strikes, bread riots, and kosher meat boycotts in Canada and elsewhere, the 1947 children’s action also drew on time-honoured strategies developed by militant mothers, many of whom were ethnic women. One of the HCA’s founders, Ukrainian Canadian Mary Prokop recalled that women like herself – factory workers, mothers, the Canadian daughters of immigrant women, and female members of long-standing left-wing ethnic groups – used their networks “to do something” about the “rough” times caused by “unemployment [and] prices [that] skyrocketed after the war: bread and eggs and all commodities.”1 Although the HCA explicitly rejected a direct affiliation with any political party or organization, it came quickly under fire by Cold Warriors … who portrayed its membership as well-intentioned but naive women duped by Communists, including Canada’s own red foreigners. When asked

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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about the role of “ethnic” women in the HCA, an elderly Prokop said the association was the product of sisterly networks of women from both the Anglo-Celtic and ethnic left, but also that such relationships could be unequal: ethnic women had played a crucial role in the organization – perhaps even more so than that of the Anglo-Celtic women – but their work was never acknowledged, either by their “Canadian” sisters, their allies in the male-dominated left, or the Canadian public. This chapter documents the rise and fall of Canada’s radical consumer movement, focusing on its origins, the leaders’ strategies and the responses they provoked, and the role of ethnic women and their organizations. A contribution to the historical scholarship on ethnic women on the political left and the social and gender history of the Cold War, the HCA offers a graphic illustration of how the Cold War national security state, supported by the mainstream media, deployed prevailing common-sense notions of femininity and ethnicity to recast a grassroots political movement in which both Anglo-Celtic and ethnic women were active as a moral contagion that required “domestic containment.”2 The HCA’s ethnically diverse, cross-class composition, which temporarily united women from a wide range of organizations and social positions – including social workers and teachers, factory workers and homemakers, liberals, social democrats, and radicals, working-class and middle-class women – provides an unusual vantage point on leftwing women.3 Whereas most such studies focus on the pre–1945 era and on a small elite of writers and propagandists, and treat ethnically unmarked, normatively “Canadian” women and groups separately from those that are identifiably “ethnic,” my focus on an organization that brought together women from varied backgrounds, experiences, and class positions into a post–Second World War community-based organization provides a rare perspective on cross-ethnic relations on the front lines of radical protest in a Cold War context. With few exceptions, the important Canadian works on left ethnic women adopt the single group approach, whereas this essay deals with cross-ethnic relations among women on the left, in this instance, in a specific multiethnic lobby.4 The study also highlights the ways that female gender and ethnicity were linked in official discourses to nativism and xenophobia, which were invoked, by both mainstream media and representatives of the state, to undermine the legitimacy of popular, grassroots protest and destabilize dissent. The Housewives themselves – drawing on a tradition of “socialist maternalism” that was familiar to many left-wing and ethnic women

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– challenged official and popular discourses that defined postwar femininity as passive and apolitical … Like earlier anarchist, socialist, and Communist women in Canada and elsewhere, they naturalized their incursions into the normatively male domains of federal Cabinet meetings and picket lines by defining these activities as natural extensions of their roles and responsibilities as mothers. Competing and contradictory constructions of identity were the stakes in the HCA’s struggle for legitimacy, expressed in the conflict between the popular and institutional discourses of anti-Communism, traitorous foreigners, and female domesticity, and the HCA’s efforts to construct its own identity as class-conscious consumers, real and ordinary housewives, and militant, politically responsible citizen-mothers. As political actors, the Housewives embodied these contradictions. Their credentials as political actors who could facilitate a diverse mass movement depended on their legitimacy as mothers and homemakers with a right to speak on behalf of ordinary Canadians. But such selfrepresentations elided the ideological distinctions that set them apart from other “ordinary” women. The Housewives’ effectiveness as political actors rested on their conviction that ordinary people were entitled to a voice in governance and a larger share of social goods, a belief that drew directly on the social egalitarianism of the Communist left. Many of its leading members were members of the Communist Labor-Progressive Party (LPP), women’s auxiliaries of Communist-led labour unions, or members of ethnic cultural organizations widely identified as Communist. Identifying themselves as part of the broadbased, left-wing movement, the HCA used the publicity and mobilization strategies popular with the political left, expressed solidarity with LPP causes, and recruited members and support through left-wing newspapers and community organizations. Personally committed to opposing capitalism, they were ideologically distinct from most other Canadian women. As long as they were perceived as women and Canadians, the Housewives could function as the leaders of a broadly based popular movement, but as Communists or suspected Communists, and particularly as demonized foreign Communists infecting the body politic from within, they lacked credibility … The strategic choice to represent themselves as “ordinary” Canadian women was not, however, unproblematic. Like the Communist Party, which chose to portray itself as the very essence of Canadian-ness in order to avoid the added stigma attached to foreigners or those who were perceived as “aliens” – a designation that included native-born

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Canadians of immigrant parents, as well as Jews of any national origin – to an already problematic political identity, the Housewives chose Anglo-Celtic women, or women who appeared to be Anglo-Celtic, as the public representatives of the organization … Despite its “WASP” public face, the HCA was ethnically diverse – and more so than might be suggested by the names of its members, many of which had been Canadianized or anglicized – and owed much of its (temporary) success to the support of the organizations of the ethnic left. Such links were often obscured, however, by the adoption of Canadian-sounding names, whether by birth or husband’s name. Prokop’s name belonged to her husband, a left-wing labour organizer who had changed his name because of state harassment and the strong anti-immigrant mood of the wider public. Ann Ross, wife of Winnipeg Communist party leader Bill Ross, was a Jewish Russian immigrant whose husband belonged to the politically active Zuken family. Toronto-based HCA campaign manager Helen Weir, born Kucherian, was a Ukrainian Canadian and an active member of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC). Her husband, John Weir, who came from the Viviurski family of Communists, wrote for several Communist newspapers, and was one of the mostly Ukrainian Canadian Communists interned during the war.5 The available evidence also suggests that the strategy of creating a Canadian front for the ethnically diverse HCA reinforced the marginalization of ethnic women within the organization … At the very least, the Housewives, by cultivating a public image of themselves that conformed, in significant ways, to dominant, arguably bourgeois notions of female respectability, opted for a strategy that stood in contrast to that of their ethnic “sisters,” who drew on a very different tradition of female political activism, one that viewed bourgeois womanhood with suspicion, eschewed delicacy as a useless affectation, and prized feminine courage and strength … Children on the Line: The Chocolate Bar Boycott, 1947 Canadians who listened to CBC Radio news on 1 May 1947 learned that children in Toronto, Montreal, and Regina, their huge placards covering them from head to toe, had organized to protest an increase in the price of chocolate bars.6 Many would have understood clearly the message being conveyed: inflation, and particularly the rising cost of food and everyday commodities, had become so serious a problem for many families that even children were suffering from the effects of the growing disparity between postwar prices and postwar wages.7

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The spectacle of schoolchildren organizing in cities across Canada to protest a 60 per cent increase in the price of chocolate bars, which had risen from five cents to eight cents, focused major media coverage on the HCA’s campaign against rising prices.8 Militant child picketers provided good copy for radio stations and newspapers eager for entertaining, “soft news” stories. The construction of inflation as an urgent family matter also conferred legitimacy on the Housewives’ campaign. Protestors who might otherwise be perceived as engaging in an unseemly form of political protest reconfigured their activities as eminently respectable by invoking the moral authority of that most respectable of institutions, the family. The central plank of the Housewives’ campaign was a call for an immediate change in the federal Liberal government’s social and economic policies to protect the well-being of working-class families. Speaking as the ones with the primary responsibility for managing household budgets and caring for daily needs, they criticized the government for capitulating to the interests of big business, and called for sweeping reforms, and in particular, revised economic policies. Arguing that wartime price controls had come off too soon, they accused business of exploiting temporary shortages by charging exorbitant prices. They submitted briefs to government committees outlining their agenda. In public meetings and in radio broadcasts, they called for a comprehensive housing policy to resolve the postwar housing crisis through rent controls and a home-building program, reforms to old age pensions, hot lunches and free milk for schoolchildren, government-sponsored child care, and a number of other social policy initiatives.9 Although ethnically unmarked, apparently Anglo-Celtic women were most prominent in activities such as lobbying members of Parliament; many of the Housewives’ strategies, such as picketing grocery stores, organizing boycotts, and marching with babies and children down the main streets of their communities to protest the high prices of milk and bread, would have been familiar to members of Canada’s ethnic communities. Community- and family-centred strategies such as these drew in part on the radical traditions of militant mothers who, in the past, had deployed public protests featuring children in ways designed to attract sympathy and attention to their cause – be they Jewish women who organized kosher food boycotts that sometimes erupted into violent clashes at the shop door, Italian American women who protected their children during violent strikes by sending them to live with friends further away, or the Ukrainian, Hungarian, Jewish, Italian, and other women in the multi-ethnic town of Crowland, Ontario, who brought

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their children into the streets to help them resist the police trying to force relief strikers back to work in a Great Depression–era strike that mobilized an entire community.10 Similarly, left Ukrainian Canadian women in the HCA, like Prokop, commonly brought their children to ethnic halls, political meetings, and demonstrations. Babies and politics went hand in hand.11 Like many other female militants, the Housewives defined political activism, drew on constituencies, and developed activist strategies that differed from those of labour organizations and political parties led by men. Both the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) and the LPP called for postwar price controls, but neither organization addressed as broad a constituency as the Housewives, who reached into women’s homes across the country through telephone networks and neighbourly visits. The differences in strategy are especially striking in the case of the CCL, whose campaign focused on unionized male workers, writing women implicitly out of the negotiation.12 The Housewives’ program, by focusing on the relations of consumption rather than production, also diverged both analytically and strategically from that of the male-dominated left. The LPP endorsed the Housewives’ campaigns and urged party members and members of left-wing labour unions to participate in them, but the party had little interest in consumption.13 Party strategy concentrated on organized labour and electoral politics, and despite the regular appearance in the Communist press of exhortations from LPP leader Tim Buck urging active support for the Prices campaign, the response from the male left appears to have been tepid. Indeed, although anti-Communists accused the HCA of being nothing more than a front organization for the Communists, the evidence points to a more complex relationship. The Housewives looked to the LPP for assistance with research and publicity, and possibly for advice, but RCMP surveillance files reveal that the security service could find no evidence of any more substantive connection.14 In contrast to the LPP, whose campaign focused on unions and their auxiliaries, the Housewives’ campaigns reached out to women in traditional, family-centred roles. Who knew better than the housewife, they asked, for whom purchasing was part of the job definition, that rising prices and smaller pay packets meant fewer and poorer quality groceries in the shopping basket? Pointing blame at unscrupulous corporations, whose rapacious greed for profit threatened the well-being of ordinary families, they portrayed class struggle as both reasonable and respectable, an activity well within the bounds of feminine propriety.

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Along with sweeping economic and social reforms, they called for a more participatory style of democracy, in which consumers would have both voice and vote in determining policy and legislation. The politicized concept of consumption implicit in these demands was animated by a conviction in the injustice of existing class relations that they shared with the Communist left. But unlike the male-dominated left, which was primarily concerned with the relations of production, their program for social justice called for a radical renegotiation of the class relations of consumption.15 As class-conscious consumers, they expressed their demands for a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between citizens and the state in familial terms, pointing to their traditional roles and responsibilities as housewives and mothers to justify their right to demand fundamental change. Radical Motherhood The Housewives’ representation of public policy as an appropriate focus of female concern … was consistent with maternalist movements elsewhere. From the late nineteenth century and into the 1940s, European and American women had been campaigning collectively for the creation of social policies, pointing to their authority as mothers and homemakers to justify their demands. In contrast to Canada, where nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century maternal feminism was overwhelmingly middle class, European maternalism encompassed both middle- and working-class movements, although class consciousness usually varied according to class composition.16 Within these movements, working-class consciousness informed a very different agenda for social reform than that espoused by middle-class maternalists. Social Democratic and Labour women in Australia, Sweden, and Britain, for instance, were less interested in the vote than in the creation of progressive social policy, and these working-class maternalists continued to work for change long after the suffrage was obtained.17 Similarly, the HCA, while claiming kinship with turn-of-the-century suffragists, invoked maternal authority to legitimate their demands for sweeping political reform.18 The radical maternalism that was implicit in the Housewives’ claims to legitimacy as political actors has roots in traditions of socialist and anarchist motherhood such as those examined by Caroline Waldron in her study of turn-of-the century anarchist Italian American and Frenchspeaking Belgian women whose husbands worked in the coalfields of

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Illinois. They based their right to participate in the struggle for social and political reform in their maternal responsibilities and domestic expertise.19 And, like the militant working-class women who joined their husbands, fathers, and brothers on picket lines in industrial towns and cities across the nation or who struck to improve their own working conditions with or without the assistance of men, they engaged in collective struggle with an enthusiasm that points to a far more combative norm of womanhood than that embraced by their middle-class sisters.20 Women such as Mary Prokop, Lil Ilomaki (born Himmelfarb into a family of Jewish Polish socialists in 1912 and a graduate of the Pioneers and Young Communist League), and Alice Maigis, a Lithuanian Communist, not only lived intensely political lives but also strongly rejected what they perceived to constitute bourgeois womanhood. Notwithstanding its hegemonic quality, not all women fell victim to its admittedly powerful influences. At the same time, the conflict between the Housewives’ political activism and the demands of normative femininity was constantly at issue in the HCA’s ability to retain popular support and deflect attacks on their legitimacy. Their ability to create the large-scale social movement necessary to press such claims pivoted on their ability to reconcile the inherent conflict between promoting a radical political agenda and retaining the appearance of normative respectability. This conflict, which became increasingly pronounced in the late 1940s, as Cold War sensibilities permeated cultural assumptions about behaviour and identity, was particularly problematic for women.21 Constrained by restrictive norms of familialism and domesticity, women hovered uneasily on the margins of political legitimacy. The Housewives’ attempts to mobilize women obliged them to establish beyond a doubt that womanly respectability would not be compromised by engagement in the public world of politics. In the increasingly restrictive social context created in part by antiCommunism, respectability could also be called into question by opponents who invoked fears of foreigners to discredit the organization. Roll Back Prices In February 1947, the HCA began making headlines in both the left-wing and mainstream press. In response to the repeal of federal price ceilings and galloping inflation, they announced a Roll-Back-Prices campaign that called on the government to protect consumers by reinstituting the price controls and subsidies that had guaranteed a minimum standard

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of living during wartime. From the West Coast, through the Prairies, and then into central and eastern Canada, Housewives Associations and Consumers Leagues began organizing parades, picketing stores that refused to lower their prices, printing leaflets, and making radio broadcasts. Membership soared; by April, the Housewives claimed a national membership of 100,000. Although precise numbers do not exist, people across Canada clearly knew about the Housewives’ campaigns.22 Loosely affiliated Housewives organizations in almost every province began working together to create a movement, generating petitions and postcards calling for a return to price controls and boycotting designated foods and clothing … By early March, Housewives associations in the western provinces had produced a nine-point brief detailing their grievances and outlining proposals for change. Delegates, including a Saskatchewan provincial Cabinet minister, were nominated to take it to Ottawa.23 Framing their demands in familial terms, the Housewives got an audience with federal Finance Minister Douglas Abbott. Twelve representatives from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia journeyed to Ottawa for their meeting on 31 March. The news coverage of their lobby was sympathetic, reiterating the maternal language with which they expressed their demands, describing the Housewives as “not interested in the new Spring hats displayed in Ottawa’s store windows, but rather in milk for our babies [and] control of goods and services essential to the health and welfare of the Canadian people.”24 Finance Minister Abbott listened politely to their appeals for the reinstatement of price controls, but having been forewarned of their political sympathies, he knew he could disregard their demands. Early in the following week, he announced not the reinstitution of price controls, but rather their further removal.25 Less than a month later, the Housewives’ campaign suffered another, much larger setback. On 23 April, the Winnipeg Free Press declared that at least four members of the delegation, as well as a number of the association’s officers, were card-carrying Communists or the wives of provincial LPP leaders. The news was picked up by papers across the country, whose inflammatory headlines – “Hundreds of Unwary Women Duped,” “Communist Strategy Is Exposed,”26 – recast a straightforward expression of frustration by ordinary women trying to keep house on dwindling family incomes as a subversive activity. These revelations were also serendipitous for the government, which could now ignore the Housewives’ demands with impunity …

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Virtually overnight, the Housewives became the target of an outraged public debate. Newspapers across Canada filled their pages with articles and editorials expressing a range of viewpoints, but weighted heavily towards the side that saw Communist housewives as shabby fraud, a clever trap set by unscrupulous Communists, who were “not genuinely concerned about prices, but wanted only to spread discontent … for their own selfish and dangerous ends.”27 The dismal failure of the western delegation was a setback for the Housewives, but it was not yet the end. Learning quickly from their mistakes, the Housewives stepped up their campaign and attempted to reconfigure their public image. Renewing their efforts for another delegation, Housewives organized publicity events designed to highlight their connections to the family and distance themselves from the negative connotations of Communism. In the first week of the campaign, eight hundred children paraded in Regina to protest the price of chocolate bars. The following week, twenty mothers and babies paraded to protest butter and milk prices. Ottawa Housewives spread the word by telephone, encouraging women to call their neighbours and urge them not to buy expensive cuts of meat. In Toronto, the Housewives set up tables on busy street corners on Saturdays, asking shoppers to sign postcards protesting high prices and making sure these were sent directly to the prime minister. And in June, Housewives across the country began a series of escalating boycotts to draw media attention to their campaign in preparation for their trek to Ottawa at the end of the month.28 An Orchestrated Campaign The Housewives denied the accusations against them, insisting that they welcomed members of all political stripes, but damage control had become a compelling concern. Distancing themselves from the discredited western delegation, Housewives spokesperson Lily Phelps declared that this second lobbying expedition would have “broader representation” and “better results.”29 The choice of Phelps to lead the delegation also suggests the Housewives’ enhanced awareness that it was important to create the correct political appearance, which meant erasing any obvious links to the LPP as well as any evidence of ethnicity. Phelps, a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), could not be accused of being a Communist. She was backed up

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by Mrs Rae Luckock, another card-carrying social democrat, who had won elections to both the Toronto Board of Education and the Ontario Legislature as a CCF candidate.30 Twelve-year-old Shirley Endicott, representing the chocolate bar faction, provided additional support.31 Although many of the activists in the HCA were members of various ethnic communities, none of these women were prominent among the delegates. Their absence … adds credibility to Mary Prokop’s assertion that the organization deployed its Anglo-Celtic members strategically as part of its public campaign. The Housewives’ adoption of the rolling pin as the symbol of their campaign also suggests a conscious effort to direct media attention away from their troublesome political affiliations. Deploying miniature wooden rolling pins inscribed with the words “Roll Back Prices,” the Housewives provided the reporters covering their campaign with a catchy headline that invoked images of respectable domesticity. The newspapers obliged, running headlines such as “Women Wield RollingPins to Help Roll Back Prices.”32 No doubt hoping that the identity associated with housewifery would override that suggested by Communism, the Housewives made rolling pins the defining symbol of their campaign. To reinforce that metaphor, the two hundred delegates who arrived in Ottawa on 23 June to begin three days of lobbying gave handmade rolling-pin lapel pins to every MP in the House. Phelps herself brandished a full-size wooden rolling pin festooned with a blue ribbon. While evidently intended to reinforce the Housewives’ presentation of themselves as ordinary homemakers, the rolling pin has also typically been depicted as a weapon used by women in domestic disputes, thus invoking both female domesticity and resistance. In turn-of-the-century New York City, an Italian mother accompanied her socialist seamstress daughters to union meetings armed with a protective rolling pin tucked under her arm.33 Indeed, a cartoon in the Winnipeg Free Press depicting a Housewife brandishing a rolling pin while she chased a greased pig labelled “Prices” suggests that the dual meaning of the rolling pin as both a symbol of domesticity and a weapon was apparent to the HCA’s supporters.34 The care that seems to have been taken to present a favourable image suggests that the Housewives’ second trip to Ottawa was a carefully stage managed event designed to counter some of the bad publicity created by the first … Yet the media coverage of the event suggests an inverse relationship between respectability and political relevance.

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Newspaper accounts of the Housewives’ audience with the finance minister and two of his Cabinet colleagues reiterate their carefully constructed self-representations as harmless housewives, but also depict them in terms that are at once slightly ridiculous and sexually suggestive. Indeed, the overwhelming response of the press was to treat the entire event as a joke.35 A description of Phelps wielding her rolling pin like a mace while Mrs Beveridge explained the “housewifely facts of life” to the finance minister suggested a parody of a real political encounter: the “dark-haired matrons … in their robin’s egg blue crepe suits, chic print dresses and black net picture hats”; the finance minister, “utterly charming, [and] wearing his friendliest smile,” equally well turned out in a “ neat brown doublebreasted tropical worsted with a brown and white check cravat.”36 Already steeped in the restrictive idiom of postwar gender definitions, this depiction became almost salacious in its account of Abbott’s escape, which he achieved by squeezing through a doorway blocked by the ample figure of the “buxom Mrs Florence Flowerdale,” thus demonstrating “the agility of an adagio dancer.”37 One report, in the style of a slapstick comedy, described Abbott running down the East Block, followed by the cries of the women, “sounding like 100-odd soprano Lou Costellos calling, ‘Mr Abbott! Mr Abbott!’”38 But a critical reader might wonder whether the women’s readiness to challenge the minister on statements he had made in his budget speech and to dispute his cabinet colleagues’ claims that high food prices actually meant higher incomes for farmers wasn’t the reason he was so anxious to escape. Unsatisfied with the response of the government, the Housewives continued to speak at public meetings, circulating pamphlets, and joining the picket lines of striking workers, where they gave speeches about the relationship between wage demands and price controls. In the fall, RollBack-Prices conferences were held in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, and in December, seventy-five delegates met with the finance minister to urge him to reconsider price controls. Predictably, Abbott refused to discuss any change in policy, but the Housewives’ relentless agitation kept the issue of prices in the news. Editorials decried the inadequacy of the government’s response to high prices and urging price controls, while Abbott himself was portrayed as evasive and high-handed.39 The March of a Million Names In January 1948, the cost of living reached an all-time high, and the Housewives called for a new wave of buyers’ strikes.40 They also

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launched their new campaign, the March of a Million Names. Stressing the breadth of popular support for their proposals, they announced plans to collect a million endorsements in petitions and present them to the finance minister. The Housewives embarked on another round of leafleting, radio broadcasts, conferences, and public meetings, taking special care to point out the diversity of the groups and individuals who supported their cause. Members of the clergy, trade unionists, and child-care activists participated in public meetings calling for government controls on runaway prices and pointing to big business as the sole beneficiary of current policies. In preparation for yet another lobbying trip to Ottawa, during which they also planned to establish a national consumers’ organization, Housewives’ Associations from Cape Breton Island to Vancouver organized a variety of activities designed to reach broadly across the community. Radio broadcasts … urged people to support the campaign in the interests of securing a better life for themselves and their children. Provincial prices conferences were organized in Edmonton, Vancouver, and Regina. In Toronto, Housewives canvassed door to door; in Winnipeg and Vancouver, they set up tables to gather signatures on petitions calling for the reinstatement of price controls. Articles endorsing the Housewives’ campaign and eliciting support in the left-wing ethnic press, such as Ukrainske Zhitya (Ukrainian Life), the Finnish-language Varpaus, and the Canadian Jewish Weekly, and their successful elicitation of support from the left-wing Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, suggest the extent to which the organization depended on women in ethnic communities. On this point, RCMP reports confirm the oral testimonies of HCA activists, particularly with regard to the very active role of left-wing Ukrainians, who helped fill the meeting halls throughout the West. AUUC women contributed much-needed funds and helped gather signatures on petitions, passed out pamphlets, and organized rallies.41 For their part, English-language Communist newspapers endorsed the Housewives’ campaign, as did municipal councils, labour organizations, churches, home and school associations, Catholic Women’s Leagues, veterans’ associations, pensioners’ groups, religious leaders, teachers, doctors, town councillors, and other prominent citizens. Much of their support came from labour organizations, including trades and labour councils and a number of labour unions, but also from the Alberta Farmers’ Union, a number of prominent CCFers, including national CCF leader M.J. Coldwell and Saskatchewan premier T.C. Douglas.42 Contending that the government was seriously underestimating Canadians if they thought only Communists were concerned about the

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high cost of living, they threatened to bring down the Liberals in the election if their demands were not heard.43 But their efforts to establish broad popular support for their campaign were hampered by an increasingly vitriolic anti-Communism in the mainstream media, of which the Housewives were a regular target. Editorials accused the Housewives of being a particularly pernicious kind of fifth column, whose sole objective was to undermine freedom and democracy and deliver unsuspecting Canadians to their evil masters in Russia. Although they claimed to be housewives, one such article asserted, they were really a Communist front, “organized for the violent seizure of Canada’s material and human resources to enrich the world’s most tyrannical dictatorship.” They warned that ordinary, decent women who were taken in by the Housewives’ campaigns were in danger of becoming part of an “involuntary fifth column …” The Housewives were under constant surveillance by the RCMP’s Special Branch, which sent regular memoranda to J.L. Ilsley, federal justice minister, detailing their activities and speculating on their intentions.44 In April, when the Housewives again attempted to meet with the Cabinet, having gathered over seven hundred thousand endorsements, their appointment with the Cabinet was abruptly cancelled. And when Luckock, who had succeeded Phelps as president, attempted to enter the House of Commons bearing an armload of petitions, she was intercepted by two large RCMP officers.45 The finance minister’s decision was applauded in the House of Commons, and even the CCF leader, M.J. Coldwell, made only a token objection, pointing out that refusal to see the Housewives would leave the government open to accusations of disregarding the most elementary rights of citizenship, and that most of the five hundred delegates, and the organizations they represented, had no connection to Communism. Abbott acknowledged both of these arguments, yet defended his decision on the grounds that those who had joined the movement were duped, and had inadvertently become propagandists for Communist dogma. His accusations were bolstered by the simultaneous disclosure in the press that Housewives’ literature had been found in a police raid on the Montreal French-language Communist newspaper Combat.46 Dupes of Communism Politicians and the press publicly dismissed the Housewives as a political force, either by taking them at their word and treating them as merely women, and thus not worthy of serious consideration, or by

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identifying them as Communists, and thus not entitled to the normal rights of citizenship.47 Yet it was clear that they were articulating demands that a large number of Canadians found relevant. Early in 1948, the press reported that shopping boycotts were not only well supported by consumers, they were having a negative impact on merchants.48 Moreover, although there was little doubt that many of the Housewives were, in fact, Communists, many ordinary Canadians supported their campaigns. Women had to consider, however, whether being part of this movement was worth the cost. Between 1947 and 1950, a steady stream of articles appeared in newspapers and in magazines as diverse as Chatelaine and the Financial Post, portraying women who joined the organization or endorsed their campaigns as impressionable fools who had been duped by Communists into betraying their country and undermining all the values for which Canadians had so recently fought.49 Even worse, close contact with Communists put women at risk of moral contagion. The overlapping membership of the HCA with left-wing ethnic organizations, such as the AUUC, the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO), the Finnish Organization of Canada, and the Russian Canadian Organization created further opportunities for red-baiting. While media coverage steadily undermined the Housewives’ claims to respectability, an alternative consumer organization emerged. In April 1947, before the Housewives had acted on their proposal to establish a national federation of consumer leagues, the Liberals quietly sponsored one of its own, the Canadian Association of Consumers (CAC), which proved to be an elite organization that captured little popular support. For a time, however, it was portrayed as a more respectable alternative to the Housewives Consumers.50 The CAC made no effort to compete with the Housewives’ program, but focused instead on creating a more favourable public image. This consisted primarily of reminding people of the Housewives’ Communist connections and trading heavily on the white, middle-class respectability of its own executive, including warning housewives to beware of alleged consumer organizations which did not contain “Canadian” in the name.51 Conclusion By 1950, the HCA had faded into irrelevance and lost most of its active members to a new organization, the Congress of Canadian Women, which followed closely the Communist Party line.52 In the triumph of

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respectability over relevance, Canadian consumers had lost an opportunity to expand their political influence and speak directly to the shaping of government policy. Still, the Housewives’ achievements are important. During a time when prescriptive definitions of respectability were gaining widespread acceptance, laying the foundation for the political restraint that characterized the 1950s, the Housewives were remarkably successful in mobilizing large numbers of Canadian women and men, despite their well-known Communist connections. Their popular campaign constituted a challenge to restrictive postwar norms of politically passive femininity – achieved not by rejecting contemporary common-sense notions linking femininity and domesticity, but rather by embracing existing cultural assumptions about female identity and redefining them. They expressed political entitlement in terms consistent with their experiences as women. Political activism, so defined, was compatible with their identities as mothers and housewives, identities that were culturally recognized and endorsed, and personally authenticating. Finally, by suggesting that consumers, like producers, made a vital contribution to the economy, and thus were entitled to exercise their rights as citizens by participating in governance, the Housewives argued for a broader understanding of citizenship itself, a notion that placed at its centre the conviction that politics was not rightly the exclusive domain of elites, but a right and a duty of ordinary people. In centring the activist role of ethnic women on the left during the Cold War, this essay joins the important literature in feminist labour and left history that has de-centred the “white woman worker” as a central female subject and that recognizes a working-class women’s history of “unequal sisters.”53 In so doing, this study enlarges and even redefines the political from the vantage point of marginalized and redbaited female consumer citizens in a context in which the state challenged their right to participate as full citizens.

NOTES 1 Interview by the author with Mary Prokop, Toronto, 15 December 1998. On earlier periods, see, for example, essays by José Moya and Jennifer Guglielmo in Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 189–216 and 247–98; Dana Frank, Purchasing Power:

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3

4

5 6

7 8

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Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Reginald Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Gary Kinsman, Dieter Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, eds., Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000). Canadian studies include Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Mercedes Steedman, Angels of the Workplace: Women and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Canadian Clothing Industry, 1890–1940 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997). For example, Varpu Lindström, Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada, 2d ed. (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992); Frances Swyripa, Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Frager, Sweatshop Strife. A more comparative approach is Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Information from interviews with former members of the HCA. CBC Archives Radio News, 1 May 1947; RCMP case file, Housewives Consumers Association, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 24 April 1947, National Archives of Canada (hereafter NAC), Housewives and Consumers Federation of Canada, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1. Canadian Political Facts, 1945–1976 (Toronto: Methuen, 1977), 128. Toronto Star, 5 January 1948; Ottawa Citizen, 26 April 1947; Montreal Standard, 10 May 1947; Winnipeg Free Press, 12 May 1947; Montreal Gazette, 12 May 1947; Ottawa Journal, 13 May 1947, clipping file, Housewives Consumers Association Toronto, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1. Untitled text of radio broadcasts, 25 and 27 March 1947, attached to RCMP case file, C.P. Activity in Labor-Progressive Party, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1; Tribune, 18 October 1947, clipping file, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1; Ottawa Citizen, 9 February 1948, clipping file, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1. Frager, Sweatshop Strife; Carmela Patrias, “Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression in Crowland, Ontario, 1930–1935,” in Franca Iacovetta with Paula Draper and Robert Ventresca, eds., A Nation of

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12 13

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Julie Guard Immigrants: Women, Workers and Communities in Canadian; History, 1840s– 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 322–58; Paula Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70, 1 (September 1980): 91–105; Roz Usiskin, “Winnipeg’s Jewish Women of the Left: Radical and Traditional,” in Daniel Stone, ed., Jewish Life and Times, vol. 3, Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905–1960 (Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, 2002), 106–22. Prokop, interview; interview with Alice Maigis and Lil Ilomaki, Toronto, 12 December 1996; interview with Mona Morgan, Peggy Chunn, and Audrey Modzir, Vancouver, 24 July 1998. All interviews by the author. Canadian Unionist, 1946–7. Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada: A History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975); Norman Penner, Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto: Methuen, 1988); William Rodney, Soldiers of the International: A History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1919–1929 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). See Julie Guard, “Women Worth Watching: Radical Housewives in Cold War Canada,” in Buse, Kinsman, and Steedman, Whose National Security?, 73–88. The narrowing of the male left’s focus away from the community and onto the labour movement is examined for the United States by George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). The origins of consumer culture are explored by Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 1993). See, for example, the essays in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s– 1950s (London: Routledge, 1991); and in Seth Kovan and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). Marilyn Lake, “A Revolution in the Family: The Challenge and Contradictions of Maternal Citizenship in Australia,” in Kovan and Michel, Mothers of a New World, 378–95; Jane Lewis, “Models of Equality for Women: The Case of State Support for Children in Twentieth-Century Britain,” in Bock and Thane, Maternity and Gender Policies, 73–92; Pat Thane, “Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare States: The Case of Women in the British Labour Party and Social Policy, 1906–1945,” in ibid., 93–118. See also Deborah A. Gerson, “Is the Family Now Subversive? Familialism against McCarthyism,” in Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver:

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22 23

24 25 26 27 28

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Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 151–76. Caroline Waldron, “Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns,” in Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 217–46. For example, Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Ester Reiter, “First Class Workers Don’t Want Second Class Wages: The Lanark Strike in Dunnville,” in Joy Parr, ed., A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 168–99; Steve Penfold, “‘Have You No Manhood In You?’: Gender and Class in the Cape Breton Coal Towns, 1920–26,” Acadiensis 23, 2 (Spring 1994): 21–44; Robert Ventresca, “‘Cowering Women, Combative Men?’ Femininity, Masculinity, and Ethnicity on Strike in Two Southern Ontario Towns, 1964–1966,” Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1996): 125–58. Joan Sangster, “Doing Two Jobs: The Wage-Earning Mother, 1945–70,” in Parr, Diversity of Women, 98–134; Veronica Strong-Boag, “Canada’s Wageearning Wives and the Construction of the Middle Class, 1945–60,” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, 3 (Fall 1994): 5–25; Strong-Boag, “Their Side of the Story: Women’s Voices from Ontario Suburbs, 1945–60,” in Parr, Diversity of Women, 46–74. Ottawa Journal, 7 February 1947; Leader Post, 1 March 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 2A. Montreal Standard, 5 April 1947; Leader Post, 1 March and 27 March 1947; Winnipeg Free Press, 27 March 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt. 1. Ottawa Citizen, 31 March 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt 1. Winnipeg Free Press, 3 April 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt. 1. Winnipeg Free Press, c. April 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1, and supp. 1, pt. 1. Winnipeg Free Press, c. April 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt 1., and supp. 1, pt. 1. Winnipeg Free Press, May 1947; Ottawa Citizen, 10 May and 13 May 1947; Montreal Standard, 10 May 1947; Montreal Gazette, 11 May 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1. Winnipeg Free Press, 24 June 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt. 1.

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30 Rae Luckock’s involvement with the HCA eventually led to her expulsion from the CCF. 31 Globe and Mail, 23 June 1947; Ottawa Citizen, 24 June 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, vol. 1; Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 188. 32 Winnipeg Free Press, 24 June 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, vol. 1. 33 Jennifer Guglielmo, “Italian Women’s Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s–1940s,” in Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives, 247–98. 34 Winnipeg Free Press, 8 July 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 1A. 35 Albertan, 12 May 1947; Ottawa Journal, 24 June and 25 June 1947; Ottawa Citizen, 24 June and 25 June 1947; Toronto Star, 25 June 1947; Globe and Mail, 25 June 1947, 12; Montreal Gazette, 25 June 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, vol. 1. 36 Ottawa Journal, 25 June 1947, clipping file, NA, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, vol. 1. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ottawa Journal, 25 June 1947; Toronto Star, 12 December 1947; Ottawa Citizen, 13 December 1947, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1. 40 Toronto Star, 5 January 1948; Ottawa Citizen, 6 January 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, vol. 1. 41 RCMP case files, Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, 3 March, 12 April, and 5 June 1948, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 2A; interviews with Modzir, Morgan, Chunn, and Prokop. 42 Toronto Star, 20 January 1948, RCMP clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1; RCMP memoranda, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 2. 43 “Voice of the Bush,” radio broadcast, Timmins, Ontario, 28 April 1948, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 2; Canadian Tribune, 17 April 1948. 44 Windsor Star, 10 March 1948, reprinted in Halifax Herald, 13 March 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 2; Hamilton Spectator, 24 January 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1. 45 Canadian Tribune, 24 April and 17 June 1948; Westerner, 1 May 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353 pt. 2. 46 Ottawa Citizen, 14 April 1948; Ottawa Journal, c. 1948; Montreal Gazette, 14 April 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt. 2. 47 Ottawa Citizen, c. 1948; Montreal Gazette, 16 April 1948; Globe and Mail, c. 17 April 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, supp. 1, pt. 2. 48 Toronto Star, c. 12 June 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 1. 49 Financial Post, 7 June 1947; Chatelaine, April 1949.

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50 Joy Parr, “Shopping for a Good Stove: A Parable about Gender, Design, and the Market,” in Parr, A Diversity of Women, 75–97; Joy Parr and Gunilla Ekberg, “Mrs Consumer and Mr Keynes in Postwar Canada and Sweden,” Gender and History 8, 2 (July 1996): 212–30. 51 Montreal Gazette, c. 1948, clipping file, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3440, pt. 2A. 52 RCMP memorandum for file, The Housewives Consumers’ Association, 17 January 1950; RCMP case file, Re: Congress of Canadian Women, British Columbia, 16 June 1951, NAC, RG 146, vol. 3353, pt. 3; Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 189–91. 53 Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruíz, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Haitian Feminist Diasporic Lakou1: Haitian Women’s Community Organizing in Montreal, 1960–1980 Grac e L. San de rs Joh n s on

Introduction On any given Sunday between 1972 and 1983, half a dozen women carpooled to La Maison d’Haïti, a community centre in Montreal,2 arriving at the rented space on Rue Lajeunesse with cleaning supplies in tow.3 Easily mistaken, perhaps, for the many Haitian maids in the city,4 these women were devoting their day of rest to preparing the “home” of Montreal’s Haitian community. As they cleaned the dust and debris from the previous week’s activities, which included literacy classes, holiday parties, and immigration and education workshops, they exchanged ideas about work, politics, and parenting. For many of them, this home-making ensured them emotional health and helped shape their respective identities as members of a burgeoning Haitian diaspora in Canada. The practice of preparing a communal gathering place was deeply rooted in the women’s history and sociocultural upbringing. Since the abolition of slavery and Haiti’s independence from France in the nineteenth century, the lakou – a family compound or shared sacred space – has constituted the centre of economic and political exchange for rural communities in Haiti. Unlike labour under enslavement, families and neighbours in the lakou system collectively owned and maintained an area of land.5 As Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Sylvain-Comhaire explains, “the lacou” is “a social community more than a physical ensemble,” where kinship networks maintain culture, establish community accountability, and provide reciprocal sharing and support for the family.6 And it is the women – the poto mitan (centre pillar) – who hold it together by preparing and fortifying the shared space.7

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Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Montreal, gathering spaces like La Maison d’Haïti operated as contemporary diasporic lakous where young Haitian women created, cultivated, and negotiated their woman-centred consciousness and transnational feminism. Starting in the late 1950s, young women were among the estimated five hundred thousand Haitians forced by the violence and economic fragility of the François and Jean-Claude Duvalier presidencies to flee their homes for North American cities like Montreal. State-sanctioned home invasions and threats to young women’s bodies made it impossible for women to meet and discuss politics, philosophy, or even family issues. Thirty years of social and political unrest spurred the migration of Haiti’s youngest generation of women, many of whom met their desire to maintain kin relations and cultural continuity with Haiti through community organizing. A key element of their activism was the creation of a safe home space, which also informed their (re)formation as leaders and residents in Montreal. Following Carol Boyce Davies’ call to better understand women’s transnational activism, and how “identities are formed in movement,” both in the physical movement of multiple border crossings and overlapping diasporas, as well through the creation of and participation in social movements,8 this chapter documents the history of migration and women-centred organizing between Montreal and Port-au-Prince. In response to repression and displacement from their home country, threats of deportation from Canada, and North American racism and cultural discontinuity, women established a Haitian feminist diasporic lakou, and thus new nationalist domestic spaces and kinship relations, in order to protect their families and their ideals. The essay explores Haitian feminists’ understandings of home and home-making and their transnational political activism. The Migration of Girls Girlhood was disrupted by Haitian President François Duvalier’s violent government and repressive gender codes. Before 1957, women and girls were considered “innocents” exempt from targeted political violence, but under François Duvalier’s presidency (1957–71) and that of his son Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971–86), they were targeted for physical and sexual assault as retribution for their and their family’s or friends’ perceived disloyalty to the state.9 This “dictatorship of fear” was directly related to Duvalier’s invasion of private space.10 Bodies and

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spaces traditionally the domain of the innocent – children, churches, and community leaders – were targeted as sites of control and conquest.11 Duvalier’s paramilitary army, the Tonton Macoute, disrupted the codes of civility, domestic sovereignty, and social respect when they entered homes uninvited. Author and feminist activist Marie-Célie Agnant recalled being terrified as a child when the Tonton Macoute brazenly entered her home: “I remember being in my bed at night and watching the military opening the closets, searching and terrifying us.”12 Government repression was not unique to the Duvaliers’ presidency – historically, presidents were known to harass, imprison, and exile those who threatened their power – but, under the Duvaliers, all forms of state surveillance and repression were escalated. Similarly, state violence against women, which ruptured the sanctity of freedom and self-governance through attacks on private space and the symbolic referents of home life (women, wives, and daughters), did not begin with Duvalier but, as Michel Rolph-Trouillot notes, “It touched many more women than preceding regimes,” and meant “the complete disappearance of the protection traditionally conferred by femininity.”13 That protection, though patriarchal, had given women provisional safety, but under the Duvaliers, critics of the government were construed as aberrations of womanhood, and many were forcefully reprimanded.14 The power that the Duvaliers held over the nation’s households disrupted the nuclear governance within families. Instead of being guided  by home-based rules, parents and children were subject to the government’s arbitrary rules.15 The Tonton Macoute routinely targeted young girls and women on the street, inviting or cajoling them to be their girlfriends and sexual servants. If they did not agree, the girl, her parents, or other family members could be publicly humiliated and physically punished. The government’s ever-present threat of indiscriminate violence compromised interpersonal relationships, though families went to great lengths to try to protect each other. Some responded with silence and self-imposed isolation. The threat to daughters prompted other families to move to the mountains or countryside. This urban-to-rural migration (“contemporary marronage”), however, was short lived.16 Families with the financial means left Haiti in order to ensure the safety of their children, particularly their girls.17 Young elite and middle-class girls were among the first of the approximately half-million Haitians who migrated to North America en masse between the late 1950s and

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mid-1980s.18 Many were sent alone or with a sibling or single parent to cities like Miami, New York, and Montreal. It took months, sometimes years, before families were reunited. Maturing in Montreal Haitian migration to Canada in the early 1960s made sense to Haitians and Canadians alike, both of whom saw it as temporary.19 Haitians had been migrating to Montreal in small numbers since the early twentieth century for business, education, vacations, and as domestic servants, but limited Haitian interest and Canada’s racist immigration policies kept the numbers low. As the steady influx of post-1945 European immigrants whose labour had been crucial to the Canadian economy began to decline in the 1960s,20 Ottawa expanded the entry requirements to include non-Europeans with the Immigration Act of 1962. Elite and middle-class Haitian professionals were an ideal fit for this early point system, through which immigrants gained admission on the basis of education, skills, and language, among other criteria. Fleeing the repressive François Duvalier government, these well-educated and Frenchspeaking professionals initiated the influx of post–Second World War Haitian immigration to Canada.21 This first wave occurred from 1957 to 1969.22 Between 1968 and 1970, 46 per cent of the Haitian women in Montreal had completed twelve or more years of school,23 allowing them to quickly find jobs as teachers, nurses, and business professionals in Quebec.24 As they settled into the Montreal neighbourhoods of Villeray, Saint-Michel, and Parc-Extension, many believed that, once Duvalier died or was forcefully removed, they would return to Haiti.25 On temporary visitor or student visas, most had no intention of seeking permanent Canadian residency. The majority of the women who came to Montreal in the 1960s were also young: 79 per cent of Haitians who entered Montreal between 1968 and 1975 were between the ages of fourteen and forty-four.26 Separated from their family, most had left parents behind or travelled with one or two other family members and waited to be reunited in Montreal.27 Other women were young professionals and parents of school-aged children and teenagers. Family separation and adjustment to a modern metropolis meant a difficult transition for some, but others found the new environment liberating. After arriving in Montreal, Myriam Joseph enrolled in nursing school, making friends with the other Haitian girls in her courses. In

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her limited free time, she wrote to her fiancé in Port-au-Prince. In Haiti, the couple’s interactions were monitored by her mother and other women in the community who would report any inappropriate public displays of affection. But after completing her first years of school, Myriam Joseph invited her fiancé to join her in Montreal, and they lived together in their own apartment. Troubled and embarrassed by the arrangement, and concerned about her daughter’s education, Myriam’s mother begged her to finish school before living with her fiancé. But Myriam had grown up. Exposed to other young Haitian and immigrant women who lived in Montreal without parents, she had gained a sense of independence and agency and felt she could make her own life decisions. Through migration, Myriam transitioned into adulthood, or what Michel Laguerre might call “diasporic citizenship.” This citizenship was transnational in that Myriam maintained material and ideological ties with Haiti and her mother, but the distance created “asymmetry in relations between households” in the two places, disrupting the authority structure of the stem home in Haiti28 and patriarchal power over the women. Gina Ulysse explains in her auto-ethnographic essay about developing a feminist consciousness as a teen in the United States: “I interpret my struggles with my parents’ patriarchal authority as oppositional to their attempt to protect their investments in us as their social capital,” adding, “it was through some of my earliest confrontations with both parents that I first learned how power is configured and the limits of gender opposition.”29 For Ulysse, as with Myriam, this confrontation manifested itself in expressions of sexuality. In Montreal, Myriam did whatever she wanted. As the first family member in Montreal, she also became a source of material income and social capital for her family and the means by which family members could petition for visitor visas to enter Canada. The child had become the family provider (“I became the leader of the family,” she said), and it made her feel justified about governing her own life.30 Taking on a role that her mother had held since her father’s political “disappearance,” Myriam was propelled into both familial responsibility and personal agency while abroad. Young Haitian women frequently identified a direct relationship between migration and evolution into mature adults with a womancentred consciousness. Arriving in 1970, Marie-Célie Agnant noted how coming to Quebec at a time “when they were talking a lot about women’s rights” and “all of this change [was] happening,” she “felt a feeling of freedom” and “liked … that I could discover the world.”31 Another

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activist similarly recalled: “I was a child in Haiti … but in Montreal I was the head of the household and I had to make money. I became a woman; a woman who was allowed to think … to critique, and who was allowed to breathe and build.”32 Foundations of a Lakou: 1960s Activism in Montreal When the young women arrived in Montreal, they encountered protests in the streets and bustling cafés where French Quebeckers expressed their frustration with the Roman Catholic Church’s control over government policy and welfare. The Quiet Revolution was underway. As Sean Mills observes, social and political movements in 1960s Montreal, from Caribbean student anti-racist groups to labour and Quebec nationalist movements, were linked through an appropriation of anti-colonial and black power discourse that supplied an empowering “grammar of dissent.”33 It included the women’s movement, which young Haitian women encountered through demonstrations, pamphlets, and conversations with school- and workmates who encouraged them to assume agency over their lives and sexuality. Young Haitian women’s newfound independence primed them for this political scene. Haitians in the first wave arriving in Canada were well travelled. Many had spent time in the United States, Central Africa, or France before settling in Montreal, and they were familiar with both North American and European racism and cultural prejudices as well as the liberation struggles of Afro-Caribbean and African students, and the civil rights movement and black power activism of African American youth.34 In their teens and early twenties, women like Marjorie Villefranche joined feminist and leftist groups such as Le Mouvement de libération des femmes and La Lutte.35 Given their intertwined character, Marjorie explains, through La Lutte “we were in touch with all the [left] movements.”36 When organizing with left Quebeckers, left Haitians adopted an anti-American rhetoric directed against US support for Duvalier, this anti-Americanism intensifying as activist women began to identify with the writings and speeches of Malcolm X and, to a lesser extent, Martin Luther King Jr.37 Anti-Americanism was also infused by the anti-Anglo views of Montreal’s French Quebec labour movement, which saw Canadian racism as an extension of US racism and capitalism.38 Although young Haitian women (and men) found community in leftist organizations, these political platforms did not fully speak to the

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women’s immigrant experiences.39 These organizations only had a handful of black participants and even fewer Haitians. Despite their strong association with black power rhetoric, these groups said little about the systemic racial injustice Haitians experienced in Montreal, a city divided by colour, class, and language. For many Haitian women, their entry into public activism began with their negotiation of everyday life. As “visible” minorities openly discriminated against in housing and job promotions, young Haitians could not reconcile the rhetorical gap regarding race within the left organizations. As they adjusted to a new home and educational system, and negotiated their identities as migrants as well as friendships and their sexual identity, women like Villefranche soon began to connect their communist and feminist sentiments with the repressed conditions of their nation. In search of an activist space that could address their multiple subjectivities, they transferred Quebec’s anti-colonial anti-racist rhetoric to one of “antidictator” and protested the violent, undemocratic regimes that compromised their humanity. Feminism and Anti-Duvalierism By the mid-1960s, the anti-Duvalier movement gaining momentum in Montreal was dominated by students, professors, and young professionals who, fully intending to return home, were deeply invested in establishing strategies to overthrow President François Duvalier. They also articulated a national pride informed by an ethos of eradicating global oppression of poor and colonized people.40 According to Herard Jadotte, the heavily elite and middle-class antiDuvalier movement’s radical nationalist platform, with its revolutionary call to “a fight to the death,” lacked a strong political base in Haiti with which to actualize its objectives.41 The anti-Duvalier movement also failed to absorb the principles of gender equality and civil rights for which women in Haiti had fought during the first half of the twentieth century. The spirit of solidarity was ripe in their speeches, songs, and literature, with organizers claiming “liberation” for “the working mass, the peasants, Haitian families, and students,” yet anti-Duvalier activists failed to acknowledge that the large majority of these groups were women who were unequally represented in Haiti’s government and community politics. In the late 1960s anti-Duvalierist women like Joseph began to question these problematic gender politics. At meetings, men frequently

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overlooked women’s raised hands or spoke over them. Some women were openly degraded and blamed for the movement’s disorganization. Several women remember being treated as servants to male leaders who relegated them to food and clerical work or, as one member derisively put it, being “coffee makers.”42 In response, these independent and socially astute women established the Point de ralliement des femmes haïtiennes (PRFH) in 1970. Maud Pierre-Pierre, a feminist activist who moved to Montreal in 1968 and an early PRFH member, recalled the sexism of the anti-Duvalier movement, saying that if, in the 1970s, one mentioned addressing women’s issues in the muchtalked about anti-Duvalier movement, the men would sarcastically reply, “Haiti is in trouble and we’re talking about women’s problems as if it was important.” But like many feminists in social and political movements, Pierre-Pierre explained, “If you are going to do a revolution in Haiti and you’re going to leave the women out of that revolution, it is not a successful one.”43 She also linked her migrant imaginary politics of gender equality44 to the interconnected realities of Montreal’s thriving women’s movement and her expectation of better conditions for Haitian women in Canada. One had to be “against Duvalier” and for women “concurrently,” she concluded.45 Linking feminist and nationalist politics preoccupied these women during the next decade as they both drew on the movements around them and challenged the ideals of their national community. To help ensure their new home would not replicate the ills of their old, they slowly established their own organizational base. Landscape of a Lakou Similar to Haitian women earlier in the century, these women began  organizing reading groups. Like Myriam’s “Exchange,” these consciousness-raising groups rarely grew beyond a dozen participants, but together they significantly impacted the evolving movement.46 Point de ralliement des femmes haïtiennes believed in “advancing the fight for the improvement of the women’s condition, most specifically, Haitian women.” As one member explained, “This mobilization was made possible because 1970 was a year of global mobilization of women against their exploitation and all forms of prejudices that made and kept women as second class citizens.”47 Initial support came from women’s groups such as Le Front de libération des lemmes du Québec and other regional movements, but since PRFH was primarily concerned

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with Haitian women this meant confronting the men and women in their Montreal community. It gained sympathy from some members, but this was often expressed from afar because, as a PRFH member explained, the diaspora community considered explicit support for women and gender equity issues, such as equal wages or women’s ownership over their sexuality, to be too divisive. In its first years, PRFH had only fifteen members, which leaders attributed to the social threats as well as work and home constraints imposed on women. According to Point de ralliement, many women faced the double day, working outside of the home and then carrying out domestic duties with little help from partners, leaving them too tired for political organizing. They attributed this hold on women’s time to Haitian cultural norms that equated a “respectable” woman as one who stays at home.48 Public condemnation of Haitian feminists kept other women away. Members of Point de ralliement were called sexually frustrated troublemakers and bad sexual partners.49 Ironically, male comrades’ attacks against Haitian feminists echoed Duvalier’s nationalist rhetoric, which associated women’s activism with deviant sexuality. Such critiques compromised women’s claims to femininity and undercut claims to citizenship. Nationalists accused Haitian feminists of transporting a Canadian problem into their community, the implication being that feminism had no place in the anticipated return to Haiti,50 and argued that migrant women should be satisfied with their generally improved situation.51 However, as it became more clear that many Haitians would not return home, feminists like Point de ralliement members Pierre-Pierre and Mozart Longuefosse viewed feminism as involving the improvement of women’s condition in the Haitian Canadian community without losing sight of Haiti. “At one point,” Pierre-Pierre recalls, “we said, ‘Okay listen, we are here to stay. Even if Duvalier falls tomorrow, not all of us are going to go back.’” 52 This is largely what happened. In 1971, François Duvalier died but his son assumed his position as “President for Life.” His youth, combined with the support of the Tonton Macoute and a politically savvy mother, convinced many Haitians that repression would continue and thus Quebec would remain “home” for a little longer. The winter following Duvalier’s death was unusually cold and the “storm of the century” hit Montreal in March 1971. The extreme conditions, however, were accompanied by significant changes in social policy: Canada’s adoption of the Multiculturalism Act, promoting ethnic diversity in the nation. This policy change, along with Jean-Claude

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Duvalier’s repressive presidency, and a failing economy in Haiti, made Canada an even more attractive destination, as evidenced by the 28 per cent increase in Haitian immigrants to Montreal between 1971 and 1973.53 Between 1965 and 1973, Haitian residents in Quebec jumped from roughly four hundred to over twenty-five thousand.54 By 1974, Haiti was the number one source nation of immigrants to Quebec, making up 14.5 per cent of the province’s total immigrant population.55 With the Haitian population growing in Montreal, negotiation of migrant identities became increasingly important. Haitians faced the dayto-day reality of living as ethnic and racial minorities in a nation that only two decades earlier knew little about them. As more Haitians arrived, the demographics of the migrants also varied; the second wave (1971–80) were not as well educated as the first, spoke little French, and came from working-class and poor backgrounds.56 This more diverse population begged the questions: what did it mean to be Haitian in Montreal? What were the needs of the Haitian community? By 1972, these questions could not be avoided: in November, the government amended the immigration policy, prohibiting foreigners from applying for landed immigrant status from within Canada. Those who arrived in Canada after November 1972 without legal status before entering the country were subject to deportation. By summer 1973, approximately fifteen hundred Haitians who had entered Canada on tourist visas were scheduled for deportation, and immigration services made arrests, intimidated family and friends, and held people in detention. The tactics, though not as severe, resembled the abuse of executive power that many Haitian immigrants had experienced back home. Seeking to develop a cohesive unit and address the issues of the Haitian diaspora, community members established La Maison d’Haïti (Haiti’s House) and Le Bureau de la communauté chrétienne des Haïtiens de Montréal (BCHM) in 1972. Founded in November, the BCHM immediately drew members. It was primarily concerned with providing a community base for discussing integration into Quebec society as well as providing a spiritual space for Christian families. Similarly, Maison d’Haïti sought to provide an enclave for the community and a place where families could continue to rear their children in Haitian cultural practices, such as carnival, and folklore. Both centres also operated as a base for political organizing and attending to the legislative concerns of the community. BCHM founder Paul Déjean coined the deportation crisis of the 1970s “Operation 1500.” Along with BCHM and Maison d’Haïti members,

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the community conducted a massive public relations campaign to inform Canada about the conditions in Haiti and the dangers of sending people back there. “Operation 1500” drew Canada’s attention. From mid-1974 to 1975, Minister of Immigration Robert Andras was bombarded with letters from citizens across Canada, who argued that deporting Haitians to a dictatorship was immoral and antithetical to Canadian ways.57 In the end, more than half those threatened with deportation were allowed to stay in Canada. Over the next decade, some four thousand non-status Haitians residing in Canada were given legal status.58 At its core, “Operation 1500” was a battle against further home invasion and family separation. The campaign proved that collaboration with local movements through public education about Haiti and Haitian culture could transform Canadian policy. This activism profoundly affected how Villefranche imagined the efficacy of Haitian community organizing in Montreal. By the early 1970s, she had finished school, married, and had her first child. Through friendship networks, she also became acquainted with Maison d’Haïti, getting immediately involved.59 Although BCHM and Maison d’Haïti did not have explicitly feminist platforms, they provided a space for women to meet and share their experiences of migration and parenting. These community centres also established a network for housing and employment as well as language assistance programs for those who did not speak French or English. Informal interactions gradually turned into friendships, and organized meetings evolved into new women’s organizations. In 1973, women who frequented and worked with women and youth at Maison d’Haïti formed Rasanbleman Fanm Ayisyèn (RAFA). Like Point de ralliement, RAFA grew out of a concern for women in Haiti; RAFA was different, however, in that it worked closely with the antiDuvalierist movement’s male leadership on the grounds that an engagement with the left and feminist concepts and practices were the best tools against the Duvalier regime. The women, a mix of teachers, health professionals, and factory workers, had three major objectives. First, they organized with and on behalf of single mothers, recent immigrants, and victims of domestic and sexual violence.60 Meeting once a week, they discussed books by writers like French feminist Simone de Beauvoir and African American activist Angela Davis. They debated what it meant to be black women61 and interrogated the social and cultural gender constructs within Haiti, Quebec, and the wider world. Second, committed to establishing a democratic nation in Haiti, they debated how best to merge their communist and feminist ideologies with

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their opposition to the Duvalier regime and solidarity with other activist organizations. Third, and relatedly, they sought to insert themselves into as many organizations as possible in order to bring their anti-Duvalier platform to the international stage. In the hopes of developing “a solidarity” with other groups of women in Quebec and with “movements for national liberation” in Central America and elsewhere, they “participated” in the Congress of Black Women of Canada.62 These objectives constituted their meaning of Haitian feminism. When asked by a journalist whether RAFA was “feminist,” one member replied, “We define ourselves as a group of women who are interested in the questions regarding women … It is not our concern to attach ourselves to one feminism or another.” While “we believe there is work to do with Haitian women,” she added, “this did not prevent collaboration with other groups of women belonging to different feminist types.” However, “as members of a community that by definition is mixed,” they did not agree with the premise that there was only one type feminism that fit all women.63 Like women of colour throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, Haitian women challenged the idea of a singular definition of “woman” and a universal feminism. Recognizing that the diversity among Haitian women made it difficult to situate an organizational practice inclusive of all their experiences, RAFA members rejected a static view of women that assumed all women faced the same issues. Much like the lakou system, members of RAFA and Point de ralliement sought to work for gender equality alongside other activist communities while also keeping other communities and each other accountable to the Haitian women’s needs. Thus, in 1972, 1973, and 1977, members of both organizations attended meetings of the Canadian Congress of Black Women.64 During the 1972 Congress, RAFA members insisted that the condition of women in Haiti be made a concern for the larger international community of black women. 65 In 1974, the Congress resolved to “reinforce relations between French- and English-speaking Black women.”66 The call for organizational solidarity between Krèyol and French-speaking Haitians and English-speaking black women in Canada was well intentioned but very difficult to actualize, thus leading the 1976 Congress to call for “some follow-up action.”67 A year later, an editorial in Contrast, a Toronto-based black newspaper, chagrinned that by the time the major social issues concerning Africa and Haiti came up on the agenda during the 1977 Congress, “little of the original enthusiasm remained” and “only a small remnant of the several hundred participants” were left.68

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Notwithstanding the rhetoric of sisterhood and sentiments of solidarity among black immigrants and black Canadians, it was difficult to maintain collaborations across linguistic lines without concerted effort. While RAFA and Point de ralliement continued to attend the Congresses, little collective organizing occurred outside the annual conventions. Nevertheless, the organizations did see themselves as belonging within a shared circle of interests, and by the mid-1970s, this circle expanded as RAFA experienced its greatest success in activist solidarity through international collaboration. Transnational Lakou Rasanbleman Fanm Ayisyèn had always maintained an eye towards Haiti. Shortly after its formation, the plight of women prisoners in Haiti held most of the membership’s attention. Through its ties with the National Congress of Black Women, RAFA developed some alliances with Afro-Caribbean women in Canada, but they received most of their support internationally. Because RAFA’s international as well as local affiliations continued to indicate a strong appreciation for communism, the women worked hard on developing a platform they could take to communist countries and communist sympathizers worldwide in order to block the Duvalier regime’s relations with these nations.69 Using international conferences and summits to give Haitian women a global audience, the women travelled to East Berlin in 1975 for the Raccont international des femmes. In October 1975, RAFA and Carrefour International, another feminist organization, arranged for former Haitian prisoners to testify to the World Congress for the International Year of the Woman in Berlin. There, Anita Blanchard bravely told her story of home invasion, family persecution, and imprisonment. In 1969 the Toton Macoute had come to her village looking for her brother but “arrested everyone that they found at the house.”70 Providing vivid detail of her five years in prison, during which she was never brought to trial nor formally accused of a crime, she told the Berlin audience to speak out against the Duvalier administration. Two years later, RAFA and Carrefour International used the same strategy at the Regional Seminar of the International Democratic Federation of Women in Panama. This time, Lisette Romulus expressed “the anguish of thousands of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters who have members of their family in prison,” and testified to the violations committed against her family.71 Nine months later, Lisette’s husband and

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several other female inmates were released from prison. In 1979, at an International Day of Women celebration organized by RAFA, one of the released female prisoners, Laurette Badette, expressed her gratitude to the organization: On this International Day of Women … I thank women from all over the world and particularly the women of my country. I wish them courage … to fight for profound changes in our country. We must have a lot of courage in order to make Haiti a country where we can live in peace and freedom and where we can assure good quality of life for our children …. because … the fight that women lead for democratic change does not make sense if it does not target the improvement of the condition of all children.72

RAFA recorded this and other testimonies of female prisoners in a book, Femmes Haïtienne, published by Maison d’Haïti. The public dissemination of these stories was not only a significant testament to the collective feminist transnational activism of disaporic Haitian women in Montreal, but it also successfully managed to produce change in Haiti.73 Their success also gave them the confidence and time needed to refocus their efforts on Quebec. Having witnessed the power of community accountability and collaboration through international organizing, the women of RAFA, renamed Nègès Vanyan (Courageous Women) in 1979, turned their sights on their children, who were growing up in a foreign, yet increasingly familiar, land. Diasporic Feminist Lakou Haitian immigrant women both in and outside the feminist movement feared that their children in Quebec would lose their cultural identity. As a generation who arrived in Montreal as young adults in the 1960s, Nègès Vanyan members were attuned to the intergenerational fissures caused by migration. Yet, the asymmetry of their homes and their gendered experiences of migration had also inspired them to imagine Haiti and their citizenship between two nations with new eyes. In particular, they saw the shared experience of dislocation within the Montreal Haitian community as an ideal position from which to recreate home and reimagine the fight for the rights of women and children. Essential to this process was devising a community approach that accurately responded to the needs of black immigrant women and the younger generation of new immigrants. Marie-Célie Agnant captured

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this sentiment well with the following comparison: “For me being a feminist is being vigilant about the way I am raising my kids, about taking a stand for poor women in our country. But I don’t think that white women here have the same challenge. For them, feminism is the right for abortion, the right for having the pill, but we cannot even keep the kids that we are having alive.”74 Such sentiments were widely shared within Haitian women’s organizations. Building a strong Haitian community where women could raise their children and live with dignity started with combatting negative images. In 1982 Nègès Vanyan and Maison d’Haïti women produced a series of booklets (and workbooks) that used short skits in Krèyol and French to facilitate role-play discussions about finding employment, dealing with racism in housing, helping children with homework in a language the mother did not understand, and maintaining physical and mental health through friendships with other women. The exercises also included multiple-choice questions meant to challenge Haitian popular culture, such as the following traditional proverbs to which the reader was asked to respond “True or False”: Bèl fanm, bèl malè (Beautiful women, beautiful trouble); Fanm se zanj, fanm se demon (Women are angels, women are demons); or Gason konn bouke, men pa fanm (Men know tiredness, but women don’t).75 These skits and exercises challenged long-standing national narratives that cast women as natural domestic labourers and selfish troublemakers incapable of healthy relationships. The booklets openly addressed feelings of immigrant inferiority by, for example, validating Krèyol as the primary language of Haitian women, though they also provided translations in order to encourage French literacy. Similarly, affirmations about being proud immigrant women were sprinkled across the exercises. One slogan read, “Let us discover our true value, through our individual and collective resources. Let us demonstrate our solidarity between Haitian women, immigrant women, and Quebec women. Let us put our heads together to fight all of our troubles and problems, and we will find a solution for them.” Such objectives necessitated caring for and supporting other women and their feminist goal to nurture their children and family networks while also leading safe and productive lives in Canada. As a new mother, Villefranche was also searching for a place that would help teach her daughter Haitian culture. Her first job at Maison d’Haïti was in youth programming, which included curating cultural events for the children, such as puppet shows and live readings of traditional Haitian stories. For the teenagers the organization started a

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group called “Nou gen paye tou” (We also have a country), which enabled them to learn about Haitian culture and history while also discussing their experiences in Quebec society.76 Also concerned that they would forget aspects of their culture, women like Marjorie found that attending the puppet shows and storytelling “was like discovering my culture all over again.” Through song, dance, sharing jokes, and speaking Krèyol, Haitian women built a new family compound and experienced the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and respect so central to their understanding of personal sovereignty and self-actualization. Speaking of having collectively built a diasporic feminist lakou, Villefranche explained, “I was useful for Maison d’Haïti, but Maison d’Haïti was really useful for me, too.”77 As had been the tradition throughout the twentieth century, the lakou’s multigenerational purpose spoke to a Haitian transnational feminism that was not only about keeping their children alive but also ensuring that they thrived and were fully immersed in the diasporic community for generations to come. Villefranche recalls that Nègès Vanyan and other groups met so frequently that her children began to “play meeting” rather than “play house” or other childhood games. Almost as a universal call to Haitian women and their Canadian allies, her daughters would find some paper and begin, “So, what is the order of the day?” Conclusion Although Haitian diasporic feminists enjoyed extensive alliances with other movements in Montreal between the 1960s and 1980s, they remained somewhat on the margins of these collectives. Yet, from these margins, women were able to construct a new centre that, rooted in both cultural legacies and experiential knowledge, allowed them to act as the pillars of their community lakou. This work was often difficult to maintain, and the official membership of organizations such as Point de ralliement and RAFA remained small (oscillating between twenty and thirty members). But as the efforts of Nègès Vanyan and Agnant’s comments illustrate, a key feature of the Haitian women’s movement was to define feminism and feminist practice based on the multiple and varying needs of the women. If it did not always boost membership, it did facilitate safe spaces for women in Montreal. In a collective reflection of their activism, four Haitian feminists wrote, “We believe that unstructured and clandestine Haitian women’s movements play an

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important role in the Haitian community of Montreal because in challenging the status of women, these movements also challenge the feudal-patriarchal Haitian society in its different components.”78 In this way, attending to women’s needs through informal get-togethers, calling a neighbour on the phone, or even gathering to clean the floors of a community centre had a wider impact than formal membership reflected. More than simply another example of unequal and unpaid female labour, the women’s work involved preparing a community space that facilitated the exchange of ideas, camaraderie, and a women-centred consciousness that in turn redefined the meaning of family as well as individual, community, and national identity. By the end of the 1980s, Haitian women continued to confront sexism both in and outside of their community as well as cultural and racial discrimination in Montreal. The difference now was that, through the physical and ideological space of the diasporic lakou, they had developed a community with which to struggle against such forms of oppression. While it was not their beloved Haiti, it was, at least for now, a place to call home.

NOTES 1 Building on the concept of “diasporic lakou,” in Charlene Désir, “Diasporic Lakou: A Haitian Academic Explores Her Path to Haiti Pre- and PostEarthquake,” Harvard Educational Review 81, 2 (Summer 2011): 278–95 as a methodological resource for understanding how to practise ethical and accountable research in Haiti, I use the term to understand women’s oral histories and written records relating to late twentieth-century Haitian transnational feminism. For more details about this chapter, see my La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women’s Rights, National Politics and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1935–1986 (doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013). 2 “Memoire de la Maison d’Haïti à la commission d’étude sur la formation des adultes,” La Maison d’Haïti, Inc, December 1980. 3 Marjorie Villefranche, interviewed by author, May 2010, Montreal. Maison d’Haïti initially rented space at the YMCA on rue Le Parc, and later on rue Lajeunesse, before moving to the current location on rue St Michel in north Montreal. 4 Ellen Carrie Scheinberg, The “Undesirables”: Canadian Deportation Policy and Its Impact on Female Immigrants 1946–1956 (doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2007), 68, 72.

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5 In Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2012), 92–3, Laurent Dubois writes that the lakou “came to represent specific social conventions meant to guarantee each person equal access to dignity and individual freedom.” 6 Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, unpublished manuscript, 151, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain Papers, Stanford University Archives (SUA). It became “Courtship, Marriage, and plasaj at Kenscoff,” Social and Economic Studies 4 (1958): 210–33. 7 Désir, “Diasporic Lakou,” 282. Désir shows that recent scholars assert that contemporary lakous are “relational spaces” of real or imagined communities. 8 Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 20–1. 9 Carolle Charles, “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierist State, Transnationalism and the Emergence of a New Feminism, 1980– 1990,” Feminist Studies 21, 1 (Spring 1995): 137–40; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 161. 10 Peter Kihss, “Tyranny in Haiti Is Charged Here: Terrorism and Corruption Laid to Duvalier Regime by 2 Former Backers,” New York Times, 27 July 1959. 11 Trouillot, Haiti, 166, 168. 12 Marie-Célie Agnant, interviewed by author, 27 May 2007, Montreal. 13 Trouillot, Haiti, 167. 14 Beverly Bell, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Marie Sassin, interviewed by www.teleimagetvshow.com, March 2012, Port-au-Prince; Charles, “Gender and Politics,” 140. 15 Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel (Boulder: Westview, 1990), 129–31. 16 Chantalle Verna, “Haitian Migration and Community-Building in Southeastern Michigan, 1966–1998,” in Regina O. Jackson, ed., Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2011), 168. 17 Myriam Chancy, Searching for Safe Space: Afro-Caribbean Writers in Exile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). Also Alexandra Philoctète, interviewed by author, March 2011, Montreal, Canada. 18 Of the 500,000 Haitians in North America, more than 300,000 were in the New York City area. During this period the population in Montreal grew to approximately 24,000. Deborah Anne Paul, “Women and the International Division of Labour: The Case of Haitian Workers in Montreal” (MA thesis, Queen’s University, 1992).

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19 Herard Jadotte, “Haiti Immigration to Quebec,” Journal of Black Studies 7, 4 (June 1977): 485–500. 20 Ibid., 487. 21 “Movements of Domestics from Haiti,” RG 76, vol. 838, Canada Immigration Division, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), Ottawa; “Students to Canada from Haiti,” RG 25, vol. 3981, LAC; Paul Déjean, Les Haïtiens au Québec (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Québec, 1978); Micheline Labelle, Serge Larose, and Victor Piché, “Émigration et immigration: Le Haïtiens au Québec,” Sociologie et sociétés 15, 2 (1983): 73–88; Dorothy Williams, The Road to Now: History of Blacks in Montreal (Montreal: Véhicule, 1997). 22 Paul Robert Magocsi, ed., Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Estimates based on Canadian Census are approximations because before 1971 “Haitian” was not a category but part of a West Indian designation including people from the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. 23 Paul, “Women,” 140. 24 Paul Déjean, Les Haïtiens au Québec (Montreal: PUQ, 1978); Maud PierrePierre, interviewed by author, 7 June 2008, Montreal. 25 Maud Pontel, “Femmes Noires et Alors?: Des Québécoises d’origine haïtienne dissent la violence,” Bureau de la Communauté Haïtienne de Montréal Study (Montreal: Université à Montréal, 2004), 16. 26 Labelle, “Émigration,” 85. Haitians were significantly younger than other Montreal immigrants. 27 Ibid. 28 Michel Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 12; Myriam Joseph (alias), interviewed by author, 17 March 2011, Montreal. 29 Gina Ulysse, “Papa, Patriarchy, and Power: Snapshots of a Good Haitian Girl, Feminism, and Dyasporic Dreams,” Journal of Haitian Studies, 12, 1 (2006): 25. 30 Joseph interview. 31 Agnant interview. 32 Suzie Boisrond, interviewed by author, March 2011, Montreal. 33 Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Williams, Road to Now. 34 Boisrond interview; Fabienne Pierre-Jacques and Ghislaine Charlier, interviewed by author, September 2010, Montreal.

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35 La Lutte was the women’s division of the communist organization at Marjorie’s CEGEP campus. 36 Villefranche interview. La Lutte was heavily involved with the Quebec nationalist movement. 37 Alexandra Philoctète, interviewed by author, March 2011, Montreal. 38 Mills, Empire Within. 39 Davies, Left of Karl Marx, 3. 40 “Police Supports ‘Papa Doc.’” UHURU: Black Community News Service, 3. 41 Herard Jadotte, “Haiti Immigration to Quebec,” Journal of Black Studies 7, 4 (June 1977): 487. 42 Myriam Joseph, interviewed by author, 17 March 2011, Montreal; PierrePierre interview. See also Ghila B. Sroka, Femmes Haïtiennes, Paroles de Négresses (Montreal: Les Éditions de La Parole Métèque, 1995), 67–8. 43 Pierre-Pierre interview. 44 On migrant women’s imagination and mind work, Pessar and Mahler, “Transnational Migration,” 817. 45 Pierre-Pierre interview. 46 Within the up-to-100 point system, secondary and higher education was important; many were denied entry because they did not meet the bar. 47 Both quotations from Raymonde Ravix, “Entrevues avec les regroupements de femmes de Montréal,” Collectif Paroles: Revue culturelle et politique haïtienne, no. 28 (Montreal: March/April 1984): 6. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 8. 50 Fabienne Pierre-Jacques, interviewed by author, 30 May 2007, Montreal. 51 Pierre-Pierre interview. 52 Few returned to Haiti before the 1980s, but after Jean-Claude Duvalier’s presidency in 1986, many did, including feminists who then began organizing women’s organizations in Haiti, such as the Women’s Ministry (1991). 53 Calculations from Table 1 in Jadotte, “Haitian Immigration to Quebec,” 490; Sean Mills, “Quebec, Haiti, and the Deportation Crisis of 1974,” Canadian Historical Review 94, 3 (September 2013): 412. 54 Labelle, “Émigration et immigration,” 84. 55 Paul, “Women,” 139. 56 Ibid., 140. 57 For example, Paula Fletcher to Minister Robert Andras, 12 December 1974, and “Haiti Deportation” Petitions to Minister Robert Andras, RG 76, vol. 733, LAC. 58 Mills, “Quebec, Haiti, and the Deportation Crisis.”

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59 She was invited by Adeline and Max Chancy, exiles from Haiti in 1965 who immediately joined the anti-Duvalier and other Montreal groups and founded Maison d’Haïti. 60 Ravix, “Entrevues,” 10. 61 Villefranche interview. 62 Ravix, “Entrevues,” 10. 63 Ibid., 11. 64 Members Eustache and Josette Pierre Louis served on the “Economics in the Black Family” workshop committee; Adeleine Chancy (RAFA) presented research at the 1972 Congress and was a panelist on the “Consciousness Raising – The Multicultural Black” panel at the 1977 Congress. “Notes from Congress of Black Women’s,” RG 17, vol. 23, LAC. 65 “Notes from Congress of Black Women’s,” RG 17, vol. 23, LAC. 66 “2nd Annual Congress of Black Women, Program,” RG 17, vol. 23, LAC. 67 Congress of Black Women: Resolutions Presented to Plenary Session, 3. 68 “Fourth National Congress of Black Women,” Contrast, 25 August 1977. 69 Villefranche interview. 70 Femmes Haïtiennes, “Anita Blanchard (Anna Napoléon) Intervention au Congrès mondial pour l’Année internationale de la femme, Berlin,” 57. 71 Femmes Haïtiennes, “Lisette Romulus, Séminaire régional de la Fédération démocratique internationale des femmes (FDIF), Panama, janvier 1977,” 58. 72 Femmes Haïtiennes, 61. 73 They later made appearances at women’s conferences in Moscow (1978, 1979) and Cuba (1978). 74 Agnant interview. 75 Maison d’Haïti, Fanm Poto Mitan: Femmes immigrantes haïtiennes (Montreal: Les Presses Solidaires, 1982), 2. 76 Villefranche interview. 77 Ibid. 78 Monique, Myriam, Rosemary, Viviane, “Femmes haïtiennes (noires, immigrantes, refugiées),” Canadian Women Studies/Les cahiers de la femme 4, 2 (Winter 1982): 51.

“An Unlikely Collection of Union Militants”: Portuguese Immigrant Cleaning Women Become Political Subjects in Postwar Toronto S u sana Mi r anda

Introduction On 27 June 1984, with reporters on the scene, striking cleaners at First Canadian Place, an office tower in Toronto, were repeatedly warned that they would be arrested unless they left the lobby of the building. Almost all of them were Portuguese women, and they had been on strike since 4 June. They insisted on meeting with the workers, mainly young students, who had been hired to replace them during the strike. The female cleaners who earned $5.83 an hour and male cleaners who earned $6.97 an hour wanted a wage increase of $0.50 an hour each year for two years. Their employer, Federated Building Maintenance (FBM), which was contracted to clean First Canadian Place by the company that owned the building, Olympia and York Development (O&Y), refused to pay this increase. According to the Toronto Star, Ron Bond, a representative of O&Y pleaded with the strikers to picket outside the building, stating that they were embarrassing the building’s (upper middle-class) tenants. The women refused to leave. When police were brought in, the women shouted in Portuguese and others cried as they saw those arrested being led to the police van. When surrounded by police, one woman screamed, “I’m stayed. I’m stayed,” as she defiantly threw her megaphone to the ground. Another woman shouted to a police officer, “I am poor, I am poor. Will you feed my family?” At one point it took six uniformed police offers to get one screaming woman, Lucia Ferreira, a cleaner and union representative, into the police van.1 This chapter is reprinted with permission from Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 32, 1 (2007): 111–21.

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This episode, like others that transpired on the picket line during the strike, received public attention in part because reporters for the Toronto English-language press considered it remarkable that a group of marginal, foreign-speaking women took to the streets to protest their exploitation in the city’s wealthy financial district. This chapter examines what one journalist called “an unlikely collection of union militants,”2 a group of Portuguese immigrant women office cleaners who, to most everyone’s astonishment, led and sustained a six-week strike in 1984 against the owners of and the company contracted to clean the large financial tower in downtown Toronto. More specifically, it highlights the ways in which the women gained a public presence during the strike both on the picket lines and in the city’s newspapers. I draw primarily on newspaper accounts of the strike, though where necessary I also make use of archival and other sources. In addition to contributing to the still-sparse literature on the Portuguese in Canada,3 this chapter raises broader questions about immigrant women’s stillunderstudied role in the expanding service sector and in labour activism in Canada after the Second World War. It also applies some of the recent key insights and criticisms that feminist labour historians, particularly of immigrant, ethnic, and racialized workers, have raised in response to the largely Anglo historians in Canada and the United States whose concepts and understandings of working-class femininity, female respectability, family, and militancy have been largely derived from studies of dominant majority women. Indeed, my chapter … aims … as Franca Iacovetta has put it elsewhere, “to more effectively de-centre the WASP woman worker” in Canadian and North American labour history.4 One concrete way of doing so is to continue to recover and write the history of marginal ethnic female militants, whether they belonged to a specific racial-ethnic group or a multiracial workforce and community. As recent publications have demonstrated, alongside the critical debates and paradigm shifts in the field, many feminist labour historians continue to recognize the importance of centring the history of such supposedly “unlikely militants” as Italian garment workers, African American laundry workers, Latina maids, Puerto Rican tobacco workers, South Asian call centre workers, and Portuguese “cleaning ladies.”5 The Portuguese women who took on big capital in 1980s Toronto had lived under a dictatorship in their homeland and had no prior experience with unions, let alone organizing union drives.6 They openly identified themselves as immigrants who nevertheless had a right to decent wages and basic security and respect

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in a country that had long declared itself to be an enlightened, liberal immigrant-receiving nation. Immigrant Cleaners and Unionization Large-scale migration from Portugal to Canada occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and by 1982, approximately 137,000 Portuguese had immigrated to Canada, the majority having settled in Toronto.7 The postwar Toronto economy contrasted sharply with Portugal’s economy where agricultural stagnation and minimal industrialization left few opportunities for Portuguese male and female workers. Due to their legal status as dependants and their low educational levels, Portuguese women were confined to the lowest paid sectors of the female and ethnic job ghetto in Canada, which predominately included work in factories and cleaning hotels, private homes, and offices.8 Toronto’s new position as Canada’s most important financial centre spurred a construction of postwar skyscrapers in the heart of downtown Toronto, including in 1975 the 72-storey First Canadian Place, home to the Bank of Montreal central offices. The growth and centralization of Toronto’s financial district and activity, then, stimulated a parallel growth and centralization of cleaning jobs for Portuguese and other immigrant women and men in these new towers.9 Alongside other groups of immigrant women, Portuguese women were crucial workers in the expanding post–Second World War service sector that so many “Canadian” women shunned in favour of white-collar jobs. The contracting out of cleaning functions within private enterprise and government departments has been on the rise since the 1970s. However, under the Ontario Labour Relations Act, cleaners and other workers who are employed through contractors receive no protection for their unions. They have no successor rights; that is, a union’s collective agreement with one contractor does not carry over to another contractor, even though the same workers might be cleaning the same building.10 When cleaners organize they are threatened by their employer with the possibility that the cleaning contract will be terminated due to higher costs associated with wage increases and better benefits. Thus, most cleaners are not unionized, and for those who are, any gains they make from collective bargaining are easily lost with the tendering of new contracts. Often, the workers being rehired by the new contractor do the same job they did previously, but under inferior conditions.11 Private contractors rely on low wages and the intensification of work to

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maximize their profits and to beat their competition when bidding for a contract, and thus immigrant women are extremely low-paid workers in a sector of the service industry that relies heavily on their labour. These restrictions on the unionization of contract workers began in the 1970s as part of the larger effort of the Canadian neo-liberal state to undermine workers’ collective power.12 Also, the fact that most contract cleaners are immigrant women, and the state has limited their ability to unionize and retain their union, points to power relations that, contrary to multiculturalism rhetoric, serve to privilege white male Canadians at the expense of immigrant men and, most of all, immigrant women.13 Despite the strong presence of research on immigrant women workers in Canadian labour history, studies that investigate unionization have actually paid little attention to immigrant women.14 This situation leads to the perception that they have somehow been absent from or passive in workplace activism. Furthermore, there has been comparatively little analysis of immigrant women’s involvement in the post– Second World War labour movement, a period that saw a dramatic increase in the unionization of women workers in general. In 1979, the Canadian Food and Associated Services Union, an affiliate of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU), began a campaign to get the mostly Portuguese building cleaners at First Canadian Place to join their union. The CCU was active in organizing immigrant workers in Toronto through such affiliate unions as the Masons Independent Union of Canada and the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union. Their interest in organizing these cleaners stemmed from the CCU emphasis on the exploitation of immigrants and a greater willingness than that demonstrated by the Canadian Labour Congress to take on tough struggles.15 In the case of cleaners, this meant struggling to organize contract workers with little protection in labour law and immigrant women who were generally not perceived as strong unionists by mainstream unions. The employer, FBM, tried to block the union’s certification, arguing that because most of the cleaners could not speak, write, understand, or comprehend English, they could not understand the labour board notices posted in English. However, a labour board chairman ruled that language had no bearing on the validity of the union’s application and the union was certified. Of the 120 eligible, 96 cleaners had signed union cards, well above the 55 per cent required for automatic union certification. The union was certified in October 1979 to represent the employees of FBM at First Canadian Place, and the first collective

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agreement was negotiated and came into effect on 13 April 1980.16 That almost all of the Portuguese immigrant cleaners at First Canadian Place signed union cards indicates that these women were not only aware of their exploitation but were willing to fight for their rights despite the risk of losing incomes that were so crucial to their families’ well-being. Furthermore, they participated in union politics, developed leadership skills, and took on leadership positions within this union’s local, including that of president, vice-president, and secretary-treasurer, as well as steward and bargaining committee positions. These immigrant cleaners can be situated as important and active members of the Canadian union movement in the post-1945 period. Going on Strike A second collective agreement with FBM was executed in 1982. In 1984, the union, which had been renamed the Food and Service Workers of Canada (FASWOC), was bargaining for the third time with FBM. On 3 June the union local voted to reject a two-year contract offer, including a wage increase of $0.30 an hour effective in January 1985.17 The next day, 250 cleaners who cleaned First Canadian Place went on strike. The cleaners were demanding a wage increase from their employer of $0.50 per hour each year for two years retroactive to 13 April, the day the contract with the union expired. In a period of heavy inflation, the wage increase the employer had offered meant little to the workers. Many of these women also held day jobs in factories or cleaned private homes in order to make ends meet. FBM refused the union’s demand of a wage increase on the grounds that since O&Y (a company with a net worth of approximately $3.5 billion) would not increase its contract price, FBM would lose their profit.18 For most women, this was their first strike, and they desperately wanted to fight for higher wages, despite the threats and the risk of losing their jobs. The real possibility of injury for Portuguese immigrant men performing dangerous jobs in construction meant that many of these women were in effect the family breadwinners, although they did not appear as such on census or other records. Torontonians first learned about them because they were profiled in newspapers such as the Toronto Star. They included women like Margarida Correia, who supported three small children because her injured husband had not worked for nearly four years. Another was Maria Estrella, a mother of four small children whose husband had been unable to work for seven years.19 Their

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situation underscored the precarious position in which working-class families found themselves when a husband was unable to work.20 The average age of the women involved in the strike was forty years old,21 and most of the women were married with children. Like other working-class women, these women’s activism was rooted in their everyday material realities and their responsibilities to their families. However, as migrants, these women also had transatlantic familial obligations. Migration not only provided new material hope for those migrating, but important material aid to their impoverished families across the Atlantic. Indeed, some women cited their inability to buy and send clothes to their families in Portugal as an impetus to fighting for higher wages.22 These women were thus transnational subjects who played a critical role as breadwinners for transnational family economies stretched across the ocean.23 Moreover, in striking, they made their own decision independent of their union leadership, which did not make any recommendation on whether to strike or not. As these were contract workers, the union knew the cleaners might not have any jobs to come back to.24 The cleaners voted 96 per cent in favour of a strike and actively pursued their own agenda.25 Furthermore, the striking cleaners were acutely aware of their vulnerable position as immigrant workers in the Canadian economy and were prepared to talk about it publicly. In their coverage of the strike, Toronto journalists noted the deep-seated sense of disappointment expressed by women who, having come to Canada with visions of a better life and prepared to work hard, found that they were being exploited and ignored because they were immigrants and spoke little English. As Maria Cruz, a striking cleaner, explained to a reporter on the scene, “I knew I had to work hard here, but I didn’t know something like this would happen … They are trying to exploit the immigrants, especially the immigrant women. Because we are women and we do not speak English, we have no rights.”26 Facing exploitation as ethnic immigrant women workers, Cruz and others like her joined and actively participated in unions. They challenged their employers and the government in an effort to attain the goals they had hoped for in migration, including ensuring a better life for their children. Furthermore, compared with Portugal, Canada allowed them some space to fight for their rights as workers, and they took full advantage of this opportunity. In taking to the streets and demanding better pay, these women also directly challenged Canada’s self-proclaimed liberal image as a benevolent nation of immigrants that offered newcomers the opportunity not

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only to work but to eventually enjoy the status and entitlements that came with citizenship. Interestingly, in their communications with the press as well as with employers and state representatives, these women positioned themselves as immigrant women, not citizens, who were being exploited as cheap labour, even though roughly half of the women were Canadian citizens (the other half were landed immigrants). In a letter to Albert Reichmann, president of O&Y Ltd, Emilia Silva, president of the local stated, “Mr Reichmann, surely you can understand our situation. We are immigrants to this country. We take pride in our work and we work hard. We are trying to make a better life for our families.”27 Furthermore, the taunts and insults that the women endured at the hands of critics and passers-by – antics that were also covered in the press – belied the notion that Canada was an inclusive haven for immigrants who worked hard. On the picket line, they faced shouts of “go back to your country” from tenants of the building and passers-by.28 The feeling among the women was that they could not truly claim citizenship as a basis to equal rights, that they were not perceived as citizens by the wider society or the state. In their attempts to gain economic justice, they appealed instead to the public’s sense of human rights, positioning themselves as poor immigrant women unscrupulously exploited by a rich corporation. The presence of the women’s family members on the picket line was an important characteristic of this strike and probably helped in attracting media attention. As in other strikes involving married women, children became very much part of the strike.29 The press noted that the children played tag around the buildings and that “on most evenings, children strut along the sidewalk, carrying signs, slurping popsicles, shouting through a megaphone or generally annoying their mothers.”30 The presence of children on the picket line had much to do with the women’s inability to pay babysitters at times when their husbands were at work and could not care for them, but it also served a strategic purpose. The children were visible reminders that these women had families to support, so their presence reinforced the justice of their cause. The union encouraged husbands to join the picket line. Many of the men had developed a union consciousness and commitment to the labour movement through their experience with construction unions and they supported their wives during their picket line duties even though it meant that women were spending less time on their domestic and familial responsibilities. Significantly, the men’s own experiences with unions did not promote a sense of working-class masculinity that

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excluded women from unionism but instead led them to support their wives’ activism. Of paramount importance was a couple’s shared goal of attaining the financial security hoped for in migration and the desire for respect as immigrant workers in the Canadian economy. As Lucia Ferreira told a Star reporter, “My husband supports me. For sure, he would like me [to be] at home, but he knows why I am here and sometimes he comes to walk on the line.”31 As with other immigrant strikes, the ethnic identity of the strikers helped shape the character of the picket line and their cultural displays of picket-line behaviour and dissent reflected a fascinating blend of Portuguese rituals (including festive rituals and dances), worker solidarity, and even Catholicism. The picket line was sometimes reinforced with a Portuguese band. Other times, portable music players blared as women danced directly across from an upscale restaurant favoured by politicians and corporate leaders.32 A booklet of songs sung on the picket line signals the ethnic influence on working-class culture. In addition to English-language working-class songs, the women sang a Portuguese translation of the song “We Shall Not Be Moved” as well as a Portuguese song to St John, as these women were predominantly Roman Catholic. Their religious faith was very much a part of their union activism. They also sang, and danced, a wedding and party favourite, the “Bird Dance.”33 They appropriated and continually chanted a Latin American rallying cry in Portuguese: “the people, united, will never be defeated.”34 More than simply a way of gaining public attention, the ethno-cultural expressions of militancy and solidarity so central to the strike offered a way of claiming a political identity. It defined the strikers in ways that distinguished them from Anglo-Canadian society even though the strike confirmed that these women had much in common with other working-class women. For the Portuguese women who made up the majority of the cleaners on strike, the overlapping bonds of ethnic, class, and gender solidarity served to reinforce the cohesiveness of the group, and a particular form of radicalism was born of these multiple identities. Defying Stereotypes The militancy of the strikers marked the strike as exceptional for this group of immigrant women who, as the press repeatedly noted, did not have any experience with unions in Portugal. One reporter declared that the “strike has turned these docile women, keepers of home and

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hearth, into a bitter, vociferous group intent on fighting their employers.”35 In assuming that the women had been transformed into fighters, this reporter, of course, was drawing on the all too familiar stereotypes of immigrant women, including southern Europeans, as docile before husbands and employer alike. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that points to the women’s everyday resistance at home and in the workplace.36 Still, it is clear that for Canadian observers, the women’s militant behaviour on the picket line was in stark contrast to their perceptions of how Portuguese women would act. Even the union had expressed scepticism about the women’s ability to hold a successful strike. A non-Portuguese union representative, Isabel Saez, publicly admitted that “these women are stronger than any of us thought they would be,”37 which made them all the more newsworthy. Most of all, these otherwise ignored immigrant women emerged from their invisibility to publicly defy their economic exploitation right at the heart of Canada’s most profitable financial district. This irony also helped draw attention to their cause in the Canadian press. In defiance of the stereotype that immigrant women workers were not typical striking workers, the women themselves enlarged the definition of who could belong to an active and militant working class. In short, they redefined the political and made themselves public, political, militant, female subjects. Picket-line anger mounted when a group of about ten workers who had been on strike were escorted across the picket line to return to work. Four strikers were taken to hospital for injuries and one person was arrested when a shoving match started between the two groups. Tensions mounted further when the police began helping “scabs” (replacement workers) cross the picket line. Many of them had been referred by the Canada Employment Centre for Students, a federally run agency. Picketers shouted at strike breakers who arrived in front of the building and attempted to block underground tunnels leading into the building. Maria Serafin stated, “I’m angry. Tell them [the students] not to take my job because I have a family to feed.”38 On 13 June, three women who had been picketing in one of the tunnels were assaulted by a private security guard escorting strike replacements past the picket line. The women suffered various bruises and scratches and one sprained hand and all received medical attention at Toronto General Hospital. As word of the assaults spread around the building, the women became very upset.39 In response, the union pulled the women off all the entrances and gathered them together for a meeting in order to speak with them and calm them down. But as they did so, a cab

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containing scabs pulled up and the women, already agitated, rushed the car, hitting it with their hands and shouting. Maria Medeiros, a cleaner, was arrested for hitting a male supervisor from FBM with her umbrella.40 Such incidents made the strikers aware that they were not only fighting O&Y and FBM, but also the government. Indeed, the women were particularly incensed over the collusion of the state, through the recruitment and police protection of the strike breakers. The women saw their aggressive and militant actions as justified in the light of the exploitation and injustice they faced. They were fiercely committed to fighting the exploitation even though it was supported by state laws. As mentioned earlier, some Portuguese women – about twelve in all – did cross the picket line and return to work during the strike.41 According to a union representative who spoke with reporters, these women had done so “under pressure from husbands to give up the strike and return to the kitchen in the Portuguese tradition.”42 But the union representative missed the obvious point: the women were not returning to the kitchen but returning to their jobs. The matter of paid employment was not the problem. For some couples, the presence of women on a highly publicized and occasionally violent picket line might have caused tensions at home. Others might have also considered it an embarrassment to the Portuguese community. However, it seems clear that a woman’s decision to go back to work had very little to do with a husband’s notion of obedient womanhood or with dominant notions of feminine respectability, and far more to do with an immediate need for money. The loss of a regular paycheque during the strike caused hardship to their families. They also feared that, if they lost the strike, they would probably be fired. Yet, despite such fears being widespread, the vast majority of the Portuguese women did not cross the picket line but stood firm, and their defiance is important in showing that so-called respectable gender norms did not dampen the militancy of this group of ethnic female strikers, as has been noted for groups of Anglo-Saxon women workers in earlier periods.43 Like other strikes in which immigrant women predominated, these women were not constrained either by dominant notions of femininity or working-class ones.44 The striking workers received picket-line support from other cleaners, including those who worked at the TD (Toronto Dominion) Centre and were organized by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). The strikers also received picket-line support from other unions and women’s groups including other affiliates of the CCU, the United Auto Workers (UAW), as well as Ontario Working Women, and the Canadian

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Congress of Women. Support from the Portuguese community came through the Portuguese-Canadian Democratic Organization and representatives from the Portuguese Pastoral Council. All of this support from unions, women’s, and community organizations also helped the cleaners gain favourable media attention and increased pressure on FBM and O&Y to settle in the union’s favour. The strikers’ issues also became explicitly political when their actions drew the attention of major politicians, particularly members of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP). High-profile provincial politician Bob Rae and federal politician Dan Heap joined the women on the picket line.45 The strike also triggered a debate that continued long after the end of the strike on successor rights in the cleaning industry and the treatment of immigrant workers in the Canadian economy. The NDP brought the issues to the attention of the Canadian public and Canadian politicians. After six weeks, the strike ended when the cleaners accepted FBM’s new offer. It provided them with a $0.35 hourly increase retroactive to 13 April, when the old contract expired, and a further $0.25 increase in the second year of the agreement. As the journalists reported, when the contract was accepted, the cleaners shouted “the people, united, will never be defeated” in Portuguese. Emilia Silva shouted into a megaphone, “We have proven to everyone that we have the courage. We proved to Canada and to Olympia and York owners of the building that we are women, and we are immigrants but we can fight.”46 Clearly, these women accomplished an immense feat by winning a strike against a major corporation. They also showed that female immigrants had a right to equality in Canadian society and could be strong and active union members, belying the notion that immigrant women were simply passive victims of an exploitative industrial-capitalist economy. In the end, the strike, for all of its importance, did not secure longterm rights and security for immigrant cleaners. By February of 1986, the 250 cleaners at First Canadian Place were in danger of losing their jobs, as well as their hard-won rights because O&Y was putting the cleaning contract up for tender precisely when the collective agreement was set to expire. A delegation from the FASWOC met with Liberal Ontario Premier David Peterson and Labour Minister Bill Wrye to press for successor rights legislation but they were not successful. In the meantime, the cleaners at First Canadian Place accepted FBM’s offer of a pay raise of $0.35 cents, an increased workload, and fewer working hours. They did so because it would allow their employer to remain competitive for gaining the contract with O&Y, which meant that they could

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keep their jobs and the collective agreement.47 The cleaning contract was renewed. The cleaners were forced to give up many of the gains they had made during their six-week strike, as the contracting-out process worked in favour of employers and business interests. It was not until 1993 under the NDP provincial government, through Bill 40, that successor rights for contract cleaners were incorporated into changes to labour law. However, Bill 7, the first major piece of legislation introduced by the Conservative Mike Harris government in 1995, eliminated successor rights.48 Immigrant women were denied, once again, the right to improve their wages and working conditions. Conclusion This examination of how an “unlikely” collection of ethnic female militants mounted and sustained a six-week strike at First Canadian Place, and the press coverage as well as political debate that it engendered, provides a useful case study for examining the position of immigrant women in the Canadian postwar economy, labour movement, and neoliberal state. Portuguese women played a crucial role in the expansion of the service sector in the postwar years while at the same time their entry reinforced an already-existing gender and ethnically stratified workforce that was low paid and toiled in inferior conditions. These conditions were supported by state laws that limited their ability to unionize and retain their unions through the contracting-out process. Yet, despite rhetoric to the contrary, immigrant women could be and were militant participants in the labour movement at a time when labour faced increasing limits on workers’ power. Gender, class, and ethnic identities converged to drive this group of workers to assert their commonalities with other working-class groups as well as their distinct concerns as ethnic workers. By taking protest to the street in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, and by attracting plenty of press attention, much of it sympathetic, the women became explicitly political subjects and their actions informed a much longer and larger debate on the place of immigrant women in the Canadian economy and state.

NOTES 1 Tim Harper, “Four Arrested for Trespassing at Cleaners’ Picket Line,” Toronto Star, 28 June 1984, A3.

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2 Tim Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” Toronto Star, 11 July 1984, A1. 3 Most scholarly work on the Portuguese in Canada has been produced by sociologists and anthropologists. See Wenona Giles, Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Edite Noivo, Inside Ethnic Families: Three Generations of Portuguese-Canadians (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); for a historical work, see Grace Anderson and David Higgs, A Future to Inherit: The Portuguese Communities of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976). 4 Franca Iacovetta, “Feminist Transnational Labour History and Rethinking Women’s Activism and Female Militancy in Canadian Contexts: Lessons from an International(ist) Project,” paper presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, June 2004. 5 Labouring Feminism and Working-Class History in North America and Beyond Conference, Toronto, Fall 2005; papers by Caroline Merithew, Ginetta Candelario, Teresa Carrillo, Ivette Rivero-Giusti, Jennifer Carson, Julie Guard, and Mercedes Steedman. Recent publications include Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Julie Guard, “Canadian Citizens or Dangerous Foreign Women? Canada’s Radical Consumer Movement, 1947–1950,” in Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds., Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, 1st ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 161–89. 6 Under a right-wing dictatorship in Portugal from 1933 to 1974, the state enacted laws forbidding strikes, organizing, and collective bargaining. 7 Giles, Portuguese Women in Toronto, 29. 8 The 1981 statistics indicate that 86.96 percent of Portuguese-born immigrant women in Canada worked for wages: 37.30 per cent were in manufacturing, 8.70 per cent in accommodation and food services, and 13.46 per cent in “other services,” which includes cleaning. Giles, Portuguese Women in Toronto, 67. However, the percentage of women in “other services” was surely underreported as many Portuguese immigrant women worked clandestinely in private domestic service. 9 A 1975 article cited 36,557 cleaners in Toronto, mostly immigrant women: Rosemary Spiers, “Office Cleaning: Big Business or an ‘Evil Industry’?” Toronto Star, 27 September 1975, B3. A union organizer indicated that in Toronto cleaners were mostly Portuguese, though the Greek, Italian, Latin American, West Indian, and Eastern European communities were also

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11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

Susana Miranda represented. Wendy Iler, “A Look at the Cleaning Industry,” Canadian Woman Studies 4, 2 (Winter 1982), 70. Luis Aguiar, “Restructuring and Employment Insecurities: The Case of Building Cleaners,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 9, 1 (June 2000): 64–93. Committee for Cleaners’ Rights: Synopsis for Meeting with Honourable Gregory Sorbara, Minister of Labour, 18 May 1988. CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Craig Heron, The Canadian Labour Movement: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Lorimer, 1996), 124. Tania Das Gupta and Franca Iacovetta, “Introduction: Whose Canada Is It? Immigrant Women, Women of Colour and Feminist Critiques of Multiculturalism,” Atlantis 24, 2 (Spring/Summer 2000), 1–2. Exceptions include Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). John Lang, interview by author, 13 March 2007. John Deverell, “Chars Clean Up – on the Boss,” Toronto Star, 3 October 1979, A3. Erika Rosenfeld, “Police Accused of Helping ‘Scabs’: Tension Rises on Cleaners’ Picket Line,” Globe and Mail, 6 June 1984, M4. Ontario Labour Relations Board, 29 November 1985, Food and Service Workers of Canada vs. Federated Building Maintenance Company Limited and Olympia and York Developments Limited, CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Suzanne Goldenberg, “Cleaners Vow They Won’t Quit Despite Hardships of Walkout,” Globe and Mail, 30 June 1984, 19. Franca Iacovetta discusses the participation of Italian men in dangerous construction trades in Toronto, and how injury or death adversely affected the family economy. See Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). Applications for employment at First Canadian Place, various dates, CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. It is usually male migrants that are credited with sending remittances home. For example, see Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860–1914 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991).

An Unlikely Collection of Union Militants? 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45

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Wendy Iler, interview by author, 16 August 2006. Stuart Crombie, “Cleaners on Line,” NOW, 21 June 1984. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. Emilia Silva, president of Local 51 FASWOC, Letter to Albert Reichmann, president of Olympia and York Developments Ltd, 30 June 1984, CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Crombie, “Cleaners on Line.” See Carmela Patrias, Relief Strike: Immigrant Workers and the Great Depression in Crowland, Ontario 1930–1935 (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1990). Goldenberg, “Cleaners Vow They Won’t Quit,” 19. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. Crombie, “Cleaners on Line.” Food and Service Workers of Canada (FASWOC), Booklet of Songs, 1984, CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Duncan McMonagle, “250 Striking Cleaners Expect Strike-Breakers,” Globe and Mail, 9 June 1984, 19. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. Susana Paula Miranda, “Working Women, ‘Cleaning Ladies’: Portuguese Immigrant Women and Domestic Day Cleaning in 1960s and 1970s Toronto,” Portuguese Studies Review 11, 2 (Winter-Spring 2004): 89–108. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. Harper, “Four Arrested for Trespassing at Cleaners’ Picket Line,” A3. Notes by Maria Medeiros’ lawyer, CAW Local 40, First Canadian Place files. Mary Ellen Nettle, “Immigrant Women Clean Up!” Hysteria 3, 3 (Fall 1984): 7. Nettle, “Immigrant Women Clean Up!” 7. Harper, “Cleaners’ Strike Shakes Dream of a Better Life,” A1. See Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners; Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Wage-Earning Women in Small Town Ontario, 1920–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Pamela Sugiman, Labour’s Dilemma: The Gender Politics of Auto Workers in Canada, 1937–1979 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See Julie Guard, “Authenticity on the Line: Women Workers, Native ‘Scabs,’ and the Multi-ethnic Politics of Identity in a Left-Led Strike in Cold War Canada,” Journal of Women’s History 15, 4 (Winter 2004): 117–40; Robert Ventresca, “‘Cowering Women, Combative Men?’: Femininity, Masculinity and Ethnicity on Strike in Two Southern Ontario Towns 1964– 1966,” Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997): 125–58. Nettle, “Immigrant Women Clean Up!” 7.

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46 Rosie DiManno, “Strike Wins Women Better Deal,” Toronto Star, 14 July 1984, A1. 47 No Author, “Cleaning Jobs in Jeopardy Despite Vote,” Globe and Mail, 16 February 1986. 48 Aguiar, “Restructuring and Employment Insecurities.”

PART SEVEN Food, Family, and Culture

Over the past decade, food studies has become a lively area of inquiry in numerous disciplines. As well, people generally are increasingly concerned about what they eat – where it comes from, how it was produced, how it tastes, and what it costs. While anthropologists and ethnographers have long studied the significance of food in the lives of people and their cultures, historians have taken up this focus more recently. Food studies scholars frequently differentiate “foodstuffs” – the things we eat – from “foodways” – the attendant practices and customs. Food, whether inadequate or abundant, is central to the formation of class, racial, family, gender, religious, and overall cultural identity. The relationships between peoples – whether peaceful or conflictual – are commonly shaped by their food encounters and exchanges; this is true of the meeting of settlers and Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago and also between residents and newcomers in contemporary Canada. Because foodways often go through dramatic changes as people migrate from one culture and country to another, food has become an important theme in immigration history. Food modifications and innovations that occur in transnational processes frequently result in what are referred to as “hybrid” diets. Sometimes immigrant foodways change significantly as they “hybridize” – adapting to the food practices and ingredients available in new environments. But other times immigrant cuisine and the customs surrounding what feeds the family experience a reinforcement and resurgence of “traditional” ethnic foods from pre-migration contexts. As part of a process of retaining identity in a national context with many different ethnic and racial groups, immigrants often seek “authenticity” in their eating habits. Women frequently carry special roles in either adapting or preserving community foodways.

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Food is “gendered” in so many ways: grocery shopping, food preparation, and clean-up are historically so often women’s responsibility, even if men were the hunters and barbecue masters. Scholars of women and gender are increasingly interested in how that linkage can both oppress women and offer them a powerful and creative space in their households and communities. Bringing these topics together, we find that women immigrants had (and have) particular roles to play in accessing foodstuffs and nurturing or adapting foodways through the process of migration. Even while we resist “essentializing” women – suggesting that women are “by nature” more closely tied to food issues than men – by highlighting the meaning of food in their lives, we acknowledge this as an expanding subject area and so created a separate “food” section in this book. The three chapters included here represent different approaches to the topic. Franca Iacovetta and Valerie J. Korinek focus on reception work and social service activities among immigrant and refugee women in the post–Second World War era, as exhibited in the activities of the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto and in the content of the popular Chatelaine magazine. The authors find that even while the peculiar eating customs of immigrants were celebrated as part of postwar pluralism, immigrant women were encouraged by experts to shop, cook, and eat “Canadian.” In their analysis, food was a signifier of difference between cultures, but eating and the gendered functions surrounding it also were a site of power negotiation and encounter in which “immigrant” and “host” cultures were both transformed. Even while immigrant diets were transformed through the process of migration, resulting in “food hybridity,” transnational identities – whereby individuals maintain social practices and networks in multiple nation-states and territories, both imagined and real – are important factors in shaping immigrant women’s relationship with food. For example, through an examination of the food shortages and later abundance experienced by Mennonite refugees prior to and following their immigration to Canada after the Second World War, Marlene Epp seeks to understand the place of food in their post-migration memories and lives. Using oral and written life-story sources, she finds that narratives of food and eating are organized around pre- and post-migration settings of deprivation and abundance. In this analysis, food has significance beyond just what people consumed to nourish themselves. It functions “semiotically,” that is, it holds symbolic meaning as people give account of tumultuous events in their lives.

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We learn about the intersection of gender and migration in more recent times through the chapter by Helen Vallianatos and Kim Raine on Arab and South Asian food consumption patterns and identity formation in immigrant households. Through their interviews with women from both cultural communities, they explore the complex negotiation that women undertake in preserving religious and ethnic food practices in a new country that is sometimes inhospitable and in which women experience numerous gender-based barriers to integration. They use the term “gastropolitics” to refer to these negotiations, which include socio-economic challenges. Certainly, this study reveals how foodways can be a contentious zone where newcomer women struggle with their roles as wives and mothers, and also their own self-identity. How have the foodstuffs and foodways changed in your community as new groups of immigrants arrived and settled? Where do you see food hybridity in your community and in your own eating? If you are part of a first-generation immigrant household, how did (or did not) your eating habits and traditional foodways change through the process of migration? How is gender related to food and what happens to men’s and women’s roles when they adapt to new national environments?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Avakian, Arlene Voskin, and Barbara Haber, eds. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Cho, Lily. Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Cooke, Nathalie, ed. What’s to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Driver, Elizabeth. Culinary Landmarks: A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks, 1825–1949. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Epp, Marlene. “Eating across Borders: Reading Immigrant Cookbooks.” Histoire sociale/Social History 96 (May 2015): 45–65. Evans, Jennifer Hough. “Turning ‘Space’ into ‘Place’ with Food: Immigrant Women’s Food Narratives in Post-1945 North Bay, Ontario.” Ontario History 106, 2 (Autumn 2014): 214−35. Iacovetta, Franca, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp, eds. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

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Mosby, Ian. “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952.” Histoire sociale/Social History 46, 91 (May 2013): 615–42. Tye, Diane. Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Vibert, Elizabeth. “The Contours of Everyday Life: Food and Identity in the Plateau Fur Trade.” In Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers, eds., Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

The Semiotics of Zwieback: Feast and Famine in the Narratives of Mennonite Refugee Women M a rlen e Epp

Introduction Nearly fifty years ago, a prominent American sociologist of the Mennonites wrote a popular booklet about Mennonite beliefs and customs. In a section devoted to culinary practices, he noted the reputation of Mennonite women for good cooking, suggested that “they eat well” and as evidence of it, noted their lack of concern for waistlines.1 Images of contented, indeed jolly, robust Mennonite women whipping up huge batches of borscht, pie, and buns come to mind. Slim Mennonite women who are not especially inclined towards cooking, or those who well remember homeland experiences of famine, may chafe at such stereotyping of both their gender and their ethnicity. Yet the linkages between food and ethnicity cannot be denied. Anthropologists Peter Farb and George Armelagos once said, “The surest way of discovering a family’s ethnic origin is to look into its kitchen.”2 … As much as it connotes ethnicity, food also signifies gender. In times of both famine and feast, the consumption of food and communication about food hold meaning particularly applicable to gender. Especially for mothers, whose most fundamental relationship with their children is that of providing physical sustenance, self-identity is intrinsically linked with their ability to fulfil that role. The preparation of food and its distribution within the household is historically an activity over which women have had an important measure of control: “women’s ability to prepare and serve food gives them direct influence

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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over others, both material and magical.”3 When that domain is threatened by food shortage or by the complete displacement of the household, women are accordingly disempowered by the loss of that domain. Women have been the primary conveyors of ethnic culinary traditions, passing their knowledge through generations of daughters. As immigrants, women assume the responsibility of maintaining food customs often in a social environment that is inhospitable to such ethnic persistence, as Iacovetta and Korinek also demonstrate in this volume. In the kitchen, they are “strangers” more than “sisters” to some other Canadian women. Indeed, women’s roles in immigrant communities have often been evaluated in terms of their contribution to “ethnic cohesion.” At the same time, however, the kitchen is quite often the setting in which particular traditions are transformed through the introduction of “outside” cultures to the act of food preparation …The relationship between food and culture is singularly important for immigrant women for whom preparing, serving, and eating meals is often the site at which the old and new worlds meet. … This chapter will focus on Mennonite women refugees whose experience of eating ranges from famine to feast through the process of uprooting and immigration to Canada after the Second World War. Examining issues of food, gender, and ethnicity is particularly interesting in the context of the refugee sojourn in which individuals frequently experience dramatically shifting environments of famine and feast, and in which long-held food identities are challenged and modified to meet the exigencies of particular situations. Mennonites under Stalin The Mennonites are an ethno-religious group with origins in the sixteenth century Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands who established autonomous settlements near the banks of the Dnieper River in Ukraine beginning in the late eighteenth century. Many of their cultural forms have their origins in a Dutch ancestry, yet Mennonites in Russia were identified as ethnic German colonists within the Russian Empire. A small minority in a large empire, Mennonites nevertheless carved out a thriving economic and cultural niche for themselves in imperial Russia. A “golden age” of prosperity and a flourishing Russian Mennonite culture began its disintegration with the Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War. Mennonite communities

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were targeted with varying degrees of repressive measures because of their material wealth, their German culture, their Christian religious beliefs, and their resistance to communism. During the 1920s, civil war, famine, the emigration of twenty-five thousand Mennonites to North and South America, followed by collectivization (transfer of private property to collective ownership) and de-kulakization (the arrest and exile of property owners and perceived subversives) had depleted the male leadership strength and deeply challenged the self-identity of the Mennonites. The decade of the 1930s, which witnessed famine in Ukraine, along with several waves of arrests, deportations, and executions, broke the spirit of Mennonite communities further. Families were wrenched apart, as fathers, brothers, and sons, in particular, disappeared in the purges of Stalin, which climaxed in 1937–38. By the time the German army occupied Ukraine during the Second World War (1941–43), the demography of Mennonite villages was decidedly that of women, children, and the elderly … When the German forces retreated westward from Ukraine in the fall of 1943, they took with them approximately 300,000 German colonists, of which about 35,000 were Mennonite. Of the roughly 23,000 Mennonites who made it to Western Europe and escaped repatriation to the Soviet Union, 8,000 immigrated to Canada in the great postwar migration.4 The latter migrant group was numerically imbalanced in terms of gender – a female/male ratio of slightly greater than two-to-one existed among adult immigrants in 1948 – and consisted of fragmented families, many of whom were female-headed … And although their post-migration lives gradually settled into socio-economic stability and prosperity, the self-identity of Mennonite refugee women and the manner in which they negotiated their lives in  a new country continued to be shaped by their premigration life experiences … Deprivation: The Famine While culinary memories from Russia were of a simple but hearty diet, rich in fat, those who lived through famines in the early 1920s and 1930s and wartime shortages in Europe also knew severe deprivation firsthand. The contradictions between a cultural heritage that included a rich mixture of food traditions from the Netherlands, Prussia, and Ukraine and the lived experience of near-starvation became part of the historical self-identity of Mennonite immigrants to Canada. Just

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as the years of prosperity and self-sufficiency are often described with reference to bountiful tables, community feasts, and the daily tasks of growing, harvesting, and preserving foodstuffs, the years of hardship similarly are conveyed in a narrative that centres on the existential details of physical sustenance. The deep emotional pain of watching family members die of starvation and for women especially, the inability to feed one’s children, remain a subtext beneath the concrete descriptions of scarcity. The famine in Ukraine in the early 1920s followed an already tumultuous period after the First World War when Mennonite property owners were plundered by anarchist terrorists and almost every family experienced rapes and murders. Civil war brought further turmoil and in its wake, left typhus and other diseases that claimed hundreds of lives. In an Anne Frank–like memoir, Anna Baerg wrote her diary on the backs of evaporated milk can labels included in relief packages sent to Russia by American Mennonites. In March 1922 Baerg, age twentyfive, wrote, “I have heard that some people have even eaten their own children,” then went on to describe her own family’s somewhat less desperate situation: Although we haven’t actually starved, we are hardly ever full. Today at lunch, for example, there was buttermilk and water, thickly cooked wheat with a sauce made from milk, oil, and onions, and a small piece of bread. Bread, by the way, isn’t made according to the old recipe anymore – half of it consists of clay. And last time we added old, brewed Prips grounds [roasted wheat used as a coffee substitute] to the dough. Not long ago we would have pushed the concoction away in disdain. Now we don’t even ask how it tastes just as long as it’s edible.5

As famine intensified in 1921, people ate such things as “dried pumpkins or beets, chaff, dried weeds, ground-up corncobs, the remains of processed linseed, dogs, cats, gophers, and such carcasses as were available.”6 It was the hardships of these years that prompted a mass exodus from Russia and saw some twenty-five thousand Mennonites migrate to Canada and South America. Those who were unable or unwilling to leave in the 1920s faced more food hardship a decade later. In 1932–33 several million peasants, mostly Ukrainian, starved to death in a famine generally acknowledged as man-made when Stalin’s government seized with force the 1932 crop and produce.7 … Recollections of this time include stories of eating

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acacia flowers, tree bark, sawdust, cornstalks, thistles, and sweeping out granaries and silos to salvage whatever kernels of corn or grain might be left behind. Desperation even drove some people to pick kernels of grain from dried cow’s manure and “to eat the fetid carcasses of dogs, cats, and mice.”8 Severe malnutrition was accompanied by diseases such as typhus, smallpox, pneumonia, diptheria, and malaria, all of which contributed to a high death rate and decreasing birth rate … During this time the lack of food and creative ways of devising edible foodstuffs preoccupied the thoughts and activities of women and their families. Mariechen Peters relates the food hardships in a 1931 letter to her sister in Canada: “Very few remain … who have bread. They live on gruel, and there isn’t enough of that. They don’t have many potatoes. Sister Sara only had ½ pud [pound] corn flour left for the children. She and Peter were eating gruel.”9 Similarly, Maria Bargen wrote to her children in Canada in 1932: “It seems so hard to live through the experiences here. We have had no bread at all for 2 months. We have had no flour in the house and very little hope for any in the future. There are only 5 months until the harvest, and then perhaps we can get some potatoes.”10 … During periods of deprivation, the Mennonite diet also evolved to include foods that, under normal conditions, would not have been part of their culinary traditions. One individual wrote that beets normally used to feed livestock were consumed as a delicacy.11 Mushrooms were a common part of the Russian peasant diet, mainly as a substitute for meat and dairy on those days where religious observance prohibited such foods. Mennonites generally did not adopt this affinity, perhaps because they didn’t have a similar practice of religious fasting, or because their preference for a hearty meat-and-potatoes diet made mushrooms seem insubstantial. But under conditions of exile in Siberia and also during the refugee flight, Mennonites too, it appears, gathered mushrooms for survival.12 For instance, Tina Dyck Wiebe recalled that living in an orphanage in Siberia, dinner would always consist of a bowl of soup made from mushrooms and that she and her sister would gather mushrooms to eat because they were so hungry.13 Bread, a mainstay of the Russian Mennonite diet, became particularly scarce, and women devised ways of baking even a semblance of the fluffy white or heavy rye bread that was symbolic of better times. Sorghum, a grain hitherto disdained, was added liberally because its sticky consistency allowed a small amount of wheat flour to go a long

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way. The amount of bread available to each person also corresponded to increasing scarcity. Susan Toews, in a letter to her family in Canada in 1931, observed that as conditions worsened, the morsel of bread became smaller: “The piece of bread does not become larger, but quite the opposite. If there is no more [bread], and many don’t have any, what will happen?”14 … The severe deprivation of the early 1930s lessened later in the decade and further during the German military occupation of Ukraine during the Second World War. However, a new form of food hardship, that of the refugee sojourn and general wartime scarcity, made food once again central in the narratives of Soviet Mennonites. The so-called great trek of Mennonites from the Soviet Union, led by retreating German forces, began in September 1943. As the Soviet army advanced from the east, Mennonite villagers had barely a day or two warning to vacate their homes. Not surprisingly, preparations centred on food. Animals were butchered and the meat packed in lard for preservation. Fruit was dried and bagged. And most importantly, zwieback (two-layered white buns) were roasted and dried in abundance. Most families had begun the trek with an ample supply of food but as weeks lengthened into months of travel, supplies ran out and the refugees had to scavenge for meals. Mary Krueger, age ten at the time, remembered when her family’s food supply was completely gone. One evening her mother gave each of the three children a spoonful of syrup with a little sugar on top, their last meal.15 Children were sent ahead into villages to beg door-to-door or into farmers’ fields to search for grain or root vegetables left after the harvest. Cows, brought along for their precious milk supply, were butchered. Only sometimes along the trek did the refugees stop long enough to cook a meal, which might consist of some cooked potatoes, or a pot of soup, hastily prepared when a hole was dug in the ground, a fire lit, and some stones put in. More often than not, the daily fare consisted of just bread and water. … Over ten thousand Mennonite refugees made it to the West where, once Allied relief supplies began to flow at war’s end, they saw a beginning to the end of a long period – for some a lifetime – of inadequate nourishment. Many others, caught in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany and Poland, existed in a state of near starvation; rations being far below what was needed for subsistence, two women in the Soviet zone swept out the floor of a granary into a bag and brought it home,

Women gather each morning to prepare vegetables and peel potatoes for noonday camp meal, ca. 1947, Gronau, Germany.

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washed the grain, dried it, ground it, and made a kind of porridge soup from it.16 During the periods of “famine” described above, access to food became foremost as an activity and as a value in the lives of women and their families. Agatha Schmidt, a young refugee widow who fled the Soviet Union with her mother and two sisters, said, “When you are hungry you forever think about food, it is like an obsession.”17 … Food became an obsession and procuring it by whatever means was paramount. Descriptions of food and eating during conditions of shortage also serve to illustrate the breakdown of regular social relations and behaviour within the Mennonite community. The lack of regular meals particularly on the trek and flight reinforced the sense of normalcy breaking down, of life turning to chaos. The regularity of eating is a fundamental rite that maintains the structure of daily life even when there is disruption in other aspects of a routine. During times of famine, the entire day could become a preoccupation with scrounging for and preparing something edible for one’s family, while on the refugee flight there was sometimes little opportunity to eat at all … Another important impact that food shortage had on social relations was to challenge ideas about family. Anne Murcott has written that the idea of the “proper” meal has much to do with the idea of “proper” family life.18 So that the lack of adequate food and thus “good” meals as part of daily routine during the 1930s and throughout the war years coincided with the breakdown of family life, and may in fact have reinforced the idea that social/moral life was disintegrating among Soviet Mennonites. The breakdown of eating routines and the shortage of food also had the effect of broadening the idea of family. With the losses of numerous individuals – mainly male – from Mennonite villages throughout the 1930s, the structure of families altered to meet the exigencies of the situation. Women, children, and the elderly were all that remained in most families and, as a result, living units composed of individuals with extended family or village relationships became common. Especially during the refugee flight, individuals rallied together to share limited resources – food, shelter, transportation – as well as the emotional support needed to confront fearful situations … For Mennonites, the sharing of meagre food portions solidified the bonds of village, family, and “grab bag” households in a way that never happened when individual households and families had plenty of their own …

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Food as Sign and Symbol Food deprivation had particular social effects, but in the context of immigrant narratives and memoirs, it had semiotic significance as well. When scarcity was particularly acute, certain foods became symbolic of survival and indeed life itself. Two of these, potatoes and zwieback, were mainstays of the Mennonite diet and became even more so when other foods were unavailable. Potatoes, along with other root vegetables, became an important part of the Mennonite diet in West Prussia in the 1800s and were grown in great abundance in southern Russia. … Potatoes became symbolic of both survival and starvation. As a means to survival, potatoes were often the last remaining food in a diet of deprivation: the lowest common denominator, if you will. As Anne Penner Klassen recalled in the spring of 1940, “It was becoming more and more difficult to get bread. After I had been standing in the bread lines for several days without getting any, I bought 110 pounds of potatoes for 54 rubles.”19 Potatoes, it appears, were the last resort as the centrepiece of a meal, bread being much more preferable. She goes on to describe the struggle to meet nutritional needs: “… We supplemented our diet with sorrel which we picked in the wild, and occasionally we could buy skim milk or some very thin soup. Many people were suffering from hunger, and we didn’t always know what we would eat for our next meal.”20 Mennonites exiled to Siberia similarly recall that the only thing that allowed for physical survival was when the truck or train would occasionally stop by a potato field long enough for refugees to dig a few of the vegetables, build a fire, and cook them.21 And when the war ended, one refugee woman in Germany recalled that potatoes again became the centre of her family’s diet, when, given the scarcity of bread, local farmers gave them sacks full in exchange for help with the harvest.22 … If the potato became a symbol of survival against starvation, then roasted zwieback was first of all a sign of migration and preparedness against hunger. Zwieback (literally two-buns, a smaller one stacked atop a larger one) was not unique to Mennonite fare, but was a central feature on their tables already in the Netherlands and Prussia. It also became the main staple of the immigrant and refugee family’s diet while en route. In preparation for departure, first in the nineteenth century, and then in the 1920s and 1940s, Mennonite women baked thousands of zwieback and roasted them for the journey. When roasted properly,

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thoroughly dried out, and cooled, they can last for up to several months without turning rancid. Such is the typical description of one man who recalled his family’s journey to Canada in 1923: “Mother roasted buns in the oven in order to dry them out so they would not go mouldy on the trip. When they were roasted, they kept for months. Many a little youngster was raised as a baby with a portion of dry bun soaked in coffee, sprinkled with sugar, wrapped in cloth as a soother.”23 Zwieback are prominent in stories in which predominant emotions are loss and sadness: leaving homes, saying good-bye to loved ones sent into exile, and preparing packages for those in prison. But zwieback was also about looking to the future. The roasting and packing in sacks of zwieback became a ritual of hope and movement forward.24 Or as Norma Jost Voth remarks, “Baskets filled with toasted buns have been a blessing on long treks and journeys, partially sustaining the wanderers in their search for new homes.”25 The life-giving potential of this modest breadstuff is epitomized in Tina Dyck Wiebe’s description of her mother’s death in exile in Siberia. The family was severely malnourished and suffering from scurvy when a package of food arrived from relatives: At last the sleigh came with a package. How much joy! But Mother was hardly able to smile as Father opened it. He soaked a roasted Zwieback, and tried to feed her. But she only looked at it with big eyes as she sank down in her pillow. She whispered with her lips: “I don’t need it anymore.” It was barely audible. “No, No! You cannot die!” Father cried out in despair. “Don’t leave me alone with the children!” But Mother never opened her eyes again.26

… The hope that a taste of zwieback would revive Tina’s mother is echoed in numerous references to bread that are about more than just giving bread, but about giving life. Abundance: The Feast For those Mennonite refugees who made it to the Western zones of the postwar occupation, and for those who later immigrated to Canada, the previous two decades of deprivation were replaced by a time of abundance: the feast. In personal narratives, a border crossing to the West, the arrival at a refugee camp, or the trip to Canada are frequently

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marked with reference to the foods encountered, most of which offered a stark contrast to the immediate past. In her memoir of the flight from the Soviet Union, Susanna Toews makes frequent references to the food they received and ate at various points of the journey. When they finally crossed the border into Holland, she says, “We were served such food as we hadn’t seen for a long time – milk, cheese, sausage, white bread and butter.”27 White bread, a symbol of prestige and plenty,28 marked a departure from hardship, when any morsel of dark, rough bread was devoured eagerly. The preparation of some traditional Russian Mennonite foods in Mennonite agency–run refugee camps was a welcome treat after the deprivation of the trek and earlier; it also provided a symbol of ethnic identity for people who were in doubt about their national and religious affiliations. Justine Thiessen Warkentin recalled her arrival at the Mennonite Central Committee refugee camp in Berlin: “There on the table was a green bean soup and a plate full of bread. We could eat as much as we wanted. We could not imagine that something like this existed.”29 At Christmas at the Berlin camp, peppernuts – a small spice cookie – were baked during the night, much to the delight of Mennonite children awakening the next morning.30 Elizabeth Klassen, recalling time spent at a Mennonite Central Committee refugee centre in the Netherlands, remembered that “on festive occasions our cooks arranged for the use of the baker’s ovens [in a nearby village]. They would come back with piles and piles of Zwieback to everyone’s delight.”31 If potatoes were symbolic during times of shortage, of scarcity and survival, then after the war they were eaten in abundance. In a Western zone of occupied Germany, Agnes Dyck and her family lived on an estate. Earlier residents had planted potatoes and when the Dycks arrived they were given forty sacks of potatoes. They had enough to feed the rabbits, pigs, and themselves: “From potatoes you can make lots of things. We had some milk every day. We cooked some milk soup with grated potatoes in there which tasted great. We had cooked potatoes, and fried potatoes and soup and what not all.”32 In her mind, potatoes were abundance, even though they were so exactly because, in the immediate aftermath of war, many other food items were expensive or unavailable … As zwieback and potatoes could be signs of scarcity, sugar was symbolic of prosperity and abundance. Sugar, which was dear and often scarce, offered caloric energy but its sweetness was also a metaphor for better times. Susan Toews wrote the following to her brother in Canada

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in the fall of 1929: “One is happy for a dreamless night, for life has become very bitter. Some time ago we got some syrup from the store in order to sweeten our lives a little. We can only imagine sugar. Enough of all this bitterness …33 The possibility of consuming sugar, physically and also metaphorically, was realized for many refugees upon immigrating to Canada. Indeed, the sweetness of oranges eaten on the overseas journey is highlighted in many narratives, though rough seas often meant that food could hardly be kept down at all. Edna Schroeder Thiessen described the Jell-O and fruit desserts she received on her transatlantic journey in 1949, saying, “It was like being at a wedding every day!”34 And Agnes Pauls recalled that when her sickly young son was asked by a medical officer in a refugee camp, “And what do you want in Canada?” the boy replied, “I want to eat myself full of chocolate.”35 If refugee camps in Europe offered a rescue from starvation, then Canada, at least ideas about it, represented the epitome of abundance … As well, white bread spread thickly with butter, tall glasses of milk, and sausage are often mentioned as precious memories of arrival in Canada. One sixteenyear-old girl was enthralled with the plentiful food available during the train trip from Halifax to Alberta. “We had never tasted such white soft bread or drank such cold rich milk before,” she said.36 The consumption of foods traditional to their diets, but that hadn’t been available for a long time, provided new immigrants a comforting connection with a past culture and offered an important sense of belonging to the newcomers. The absorption of postwar refugees into Canadian Mennonite communities, even while beset with clashes based on disparate experience, also presented the opportunity of reproducing, in a new national setting, the “golden year” of Russian Mennonite culinary culture. Young women, however, who had grown up during the years of deprivation, felt inadequate when their abilities to “cook Mennonite” were found wanting.37 At the same time, unfamiliar foods were a reminder to newcomers of their immigrant identity and were symbolic of the strangeness of Canada, alongside its abundance. When Anny Penner Klassen and her family arrived in Winnipeg in 1948, they were met by groups of Mennonites who gave them bags of fruit that included oranges and bananas: “We were not familiar with bananas and oranges, so we did not take a fancy to them immediately. However, we soon learned to enjoy and appreciate these fruits.”38 Particularly for children and teenagers, new and unfamiliar foods offered a sense of wonderment. Mary Krueger says, “I remember seeing ice cream in a store and wanting it but I didn’t know what it was called.”39

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… As most Mennonite refugees settled into postwar lives of economic stability and prosperity, memories of their pre-migration years of hardship and scarcity persisted but provoked varying responses. One response is a fixation on good eating and lots of it. Paul Fieldhouse notes that excessive food consumption is sometimes a response to insecurity over food supply based on experience of scarcity: “Parents who have lived through hard times, when food was scarce or rationed, are determined that their offspring will not be similarly deprived, and so overfeed and force food on them.”40 Evidence for this comes particularly from the post–Second World War Mennonite refugee family into which I married some fifteen years ago. I was struck immediately and continually since my first introduction to their dinner table, by the excessive nature of some of their meals – custard-based tortes for breakfast, for instance – and by the perpetual talk about meals both past and future, which seemed to eclipse all other topics … Another, sometimes coexistent, response to abundance was an attitude that viewed food as never to be taken for granted, since hunger might be just around the corner once again. Fifty years after migrating to Canada, Agnes Pauls says she still marvels at “the rows of rich fruit, the abundance of food, and my ability to buy as much as I want” at the grocery store.41 … Food and Religiosity Aside from functioning materially and figuratively as a focal point during feast and famine, food served to both heighten faith among the Mennonites and also acted as a substitute for customary religious observances … Following the Communist Revolution, religious institutions and practice were increasingly restrained and repressed … When families could no longer worship together, sharing a mealtime prayer and breaking bread may have served symbolically to affirm their belief that their lives were in the hands of a protecting higher power. That they continued to have a minimum to eat helped to confirm the existence of God as “bread of life” even in the midst of the worst despair. Preferences for particular foods or forms of preparation also acted as a badge of ethnic identity that offered a sense of group belonging, in the absence of historic religious rituals. Where food figures most prominently in a religious sense is in stories of providential rescue when all sources of hope seem lost. Such anecdotes occur especially in narratives of the Ukrainian famine and during

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the refugee flight out of the Soviet Union. For instance, Agatha Schmidt remembers an incident from the time of severe famine in 1932–33: That our family ever lived through this time is truly a miracle. One time I remember mother baked a “korshik” [flatbread] which she divided into four equal parts. After we had each eaten our portion she said: “Children, that was the last flour. We have no food left for tomorrow.” Then she took us into the living room where we all knelt down while she prayed with us. That evening a knock came at the door. Then the figure of a woman thoroughly shrouded to conceal her identity, came in, set a freshly-baked loaf on the table and disappeared into the darkness once more. We had no opportunity even to thank her, and to this day we have never discovered the identity of our benefactor who took risks to help us.42

In a similar account, Peter Epp describes the experience of his wife, who, alone with five children and expecting the sixth, fled Poland ahead of the Soviets in the winter of 1945. In her haste to leave, she had left behind her bag of provisions and had only one loaf of bread with her. He continues, “But God was always there! When her hope had all but vanished, my wife found a kettle with warm boiled potatoes on an abandoned farm.”43 … Images of food also offer a means for individuals to focus their memories of loss. All of the postwar Mennonite refugees had stories of family members – usually husbands and fathers – who had been arrested and disappeared. Most families received no confirmations of death in these cases but were left with only particular anecdotes as symbols to reify loved ones who were dead and yet not dead. Anny Penner Klassen Goerzen related the following story that was forever linked to the departure of her husband. On the day her husband Johann was taken in 1938 she had cooked his favourite Wareneki (a Mennonite version of perogies) with cottage cheese inside; later the two had visited the garden and seen the first cucumber that was growing but she had told him to let it grow longer before picking it. That night the GPU (Soviet secret police) arrived and arrested her husband: “That day I couldn’t eat the leftover Wareneki. I could not get myself to eat that first cucumber either, for it drove me to tears. After that, whenever I made Wareneki, I always thought of that last evening. And every year when the first cucumber was ready for picking I was reminded of that evening, and I couldn’t hold back my tears.”44 In this case, food items – the Wareneki

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and the cucumber – gave Anny concrete memories of her husband, whom she had married only three years before his arrest and about whom her recollections may well have been rather dim. … Procuring food in times of deprivation also became a moral and ethical question for Mennonites, whose religious framework included an entrenched sense of right and wrong, and strong feelings of guilt over actions perceived as sinful. Many families recounted stories of stealing produce from farmers’ fields during the refugee trek, actions that were taken for sheer survival but that nevertheless prompted reflection over behaviour otherwise considered sinful or immoral. One woman who spent her childhood years as a refugee recalled taking potatoes and carrots from farmers’ fields: “We talked about stealing one time too. Over there we sometimes took things that didn’t belong to us because we were hungry. We were starving. We decided that’s something that God will forgive.”45 … The linkage between food and ethical questions may have been heightened for those who had experienced the extreme suspicion levelled against workers on the Soviet collective farms during the early 1930s. During this era, women and men could often be accused of withholding foodstuffs (they had very little to eat themselves) and be arrested and their children orphaned. The dilemmas presented were exacerbated when officials offered to overlook the “stolen goods” in a woman’s possession in exchange for sexual favours.46 The exchange of food for sex became more common for Mennonite women refugees living in the Soviet zone of occupation after war ended. One woman who was assigned to do housework for Soviet officers, said she initially submitted to the sexual propositions of one officer in order to gain protection from molestation by others: “It was better … if you had a friend, then the others would leave you alone.” As food became increasingly scarce, however, her motivation for submitting to his sexual demands became the desperate need to feed her three young children. In later years she categorized her actions as sinful – especially when confronted by a Canadian Mennonite minister – yet felt justified in her choices because of her maternal responsibility.47 Food and Motherhood The need to provide nourishment for their children in a context when resources were at their most scarce drew mothers, perhaps more than anyone else, into grey ethical areas. One man illustrated this by telling

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the story of his mother’s deceit towards Communist officials who came to search their house for flour or grain in 1933. His father stated that they had nothing but a small container of sorghum and since he had a reputation for being truthful, the officials believed him. When the family managed to survive the winter, the mother quizzed the father as to why he had never asked how she could cook sorghum the way she did. She then admitted that she had hidden 30 kilograms of flour and each day she had mixed in a little with the sorghum to make it stick together. To explain her deception to the authorities while her husband told the truth, she said, “I had to save my children … my truth is my children.”48 In another case, a widowed mother of three hid a small piece of meat in a bucket of dirty floor-washing water and smuggled it out of the home where she did housework after the war.49 In such cases, the moral imperative to keep children alive surpassed a dogmatic separation between truthfulness and dishonesty. … The inability to counter hunger in their households had a direct impact on the self-identity of mothers and others, sometimes elder sisters or grandmothers, who became effective heads of their families. Peter P. Janzen relates the following incident from his childhood of hardship in the Soviet Union: “I remember very well one occasion when we hadn’t had bread for a number of weeks. Mother traded something for one slice of bread. She divided the slice into two pieces, one for my sister and one for me. ‘Mother, my sister’s piece is a little bigger than mine,’ I  complained. Mother cried out, ‘Children, I wish I could give you enough to eat!’ I was so embarrassed. She had no bread for herself and had little else than potatoes and salt in the house.”50 When women could no longer provide adequate nourishment, their primary role as caregiver was undermined and an important sense of gender identity called into question. Conclusion … Mennonite refugee women arriving in Canada after the Second World War came with a history of food deprivation that would shape their attitudes towards food and eating even after they had feasted for decades in the land of plenty. If eating is used as a metaphor to define their pre- and post-migration lives, their life experience could easily be divided into images of famine and feast. Deprivation symbolically

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encompassed all the hardship, loss, and trauma that Mennonite women and their families had experienced throughout the 1930s and during the war, while abundance signified arrival, settlement, and acculturation. Because the preparation and distribution of food is traditionally such a gendered function, the activity of cooking and eating during times of both feast and famine present challenges and opportunities of especial significance to women. Furthermore, the extremes of food availability also reinforced, modified, or completely contested commonly held notions about ethnicity. At a concrete level then, food – or the lack thereof – is a central motif in the immigrant accounts of Mennonite refugee women. But at another level, images and recollections of food and eating also serve to organize memories and create narrative devices that offer individuals a familiar way in which to describe the unfamiliar and insecure terrain of uprooting and settlement.

NOTES 1 John A. Hostetler, Mennonite Life (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1954), 15–16. See also my column on Hostetler’s booklets: “Research Findings from Mennonite History: Shrinking Waistlines and Changing Perceptions,” Mennonite Reporter 18 (6 June 1988): 7. 2 Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 6. See also Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3 Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, “Introduction,” in Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 4 For an analysis of this migrant group of Mennonites, see my book, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 5 1 March 1922. Diary of Anna Baerg, 1916–1924, translated and edited by Gerald Peters (Winnipeg: CMBC, 1985), 89. Prips is a coffee substitute made from roasted grain. 6 John B. Toews, Czars, Soviets and Mennonites (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1982), 112. 7 See James E. Mace, “Soviet Man-Made Famine in Ukraine,” in Samuel Totten et al., eds., Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland, 1997): 78–90. He suggests that 5 to 7 million people in Ukraine were victims of the famine.

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8 For a brief description of some of the foods eaten, see for instance, Colin P. Neufeldt, “Through the Fires of Hell: The Dekulakization and Collectivization of the Soviet Mennonite Community, 1928–1933,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 16 (1998): 28–9. 9 Mariechen Peters, “Dearly Beloved,” in Sarah Dyck, translator and editor, The Silence Echoes: Memoirs of Trauma and Tears (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 1997), 59. 10 Maria Martens Bargen to her children, 2 February 1932. In Peter F. Bargen, ed. and Anne Bargen, translator, From Russia with Tears: Letters from Home and Exile, 1930–1938 (Calgary: By the authors, 1991), 352. 11 Neufeldt, “Through the Fires of Hell,” 28. 12 Norma Yost Voth, Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia, vol. 1 (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 1990), 29. 13 Tina Dyck Wiebe, “Memories Written by My Life,” in The Silence Echoes, 83–4. 14 John B. Toews, editor and translator, Letters from Susan: A Woman’s View of the Russian Mennonite Experience (1928–1941) (Newton, KS: Bethel College, 1988), 96. 15 Mary Krueger, “An Unforgettable Childhood Experience,” EMMC Recorder 26, 2 (February 1989): 7. 16 Interview no. 28. During the years 1992 to 1994 I conducted recorded interviews with Mennonites who immigrated to Canada and Paraguay after the Second World War. To respect the requested anonymity of individuals who shared their stories with me, I use first name pseudonyms and refer to interviews by number. 17 Agatha Loewen Schmidt, Gnadenfeld, Molotschna, 1835–1943 (Kitchener, ON: By the author, 1989), 81. 18 Anne Murcott, The Sociology of Food and Eating: Essays on the Sociological Significance of Food (Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1984), 102. 19 Anny Penner Klassen Goerzen, Anny: Sheltered in the Arms of God – A True Story of Survival in Russia (Fort St James, BC: By the author, 1988), 187. 20 Ibid., 188. 21 Schmidt, Gnadenfeld, 72. 22 Goerzen, Anny, 209. 23 Myrtle V. Ebert, Wir Sind Frei! We Are Free! A Mennonite Experience: From the Ukraine to Canada (Scarborough, ON: Lochleven, 1995), 29. 24 Paul Fieldhouse, Food and Nutrition: Customs and Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1995), 100. 25 Voth, Mennonite Foods and Folkways, 55.

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26 Tina Wiebe, nee Dyck, “Memories Written by My Life,” in The Silence Echoes, 82–3. 27 Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 40. 28 Farb and Armelagos, Consuming Passions, 110. 29 Harry Loewen, ed., Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2000), 147. 30 Voth, Mennonite Foods and Folkways, 33. 31 Elizabeth Klassen, “My Experiences and My Flight from Russia” (unpublished manuscript, 1946), iii. 32 Interview no. 13. 33 Toews, Letters from Susan, 62–3. 34 Edna Schroeder Thiessen and Angela Showalter, A Life Displaced: A Mennonite Woman’s Flight from War-Torn Poland (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2000), 153. 35 Loewen, Road to Freedom, 72. 36 Debbie Kirkpatrick, “The Story of Mrs Suse Rempel and Her Family,” research paper, Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, 1979, 44. 37 See Pamela E. Klassen, Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 91. 38 Goerzen, Anny, 217. 39 Mary Krueger, “An Unforgettable Childhood Experience, Part II,” EMMC Recorder, 4. 40 Fieldhouse, Food and Nutrition, 22, 192. 41 Loewen, Road to Freedom, 74. 42 Schmidt, Gnadenfeld, 47. 43 Peter Epp, “Memories of Difficult Years,” Der Bote no. 38 (13 October 1993): 24–5. 44 Goerzen, Anny, 153. 45 Interview no. 28. 46 See, for instance, the story: “Vanya, the Terrible,” in The Silence Echoes, 101–2. 47 Interview no. 28. 48 Interview no. 20. 49 Interview no. 28. 50 Peter P. Janzen, “A Mother’s Example,” Mennonite Reporter, 19 April 1993, B4.

Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The Gender Politics of Food F ra nc a I ac ove t ta an d Val e rie J . K o r i n e k

Introduction More than recipes, cooking, nutrition, and eating, food and its related practices have long been a matter of conflict and contest. Food campaigns have been the site of clashes and accommodations between health professionals and beleaguered mothers told to forsake folk routines to “scientific” regimes, for instance, while food tastes, though often considered a matter of personal choice, are influenced by government, education, multinational food corporations, and mass media. Food traditions evolve in cultural contexts shaped by economic conditions and class politics, racial-ethnic relations, and other factors. Food can also act as a signifier of difference. Historically, “ethnic” foods have been relegated to the margins of receiving societies, dismissed as unhealthy or inappropriate, or pilloried by food experts in search of new ideas. Bastardized versions of “foreign” recipes, with most of the chili peppers or other pungent spices removed, is one aspect of the homogenizing process that comes from adapting ethnic cuisine to mainstream culture. Yet, immigrants have also transformed (albeit unevenly) the cuisine of mainstream cultures even as their own food habits were modified. And though hardly a new phenomenon, the current allure of “multicultural” dining has brought some immigrant food cultures into the forefront, where, ironically, they have become middle- and upper-middle-class demarcators of status and taste.1

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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We grapple with the politics of food through the prism of early post1945 Canada, a period marked by a mix of social optimism and Cold War hysteria; economic expansion and persistent poverty; heightened domesticity and social and sexual non-conformity; and mass immigration (by 1965, two and one-half million newcomers had entered Canada).2 We explore how the dominant gender ideologies of capitalist democracies in the Cold War – including a middle-class model of homemaking and North American–defined standards of food customs and family life – influenced immigrant reception work … and how Canadian and New Canadian women responded to the various campaigns meant to teach them the benefits of modern homemaking. Notwithstanding the postwar rhetoric of liberal pluralism, these campaigns could isolate Europe’s many newcomer women for special attention or blame in ways that suggest some continuities with earlier assimilationist campaigns to Canadianize foreigners and also parallel in certain ways the “tense and tender relations” that characterized the “intimate” or “human” side of the imperial-colonial encounter. But as the complex dynamics and dialectical relations involved cannot be adequately captured by the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized, we adopt a “contact” perspective that treats the two subjects (experts and newcomer mothers) not in terms of their separateness but “in terms of interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.”3 We also aim to bridge the continuing gap between “Canadian” women’s history and the history of immigrant, refugee, and racialized women in Canada. Canadian “Affluence” in a World of Hunger Canadian newspapers and magazines well captured the havoc that war had wreaked on millions of people, and as Cold War tensions gripped the globe, stories of half-starved Eastern Europeans refusing repatriation to Soviet-controlled homelands or fleeing Iron Curtain countries for Canadian plenty, freedom, and democracy also served ideological ends … So did postwar articulations of domesticity, which invariably focused on women’s primary role as homemaker … and promoted a bourgeois feminine version of Canadian affluence and modernity that effectively declared that, by birth or adoption, women in Canada could enjoy the resources required to meet domestic duties. Unlike the impoverished Communist mother, masculinized by work-gang labour

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and unable to feed her family properly, the North American homemaker, claimed the Cold Warriors, enjoyed the rewards of capitalism.4 Promotional films made by the National Film Board in conjunction with the federal Citizenship Branch featured enticing images of the modern conveniences and choices that helped define Canadian ways. The film Canadian Notebook praised the one-stop shopping grocery store. A sequence featuring a white, slim, and attractive Mrs Sparks, who “finds cellophane-wrapped meats … on refrigerated shelves,” as well as magazines and even cigarettes, emphasized cleanliness, convenience, abundance, and efficiency.5 While the Cold War alone cannot explain its renewed popularity as postwar ideology, the homemaker ideal, in that it symbolized the stability and superiority of Western democratic families, took on great political import. Reflecting a conservative nostalgia for a bourgeois ideal that never entirely reflected most people’s lives, it was central to contemporary debates over women’s roles engendered by the growing presence of working mothers, daycare lobbies, increasing divorce rates, and other signs of women’s changing status in post-1945 society. That many war-weary immigrants and refugees quickly married or remarried and started families does not negate the argument that dominant definitions of family and gender, well encapsulated by the phrase breadwinner husband and homemaker wife, privileged middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, and North American ideals.6 The large presence of immigrant wives and mothers in paid labour did not stop reception workers from encouraging eventual domesticity; they considered the most effective way to encourage newcomer adaptation was to ensure that the “key” person, the housewife and mother, was sufficiently exposed to Canadian ways.7 For Canada, the immigrant influx of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was unprecedented. Most of these newcomers, many of whom were part of young families, were white Britons, Europeans (led by Italians and Germans), and white Americans, all of whom came in the hundreds of thousands. They settled across Canada, but Ontario attracted a majority of them, with Toronto the single most popular destination. But they were not a homogeneous group. For example, among the Eastern European Displaced Persons and Jewish survivors were professional or university educated middle-class women who became homemakers in Canada or found lower-skilled industrial and service-sector jobs that also drew humble women from rural, fishing, and workingclass backgrounds. There were British and European “war brides” who

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had already begun families in wartime; refugee women who had lost kin to war but had formed “grab bag” families with others in similar circumstances; Jews who had survived Nazi death camps; Eastern and Central European women (Protestant and Catholic) forced to work in Germancontrolled factories or homes following their country’s fall to Hitler; wartime rape victims who, as with Mennonite refugee women, claimed the “illegitimate” children born from the violence as blood children and grandchildren; and Hungarian “56ers.” These women would be joined by a continuing mix of peoples, including West Indians and South Asians, though before 1970, white newcomers, considered far better suited for Canadian citizenship, garnered the lion’s share of attention. The newcomers faced a barrage of pressures and programs intended to guide and reform them. Teachers, social workers, nurses, and other helping professionals who met immigrants in local settlement houses, social agencies, and community organizations hoped to attract them to their existing programs (mothers’ groups, nursery schools, and teenage social clubs) and to New Canadian classes that, as a Toronto YWCA report put it, “teach newcomers about shopping, meal planning, health and welfare resources, transportation, social customs, parent-school communication, and about their relationships with children who are better adapted.”8 Located in a heavily immigrant working-class westend neighbourhood, Toronto’s Central Neighbourhood House promoted “good citizenship” among “bewildered strangers” through English, sewing, and “household management” classes for mothers and sports and recreation clubs for youths and adults.9 These expanding social services, though a continuation of pre-war activity, also reflected Canada’s rapidly growing postwar welfare state. In addition, social service personnel adopted a language of cultural tolerance, or pluralism, preferring “integration” to assimilation, though Canadianization remained popular. Nor did talk of respecting “ethnic” traditions preclude the cultural chauvinism of the mostly middle-class gatekeepers who wanted all newcomers to learn the lessons of Canadian democracy and “adapt” their habits (including table manners) to Canadian patterns. Otherwise, resentful or disaffected people might undermine the nation, exhaust welfare resources, and become vulnerable to Communist propaganda.10 Beyond the friendly hand that ordinary Canadians were told to offer the newcomer was an army of professional experts who promised to complete the job through “proper reception and information services,” securing jobs and housing, and otherwise helping newcomers overcome social and cultural barriers to integration …11

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Nutritional experts, Food Fashion-Makers, and Women Health, and the cultivation of a healthy body politic – was linked to postwar nation-building. For nutrition experts, the first priority was to teach all Canadians, especially mothers, sound nutritional advice, healthy food habits, and the Canada Food Guide. A good diet, they stressed, improved children’s growth rate and physique, resistance to disease, and meant longer lives. In dispensing advice, food experts often prioritized middle-class food customs and efficiency regimes derived from capitalist time-management principles. Descriptions of the family meal, especially dinner, invariably assumed a nuclear family, its well-groomed members assembled around an attractively set table in a dining room, happily engaged in conversation while eating mother’s lovely meal. An awareness among experts of the many “families” inhabiting inner-city flats, boarding houses, and tiny suburban bungalows did not lead them to alter their pitch.12 Chatelaine and Canadian Culinary Ways An excellent source of Canada’s postwar health and homemaking campaigns that also sheds light on contemporary tensions is the country’s premier women’s magazine, Chatelaine. Although usually dismissed as a bourgeois women’s magazine, Chatelaine was an affordable, mass-market periodical that by the late 1960s enjoyed the largest circulation of any Canadian magazine in the country … Still, the primarily female readership was English-speaking and Anglo-Celtic but included some ethnic Canadian and immigrant women. It frequently featured the happy homemaker image, but it was not the only one contained in its pages. Amid the regular departmental material on meal plans, shopping, crafts, and decorating, Chatelaine tackled provocative issues. Dr Marion Hilliard’s columns on sexuality and suburban women’s anxieties appeared before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). By the late 1950s, the magazine was regularly publishing “social issue” articles on racism and sexism and on working-class, immigrant, Native, and poor Canadian women. Doris Anderson’s feminist editorials helped to distinguish Chatelaine from the far less politically overt US women’s magazines.13 The magazine’s food features were largely the creations of the Chatelaine Institute kitchen staff or recipe entries in the annual Family Favourites Contests that had been adjudicated and tested by the Institute

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staff. Founded in 1930 and modelled after the US-based Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen, the Chatelaine Institute was staffed by home economists whose white robes and laboratory-style kitchen lent a scientific air to the departmental features. As female professionals operating in the overlapping worlds of health and home, they took their job of orchestrating efficient, economical, and nutritious meal planning seriously: taste testings on in-house recipes, inspection visits to factories, and product test runs to determine which items would receive the Chatelaine Seal of Approval (again mimicking the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval). Given the critical importance of advertising to the magazine, it is not surprising to find products of corporate sponsors among those accorded the Seal; the business department likely recommended them. But the Chatelaine Institute nutritionists also enjoyed a degree of autonomy not enjoyed by their counterparts in the United States, where male editors vetted their submissions. Chatelaine’s editorial and advertising departments were separate, and male publishers complained about women editors refusing to be dictated to. In the budget features, women food editors who, theoretically, should have been promoting the advertisers’ products (many of them processed goods) refused, saying they were too expensive. While undergoing some transformations in the two decades under review, Chatelaine’s food features remained remarkably consistent, the Canadian way being most commonly represented by images and texts extolling the virtues of affordable abundance: ubiquitous images of attractive WASPish women pushing overflowing grocery carts or posed near well-stocked pantries attested to the Canadian homemakers’ good fortune. So did recipe contests. Proud victors photographed alongside their prize-winning Jell-O-mold salad, casserole, or dessert parfait promised women readers ease of preparation and family fun. The enticing ads brand-name food corporations placed for prepared foods, such as canned soups and vegetables, stressed how convenience foods offered maximum return for minimal preparation. By contrast, the advertisers of baking supplies preferred labour-intensive, home-made treats for husbands and children and used ads celebrating women’s supposed virtues for self-sacrifice … As to economical eating, the magazine increasingly featured frozen foods as a cheaper and healthy alternative to fresh items, though the higher price of frozen goods compared with tinned, and the limited freezer space of the older refrigerators in most fridge-owning Canadian homes, could put even frozen food beyond the grasp of many struggling families. Not so with canned foods

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– the cheapest way of attaining the well-balanced meal. Particularly in winter, women were told to buy tinned foods. On occasion, the Institute tried to emulate the pages of US women’s magazines, where lavish and colourful depictions of weekend brunches or dinner parties regularly appeared, but the majority of its food features even in the more affluent 1960s were aimed at the budget shopper and time-conscious cook. Most commonly featured, particularly in the 1950s, were affordable and healthy meals based on economical cuts of meat, such as ground beef, accompanied by quick potato or rice side dishes, and vegetables, or casserole dishes that stretched affordable meats with pasta or rice. Particularly popular with readers was the “Meals of the Month” page (see image below). Only infrequently did Chatelaine’s food articles acknowledge that many Canadian wives worked outside the home … Some 1960s examples highlighted working women preparing meals the night before or shopping at a well-stocked deli counter. The affordable meals in Chatelaine’s 1960s repertoire were slightly more glamorous than their 1950s counterparts, though casseroles remained popular. One of the quickest ways of interjecting novelty was to feature “ethnic” ingredients and food, which usually meant modifying “foreign” fare for more timid North American palates. Chatelaine’s examples of this homogenizing process included a 1960 recipe for Easy-to-Make Pizza Pin Wheels (biscuit mix, tomato soup and ketchup, pressed meat, cheese wafers, cheddar cheese, and modest amounts of oregano, green pepper, and onion) with few “authentic” Italian ingredients.14 Still, the magazine’s increasing attention to ethnic foods in the 1960s is noteworthy. Institute staff encouraged Canadian women to experiment with “ethnic” ingredients as a way of injecting more diversity into their family’s diet. Ethnic recipes were also presented as new twists on economical eating, the most common being Italian, Chinese, and Spanish ones. At times, the ubiquitous tuna casserole was replaced by lasagna and even curried chicken dishes, though such nods to cultural experimentation did not preclude food fashion-makers from using patronizing formats. Full-length features like “South Sea Foods to Enchant Your Natives,” boasted recipes for “Native Drums Barbecued Chicken, Yams Tahiti, Montezuma Casserole and Muu-Muu Punch.”15 Such features combined ethnic or exotic food – or Chatelaine’s version of it – with notions of increased affluence. A greater attention to ethnic foods … also reflected growing North Americans’ interest in “gourmet” cuisine associated with such successful food writers as Julia Child (whose bestselling cookbook popularized

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“Meals off the Shelf ”: One of Chatelaine’s popular food features was the “Meals of the Month” page, a month-long table of daily menu plans designed by the magazine’s home economists to provide busy, unimaginative, or inexperienced homemakers with ideas for cheap and nutritious family meals.

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French cuisine in the 1960s) as well as a greater degree of culinary experimentation, including among middle-class Canadian youth enticed by the alternative tastes – and “sensuality” – of global foods.16 A summary of the recipes submitted for Chatelaine’s 1965 Family Favourites Contest suggests that many Canadian housewives were incorporating ethnic cuisine, especially Chinese and Italian, into the meal plans17 – though this should not be exaggerated. Even by the end of the 1960s, the “Canadian way” was best exemplified by updated classics like “hamburgers with class” rather than experimental cuisine.18 From the Point of Nutrition? A popular postwar nutritional guide, Food Customs of New Canadians, speaks more directly to the concerns and practices of health and food experts serving immigrant communities. Produced by an organization of nutritionists and dieticians (Toronto Nutrition Committee [TNC]), the guide appeared in 1959 and was revised in 1967. Launched by the International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, the city’s largest immigrant aid society, the guide’s claims to scientific objectivity, like its rejection of an overtly assimilationist approach, reflect the general approaches of postwar reception activists like those who staffed the Institute. The TNC’s liberal perspective is clearly evident in their counselling of flexibility when assessing immigrant food customs – nutrition, not habits, being the key measure – but a presumption of expert authority is equally evident. The guide catalogued the food customs of fourteen of Toronto’s ethnic groups (with the British conspicuous by their absence), with the relevant information broken down into subcategories such as food groupings, meal patterns, and cooking facilities as well as Food for Special Ages (prenatal education for mothers, children, and public health facilities) and Teaching Suggestions (which noted changes, for better or worse, in food habits that pertained in Toronto). In most cases, however, stark contrasts are drawn between the more “primitive” facilities of rural homes and fully equipped “modern” urban homes. Although such differences undoubtedly reflected class as much as city residence, only the West Indian entry draws explicit class distinctions …19 The guide’s claim to neutral assessments of immigrant food customs and liberalism was inexorably mingled with the presumption of scientific, even cultural, authority to define standards for newcomers. It was designed precisely to inform health and social services personnel

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“helping” newcomers “adapt the familiar food patterns of their homelands to the foods and equipment available in Canada,” with an emphasis on affordable, nutritious foods they might otherwise miss – such as raw and processed fruits and vegetables available all year-round and their “proper” preparation … The wisdom encoded in Food Customs was meant to be objective, yet the advice involved an act of cultural imperialism: advising conformity to North American health regimes meant deliberately bringing about changes in the daily habits, and social and cultural values, of those being counselled. It might be unfair to equate this guide with the blatantly assimilationist intentions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic science professionals or residential school staff who taught African American, Native, and immigrant children to reject their mother’s cooking for mainstream choices,20 but it did reflect a shared normative discourse regarding dominant bourgeois definitions of Canadian “ways” and “standards” that were as much about class and capitalist notions of efficiency and budgeting as about nutrition and food. It held the North American pattern of three meals per day as sacrosanct, for instance, saying it “fits into school and working hours.” The main target audience was also clear – women from rural or impoverished regions accustomed to “primitive” cooking facilities, such as outdoor brick or clay ovens, and time-consuming preparation, would be helped through access to modern resources and “guidance in their use” to “adjust more easily, produce better meals, and prevent costly waste.” The message was not inconsistent with those of nationalist boosters or corporate manufacturers encouraging the consumption of the appliances and gadgets of a well-appointed “modern” kitchen. The nutrition committee’s preoccupation with the shopping habits of immigrant and refugee women also reflected the experts’ class and cultural bias. It pathologized daily or frequent shopping, seeing this behaviour as the consequence of poverty or rural underdevelopment, while ignoring its social significance. In the bakeries, butchers, fish shops, and other shops of Old World towns and villages, women developed important lines of trust with shopkeepers, and maintained networks of information and support. For Canadian nutrition experts, however, efficiency (modernity) concerns predominated: a German Austrian entry notes approvingly that “use of supermarkets is increasing.” Such views also ignored the fact that many thousands of workingclass immigrants would live for years in inner-city flats and basement apartments without modern stoves or fridges, and thus relied on daily

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shopping for perishables. Nor was the modern supermarket a place where immigrant women well versed in marketplace “haggling” could practise their craft. At the ethnic shops and open markets, women through frequent contact forged bonds of trust with local shopkeepers, who often extended credit to families in financial straits. Harsher professional judgments accompanied discussion of nursing mothers and child-feeding regimes. These evaluations noted childfeeding practices (breastfeeding or artificial) in each country, availability of children’s food, level of public instruction for mothers, and the state of prenatal health services. Again, immigrant mothers were evaluated in terms of their conformity to “modern” health regimes. Little respect is shown for their folk traditions. Rural Chinese women’s supposed inadequacies on the child-feeding front, for instance, were attributed to their traditional refusal to consume fruits, vegetables, or cold water for a month after giving birth. Women of other countries were depicted as more closely resembling Canadian or North American standards. Of Czechoslovakia, the guide observed, “In rural areas, breast feeding is prevalent although increasing attention is paid to modern methods” (presumably, use of baby formula). Even more positive was the assessment for Germany and Austria: “Infants are mostly breastfed up to 3 or 4 months of age; other foods introduced as in Canada. Nutrition education good; deficiency diseases in children practically non-existent.” Hungarian women were praised for improving their habits upon arrival in Toronto where they “visit the doctor regularly and follow his instructions closely.” Highest praise of all went to Dutch women whose child-feeding patterns – which followed a progression from formula feeding to gradual introduction of solid foods – were decidedly modern. In Holland, “formula feeding is generally accepted” and “a variety of evaporated milk formulae and canned infant foods,” as well as vitamin supplements, were widely used. Many schoolchildren were served milk at school, and state-subsidized school lunches were made available to “low income children” to help them meet “minimal nutritional requirements.” Overall, the nutrition experts were careful not to give any group an entirely negative evaluation. They commended most groups for varied diets that combined in-season fruits and vegetables, meat, and fish, and also acknowledged the fine-honed skills of women from modest rural backgrounds accustomed to stretching economical cuts of meat with starches and vegetables or producing one-dish meals using meat alternatives such as fish. European women like the Toronto Polish homemaker

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could make “a small amount of inexpensive meat” go “a long way in soups and stews,” and she often substituted “legumes, eggs and fish in all forms” for meat. She had adapted easily to new foods, such as citrus fruits, that had been prohibitively expensive back home, but needed to learn to cook vegetables for a shorter time and to cook a “more substantial breakfast.” Nor did any group receive an entirely positive evaluation; there was always room for improvement. Since immigrant children “become very fond of candy and sweet carbonated beverages,” the “increasing use of sweet fruits” was to be discouraged. And most immigrant women had to be taught the value of canned or frozen fruits, vegetables, and fruit juices as substitutes for expensive, out-of-season fresh imports. Without exception, the most positive evaluations were of Canada’s more “preferred” groups of Europeans: North and West European whites. The “similarity of foods in the home countries and Canada,” the guide observed of Germans and Austrians, for instance, “makes adjustment relatively easy.” The most positive evaluation went to the “Dutch housewife,” who “prizes culinary skill combined with economy and these abilities enable her to make a smooth transition in any adjustment of foods and food customs necessitated by changed environment.” “Particularly commendable” was “the generous inclusion of cheese and milk, fruits, a wide variety of vegetables and the limited use of candy and soft drinks.” There was only one main weakness: infrequent use of liver and organ meats. By contrast, women and families belonging to Canada’s “less preferred” immigrants – Chinese, southern Europeans, and West Indians – appear in the guide as less adaptable. Chinese hygienic standards needed serious upgrading. Serious adjustments were required of Italians, particularly southern Italians (who regularly use “strong spices and hot peppers” and “highly seasoned meats like salami”) even though they, like other Europeans, earned good marks for a varied diet, use of fresh foods, and a three-meals-a-day pattern. A major no-no was that this low-income group preferred expensive imported goods, such as olive oil, meats, and cheeses, when cheaper Canadian alternatives were available. Culinary Pluralism from the Bottom Up? The capacity for choice or resistance greatly differed among Canadian and New Canadian women, but low-income women from humble or

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impoverished rural regions were singled out for special attention or blame. In the late 1950s and 1960s, for example, Portuguese and Italian mothers in Toronto were branded as too ignorant, isolated, backwards, stubborn, and/or suspicious to access “modern” health care facilities or to trust the school nurses and visiting homemakers who dispensed advice.21 Still, neither group should be treated as monolithic categories, and within each group, women displayed a differing willingness and/ or capacity to embrace or resist professional interventions concerning their child’s health. New and Old Canadian women responded in selective and varied ways to external and internal pressures to recast themselves in ways promoted by bourgeois image-makers. Taking Chatelaine and a multiple readings approach to women’s responses – one that acknowledges readers’ agency and the polysemic nature of popular texts22 – permits an evaluation of female responses from across Canada to the postwar homemaker ideal and food advice from mainstream experts. The (admittedly small) number of letters received about Chatelaine’s food features shows that women were not passive users, or dupes, of the magazine’s food features. Canadian housewives, whether rural or urban, Anglo-Celtic or ethnic Canadian, enjoyed consulting recipes even if they did not try to replicate them. Certain food features were popular precisely because women found them helpful. As Mrs C. Flagg of Medicine Hat, Alberta, explained, “Meals of the Month go up inside my cupboard door – not to be slavishly followed, but for good suggestions.” Complaints were commonplace when the magazine did not run the column; a “disappointed” Mrs E.H. Donnelly from Windsor, Ontario, liked “to consult the menu plans” and encouraged their resumption, while Mrs H.M. Pawley of Edmonton reported on the “many women” who discussed the magazine’s “wonderful” recipes. Such reasoning explains the popularity of the yearly Family Food Favourites contests of the 1950s and 1960s, which showcased countless recipes submitted by readers, and of the highly successful Chatelaine cookbooks that the Chatelaine Institute, under director Elaine Collet, began to publish in the mid-1960s.23 But not all Chatelaine readers warmed to such material. Mrs Ursula McGowan of Smith Falls, Ontario, claimed she enjoyed reading the recipes but tried “only a few of them.” Significantly, serious critics of the food features tended to be older or working-class women, who included “A Subscriber” from Harris, Saskatchewan, who wrote, “All that Chatelaine seems to contain is recipes of expensive fattening foods.” “Do come down to earth,” she advised, adding, “we haven’t even

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plumbing nor electricity and I know many more of your readers haven’t.” That the Mrs Chatelaine contest – an annual competition to determine the “best” wife, mother, and homemaker and that each year attracted a large number of applicants – engendered some of the most scathing criticism of the homemaker ideal is also revealing. The letters sent by the self-styled “Mrs Slob” and her supporters, who declared themselves too unfit, exhausted, opinionated, and financially strapped to meet the lofty standards and smugness of the “sweet, goody, good” contest winners, capture the frustrations of rural, working-class, and beleaguered middle-class women who rejected what they saw as unrealistic, even oppressive, standards of homemaking …24 Many of these critics had European surnames or identified themselves as newcomers. French-Canadian and European surnames (Italian and Dutch) surface among both the winners and regional runners-up of the Mrs Chatelaine contest, and its critics. Some of the latter bore Ukrainian, French Canadian, and Polish surnames, suggesting that class and income, more than ethnicity, fuelled opposition to the contest. While Food Customs assumed that British immigrants easily acclimatized, some British readers found “Canadian-style” cuisine, with its emphasis on casseroles, tinned foods, and summer barbecues, strangely foreign. Refugee and immigrant women also responded selectively to postwar health and homemaking campaigns. Our sample of twenty-eight taped interviews25 reveals patterns that defy easy categorization: immigrant mothers who steadfastly stuck to “traditional” meals and those keen to experiment with Canadian recipes or convenience foods; refugee husbands who pressured wives to stick to familiar meals and those who encouraged wives to incorporate some Canadian foods; and endless permutations of hybrid diets in the households of working- and middle-class immigrants who increasingly combined familiar and Canadian foods and “ethnic” foods from elsewhere. Postwar immigrant and refugee narratives contain their own versions of the themes of scarcity and abundance. Female survivors recall the smaller rations of food given to women in the camps, and of the courage of Jews and Gentiles who sneaked food into Nazi-created ghettos and camps. When English soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen, recalled Amelia S.-R., “everyone” ran to the planted areas “to dig beet roots and potatoes out with their hands.” English soldiers helped them to find food, and she and others suffering from typhus and other illnesses were slowly nursed back to health by Red Cross personnel in quarantined

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hospitals in Sweden. But even there, Amelia added, the fear that they might yet starve never subsided. A Dutch war bride describing the days before Holland’s liberation spoke of “starving under German occupation.” The anti-Soviet DPs had also endured prolonged hunger and inadequate sanitation facilities in the refugee camps, forcing many to take up jobs or begin families in Canada while still suffering from malnourishment and related diseases.26 No wonder, then, that many newcomers reacted with astonishment to the comparative abundance of food in Canada. Some, including Dutch newcomer Maria B., marvelled at the stock in Canadian “selfserve” grocery stores. Many recalled their first taste of “Canadian-style” bread or cereals, and the joy of eating fresh fruits in scarce supply back home. A German woman, Helga, who arrived with her husband in 1952, swore the apples and oranges “tasted just like heaven”; they lived on McIntosh apples for months, she added, while her husband, a former electrician, looked for work. A Czech refugee who settled in Hamilton in 1949 recalled her excitement at tasting cornflakes and at once again eating eggs. Financially strapped, she also learned how to bargain shop at the market.27 Not everyone enthused over Canadian food, however. Some much preferred their dense dark bread to the light and airy Canadian fare and complained about unappetizing meat. As an Eastern European refugee woman declared, “Only the immigrants … brought good taste in food to Canada.” Many refugees expressed their disgust with Canadian “wastefulness,” especially in restaurants, where, they noted, an evening’s leftovers could have fed several refugees for weeks at a time.28 Others coped with a spartan diet.29 Still, illness or injury could cut into a modest food budget, creating yet more pressures for women. As initial arrival gave way to the pressures of everyday life in Canada, women’s concerns shifted to maintaining or modifying Old World shopping and food customs in New World contexts … The evidence does suggest that some Eastern European refugees who eventually found work in former or alternative professional or white-collar jobs more quickly moved into suburbs and integrated Canadian foods and customs into family meals and holiday celebrations. Nutritionists might have applauded Dagmar Z., a pro-royalist Czech who settled with her husband in suburban Hamilton: she claimed to have maintained a “traditional Czechoslovakian kitchen” but “altered it” to be “more nutritious and healthy,” as she had “learned” in Canada.30 But other women put up greater and longer resistance, shopping in their “old” city

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neighbourhoods to get the necessary ingredients. Working-class immigrants such as Italians, Portuguese, and West Indians could largely reproduce their homeland diets precisely because they relied on lowbudget food items such as rice and pasta and comparatively little meat, though this was more easily done in large cities like Toronto, which already had a wide range of ethnic foods, or in smaller cities like Sudbury, which had established Ukrainian, Finnish, and other ethnic businesses. Women’s efforts to negotiate a complex culinary terrain emerge clearly from our oral testimonies, which also underscore the importance of individual choice as well as differing household dynamics. For example, while many mothers experimented with tuna fish sandwiches laden with mayonnaise, hot dogs and hamburgers, and Jell-O in response to their children’s persistent requests, others resisted, even for years. An East German refugee woman who liked to supplement her “mostly German” diet with various foods also recalled the “tensions” between her and her children over her husband’s domineering approach to maintaining “strict” German standards in food and childrearing.31 By contrast, Austrian-born Susan M., who married an Italian immigrant she met in Toronto, said she never cooked “in any particular style.” While proudly insisting they had “international” tastes, she believed her daughter identified entirely as a Canadian. Even Helga A. said that while she had not consciously tried to raise her children “in a German way,” she had cooked primarily German food and everyone spoke German in her home. Still, over the years more and more Canadian foods had crept into her meal plans. Like many other immigrants, she also saw no contradiction between a continuing commitment to homeland food customs and her strong self-identity as a Canadian. For Nazneed Sadiq, a young and recently married upper-caste Pakistani woman who emigrated with her accountant husband in the early 1960s, learning to cook in her North Toronto apartment building (where everyone else was white) meant experimenting with both “Indian” and North American foods. The resulting weekly meal pattern: Pakistani food two to three times a week, a lot of salads, and the occasional Canadian-style barbeque.32 Such experimentation led to many multicultural family diets, of which holiday food customs are perhaps most emblematic: Italian households that combined lasagna with turkey for Thanksgiving, Ukrainian mothers who added Canadian cakes and hams to the family favourite, perogies, and so on.33 The Chatelaine stories dealing with immigrants devoted considerable space to culinary customs or reactions to Canadian patterns of

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consumption and domestic images. Published in 1957, when the plight and arrival of the Hungarian 56ers had captured the imagination of many Canadians, Jeannine Locke’s “Can the Hungarians Fit In?” about Frank and Katey Meyer illuminates key themes under scrutiny.34 The caption that accompanies the cover photograph of an attractive, smiling Katey declares: “[She] resembles that mythical creature, the average young Canadian housewife. In a straight-cut skirt, soft sweater and low-heeled shoes, her brown hair and eyes healthily bright, her skin rosy as a schoolgirl’s, she is inconspicuously attractive.” Katey’s domestication is all the more telling given that she was a professionally educated woman who first worked in Canada as a hospital cleaner and then a bank teller. Model refugees keen to embrace Canadian ways, the Meyers’ adjustment to life in Canada, readers learn, involved exposure to middleclass modes of living, including learning how to shop, eat, and dress “Canadian-style.” Their middle-class status, it becomes clear, better equipped them to appreciate North American bourgeois standards. Locke describes Katey’s first exposure to a modern Canadian household. In Budapest, the couple had shared a poorly heated three-room apartment with three others, but their Toronto patrons, a doctor and his large family, had given them commodious accommodations: a suite of two rooms, a new refrigerator and stove, and their own bathroom. While living there, Katey discovered the wonders of the Canadian supermarket: one day “she came home staggering under a load of newly discovered delicacies – sardines, instant coffee, canned soups, ham and chicken legs,” and “so much ice cream that they used it in great scoops even in their coffee …” Next came the department store. When husband Frank (an engineer) told Katey to buy herself a present, she had decided on a pleated nylon slip but on impulse bought high-heeled red leather pumps that cost about $35 (nearly a week’s salary for Frank), and then “limped, painfully but persistently around their rooms in her tall, thin pumps until she was accomplished enough to manoeuvre them, for the first time in public, to Sunday morning mass.” “Katey’s new red shoes,” added Locke, “were part of their celebration of three happy events”: mail from home; Frank’s (and brother Louis’) acceptance, with scholarship, into the University of Toronto engineering school; and Katey’s bank job. Canadian nutritionists might have disapproved of Katey’s culinary indiscretion (all that ice cream!) but enjoyed the depictions of a Canadian paradise of goods and the Meyers’ eagerness to become Canadian consumers (they hoped to buy a suburban home and a car).

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The couple’s enthusiasm for all things Canadian was tempered by wistful memories of Hungarian food and gypsy music – which they rediscovered in a Hungarian restaurant, the Csarda, in downtown Toronto. “Transported home by the smells and sounds” of Csarda, the Meyers, writes Locke, “eat goulash and cheese strudel” and “believe they are back in their favourite restaurant” at the lakeside resort near Budapest where they vacationed. Although the couple never enjoyed the traditional gypsy music back home (a sign of their class status), Katey is “amused” by the pleasing songs and the tarts remind her of her mother’s cooking. Katey has even absorbed North American women’s obsession with weight: at home, she yearned for expensive creamfilled eclairs but, here, where she can and initially did buy them, “[she] is suddenly calorie conscious.” The role played by food in the Meyers’ tale of escape and redemption is a complex one, at once signifying Canadian abundance, novelty, and satiety as well as a romanticization of Old World ways. As with most public articulations of postwar cultural pluralism, the tension between assimilation and acculturation is never completely resolved, yet its success at weaving a compelling Cold War narrative of a Canadian democratic paradise is suggested by the positive letters the article engendered.35 A 1965 article “The Other Canadians,” in which Chatelaine writer Edna Staebler36 profiled a young northern Italian couple in Toronto, Alda and Bruno Pilli, and their sons Luigi and Paulo, shared some similar features – including an emphasis on describing food customs and ethnic cuisine still foreign to most Canadians and on physical appearance and domestic virtues, particularly in the description of Alda as a “sensitive,” “friendly,” and “slender” woman “with the poise of good manners” and a penchant for “everything to be proper and clean.” But it also differs from the Hungarian piece in its attention to the ethnic shops and markets Alda prefers and to her daily food shopping habits, presented here as a viable alternative to the one-stop Canadian supermarket model, at least in more self-sufficient ethnic communities. Another contrast is that the Pillis, though evidently also striving to become Canadian, had no intention of abandoning most aspects of their culture, including food. Staebler detailed Alda’s various simple specialties: spaghetti, thin slices of veal, green salad dressed with lemon and olive oil, cauliflower or eggplant “dipped in a batter and fried golden brown”; and Sunday home-made pizza dotted “with anchovies, olives, and sauce.” No biscuit mix here! With their meal, the Pillis drink Bruno’s homemade wine, and when reporting that “Paulo and Luigi

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might have a little wine in a glassful of water,” Staebler avoids any explicit judgment. At the same time, Staebler sees uneven acculturation and intergenerational tensions in Alda and her husband’s preference for Italian food, and her sons’ love of hamburgers, hot dogs, and “chewie” gum. The greatest difference is the negative focus on the Pilli family’s difficulties, especially Alda’s disappointments, including her descent from “fashionable dressmaker” to “a pale, unnoticed, hard-working housewife with golden-brown eyes that often are wistful and lonely,” except when handsome husband Bruno returns home. Domestic images reinforce the Pillis’ predicament. Most of their time is spent in a “narrow, white-walled kitchen with a small refrigerator, a gas stove, and a stainless-steel sink.” The room’s only furniture was a “Formica-topped table and six padded chrome chairs.” The Pillis’ small bedroom contained some second-hand furniture and a television that could be viewed from the kitchen. In the cellar were a toilet, a shower, and the laundry tubs at which Alda toils. The monotony of Alda’s life is underscored by Staebler’s description of daily chores. Interestingly, Staebler had chosen to profile a moderately well-off northern Italian couple … even though the majority of Toronto’s, and Canada’s, Italians hailed from rural and southern regions and became permanent immigrants. Indeed, they and their northern Italian friends share a certain prejudice against southern Italians (too clannish), which Staebler appears to accept uncritically. Within a year of the article’s publication, the Pillis had returned to Italy. Conclusion As our discussion of the prescriptive literature suggests, the homemaker ideology enjoyed tremendous currency in the early postwar era. The different types of evidence scrutinized here also point to the differing capacities of Canadian and New Canadian women to incorporate, ignore, or modify the suggestions or impositions of the army of experts (and volunteers) who carried out the country’s postwar health and homemaking campaigns. More specifically, our varied evidence base suggests that the relationship between food experts and newcomers is best understood as a series of negotiations and encounters that transformed both food cultures, though not equally. Anglo-Canadian experts had the power and position to define “ethnic” food as un-Canadian, while the Food Customs guidebook and other projects for newcomers

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Aimed at the budget shopper and time-conscious cook, the magazine most commonly featured affordable meals based on economical cuts of meat, such as hamburger, usually accompanied by quick potato or rice dishes and vegetables.

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suggest that nutrition experts and food fashion-makers, sought to modify, not obliterate the food (and other) cultures of emigrating groups, but liberal intentions did not eliminate cultural chauvinism. In turn, the vast number of postwar immigrants and refugees actually transformed Canadian cuisine even as they incorporated Canadian foods into their own diets … Finally, we leave open for debate two central questions: Are Canadian and New Canadian women of early postwar Canada best viewed as sisters or strangers? Does cultural pluralism, even when practised in positive and affirming ways, always involve a degree of cultural appropriation, an act, literally, of “eating the other”?37

NOTES 1 Our discussion draws on such studies as Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo, The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (London: Sage, 1992); Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Anne Goldman, “‘I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism,” in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/ Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Joan Jensen, “Canning Comes to Mexico: Women and the Agricultural Extension Service 1914– 1919,” in New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 2 For more details about the context and relevant historical studies, such as Reginald Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), see the original article or Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006). 3 Ann Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” and roundtable in Journal of American History 88, 3 (December 2001); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 4 Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, chapters 1 and 4.

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5 National Film Board Archives, Montreal, file 51-214, Canadian Notebook (April 1953). 6 Iacovetta, Gatekeepers, chapter 4. 7 City of Toronto Archives (hereafter CTA), Social Planning Collection (SPC), SC 40, box 56, file 9-c “Immigrants, Migrants, Ethnic Groups – English Classes – West Toronto, 1954, 1959–1962, 1966,” Report of the Committee on English Language Instruction, June 1961. 8 Public Archives of Ontario (hereafter AO), Young Women’s Christian Association Collection, MU3027, box 11, Metropolitan Toronto Branch, Annual Report, 1970. 9 CTA, Central Neighbourhood House (CNH Activities), SC (Social Planning Council), vol. 5D, box 1, file 52, manuscript of Marion O. Robinson, The Heart of the City, 9–10. 10 Introduction, articles in Food for Thought, Canadian Association for Adult Education, Special Issue “Newcomers to Canada” (January 1953). 11 David Weiss, executive director, Montreal Jewish Child Bureau, “Immigrant Meets the Agency,” ibid., 42–5, and reprinted in Social Casework (December 1952). 12 For example, Charles Heustis, “The Nation’s Health,” Toronto Star, 5 February 1949; nutrition guide discussed below. 13 For more details and other relevant historical works, see the original article or Valerie J. Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine in the Fifties and Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). A comprehensive analysis of magazine materials, based on detailed databases, is available in Korinek “Roughing It in Suburbia: Reading Chatelaine Magazine, 1950–1969” (doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996, especially appendix). 14 Marie Holmes, “Meals off the Shelf” (February 1955); Elaine Collett, “98 Cent January Specials” (January 1960); “Seven Dinners on the Double”; and “Easy-to-Make Pizza Pin Wheels” (1961) Chatelaine. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty. 15 Elaine Collett, “South Seas Foods to Enchant Your Natives” (May 1963). 16 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 218. 17 Editors, “What’s New with Us” (March 1965). 18 For example, Elaine Collett, “Ten New Ways with a Pound of Hamburg” (September 1961). 19 This and the following references from the AO, International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto, MU 6410, file: Cookbook Project, booklet: Toronto Nutrition Committee, Food Customs of New Canadians. Published with funds from the Ontario Dietic Association (not paginated).

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20 For example, see J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Cynthia Comacchio, Nations Are Built of Babies (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 21 Franca Iacovetta, “Recipes for Democracy? Gender, Family and Making Female Citizens in Cold War Canada,” Canadian Woman Studies 20, 2 (Summer 2000). 22 As in the work of Rolande Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, and Michel Foucault. For an overview, see “Cultural Studies: An Introduction,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992). 23 The Chatelaine Cookbook sold 110,000 copies (for $5.50 to $6.95) at a time when any Canadian books reaching sales of ten thousand copies were classified as bestsellers. 24 Valerie J. Korinek, “‘Mrs Chatelaine’ versus ‘Mrs Slob’: Contestants, Correspondents, and the Chatelaine Community in Action, 1961–1969,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. 25 Sample of 28 interviews conducted in the 1970s with immigrant women, with the following breakdown: European (18), including European Jewry (4), Asian (2), Caribbean (1), and South Asian (mainly from India) (3). Culled from the Oral History Collection, Multicultural History Society of Ontario (hereafter MHSO), Toronto. 26 MHSO, Amelia S.-R. and Maria B. 27 MHSO, Maria B., Helga A., and Dagmar Z. 28 MHSO, sample. 29 MHSO, Iusa D. 30 MHSO, Dagmar Z. 31 MHSO, Annemarie H. 32 MHSO, Susan M., Helga A., and Nazneed S. 33 For one example, see Franca Iacovetta, “From Jellied Salads to Melon and Prosciutto, and Polenta: Italian Foodways and ‘Cosmopolitan Eating,”’ in Jo Marie Powers, ed., Buon appetito! (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 2000). 34 Jeannine Locke, “Can the Hungarians Fit In?” (May 1957). 35 “Letters to Chatelaine,” July and August, 1957; September 1959. 36 Staebler became famous for the Schmecks cookbook series featuring Mennonite and Pennsylvania-German cuisine. 37 The phrase, of course, is borrowed from bell hooks.

Consuming Food and Constructing Identities among Arabic and South Asian Immigrant Women H elen V alli anat os an d Kim Ra i n e

Introduction Migration to Canada frequently entails adapting to new lifeways, and part of this process may include adjusting conceptualizations of self and performance of identities. Experiences of this process of adjustment depend on how various aspects of self are contextualized in specific historical and spatial locations. Many immigrants hope to retain their cultural practices and identities, although some modifications are common especially as immigrants cope with socio-economic realities encountered in Canada.1 One such example is the transformation of gender roles, as financial stress necessitates the participation of both women and men in the labour force, which in turn may challenge customary ideas of womanhood and manhood. This may lead to tensions within families and communities.2 Analysis of complex symbolic meanings and associations of food and foodways provides a window into understanding how individuals construct subjectivity, and how various kinds of sociocultural boundaries (e.g. based on class, caste, religion) are demarcated. Thus, food both delineates and connects. Food also connects across time and place, and for many migrants, food is an essential component of maintaining connections to home. How and what kinds of food are consumed recall families and friends left behind, and by continuing to consume both everyday and celebratory foods migrants preserve these transnational relationships and

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version, from Food, Culture & Society, 11, 3 (September 2008): 356–73.

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enact their companionship with those back home. [Author] David Sutton … recalls being told prior to his departure from the Greek Isle of Kalymnos, to “eat, in order to remember Kalymnos,” … [and] to remember and to be Kalymnian.3 Food practices mark social boundaries but are also used to construct identities. Losing traditional culinary practices, for many immigrants, is equated with the “abandon[ment of] community, family, and religion.”4 Societal food choices and meanings reflect cultural mores that are instiled early in life as part of the socialization process; consequently food habits and the significance imparted to foods are thought to be relatively stable.5 Because of this strong connection between food and identity, immigrants tend to conserve dietary habits.6 Nevertheless, incorporation of new food elements and changes in meal patterns have been noted among immigrants in diverse contexts.7 New opportunities for socio-economic mobility may be represented by the incorporation of previously rare or inaccessible foods and inclusion of new food elements into immigrants’ diets.8 These dietary changes are dependent upon a range of factors that belie attempts to define a single immigrant experience.9 Through women’s gendered roles in providing, preparing, and presenting food to their families, they act as “gatekeepers”; they balance the need to impart family and community values via traditional foods and cuisines, with adjusting to life and foodways in Canada. Although women are predominantly responsible for food work, this responsibility is not equivalent to power over food choices. Women frequently privilege the tastes of other family members, particularly husbands.10 Family meals may be an important place where shifting gender and ethnic identities are negotiated between generations and genders. In this chapter, we explore the meanings immigrant women have imparted to their own and their families’ food choices and dietary habits and consider how this relates to their conceptualizations of self, particularly in terms of how gender and ethnicity are constructed and understood. Through our examination of various women’s experiences from two communities (Arabic and South Asian11), including individuals who migrated in different time periods (recently, in the past decade, or nonrecently, ten or more years ago), we demonstrate how the migration experience is shaped by social, political, and economic structures that in turn relate to food consumption patterns and identity constructions among immigrant women …

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Contextualizing and Learning about Immigrant Women’s Lives A significant proportion of the Canadian population is composed of immigrants (18.4 per cent according to the 2001 census). Most immigrants (74 per cent) settle in Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal.12 Although there may be some overarching similarities in experiences of settling in urban areas, the immigration experience may be different for those living in other regions of Canada.13 … Our study was conducted in Edmonton, a large city (approximately 1 million persons) in western Canada. According to the 2001 census, 17.8 per cent of this city’s population consisted of immigrants, and 14.6 per cent of the population were visible minorities. Of the visible minorities residing in Edmonton, the South Asian community is the largest, at 21.4 per cent. The Arabic community makes up 6.7 per cent of this visible minority population.14 The findings presented here are part of an ongoing larger ethnographic study examining adult women’s migration experiences. This study was designed to be community-based, and was conducted in collaboration with a local community organization composed of immigrant women from various countries. This organization helped us define which immigrant communities would participate in this study, and located research assistants (one woman from each participating community). Research assistants assisted with development of the research design (e.g., defining appropriate questions and how to best phrase them), recruitment of participants (via convenience and purposive sampling), translation when required during the interview process, and transcription of interviews. One goal of the study is to provide this community organization and other interested parties with information that can be used for advocacy in addressing immigrants’ needs. In order to compare changes over time in immigrant women’s experiences we recruited recent immigrants, who had lived in Canada for fewer than ten years, and non-recent immigrants, those who had resided in Canada for ten or more years. Six focus group interviews were conducted in 2005–06 with each community, three with recent and three with non-recent immigrant women. This number … was … adequate for understanding the range of experiences immigrant women shared.15 A focus group consisted of five to eight women. Discussion was easily elicited, and groups of this size were considered adequate for collecting a range of opinions yet allowing all women’s voices to be heard. A total of thirty-six Arabic and thirty-eight South Asian women participated.

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Gendering Migration Experiences Individuals immigrating to Canada may be admitted through one of three modules: economic immigrants, family class immigrants, or refugees. Since 1967, economic class immigrants were selected based on Canadian labour needs and skills assessments. Family reunification became the primary criterion for immigration in 1975.16 As a result, proportionally more immigrants were women, who followed their husbands already employed in Canada. Recent data indicate most immigrants enter Canada as economic immigrants, although more women enter as economic-class spouses or as family-class immigrants.17 Most women … in this study entered Canada as spouses. For many of these women, the migration experience itself was less traumatic or stressful in that they had a family member waiting for them in Canada or travelled with others … They did not have to cope with the unknown, in part represented by new foods. One South Asian woman’s first meal consisted of non-traditional foods – she had pizza. However, this was “Indian pizza,” homemade (including the dough) by her sister-in-law. The vast majority of South Asian women described their first meals as consisting of traditional foods – curries, rice, and rotis – that were consumed in their relatives’ homes. Part of the reason for the pattern of not eating out is concern with ingesting something that is prohibited. In the above “Indian pizza” example, the dough was made without eggs, which were proscribed. Dietary proscriptions are delineated by various religious traditions, including Islam and Hindu, which are practised by the vast majority of women. Women have the primary responsibility for ensuring that food proscriptions are followed and that suitable foods are available for their families through appropriate food preparation and cooking activities. As one South Asian woman said, “I have to cook everything at home because of the halal factor.” This is especially important during travelling and migration, when the availability of appropriate foods is questionable. This is exemplified by another South Asian newcomer’s experience: “I was travelling with my groceries, pots, pans, rice, flour, and lentils. We rented a room with a kitchenette so I started cooking the next day.” South Asian and Arabic women immigrants’ experiences of settlement, at least among study participants, were gendered through their relationships with others. The security and support provided for these women by their kinship relations eased some of the strain of arrival in

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Canada, as illustrated through the familiarity of their first meals in Canada. However, immigrant women who enter Canada on the basis of family connections also face challenges, particularly because there are relatively fewer language and other kinds of training geared to spouses of economic immigrants.18 The financial strain that arguably resulted from the lack of Canadian work experience and non-recognition of foreign credentials was evident in the levels of poverty among study participants. Calculations of poverty levels using Statistics Canada’s Before-Tax Low Income CutOffs (LICO), which determine poverty lines according to community and family size, showed very high poverty rates among participants’ households: 55.26 per cent of South Asian and 52.7 per cent of Arabic participants were living below LICOs. Recent immigrant women who were highly trained (e.g., medical doctor, dentist, architect) were either not employed or worked in the service sector. These women reported similar experiences for their husbands, who generally found employment in manufacturing, construction, or driving taxicabs. As expected, non-recent immigrant women reported relatively higher household incomes. Census data on income distribution among immigrants in Edmonton indicate that recent immigrants are under-represented in upper-income brackets (above $50,000), and a greater percentage of recent immigrant women than men have incomes under $10,000.19 Experiences of financial stress … have arguably affected dietary patterns and family dynamics around food. Constructing Gender through Food Household controversies over access and distribution of various kinds of resources may emerge in social transactions around food, which Appadurai has entitled “gastropolitics.”20 Gender roles and relations often become strained or undergo modification with migration, and this is often exacerbated by financial challenges. Consequently, analysis of immigrant household food transactions, or gastropolitics, may reveal how women negotiate their identities and roles after settling in Canada. The roles of mother and wife were of central importance to the construction of womanhood among women from both communities.21 Other studies have suggested that an important component of Arabic women’s definitions of self reflects their roles as family cooks, as meal providers for their families.22 Our study participants indicated such definitions of self continued post-migration, as demonstrated in the

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words of one Arabic woman: “We have more obligations to our family, we cook for our husband and children, we believe that family comes before everything.” She asserted that food provisioning, particularly cooking, is a practice through which womanhood is constructed, and in turn a means of communicating love and respect for family members. At the same time, ethnic group boundaries are being established and affirmed as the position of Arabic women within the family, symbolized through their food work, is implicitly contrasted with Canadian women. This statement was made during a discussion among a group of non-recent Arabic immigrants of how Canadian women seemed to make time for themselves, to focus on their own well-being – and this was seen to be in contrast with Arabic women, who were described, both generally and from women’s own personal experiences, as always putting family first. These are sweeping statements, not reflective of the variation within Canadian and Arabic women’s family lives, but we suggest it is precisely this generalization that serves in the construction of ethnic group identity. The prioritizing of women’s family roles as care-takers was also emphasized by South Asian participants, perceivable in this exchange among recent immigrants: 1: 2: 3: 1:

If we are healthy, we can take care of our children. And our husbands. [laughter] Yeah. Yes, our biggest responsibility. [laughter] Yes, women have to cater to the needs of all family members.

As with the Arabic participants, South Asian women underscored the importance of their responsibilities towards their families, albeit laughingly in the above exchange. For Hindu South Asian women, preparation of food has been described as holding spiritual significance, like an act of worship, consequently the act of cooking and serving food has symbolic power.23 Similar patterns of deference in Muslim South Asian women’s food work have also been described.24 Perhaps deference of tastes can also be viewed as a means of fulfilling spiritual obligations. In our interviews … South Asian immigrant women were conscientious of the tastes and preferences of family members, and strived to meet others’ likes and dislikes when planning meals. Thus, many women subordinated their own preferences, as seen in this exchange among South Asian recent immigrants:

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1: So we cook according to our husbands’ choice. All: Yeah [everyone nodding in agreement] 2: My husband doesn’t like seafood, so I rarely buy seafood. 1: Yeah, I don’t like seafood, but my husband loves it so I have to cook it. I don’t even like the smell of it, and my kids love it too, so I have to.

This exchange echoes the pattern of women subordinating themselves through catering to others previously reported in a variety of societies and contexts.25 Deference to others, particularly husbands, reflects cultural constructions of gender and power. Further support is demonstrated by women’s cooking efforts as newlyweds. Both Arabic and South Asian women made a point of learning to cook dishes in the manner favoured by husbands – even though the majority of women had learned at least basic cooking skills prior to marriage. Yet adapting to husbands’ tastes can also be viewed as women’s agency, as a way that young and relatively insecure women can proactively connect with and learn about their husbands’ personalities.26 The gender dynamics depicted through family foodways is also demonstrated in women’s definitions of gendered space. Among both participant communities, the kitchen was considered to be the woman’s domain and men were not supposed to interfere in kitchen activities beyond dictating their food desires. However, the long hours men spent working in Canada … affected how men and women interacted post-migration, and this is evident in both discussions about food and distribution of food work. One Arabic woman explained, “I think back home they’re more involved, but not like in the kitchen or cooking; there they would tell you ‘I feel like eating this kind of food’ or something, but here, they will eat whatever you make … [they] come home later in the evening and are hungry, and the first thing they want to do is eat, they don’t care what it is. But in Lebanon, they’ll tell you what they feel, and you have time to make it.” So, men were customarily involved in terms of contributing to food choices and meal planning. In Canada, however, where the lifestyle was unanimously reported to be more harried and stressful, men reportedly did not have the time or energy to contribute in this manner; rather, they exhaustedly ate whatever meals their wives had prepared. This may be indicative of shifting intrafamily gender relations, as these women take on a greater responsibility for daily food planning. The demarcation of gendered food spaces and food work was challenged among some immigrant families. In terms of domestic kitchen

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duties, some women spoke of men being more helpful and supportive in Canada, as demonstrated by this exchange between three Arabic women, recently arrived in Canada: 1: They help more than back home. I think because they see that life is stressful for both, so they help out. 2: And because there is nobody around to see him, so he helps out, because back home there are mothers and aunts and family to help … they will blame the woman if the husband is in the kitchen. 3: My husband taught me how to cook. At the beginning of the marriage he helped me more than he does now.

This exchange demonstrates the fluidity of gender roles, dependent on family context. Extended family structures were common practices for both Arabic and South Asian women participants. Such living arrangements ranged from sharing the same house and all the living spaces within, sharing a multistorey house where each nuclear family unit resided on one level, or nuclear family units living in discrete homes that were located in close physical proximity to extended family (e.g., same street). Living in close proximity with others offers both advantages and challenges. In extended families, both men and women face more social pressure to maintain their gender roles, whereas after migration, and if living in a nuclear family, these roles may become less defined. This was evident in the above exchange, as women recalled the role of extended family members in maintaining appropriate gender roles and spaces. Coming to Canada, then, may afford more freedom for both women and men to cross gendered spaces. Yet, extended families provide daily social support that is missed. Many women spoke of the loneliness and stress that followed migrating to Canada, for even if relatives lived nearby, few shared homes for an extended time (i.e., beyond a year). Living in nuclear households meant there were no others to share domestic work, especially labour- and timeintensive foods and dishes. The result was that “women have to do all the work here,” as said by a South Asian migrant. Household gastropolitics commonly shifts post-migration, but how this is manifested depends upon specific contexts which belie a simplistic association with recent or non-recent, Arabic or South Asian migrant categories. Generally, women continue to prioritize the needs of others, particularly their husbands, and this is reflected in menu planning and related food work. Women from both Arabic and South Asian

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communities have commonly lived in extended households back home, thus prior to migration, they have had to consider the meal and taste preferences of their relatives. Post-migration, household gastropolitics change for those shifting to a nuclear family structure. Although the women still predominantly spoke of subsuming their own needs, those who now only had to focus on their immediate family members may have had increased opportunities to incorporate their own preferences. Shifting social class identities is another important factor shaping household gastropolitics. Adjusting to life in Canada is often stressful, especially for recent immigrants whose credentials are not recognized … The resultant downward social shift from professional to manual labourer or service provider has emotional and economic consequences, both of which may be revealed through the quality and quantities of food purchased. Socio-economic status has shaped who shops for food, which grocery stores are patronized, and the frequency of shopping excursions. For example, the women did the grocery shopping either alone or with their husbands. Both Arabic and South Asian women recounted that back home they did not often have to leave their homes to shop because husbands or other extended family members often undertook this task, and vendors routinely sold food products door-to-door. This was not a uniform experience; whether the women came from rural or urban communities, their life stage (e.g., newlywed, mother-in-law), socio-economic status, and family dynamics all influenced their previous shopping experiences. Nevertheless, more women had the primary responsibility of grocery shopping post-migration. Access to private transport was an important factor. Shopping at ethnic grocery stores, which are predominantly located in ethnic enclaves, may be costlier than shopping at large box-store supermarkets, which now also carry many ethnic food items, but access requires a car (or money for a cab). Yet, patronizing ethnic groceries may be a way of connecting with other immigrants, and through the familiar smells, sights, and food products, connecting with home.27 … Constructing Ethnicity through Food An important idea voiced by immigrants from both communities centred on the importance of traditional cuisine and foods, of the challenges they faced in continuing to cook these foods for their families. These foods are an important ingredient in the maintenance and propagation of ethnic identity. The function of food as a symbol of ethnic

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identity is demonstrated by the importance women placed on being able to purchase food elements necessary for their cuisines. Because of the important role food plays in constructing ethnic identity, not being able to find these foods easily contributes to the anxieties of migrating and settling in Edmonton. The lack of ethnic food is symbolic of isolation, as shown with this South Asian woman’s words: We knew nobody, no Pakistani/Indian community; we had a hard time … I made baked potato with bread. I had all my spices with me. I had to boil the potato because I couldn’t find the right oil. I made cutlets [potato patties] and ate it with boiled rice, as we knew nobody there … we couldn’t find halal meat, so we were fasting.

Not only were religiously prescribed foods such as halal meats difficult to acquire, but even “parsley was not available … Parsley is needed in every Arab home” recalled one Arabic woman who immigrated twentyfive years ago. Language barriers were a further challenge, as recalled another non-recent Arabic immigrant: When I first came here, it was me and two kids, and we had nobody here. We went to Safeway, and back home, we had the cans of beef (bollabeef), so we saw the can, and we never paid attention to it (laughs). So, our first meal in Canada was dog food.

The isolation experienced by many non-recent South Asian and Arabic immigrants to Edmonton is slowly being alleviated, although recent immigrants from South Asia, Western Asia, and the Middle East overwhelmingly continue to settle in Toronto and Montreal, respectively.28 A symbol of the growth of these particular communities in Edmonton is the availability of ethnic foods. The proliferation of South Asian and Arabic grocery stores, and availability of these particular ethnic foods in supermarkets has occurred only recently in Edmonton, within the past six years. The immigrant Muslim women reported that grocery shopping was an especially time-consuming process because of the necessity of reading labels to check for proscribed ingredients (i.e., pork products). Thus ethnic groceries, once available, provide a haven for these immigrant women. In these stores, one can find the same products, with the same packaging as back home. Even growing arrays of convenience foods, such as frozen rotis, are available. Ethnic grocery stores become a cultural space where women can connect with others, and recall home.

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However, the familiar is not always equivalent with security and comfort, as foodscapes, including foods and grocery stores, may evoke complex emotions.29 Furthermore, the costs for many foods found in these small stores are high, not only in comparison with food prices back home, but also with large supermarket chains that are now attempting to meet diverse populations’ needs. Study participants who had access to transportation regularly patronized such supermarkets rather than small ethnic grocers as a strategy of stretching household food dollars, thereby foregoing the security of ethnic grocery stores. Yet Edmonton foodscapes are rapidly changing, exemplified by the stocking and display of appropriate foods required in making celebratory dishes for Diwali and Eid in mainstream supermarkets – a great contrast to the above descriptions of food shopping provided by nonrecent immigrant women. Through their food work, the women impart to their children what it means to be Arabic, South Asian or Canadian, Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim. Because food consumption and transactions symbolize group identity, the women must teach their children the social meanings of food pre/ proscriptions. This has not been easy in Canada, where many children’s friends and society at large do not share the same food meanings, as demonstrated by this exchange among South Asian women: 1: Yeah of course for us and for our kids it’s hard, but I try to pack a snack, lunch from home. We feed them a heavy breakfast, like parathas [fried flat bread], and teach them at home to abstain from meat, but it’s hard for the kids. 2: Our children also abstain from these things. 3: But we can always make [halal] chicken, beef at home for them. 2: Yeah, yeah. 4: I think it’s our teaching about our religion, we make them understand. 5: Yeah, it’s hard for young children to understand, because when we go to McDonald’s they ask for chicken burgers but when we say no, they don’t understand. 3: Yeah it’s hard, because at least we can eat fillet fish burgers, but you [looking at 1, who is a vegetarian Hindu], it must be hard for your family. 1: Yeah it’s tough, but we have no choice.

In this exchange among Hindu and Muslim South Asians, we see a number of strategies used by mothers to assist their children. First, there is formal teaching about religious beliefs and requirements. Second, the

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women pack school lunches, as opposed to allowing children to purchase lunch in the cafeteria. Third, some women provide their children with substantial breakfasts in order to decrease the chance that their children will become hungry and snack on proscribed foods. Fourth, the families rarely eat out, because of the difficulties of finding appropriate foods (e.g., halal). Because of these dietary proscriptions, most socialization occurs within ethnic/religious group boundaries, thereby diminishing the potential difficulties associated with cross-group food transactions. For example, some Arabic women would not send their children to non-Arabic children’s birthday parties, worried that “… you don’t trust what they’re going to eat, or if they’re going to be taken care of.” Other Arabic women felt more comfortable sharing dietary restrictions with non-Muslims, and noted that Canadians were respectful towards dietary concerns, as seen in this woman’s experience: “My daughter went to daycare, and I told the manager that she can’t eat pig, pork, so she doesn’t serve it at all in the daycare.” A common concern voiced by immigrant women centres on children’s diverging food taste expectations. One complaint centred on children refusing to eat meals, as shared by this woman: “They used to eat whatever we used to give them in India. But here … they want munchies and snacks.” The women were consistently frustrated with their children’s refusal to eat what was prepared, not because of the extra work entailed in meeting children’s desires (although this was an issue), but because their children were frequently preferring non-traditional foods. Because of the significance of food in marking identity, the women were concerned that children’s rejection of traditional cuisine marked a rejection of traditional values and world views. Children pressure their mothers for the inclusion of new foods, cooked in new ways, which they may have consumed at school or friends’ homes. One South Asian woman explained: As far as we [my husband and I] are concerned, we are set in our food habits, but our kids brought a lot of change … because when they eat pizza, spaghetti at school and they like it, so I try that. Now it’s changed a lot, you can’t stick to the same meal pattern.

As migrants to a new country, the continuance of traditional food patterns is a means of connecting with home. Yet the food desires of children prompt a foray into new foods and tastes, symbolizing the process of adjusting to life in Canada … The incorporation of new foods is not

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without adjustment – pizza and pasta, for example, become “Indianized.” The types of toppings, sauces, and spices are modified so as to be more acceptable to immigrants’ palates. By modifying the food item so that it is less foreign to the palate, its symbolic meanings change. In turn, the new food becomes more familiar and less threatening before the items are incorporated into the body.30 Thus, dietary acculturation is not unilateral, but a complicated process of give and take with various food traditions. The words of this non-recent Arabic migrant suggest that incorporating new foods into dietary practices alludes to the process of adjusting to unfamiliar lifeways: “I learned how to cook the unfamiliar vegetables [e.g., broccoli] and now we eat them; we accepted them.” We suggest that this process mimics that of adjusting to life in Canada, as different ideas, habits, and behaviours become selectively incorporated, and parallel the development of local heterogeneities in the globalization process.31 Although meal patterns have changed and new foods have been incorporated into immigrant families’ cuisines, the importance of traditional foods does not diminish. The women reported that at least one meal per day ought to consist of traditional food elements and be presented in a customary manner. They perceive that it is a necessary, moral issue, to ensure that children incorporate what it means to be South Asian or Arabic through the symbolic consumption of ethnic cuisines. Without eating at least one traditional meal per day, the women spoke of not feeling “satisfied,” clearly demonstrated by this South Asian woman: “Yeah, one eats these Canadian foods like a sandwich, pasta, etc. but you don’t feel satisfied; but once you eat roti and sabji [flat bread and vegetable curry] you feel satisfied.” The importance of traditional cuisine and foods rests not only in their physical attributes, but in how these foods satisfy emotional needs. They serve to connect with oneself, and to recall the foods, tastes, and people of “home.” Contextualizing Gender and Ethnic Identity We have presented how Arabic and South Asian immigrant women in Edmonton have used food’s symbolic nuances to construct and represent gender and ethnicity. The shared realities voiced by these particular women highlight common experiences of immigrants, and in turn underscore how Canadian lifestyles shape family foodways for both newcomers and long-term residents. Similarities between these immigrant women are due to their shared experiences of entry into Canada

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based on family connections, their emphasis on roles as mothers and wives, the commonly experienced shift from extended to nuclear family structures, their relocation to a Canadian city with relatively small South Asian and Arabic immigrant communities, and their marginalized political-economic status. The downward shift in economic status so commonly experienced was emphasized by all participants. Approximately half of the participants were poor, living below Canada’s Low Income Cut-Offs. Arguably, part of the reason for the economic disadvantages immigrants face is political – policies that led to nonrecognition of their credentials and experience earned elsewhere. This results in underemployment.32 Financial difficulties shape women’s dietary choices and shopping strategies, as they aim to meet their husbands’ and children’s food desires. Most of the women shared experiences of grocery shopping that highlight linguistic and cultural obstacles in adjusting to Canadian society. This was particularly evident in non-recent immigrant women’s recollections of when traditional foods were unavailable and South Asian and Arabic communities were extremely small in Edmonton. The recent increased accessibility of ethnic foods and stores has helped women purchase food elements required to re-enact “home.” Physical availability of ethnic foods does not equate with accessibility, however, as the costs of many of these food items can be quite high, especially when considered relative both to prices in home countries and income in Canada. Mainstream markets are responding to increasing diversity among Edmontonians, but for recent immigrants in particular, access to these stores is constrained by transportation and language barriers. Socio-economic contexts have resulted in the need for immigrant men to work long hours, and for many women to enter the workforce. Differences in women’s employment patterns were evident within and between participants: more non-recent immigrants were employed, and more South Asian women, both recent and non-recent immigrants, worked for wages. One reason for this pattern may be the higher language capabilities and education reported by South Asian women, particularly among younger women who had pursued “English-medium” schooling in India or Pakistan. Regardless of whether or not women were employed outside the home, the vast majority retained domestic duties, with occasional “help” from husbands with domestic tasks. Only in a few instances did a shift in gender roles and relations ensue, with men entering the “woman’s domain” – the kitchen. Women’s primacy in food work, including negotiating their families’ food desires, is

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arguably a greater challenge post-migration, as children more aggressively assert their identities via food choices. Accordingly, traditional household gastropolitics patterns continue, in the sense that women prioritize others’ food choices before their own while negotiating family dynamics and gender/age hierarchies. However, change is also evident based on shifts in family structure and economic status. We have suggested that women bear the burden of teaching their children cultural/religious values (e.g., dietary rules of consumption), thereby moulding children’s understandings of what it means to be South Asian/Arabic/Canadian. This is not to suggest that there are no tensions around identity and food consumption choices at “home.” Rather, we suggest that migration may further stress parent–child relations, as children are exposed to a variety of foods through the media, school, and peers, and want to fit in by consuming these foods. As Claude Fischler has expounded in his theory of incorporation, the foods consumed directly influence our identities, through physiological and symbolic constructions.33 So, children actively assert their desire to Canadianize, or at least to be like their friends, symbolized in part through the incorporation of “Canadian” foodstuffs (a wide array of foods, most commonly including pasta and pizza, as defined by participants), while parents, particularly mothers, aim to maintain and propagate customs and values that they cherish through the provision of traditional meals. This tension between children and their mothers is not inflexible. In fact, the women incorporated “Canadian” foodstuffs into their culinary repertoire to varying degrees. We also suggest that women are important conduits of their family’s dietary acculturation, as they negotiate family members’ competing desires and incorporate new food elements and dishes into traditional cuisines. Immigrant women value their habitual cuisines, and through continuation of their culinary practices, evoke and connect with “home” and all the sensory and emotional experiences that this conjures. Nonrecent immigrants, however, appear more nostalgic, idealizing foodways and lifeways to a greater extent than recent arrivals to Canada. Recent immigrants also report a change in foodways back home, including a greater availability of “junk foods” and foreign fast-food than recalled by non-recent immigrants. … In these conversations, women emphasized their relatively weaker financial status in Canada, and their critique of lifestyles in Edmonton – particularly the pace of life and the need to work long hours to

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maintain, let alone improve, economic status. The similarities in their experiences serve to highlight common issues that may be addressed by both local and regional policymakers and activists. This is not to suggest that experiences of immigrants are uniform, either within or between communities. Differences within and between these two groups of women are expected to be highlighted through individual interviews, where the nuances of women’s stories of migration and settlement, located in both time and place, can be teased apart. Conclusion Food conveys meanings that are actively used by immigrant women in the construction of self. By means of menu planning, grocery shopping, and cooking, women assert their individual connotations of womanhood and ethnicity. Via eating and the associated symbolic meanings of food, identity is evoked and embodied. The women’s food choices represent and echo the process of adjusting to life in Edmonton, and the course of their shifting subjectivities. Identity is also socially constructed, thus how women talk about food also reveals how they are situated in relation to their families and communities, within a specific sociopolitico-economic locus. Food practices are not only a symbolic expression of self, but also reflect social inequities … The issues and struggles these women face, such as providing appropriate home-cooked meals, balancing food budgets, and negotiating meal composition, are not unique to immigrant women – Canadian women commonly share these concerns. As such, immigrant women’s voices provide a window for understanding broader Canadian concerns.

NOTES 1 G. Buijs, ed., Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities (Oxford: Berg, 1996). 2 S.M. George, When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 372; I. Hyman, S. Guruge, R. Mason, J. Gould, N. Stuckless, T. Tang, H. Teffera, and G. Mekonnen, “Post-migration Changes in Gender Relations among Ethiopian Couples Living in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Nursing Research 36 (2004): 74–89. 3 D.E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

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4 D.R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 54. 5 A. Beardsworth and T. Keil, Sociology on the Menu (London: Routledge, 1997); D. Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London: Sage, 1996); P. Rozin, “Psychological Perspectives on Food: Preferences and Avoidances,” in M. Harris and E.B. Ross, eds., Food and Evolution: Toward a Theory of Human Food Habits (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), 181–205. 6 Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat. 7 For example, J.G. Goode, K. Curtis, and J. Theophano, “Meal Formats, Meal Cycles, and Menu Negotiations in the Maintenance of an ItalianAmerican Community,” in M. Douglas, ed., Food in the Social Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), 143–218; S. Guendelman and A.M. Siega-Riz, “Infant Feeding Practices and Maternal Dietary Intake among Latino Immigrants in California,” Journal of Immigrant Health 4 (2002): 137–46; K. Ray, The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in BengaliAmerican Households (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004); J. Satia-Abouta, R.E. Patterson, M.L. Neuhouser, and J. Elder, “Dietary Acculturation: Applications to Nutrition Research and Dietetics,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 102 (2002): 1105–18; H. Vallianatos and K. Raine, “Migration and Obesity: Social Determinants of Overweight/ Obesity among Canadian Immigrants,” Obesity Reviews 6 (Suppl. 1) (2005):  96. 8 H.R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 9 Diner, Hungering; J. Satia-Abouta, R.E. Patterson, A.R. Kristal, C. Teh, and S.-P. Tu, “Psychosocial Predictors of Diet and Acculturation in Chinese American and Chinese Canadian Women,” Ethnicity and Health 7 (2002): 21–3; H. Vallianatos, X. Ramos-Salas, and K. Raine, “Social Determinants of Overweight/Obesity among Three Immigrant Communities,” Obesity Research 13 (2005): A157. 10 C.M. Counihan, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999); M. DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); W.A. McIntosh and M. Zey, “Women as Gatekeepers of Food Consumption: A Sociological Critique,” Food and Foodways 3 (1989): 317–32. 11 The labels … were self-defined…. Participants who identified as South Asian were from Pakistan and North India. Those who identified as Arab came from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, although the majority were from Lebanon and identified as Palestinians. Of course, there is a great deal of cultural heterogeneity within South Asian and Arabic

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Helen Vallianatos and Kim Raine communities, and this is reflected in food practices. However, broad culinary patterns were evident within Arabic and South Asian women’s foodrelated experiences and cuisines. Statistics Canada Community Profiles – Edmonton, available from www12.statcan.ca/english/Profil01/Details (2001) (accessed 3 Mar. 2005). N.W. Jabbra and J.G. Jabbra, Voyageurs to a Rocky Shore: The Lebanese and Syrians of Nova Scotia (Halifax: Dalhousie University, 1984); H. Ralston, The Lived Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada: The Interconnections of Race, Class and Gender (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996). Statistics Canada, Edmonton. D.L. Morgan, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997). Ralston, Lived Experience. T. Chui, Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada: Process, Progress and Prospects (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2003). G. Man, “Gender, Work and Migration: Deskilling Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada,” Women’s Studies International Forum 27 (2004): 135–48; Ralston, Lived Experience. Strategic Research and Statistics, Recent Immigrants in Metropolitan Areas – Edmonton (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2005). A. Appadurai, “Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8 (1981): 494–511. D. Jacobson and S. Wadley, Women in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); Z. Zaatari, “The Culture of Motherhood: An Avenue for Women’s Civil Participation in South Lebanon,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 2 (2006): 33–64. I. Maclagan, “Food and Gender in a Yemeni Community,” in S. Zubaida and R. Tapper, eds., A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (London: Tauris Parke, 2000): 159–72. Ray, Migrants. D.G. Mandelbaum, Women’s Seclusion and Men’s Honor: Sex Roles in North India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). For example, N. Charles and M. Kerr, Women, Food and Families (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Counihan Anthropology; DeVault Feeding; B. Harriss, “The Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia,” in J. Drze, A. Sen, and A. Hussain, eds., The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995): 224–97; Lupton, Food; Maclagan, “Food and Gender”; McIntosh and Zey, “Women as Gatekeepers.” L. Harbottle, Food for Health, Food for Wealth: Ethnic and Gender Identities in British Iranian Communities (New York: Berghahn, 2000).

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27 P. Mankekar, “India Shopping: Indian Grocery Stores and Transnational Configurations of Belonging,” in J.L. Watson and M.L. Caldwell, eds., The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 197–214. 28 Strategic Research and Statistics, Recent Immigrants in Metropolitan Areas – Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2005). 29 Mankekar, “India shopping.” 30 C. Fischler, “Food, Self and Identity,” Social Science Information 27 (1988): 275–92. 31 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 32 Chui, Longitudinal Survey; Man, “Gender.” 33 Fischler, “Food.”

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PART EIGHT History, Identity, and Belonging

Feminist historians and anti-racist scholars have challenged the once popular myth that the post-1945 era ushered in the end of Canada’s racist immigration policy. According to this liberal thesis, Canada, though initially hesitant to admit prospective immigrants, and unashamed in its declaration to keep Asian and other historically “non-preferred” migration to a minimum, began in 1947 to open its doors, including to Eastern European refugees and family members of ethnic Canadians who sponsored them. The progressive liberalization of immigration policy that occurred over the next twenty years, this line of argument concludes, inevitably culminated in the 1967 universal, or colour blind, points system that has produced today’s multiracial Canada. Certainly, postwar Canada witnessed mass migration, and the arrival of numerous Europeans bolstered the efforts particularly of white “ethnic” elites to gain recognition as a “third force” (after the Anglo and French “founding groups”) in Canadian politics and society. The liberal interpretation, however, ignored the racism of post-1945 policy, as evidenced, for instance, by the introduction of temporary worker systems involving women and men from historically “less-preferred” countries in the Caribbean, Asia, and elsewhere. As Part Four’s Introduction explains, these workers were used to help Canada meet its shortages in occupations such as domestic service and the produce industry, and then told to return home. Several factors, including persistent lobbying and international pressure, led to modest reforms allowing some to apply for landed immigrant status. At the same time, postwar immigration, especially the increased presence after 1967 of groups from previously non-preferred sources like South Asia and South East Asia, has altered the racial make-up of immigrant flows, with significant if

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uneven impact on Canadian society. Even as restrictions and controls continue, the diversity in race, ethnicity, and country of origin for immigrants to Canada continues apace in the early twenty-first century. This brief historical and historiographical context helps us to consider how immigrant groups and “hyphenated” Canadians have constructed gender, racial, ethnic, familial, and other identities, negotiated the racial constraints of Canadian admission requirements and workplaces, and developed a sense of belonging. A feature important to all these activities is history – how people interpret their past and group history in Canada. Gender provides a critical tool for assessing individual and community identity-formation, and the histories informing such identities, even if it is not always the single most important factor involved. An intersectional mode of analysis requires us to interrogate whether and to what degree gender, along with other factors such as class and race, produced the outcome under study. All three authors deal with the themes of history, identity, and belonging in different ways. A contribution to the critiques of the liberal interpretation of post-1945 Canadian immigration policy, Laura Madokoro’s chapter focuses on events following the official repeal in 1947 of the exclusionary 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, the crowning piece in a series of measures that restricted Chinese immigration by excluding the wives and children of the mostly male workers who comprised the community in Canada. Using the documented correspondence, she highlights how Canadian officials resisted pressure from community leaders and religious groups to facilitate the entry of Chinese wives and children on the grounds that Chinese families “deviated” from the “Canadian family” and thus would endanger the nation’s domestic stability at a time of heightened Cold War anxiety. The debates over illegal “paper sons” and “paper families,” like the anxieties prompted by China’s “fall” to Communism in 1949, she argues, reflected both the responses of Chinese Canadians who had historically been denied the right to sponsor family to Canada, and a fundamental conflict between family reunification as a basic human right and Ottawa’s desire to control the racial character of the Canadian nation. Karen Flynn focuses attention on the Caribbean-trained and British-trained Caribbean nurses who entered Canada from the 1950s to the 1980s as part of a Canadian strategy to address an acute nursing shortage at home by admitting – as landed immigrants – professionals “of exceptional merit.” She uses oral history to give voice to these women, whose narratives reveal much about the challenges they faced from their Canadian professional

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colleagues, and how they maintained a sense of dignity. She also suggests that timing of arrival and other factors help to explain whether or not these nurses acknowledged the racism they experienced. Frances Swyripa explores the themes of history, identity, and belonging through a gendered analysis of the iconography of six churches in contemporary Edmonton – one an Anglo-Protestant church representing “establishment” British groups, another a francophone and bilingual one that includes French Canadian and Metis parishioners, and four Eastern European parishes. Her chapter analyses what the iconography says about how different groups commemorate their historical and contemporary understandings about their status in Canada. She suggests that Canadian ethnic groups and their churches use “sacred space” as politicized and gendered spaces to promote new secular identities in both the homeland and Canada. Images of male or female saints and secular figures, flags, military memorabilia, and other objects speak to a group’s sense of place and belonging, one based on interpretations of Canadian symbols, homeland heritage, and the group’s historical evolution as a community in Edmonton – in short, a diasporic identity. How did Chinese Canadians respond to the restrictions on Chinese admission during the early postwar era? Who were the “paper sons” and “paper families”? How did the Cold War buttress Canada’s distrust of Chinese families? Why did Caribbean nurses immigrate to Canada and how do they recall their experiences? How did deskilling in nursing affect them? Why did some nurses “fail” to acknowledge the racism they encountered in Canadian hospitals? What does “the Mother of God wears a Maple Leaf mean”? If gender is an important category of analysis, why does Swyripa suggest that “gender is irrelevant to the creation and articulation of collective and group agendas”?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Agnew, Vijay. Where I Come From. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003. Bannerji, Himani. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000. Das Gupta, Tania. Racism and Paid Work. Toronto: Garamond, 1996. Flynn, Karen, Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

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Iacovetta, Franca. Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. James Carl E., and Adrienne Shadd, eds. Talking about Identity: Encounters in Race, Ethnicity and Language. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2001. Li, Peter. Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998. Satzewich, Vic. Racism and the Incorporation of Foreign Labour: Farm Labour Migration to Canada since 1945. New York: Routledge, 1991. Satzewich, Vic, and Lloyd Wong, eds. Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Sharma, Nandita. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Swyripa, Frances. Storied Landscapes: Ethno-religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010.

“Slotting” Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947–1967 Lau r a Madok oro

Introduction For over twenty years, the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act limited migration from China to students, merchants, and diplomats who were permitted to enter and remain in Canada on a temporary basis only. All other Chinese migrants were excluded, leaving the almost forty thousand Chinese who had come in previous decades to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway and the gold mines of British Columbia cut off from wives and children who remained in China.1 The “Chinese Exclusion Act” was the brutal culmination of decades of restrictions and capitation taxes that had been particularly punishing on the Chinese family unit as a whole, not merely on those migrants who came to Canada. Not surprisingly, then, the Chinese in Canada greeted news of the repeal in 1947 and the anticipation of new arrivals in the community with “exhilaration.”2 Their celebrations were short-lived. General immigration historiographies in Canada situate the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act as a tremendous achievement and assume the period from 1947 to 1967 to be a time of progressive liberalization, culminating with the universal points system enshrined in the “colour blind” 1967 Immigration Act.3 Yet scholars interested in the history of Chinese migration to Canada present the end of exclusion in a very different light, suggesting that it amounted to getting “half a loaf” that consisted of “little more than a token gesture.”4 An examination of general immigration policies from 1947 to 1967 confirms that repeal was largely This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version, from Canadian Historical Review 93, 1 (March 2012): 25–56.

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symbolic and that the two decades that followed formed an important transitional period in the history of progressive immigration rules. The victory of the Chinese Communist Party in October 1949 and the subsequent establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) heightened historic economic, political, and social concerns about Chinese migration to Canada. Demographic fears and questions about the allegiance of Chinese migrants led to continued restrictions on Chinese migration at a time when Western liberal democracies were attempting to demonstrate their superiority over the communist alternative by actively promoting democratic ideals of equality and justice while resettling refugees from Soviet oppression in Europe and forging a domestic consensus that privileged prosperity and conformism.5 What ensued in Canada was a contorted dance aimed at liberalizing immigration rules and regulations on the surface while safeguarding restrictive measures deeply embedded in the immigration process. The continued discrimination against Chinese family migrants was intimately connected to the Canadian state’s appreciation of specific kinds of families during the early postwar reconstruction years and during the heightened tensions of the Cold War. Scholars such as Mona Gleason and Franca Iacovetta have demonstrated that the postwar family was valued by the Canadian state as an ordering and disciplining mechanism where “cooperative adherence” to a democratic way of life could be formulated.6 The Canadian state’s vision of the model household entailed a nuclear family unit where men and women occupied traditional gender roles. While some scholars attribute the resulting pressure for cookie-cutter cohesion to the fear and insecurity engendered by the Cold War, others, such as Dominique Marshall and Nancy Christie, point to the more fundamental connection between idealized family images and the imperative of the social welfare state. They offer important critiques about the manner in which traditional gender roles have been, and continue to be, promoted by the Canadian state and its programs.7 The focus on the family as a unit of analysis has led to remarkable shifts in our understanding of marginality and dysfunction in gender relations, especially through explorations of the tensions created by the presentation of idealized and largely unattainable models against the reality of a diversity of family forms.8 This approach can be developed beyond the household to consider how state perspectives of family contribute to the marginalization of entire social groups. While some scholarship on the migration of European and refugee families after the Second World has demonstrated that

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immigration, insofar as integration is concerned, bred conformity, the following assessment is concerned with structural issues. Specifically, it is concerned with how conceptions of family directed the development of sponsorship policies in the postwar period and created unequal opportunities for Chinese families who were pressed to the periphery of desirability. … From 1947 to 1967, Canadian policymakers worked with the idea that only a limited number of Chinese immigrants could be admitted to Canada without rupturing the social and economic fabric of the country. Bureaucrats and politicians refused to simultaneously admit greater numbers of Chinese relatives and resettle substantive numbers of Chinese refugees. There were only so many “slots” for Chinese migrants, regardless of the growing number of migration categories in which people could move.9 The campaign to expand family sponsorship rights for Chinese families in Canada, led by Chinese Canadians, fused with refugee resettlement initiatives in the 1960s only to encounter the Canadian state’s resistance to opening the doors to Chinese migration too wide. Official investigations into illegal migration practices and persistent doubts about the nature of Chinese families made the Canadian state reluctant to appear too welcoming.10 The result was that the campaigns for family sponsorship rights and refugee resettlement made only modest progress, forcing us to interrogate the pace and depth of change during the 1947–67 transition period and the very nature of postwar Canadian society.11 Excluding Migrants, Excluding Families From 1885 to 1947, Chinese families bore the brunt of Canada’s exclusionary immigration regime. The expensive head tax reduced the amount of money that migrants could send home, and restrictions on entry separated husbands, wives, and children for years. From 1885 to 1923, legislators inserted clauses in successive versions of the Immigration Act that made it particularly difficult for Chinese women to migrate to Canada, as admission was largely dependent on the male’s eligibility. As Enakshi Dua has argued, the government hoped that by limiting female migration Chinese men would only remain in Canada temporarily.12 Moreover, Canadian officials feared the kinds of families Chinese migrants might bring or create. Such fears were voiced by  Mr  T.G. McBride in the House of Commons debate on Chinese

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exclusion: “The eastern ideals of morality and citizenship are entirely different to ours … In China and Japan the men can have as many wives as they want, and there is no question but that this and similar views are drilled into our children where they are educated with the children of orientals. We do not want such ideas to be propagated here.”13 As a result of such attitudes, by 1930 there were only 1,302 Chinese women in contrast to 48,305 Chinese men in Canada.14 In addition to the blatant discrimination enshrined in the country’s immigration legislation, the federal government passed a series of associated Orders in Council that specifically discouraged family migration and encouraged Chinese migrants who returned home for a visit to stay there permanently.15 On 16 September 1930 Cabinet passed Order in Council (PC) 2115, which permitted only Canadian citizens to sponsor wives and children to Canada. In the same year, it also enacted PC 1378, which made it very difficult for the Chinese in Canada to obtain citizenship. They had to obtain permission from the minister of the interior in China before applying for naturalization and then had to advertise the renunciation of their Chinese citizenship in two Chinese newspapers. They then had to wait before filing the Declaration of Intention and the Petition for Citizenship and wait again before appearing before a judge to be examined. Not surprisingly, few Chinese opted to be naturalized. From 1920 to 1947, only 563 Chinese made this choice.16 Even upon naturalization, applicants had to meet a five-year residency rule before becoming eligible to sponsor wives and children to Canada. It was very difficult for even the most basic Chinese family unit to live together in Canada. According to Peter Li, there were 20,141  separated families in Canada in 1941. This number decreased to 12,882 in 1951, but ten years later 5,380 families still awaited reunification.17 When the Canadian government repealed the Chinese Immigration Act on 14 May 1947, hope soared among Chinese communities across the country that the time for Chinese families to be together in Canada had finally arrived. Their hopes were quickly dashed. The initial euphoria around the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act gave way to disappointment as state involvement in the daily lives of Canadian families, facilitated by the growing social welfare apparatus, fused with systemic discrimination vis-à-vis Chinese migrants to perpetuate the exclusionary practices of previous decades. At the heart of the government’s approach to Chinese migrants after 1947 was a belief that the nature of Chinese families was inconsistent with its postwar vision of the country. If family migration from China was not

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carefully controlled, severe damage would be done to the demographic makeup of the nation. While certain camps believed family migration should be facilitated, the dominant school of thought among Canadian policymakers held that too many immigrants from China would irreparably change the character of the Canadian nation … Even after the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, all migration from China continued to be governed by PC 2115, which required sponsors to be Canadian citizens. After obtaining Canadian citizenship, Chinese Canadians could sponsor their wives or unmarried children (under the age of eighteen) so that they could be reunited in Canada. However, they were prohibited from sponsoring other family members, since policymakers believed that broad categories of sponsorship would create an influx beyond the level of desirability.18 Part of the fear stemmed from the sheer numbers of Chinese migrants who officials believed were desperate to enter the country as a result of the protracted civil war and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The other component was concern about the integrity of the immigration program in China. Internal correspondence captures how the lack of documentation in China, such as birth and marriage certificates, led to charges of “numerous and repeated attempts to secure the admission to Canada of persons of Chinese origin by misrepresentation and fraud.”19 These fears meant that the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act initially engendered only cosmetic changes. Mr Wong Goes to Ottawa The continued obstacles and limitations to family sponsorship after repeal became a source of anger and frustration for the Chinese in Canada. In Vancouver, Foon Sien Wong emerged as an eloquent spokesperson for equality on immigration issues. Foon Sien grew up in Cumberland, BC, and was one of the first Chinese students to attend the University of British Columbia, where he studied in the Faculty of Law. He later worked as a court interpreter and translator and garnered significant notoriety during the criminal investigation into the murder of Janet Smith.20 Within the Chinese community, Foon Sien was largely respected for his pro-Nationalist activities during the war and his efforts on behalf of the Chinese in Vancouver. He became the president of the city’s Chinese Benevolent Association (CBA) in 1948. When the repeal of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act failed to produce equality of opportunity on migration issues, Foon Sien and the

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CBA, a self-described “protective organization,” began their campaign to expand Chinese family sponsorship rights, using arguments based on the principles of equality and justice to make their case.21 Foon Sien and his supporters maintained that full membership in Canadian society involved more than legal formalities: it required that Chinese Canadians be able to enjoy the same rights as others, including family reunification. Foon Sien claimed that in the case of Chinese Canadians, this right was all the more essential as they had been specifically targeted by exclusionary legislation that inhibited normal family life.22 … Issues around Chinese migration became more pressing in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. While Canadian officials were initially quite optimistic about Mao Zedong, especially given the corrupt nature of Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime by the end of the Chinese Civil War, the establishment of the PRC created an urgent desire for family reunification among those Chinese in Canada who feared for the safety and welfare of their families under the Communist regime.23 As seven hundred thousand people fled from the Chinese mainland into the British colony of Hong Kong in late 1949, Foon Sien pressed Ottawa for expanded family migration on humanitarian grounds. The presence of almost two million people in Hong Kong placed a huge burden on the social and economic resources of the colony. Housing, in particular, was at a premium and thousands of people lived in atrocious conditions. Newspaper images showed hillsides crowded with makeshift huts, and missionary reports described hovels made of scrap wood, covered by gunnysacks and palm leaves.24 Foon Sien claimed that the relatives of Chinese Canadians were flocking to Hong Kong “and becoming destitute while living there.”25 Foon Sien petitioned the Canadian government to allow those Chinese who had applied for Canadian citizenship but were still waiting to receive it to sponsor their wives and unmarried children in the meantime. He believed this policy would help people leave their difficult circumstances in Hong Kong more quickly. While Canadian politicians were somewhat sympathetic to his pleas, immigration officials insisted on processing naturalization applications slowly, convinced that to do otherwise would result in the immigration program being overwhelmed by Chinese migrants. The department’s deputy minister, Hugh Keenleyside, calculated that if all the men in Canada “took advantage” of the new regulations, sponsoring a wife and two children each, there would be about 66,000 new Chinese immigrants.26 Other

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departmental estimates, using the same model of the nuclear family, estimated a more reserved total of 36,875.27 Despite – or perhaps because of – the wide variance, these estimates appeared alarmingly large from the vantage point of officials charged with managing the immigration program. The solution was to slow the pace at which naturalization was granted to the 22,000 eligible Chinese in Canada and to limit the number of sponsorship opportunities available to Chinese Canadians. Between January and October 1947, 827 applications for naturalization were filed but only 88 applications were approved. Investigations into the identity of the potential immigrants sometimes took as long as eighteen months. As one official discerned, if people still had to be naturalized to sponsor family members, the numbers admitted could be spread out over a longer period of years.28 Similarly, the government refused Foon Sien’s request to speed the admission of dependants on the grounds that there “would be a flood of applications,” which the government “could not possibly cope with.”29 … Arguing for the Chinese Family Family was the dominant framework in which the Canadian state viewed migration from China in the postwar period. It was a context fed by a faith in the science of demographics, and it was further fuelled by a perceived need to uphold idealized models of the Canadian family in the postwar period. As Nancy Christie has observed, the Canadian family was the focus of “an intense yearning for stability,” and the attention it received in the postwar period was unprecedented, as the Canadian state incorporated particular ideas of family into successive modernist projects.30 Stable and modern families were essential to Canada’s nation-building enterprises, which required families that were loyal and, to a large extent, dependent on the Canadian state. The arguments Foon Sien and the CBA presented for expanded family sponsorship rights, based on the grounds that family was of special significance in Chinese society therefore operated at cross-purposes. On the one hand, appeals to humanitarianism resonated with the Canadian state’s postwar liberal internationalism. However, indications that Chinese Canadians did not conceptualize family households in the same way as officials in Ottawa inflamed fears that loosening restrictions on family migration would lead to large numbers of Chinese immigrants and the establishment of families in Canada that differed from

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the postwar ideal. With the growth of the social welfare state after the Second World War, the family was seen as a critical arena for developing the Canadian nation along particular social, economic, and cultural lines. The structuring and disciplining role of the family began far beyond the borders of the Canadian state and controlled the character and composition of the immigrant populace. The very ideology and structure of family among Chinese migrants cast doubt on their assimilability and their commitment to a “Canadian way of life.” There was a sense in Ottawa that Chinese migrants were too loyal to their families. Ironically, this concern affirmed the conservative critique that through the rise of the social welfare state, the government was usurping loyalties previously reserved for the family.31 The government wanted families to respond to a social ideal that was in actual fact a state ideal. The assumption was that, because of their loyalty to their families, Chinese migrants had no respect for the authority of the Canadian state and the legal terrain of the country.32 This oppressive context was the framework in which Foon Sien presented his annual petitions to Ottawa for expanded family sponsorship rights. When the Chinese Benevolent Association began its campaign for Chinese family sponsorship rights in 1949, it did so largely in response to the decades of discriminatory legislation that had been especially hard on Chinese families. At first, the CBA focused almost exclusively on the right to sponsor children under the age of eighteen, a right enjoyed by other Canadians. In 1950, after calculating the potential demographic impact of any change to the age limit, the government agreed to allow Chinese Canadians to sponsor children under the age of twentyone. In 1951, this limit was raised briefly to twenty-five “on humanitarian grounds,” given the unsettled conditions in China.33 Significantly, this apparent victory for Foon Sien came about only after the government determined that the number of Chinese migrating would not rise dramatically if the breadth of sponsorship categories remained limited. This trade-off helps explain why Foon Sien’s broader campaign to expand eligible family sponsorship categories beyond those for wives and children met with tremendous resistance in Ottawa. Foon Sien emphasized the importance of family to Chinese Canadians. He intended his argument to be a point of connection, but decision-makers in Ottawa perceived only difference.34 When Foon Sien told immigration officials that because Chinese were “a people whose society has always been based on the family unit,” he was attempting to convince officials about

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the positive effect that the admission of Chinese relatives would have on Canadian society. However, when he subsequently recommended that the government permit the admission of “close relatives” including brothers and sisters, fiancées and fiancés, and orphaned grandchildren (whose grandparents lived in Canada), officials were reminded that the generous definition of a family unit in China was a minefield in terms of migration to Canada.35 Historian Cynthia R. Comacchio has stressed the legitimate variations among social groups in defining the family unit; however, immigration officials in the 1950s tended to reject alternatives to their own image of the model family.36 They objected in particular to the CBA’s presentation of close relatives, viewing it instead as a conspiratorial way of challenging Canada’s immigration system. Reservations about the integrity of the immigration program in China, which had first surfaced in the 1920s, were reinforced.37 Perversely, Foon Sien’s campaign bolstered the perception among officials that because of the “closeness of family ties among the Chinese,” they would do whatever was necessary to get to Canada.38 To a certain extent, Foon Sien was attuned to the fear that pervaded official Ottawa about the impact of expanding Chinese family sponsorship rights. While he charged that it was difficult to reconcile continued discrimination “with the democratic idea of the Canadian government and people,”39 he also assumed what can only be described as a selfloathing stance in reassuring both the government and the Canadian public that the changes he and the CBA were proposing would not bring about a fundamental change to the character of the Canadian nation. Foon Sien pointed to practicalities that limited the number of potential migrants, noting that people were “trapped in Communist-ruled China.”40 According to Foon Sien, the Canadian state did not have to fear an influx of Chinese migrants, because few were able to obtain permission to leave. He also claimed that “a large proportion of those relatives in Canada who could have sponsored immigrants are either dead or have lost touch with their families completely.”41 While federal officials remained dubious, such reassurances appealed to media outlets that supported limited relaxations. An editorial in Regina’s Leader-Post reassured its readers that Foon Sien’s “plea is not for an open-door policy of Asiatic immigration. He is not asking for democratic equality in this respect. He is asking only for equality in immigration policy that will permit the consummation of family unity.”42 Foon Sien’s appeal to a principle of equality was a powerful argument at a time when belief in

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universal human rights was blossoming and the impact of decolonizing states was being felt globally. Yet fears about the demographic impact of Chinese migration were deeply ingrained in the minds of Canadian immigration officials and the bureaucratic culture in Ottawa. As a result, those responsible for administering Canada’s immigration program often blocked attempts at reform introduced by other sectors of society. One such instance was the case of Leong Hung Hing, an elderly Vancouver chef who wanted to sponsor his son who had been born to his second wife. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1953. At issue was whether the children of concubines were eligible for sponsorship by their Chinese Canadian fathers. The Court ruled in Hing’s favour, noting that the Chinese government considered the children legitimate and determined that Canadian authorities should therefore do the same.43 The Canadian government stalled reform for months, seeking to avoid changing the laws and leaving the three hundred affected children in China in limbo. In October 1954, an Order in Council dictated that to be eligible to migrate, the child in question had to be adopted by the Canadian father living in Canada at the time of the child’s birth. The adoption process was a deliberately complicated one. Newspapers across Canada criticized the government’s manoeuvring. The Vancouver Sun declared that “any effort to sell Canada as a land of liberty and freedom will occasion sneers of derision from those who suffer immigration indignities.”44 When Foon Sien later broached the topic of adopted children with government officials, he once again encountered deep scepticism. Adoptive kinship had a long history in China, where families relied on adoption to extend the family tree.45 Foon Sien argued that adoption was particularly important for Chinese families who did not have sons to carry on the family line, as one of the Buddhist rituals was for the son and heir to wash the face of the dead parent. He explained that if a man has no son, “he must adopt one so that his funeral services can be properly carried out after death … Many Chinese, due to financial or other difficulties, have never returned for a visit to China and subsequently there is no issue of a male heir. Under such circumstances, he adopts a relative or someone else into the family, and some in Canada have even adopted persons not of Chinese ancestry.”46 Foon Sien’s argument held little sway, despite the potential nationbuilding aspects of adoption, as the government consistently viewed any kind of expansion in family sponsorship rights as the equivalent to opening the floodgates to countless Chinese migrants or enabling

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fraudulent and illegal movements.47 Rather than expansive alterations to family sponsorship rules after 1947, progress was incremental and often treated as a special exception due to extenuating circumstances. Officials such as the formidable Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Laval Fortier loathed the possibility of creating precedent and often impeded change. As Fortier told one supplicant who needed a special passport, “After investigating the situation I am informed that there are hundreds of Chinese who are in a similar situation, and if we were making an exception to one there would be no excuse for refusing the others. I may add that, generally, what you do for one individual Chinese, it is rapidly spread through the Chinese community in Canada.”48 While the pace of change was slow, the discretionary admission of Chinese relatives (and later Chinese refugees) paved the way for more fundamental and systemic changes to Canada’s immigration program. In large part, it was the obvious discrepancies in the language and practices of humanitarianism used by government officials and members of civil society that triggered deeper and more permanent, if somewhat delayed, changes to Canada’s immigration program. A significant part of this gap stemmed from the state’s heavy association of illegality with Chinese immigration in the postwar period, an association that did not resonate as overtly among other sectors of Canadian society. Navigating the Legacies of Exclusion As discussed previously, the 1951 decision to raise the age of majority to twenty-five for Chinese children was a cautious concession to Foon Sien’s campaign for equality and a response to the tumultuous conditions on the Chinese mainland, following the establishment of a Communist regime in Beijing. As the change was discretionary, the government could easily change course if it did not obtain the desired outcomes. When reports of false representations by people claiming to be the relatives of Chinese in Canada became more frequent a few short years after the 1951 exception was granted, the government determined that its efforts at concession had failed. In 1955, the age of majority was reduced to twenty-one for Chinese migrants. Faced with the legacy of exclusion and a novel series of age-based restrictions on migration, Chinese families falsified or purchased identity documents so that they could sponsor children to Canada. Many of these transactions to create “paper families” and “paper sons” took

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place in Hong Kong, where a culture of mobility flourished and “all aspects of migration were commoditized.”49 By the late 1950s, charges of criminal activity and immigration fraud became more rampant in both Canada and Hong Kong, inhibiting attempts to reform the immigration program. In 1957, when Douglas Jung, the first Chinese Canadian to be elected to federal office, argued that Chinese Canadians should have the same sponsorship rights as “white Canadians,” Cabinet rejected his proposals, largely because of the difficulty officials had encountered in administering the sponsorship program. The highest levels of government believed that Chinese migrants could not be trusted. In 1958 discussions at the Cabinet Committee on Immigration, one participant charged that “Chinese standards of truth and morality were such that the practice of deception in/among them was very widespread and without compunction.”50 Speculation about possible deception eventually morphed into concrete concerns about illegality; these led to investigations by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into the “paper son” phenomenon. As a result of the pervasive concerns about the integrity of the immigration program in China, the RCMP shared responsibility with staff from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration for screening applicants in Hong Kong. In late 1959, an RCMP investigation exposed an organized ring that profited from the sale of identity documents to hopeful migrants. A few months later, the RCMP, aided by plainclothes officers from the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, raided the homes and businesses of Chinese in Canada (including the Chinese Benevolent Association, which the RCMP believed was overseeing the “paper son” scheme) in search of additional documentary evidence.51 Many Chinese Canadians felt unjustly discriminated against and the government proved receptive to their complaints. As the investigation proceeded, the Canadian government recognized that the migrants themselves were victims and should not be the targets of criminal proceedings; there was, though, some internal speculation about whether Canadian public opinion would tolerate a mass deportation program.52 Instead of punishing paper families, the government introduced a Status Adjustment Program in 1960 whereby all those who had come to Canada illegally could confess and then apply to be naturalized, receiving all the rights of other naturalized Canadians (including family sponsorship rights). The only exceptions were those found guilty of organizing the illegal immigration schemes; they were subject to criminal proceedings and deported. In an interview with Sid Chow Tan, a

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community activist in Vancouver, Mr Tan chuckled about being shepherded through the adjustment process as a young boy. However, his humour seemed to disguise more troubling emotions as he talked openly about his fear of being deported until he was “normalized” in 1964.53 As a result of the Status Adjustment Program, which operated until 1974, Chinese residents, regardless of how they came to be in Canada, became normalized in the eyes of the Canadian state, marking a fundamental departure in the way the government managed migration from China. By normalizing the status of Chinese Canadians, the government knowingly facilitated the possibility of increased family sponsorship. As a result of the program, twelve thousand “paper sons” became eligible to sponsor their relatives in the same way that other naturalized and Canadian-born Chinese could. But just as with the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the outcome of the Status Adjustment Program did not automatically lead to equality of opportunity in terms of immigration. Chinese Canadians still could not sponsor as many relatives as other Canadians. Discriminatory restrictions on the categories of relatives eligible for sponsorship remained in place. Worst, the tinge of illegality clung to the Chinese community for years. That Chinese migrants had developed strategies for negotiating decades of exclusion, and postwar restrictions on the age of sponsored migrants was indefensible to Canadian policymakers. These strategies were comprehensible to them only in terms of illegality, a term that, as legal scholar Catherine Dauvergne argues, replicates “layers of disadvantage and exclusion.”54 The association of illegality with migrants from China hindered attempts to expand the categories in which Chinese migrants could move, either as relatives or refugees, for years following the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act in 1947. … Contributing to Reform Campaigns by the Anglican and United churches in the 1960s on behalf of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong furthered Foon Sien Wong’s earlier efforts. While the federal government refused to support the churches’ interest in refugee resettlement, the religious campaigns to resettle refugees contributed to a major review of the government’s family immigration policy in general and immigration from Asia specifically. The review was conducted by Don Reid, who had earlier dealt with the Anglican Church’s proposal to sponsor refugees. Reid was especially

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interested in how to eliminate discrimination from the existing rules on family sponsorship.55 By contrast, he was almost entirely uninterested in expanding Canada’s refugee program. In observing the refugee regime that emerged after the Second World War and affirming it to be European in style and substance, Reid stated, “It was not intended to apply to those people in the teeming Asian countries whose plight is not so much the result of persecution as it is of over-production of humans coupled with under-production of food.”56 Refugees born of Asia were not the same as those of Europe … As a result, Reid focused his proposed reforms on family sponsorship, all of which expanded the opportunities for the Chinese in Canada to sponsor their relatives.57 These proposals met with violent opposition from Kim Abbott, director of inspection services. Abbott had been in Hong Kong when the illegal immigration rings were uncovered in the late 1950s, and he charged that Reid’s amendments would “open an area of potential fraud much larger than the area of fraud uncovered during the recent Chinese investigation.”58 While officials in the Immigration Branch believed Abbott’s fears were inflated, they themselves were not particularly excited about the amendments. Acting Director of Immigration D.M. Sloan declared, “This Branch is and always has been doubtful about the advisability of expanding the basis of Chinese immigration and the fraud associated with it.”59 However, officials felt they had no choice but to recommend change, given that the Liberal Party had made ending discrimination, particularly in sponsorship privileges, a key priority during the election campaign. When the regulations were amended in 1963, Cabinet approved sponsorship by Canadian citizens, regardless of race, for fiancés, sons, and daughters and their husbands, wives, grandparents, and unmarried sons and daughters (under twenty-one years of age). As a result, only a few outstanding categories remained where inequality was manifested between Chinese Canadians and other Canadians. These included over-aged sons and daughters and the brothers and sisters of Chinese Canadians. Departmental officials conceded that “on the surface,” the argument for parity seemed justified. However, number-crunchers in the department had misgivings about the trips made by Chinese Canadians to China from 1920 to 1929 and argued that extending the regulations was akin to facilitating fraud. One official declared that allowing for the sponsorship of married sons and daughters would “open not less than 35,000 slots for fraudulent Chinese sons and their families.” Officials believed that 25.9 per cent of the registered

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trips to China during the decade in question were used for “immigration purposes.”60 Immigration officials believed that the Chinese in Canada had returned expressly to build families either through planned reproduction or through the organization of paper sons and fake genealogies. The government distrusted the limited numbers that proponents claimed would be eligible if the age of admissibility for offspring was broadened. The same rationale applied to the sponsorship of brothers and sisters. Cunningly, the minister placed the burden of choice on Chinese Canadians, saying that to expand the family migration category to include distant relatives “would seriously interfere with the good service we propose to give to the immediate dependents.”61 Only with the introduction of immigration regulations in 1967 and their expressly universal intentions did Chinese Canadians obtain their long fought-for equality with other Canadians who wanted to sponsor family members to join them in Canada. Even then, PRC controls, which followed the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1956–66), restricted migration from China to Canada until the mid-1970s. At that point a family reunification agreement that expressly facilitated the sponsorship and  migration of Chinese relatives to Canada was signed between the two countries. Conclusion The years from 1947 to 1967 reveal a reluctant and gradual increase in immigration opportunities for Chinese families who wished to settle permanently in Canada. While categories of immigration were broadened, administrative and operational controls were concurrently tightened. Successive governments sought to ensure that the number of Chinese migrants admitted to Canada would be limited and carefully  selected. The Canadian state had always been dubious about the presence of large numbers of Chinese families on Canadian soil. In the heightened climate of conformity and stability triggered by Cold War insecurities, attention to Chinese family sponsorship became even more explicit, especially with the potential for greater sponsorships after the repeal of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act. Appeals for change on humanitarian grounds enjoyed only tepid reactions in official Ottawa; the flight of thousands of refugees out of Communist China created fears of a possible flood of migrants to Canada through family sponsorship or refugee resettlement routes. The resettlement of a small group of Chinese families in 1962 confirmed departmental officials’ worst fears about expanded migration categories, as

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the Hong Kong office wrestled with thousands of applications, and doubts about the integrity of the applicants endured. The intervention by Canadian churches impeded further change. The government became alarmed by the terms they proposed, since they were far more generous and reflected a different perspective on the nature of humanitarian aid and the level of need overseas. For some government officials, the solution was to move away from actively resettling Chinese refugees and put a brake on broadening categories of eligibility for family sponsorship. No other Chinese refugees were officially resettled by the Canadian state until the Indochinese refugee crisis of the late 1970s. The churches’ efforts to resettle refugees and Foon Sien’s campaign for racial parity on family sponsorship met with great resistance. A cloud of distrust and illegality shrouded Chinese migration among officials in Ottawa for much of the 1947–67 transition period, especially in the lead-up to the 1960 Status Adjustment Program. Even as the state facilitated Chinese migration to Canada, it was also determined to limit it, with the result that migrants had to negotiate a complicated patchwork of Orders in Council, laws, regulations, court rulings, and special exemptions to gain admission to Canada. As a result, Chinese Canadians sought reunification with their families by using whatever opening was available to them. The ability of Chinese migrants and their families to see formal migration categories as fluid opportunities for admission perpetuated government concerns about the effects of broadening family sponsorship criteria or migration categories in general. The result was a protracted debate about the very nature of migration and the place of Chinese Canadian families in postwar Canada. The government recognized that Chinese Canadians should be reunited with their families, but arguments about the doubtful integrity of Chinese migrants proved stubbornly persuasive, particularly when juxtaposed against state ideals of the modern Canadian family. Acknowledging the nature of this debate shifts our understanding of the twenty years following the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act. The prelude to the 1967 immigration regulations and the expansion of refugee resettlement and family sponsorship rights for the Chinese in Canada was a period of both progress and setbacks. Entrenched discrimination was slowly eroded as a result of appeals to equality and humanitarianism by civil society leaders. That progress hinged on these principles, rather than references to the importance of family in Chinese society, suggests that ideals of the Canadian family were influential not only in regulating behaviour within individual households but

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in shaping official perceptions of family migration from China. Government officials came to view themselves as defenders of both Canadian family norms and the integrity of the state’s immigration program. As Chinese immigrants appeared to pose a threat to both of these enterprises, they were subject to continued prejudice long after the end of the official discrimination embodied in the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act.

NOTES 1 This number is based on 1921 census figures. Edgar Wickberg, ed., From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1982), 148. 2 Wing Ching Ng, The Chinese in Vancouver 1945–80 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 23. 3 Freda Hawkins, Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public Concern (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972); and Michael Trebilcock and Ninette Kelley, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 4 Wickberg, From China to Canada, 207; Patricia Roy, The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941–1967 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 7. 5 See Robert H. Keyserlingk, ed., Breaking Ground: The 1956 Hungarian Refugee Movement to Canada (North York, ON: York Lanes, 1993). On the forging of a conservative consensus, see Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); and Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 6 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006); Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 140. 7 Nancy Christie, “Introduction,” in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 10; and Dominique Marshall, The Social Origins of the Welfare State, Quebec Families, Compulsory Education, and Family Allowances, 1940–1955, translated by Nicola Doone Danby (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006).

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8 Lori Chambers and Edgar-Andre Montigny, Family Matters: Papers in PostConfederation Canadian Family History (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1998). 9 “Memo to the Minister, 5 Mar. 1964,” pt. 4, file 3-33-7, vol. 126, Chinese Immigration, 1963–1964, RG 26, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). 10 Magda Fahrni, Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar Reconstruction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 11 Ng, Chinese in Vancouver, 20. 12 Enakshi Dua, “Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Making of Canada as a White Settler Nation,” Gender, Place and Culture 14, 4 (2007): 445–56. 13 Canada, House of Commons Debates (30 Apr. 1923), 2327 (T.G. McBride, MP). 14 “1923 Act,” pt. 1, file 5068-A-40, vol. 3193, RG 25, LAC. 15 “Memorandum to Mr Crerar from F.C. Blair, December 30, 1937,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 16 “Chinese Immigration to Canada: Possible Numbers as a Result of the Repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, and Prospects for Actual Arrivals,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 17 Peter Li, Chinese in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 67. 18 See correspondence in pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 19 “Letter from Minister to Dr Armstrong, co-Chair of the Committee for the Repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, December 30, 1949,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 20 Foon Sien Wong’s personal integrity was called into question as rumours about his ties to drug trafficking and prostitution in Vancouver’s Chinatown surfaced during the criminal trial of Wong Foon Sing. Edward Starkins, Who Killed Janet Smith? (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984). 21 Established in 1898 to safeguard the rights of railway workers, the CBA tackled a variety of issues over time, from racial discrimination to exclusionary labour practices to the protection of Chinatown itself during the heyday of urban renewal in the 1960s. “Memorandum to the Minister, June 19, 1959,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 22 “1957 Brief by the Chinese Benevolent Association,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 23 On the initial policy response, see Stephen Beecroft, “The Canadian Policy towards China, 1949–1957: The Recognition Problem,” in Paul Evans and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the People’s Republic

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25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37

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of China, 1949–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991): 43–72. For the reaction in the Chinese community, see Wickberg, From China to Canada, 213. Cindy Yik-yi Chu, The Diaries of the Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921– 1966 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 147; “Diary, 26 Nov. 1959,” James B. Atkinson, MSS. Eng. misc. ca. 510/2, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University. “Memorandum to Deputy Minister, November 23, 1949,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. Hugh L. Keenleyside, “Memo,” 7 May 1947, pt. 2, file 5068-A-40, vol. 3193, RG 25, LAC. “Chinese Immigration to Canada: Possible Numbers as a Result of the Repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, and Prospects for Actual Arrivals,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. “Memo to the Deputy Minister, November 23, 1949,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. “Memorandum to the Deputy Minister, November 23, 1949,” pt. 1, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. Nancy Christie, “Look Out for Leviathan: The Search for a Conservative Modernist Consensus,” in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds., Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada, 1940–1955 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2004), 71. On shifting loyalties between traditional families and the modern state, see ibid., 91. As an example, the acting director for immigration told the deputy minister of citizenship and immigration in 1963 that “the making of an oath does not have the same moral implications to the average non-Christian Chinese as it does to the most of us. The closeness of family ties among the Chinese completes the motivation.” “Acting Director of Immigration to Deputy Minister, December 11, 1963,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. “Memo from the Director to the Deputy Minister, July 18, 1956,” pt. 2, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. Foon Sien Wong, Chinatown News, 3 June 1955, Vancouver Public Library. “1955 Brief by Chinese Benevolent Association,” pt. 2, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 7. Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 134.

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38 “Acting Director of Immigration to Deputy Minister, December 11, 1963,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 39 “1955 Brief by the Chinese Benevolent Association.” 40 The lack of documentation required for people to move (including birth and marriage certificates) as well as PRC restrictions on mobility did indeed mean that opportunities for Chinese migrants to leave were scarce. “1955 Brief by the Chinese Benevolent Association.” 41 Ibid. 42 Editorial, Regina Leader-Post, 26 May 1955. 43 G.W. Bartholomew, “Recognition of Polygamous Marriages in Canada,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 10 (1961): 305–27. 44 “Leave Him to the Communists,” Vancouver Sun, 18 Oct. 1954. 45 Grace Po-chee Ko, Adoptive Parenthood in Hong Kong (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 2. 46 “1958 Brief by the Chinese Benevolent Association,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 47 Veronica Strong-Boag, Finding Families, Finding Ourselves: English Canada Encounters Adoption, from the 19th Century to the 1990s (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006), ix. 48 “Memorandum to the Minister, July 4 1950,” pt. 2, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1936–1949, RG 26, LAC. 49 Adam McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875–1943,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, 2 (1999): 102. 50 This statement appears only in the draft form of the minutes. It is omitted from the final version and it is therefore unclear to whom to attribute this statement. “Cabinet Committee on Immigration, July 29, 1958,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 51 “Interim Report by J.K. Abbott, January 1960,” file 63, vol. 11856, George Norman Jones Fonds, RG 18, LAC. 52 “Memo to James Bissett from Laval Fortier, January 21, 1960,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 53 Sid Chow Tan, interview with the author, Vancouver, BC, 22 Oct. 2009. 54 Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19. 55 Acting director of immigration to acting deputy minister, “Sponsorship of 50 Chinese Youths by the Anglican Church: Philosophy of Immigration,” 18 Oct. 1963, pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 56 Ibid.

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57 Reid proposed that sec. 31(d), which limited sponsorship rights to certain nationalities, be eliminated from the immigration regulations, that the lateral sponsorship of brothers and sisters be permitted, while the remaining sponsorable classes be given universal application. He also proposed certain provisions for humanitarian movements. “Memorandum from Deputy Minister to the Minister, December 23, 1963,” pt. 1, file 557-40-12, vol. 873, Canadian Church Organizations – Proposals for Entry of Chinese Immigrants from Hong Kong, RG 76, LAC. 58 “Memorandum to the Deputy Minister, re. Proposed Amendment to Immigration Regulation 31 concerning Sponsorship of Offspring and Fiance’s of Canadian Citizens, December 2, 1962,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 59 “Memorandum from Acting Director of Immigration to Deputy Minister Re. Proposed Amendment to Immigration Regulations, December 3, 1963,” pt. 3, file 3-33-7, vol. 125, Chinese Immigration, 1963, RG 26, LAC. 60 “Memo to the Minister, March 5, 1964,” pt. 4, file 3-33-7, vol. 126, Chinese Immigration, 1964–1964, RG 26, LAC. 61 Ibid.

Experience and Identity: Black Immigrant Nurses to Canada, 1950–1980 Ka ren Flyn n

Introduction Scholarship on Caribbean migration has dealt primarily with the economic factors that precipitated migration. A common argument is that conditions of economic uncertainty in the Caribbean region in the post– Second World War era prompted people to migrate in search of a better life. For those able and willing to move, immigration served as a means to economic and social mobility.1 Studies on contemporary migration to Canada focus on how the Canadian state encourages migration when there is a demand for labour and on how immigrants are funnelled into menial and unskilled work. Included in these analyses is an examination of the racialization of labour markets with emphasis on where immigrants are incorporated within the political economy.2 Studies of Caribbean domestic workers have shown how the state maintained racial and gender inequality.3 Scholars such as Agnes Calliste have explored how “professional” women, such as nurses, need to be included in our discussions of the immigration process. Her research on the role of the state bureaucracy in influencing the subordination of Caribbean nurses provides an initial framework for thinking about a professional group of female migrants that has largely been ignored in scholarship on immigration. Thus, Calliste provides an invaluable analysis of the state’s racist, sexist, and classist exclusionary policies used to curtail the migration of Caribbean nurses.

This chapter is from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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Using oral interviews, this chapter seeks to move beyond a preoccupation with immigration polices and labour recruitment to examine how Caribbean immigrant nurses explained, interpreted, and understood their experiences. I will focus on how Caribbean nurses’ lives were structured by a number of factors: their workplace, the hospital; the role of their professional colleagues in frustrating the migration process; and racism in both nursing and broader society. The goal of this chapter is to break down the image of black migrant nurses as a homogeneous category, by focusing on a group of middle-class, black nurses across age, time of migration, experience, skills, and location of training.4 In doing so, I consider how race, nation, gender, and professionalism worked together to shape the interpretations black immigrant nurses placed on their experiences. Oral history provides a useful way to recover silenced voices and has long been a tool used by feminist social scientists to place in the historical records those who have been marginalized. Despite its centrality in feminist history, oral history as a methodology needs to be interrogated especially in relation to memory: what and how people remember as well as the context in which memories emerge. Furthermore, questions about interpretation and explanation are considerations to be addressed when using oral history. While paying attention to the deficiencies in oral history, Franca Iacovetta reminds us that in acknowledging such limitations, it “hardly justifies dismissing [oral history], anymore than the fragmented and biased character of preserved written records should prompt us to abandon the archives.”5 Thus, I use oral history critically, while being mindful of the importance of language, the cultural and ideological influences that shape the nurses’ recollections, and issues surrounding subjectivity. Caribbean Nurses and Immigration Officials Following the Second World War, improved state funding for health services combined with the growth of new areas of work for women, led to an acute nursing shortage. Attempts to increase nursing enrolment through direct recruitment of young women, particularly from rural areas, to reduce the turnover rate, to entice unemployed nurses to re-enter the workforce, and to increase immigration (and reduce emigration) were the key strategies employed to alleviate the nursing shortage. White nurses primarily from Britain, and to a lesser extent, Greece, Germany, and Scandinavia, were encouraged to find employment in Canada. There

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was such a dire need for nurses that immigration officials and hospital representatives travelled to various countries on recruitment schemes to convince trained nurses of the benefits of working in Canada. Despite this nursing shortage, government policies ensured that immigration from the Caribbean was negligible. The 1952 Immigration Act, for example, allowed the minister of immigration “wide-sweeping discretion to prohibit or limit the admission of people on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, geographic origin, peculiarity of customs, unsuitability of climate or inability to become assimilated.”6 Despite the fact that with this Act, the category “race” was changed to “ethnicity,”7 the goal of the policy was to ensure that Canada maintained its British character. This meant that with respect to Caribbean migration, the federal Cabinet decided that it would admit an insignificant number of Caribbean migrants of “‘exceptional merit,’ on humanitarian grounds with government discretion.”8 Included in this group of Caribbean migrants of “exceptional merit” were professional and skilled workers such as nurses.9 In 1944, the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) passed a resolution that “reaffirmed its policy to support the principle that there be no discrimination in the selection of students for enrollment into the schools of nursing.”10 The CNA also assured immigration officials that no provincial registered nursing associations would reject registration of Caribbean nurses.11 In spite of the CNA’s assurance, immigration officials frequently blocked the migration of Caribbean nurses. The case of Beatrice Adassa Massop is one illustration of how immigration officials used their discretionary powers. The Registered Nursing Association of Ontario (RNAO) had already approved Massop’s qualifications and she had secured employment at Mount Sinai Hospital [in Toronto], but Massop was denied entry by immigration officials.12 It took fourteen months before Massop, with the assistance of Canadian activist Donald Moore and the Negro Citizenship Association, to convince immigration officials that she was indeed “worthy” of immigrating to Canada.13 Massop, upon appeal, was granted entry into Canada and she immigrated in December 1953. Although none of the nurses in this study recalled difficulties with immigration officials, Massop’s experience is not unique. Other Caribbean immigrant nurses also secured employment as well as their Canadian registration but were refused entry by the state, at times without any apparent rationale. The few black nurses that entered Canada prior to 1962 did so because of demands by hospital administrators, lobby efforts by black

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activists, and new anti-discrimination protocols adopted by the Canadian nursing elite. These various organizations played a role in forcing the state to rethink its position on the immigration of Caribbean nurses. This did not mean, however, that Canada readily opened its gates to Third World immigrants; there were restrictions placed on the number of black people, including nurses who could migrate to Canada. At the same time, the professional status and the demand for this labour pool placed black nurses in a more “desirable” position vis-à-vis the state than other Caribbean workers. Caribbean Nurses and Nursing Authorities The reasons that prompted Caribbean nurses to migrate to Canada varied as much as the nurses themselves. Canadian hospital personnel in Britain on a recruitment drive recruited two of the nurses who made this decision because, according to one of the nurses, “It seemed like the right thing to do.” While Caribbean regions were experiencing high unemployment, the majority of nurses in this study made no reference to the lack of job opportunities in the Caribbean as the impetus behind their decision to migrate. Inez Mackenzie immigrated to Canada from Jamaica in 1960 because her partner, who was attending school in Canada, encouraged Mackenzie to join him in Canada. According to Mackenzie, “things were serious between us” to the point that they were discussing marriage. While her partner pursued his studies at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, she found employment at the Oshawa General Hospital. Eventually they married. Nurses who were single and had no family responsibilities sometimes viewed migration as a form of adventure. Monica Mitchell was working at the University Hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, when her roommate approached her one day and said, “Monica, we have to start to travel. I just went to the Canadian High Commission, and I’ve gotten us the applications.” Mitchell thought it was a great idea, filled out the forms, and six months later, they immigrated to Canada. According to Mitchell, “The world was our oyster and we were having a great time.” While a few recalled hearing of the nursing shortage and did migrate because of the wage opportunities, other nurses were encouraged to immigrate because they had family members who were already established in Canada. In the case of Caribbean nurses interviewed for this study, economic uncertainty did not determine their decision to migrate nor was migration driven by the single goal of earning a better salary.

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Regardless of the nurses’ own sense of agency around their migration decisions, prospective migrants had to deal with a powerful Canadian immigration bureaucracy. While Linda Carty’s conclusion that “through its immigration laws the state regulates the selection and rejection of prospective domestic workers as immigrants”14 certainly held true for nurses as well, the latter were sometimes cast in a more positive light than domestic workers. For example, Calliste points out that Caribbean nurses were expected by government officials in Canada to act as “ambassadors for their race” and to assist white Canadians in familiarizing themselves with blacks. Referring to the migration of Caribbean nurses, Calliste maintains that “these workers were expected to contribute appreciably to the social, economic, or cultural life in Canada, and to help in making blacks acceptable to the Canadian population.”15 Such attitudes on the part of some immigration officials may help explain why a disproportionate number of nurses in this study maintained that they were dealt with in a timely manner. They considered the expediency with which Immigration Canada dealt with their applications to be a direct result of Canada’s nursing shortage and the fact that they were skilled, educated professionals. By contrast, when the nurses interviewed for this study did experience difficulty it was usually with nursing organizations, especially the nurses’ associations charged with adjudicating professional qualifications. Many immigrant nurses who settled in Ontario complained that the provincial nursing association and later the College of Nurses could not decipher foreign-trained qualifications. Therefore, it was the nursing bodies responsible for accreditation, as opposed to the state, which often proved pivotal in determining how Caribbean nurses were placed within nursing. Calliste argues that Caribbean immigrant nurses were required to have nursing qualifications over and above those required of white nurses in order to be eligible for landed immigrant status. She asserts that graduate Caribbean nurses – which would include four of the nurses in this study – were required to complete a three-month obstetrics course, be eligible for registration with the registered nurses’ association, as well as have guaranteed employment with a hospital that was aware of their racial origin.16 Calliste’s research focused primarily on Caribbean immigrant nurses as opposed to British-trained Caribbean nurses, making it difficult to make assumptions about how their qualifications were assessed given that British-trained nurses were preferred over non-European immigrants. Whatever the case, there is some

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discrepancy in terms of how Caribbean immigrant nurses’ qualifications in this study were assessed. The process of having their qualifications assessed placed immigrant nurses in one of four sets of experiences. First, there were registered nurses (RNs) who were graduates of a three-year program either in the Caribbean or Britain, and who met the provincial licensing standards. For example, Orphelia Bennett immigrated to Canada in 1955 from Jamaica. Bennett trained at the University of the West Indies as a general nurse. She also obtained a midwifery certificate and her qualifications were accepted without upgrading. Likewise, Vera Cudjoe trained in Britain, later returned to Trinidad, and subsequently immigrated to Canada in 1960; because she had midwifery training, she was also granted her RN status without having to upgrade or take additional courses. When June Heaven immigrated to British Columbia from Jamaica in 1967 she did not need additional courses to obtain her registration. But there were definite differences in terms of how provincial nurses’ associations adjudicated immigrant nurses’ credentials. When, for example, Heaven went to Ontario seven months later, she had to take a three-month obstetrics course to obtain her registration. Both Mitchell and Mackenzie had to upgrade in order to obtain their registration even though, like Cudjoe and Bennett, they too had midwifery training. Some of the nurses did not take a formal obstetrics course but read the necessary materials and then wrote the exams. The nurses in the second group who obtained their RN status upon arrival were the exception, in comparison with their other Caribbean counterparts who had to upgrade by taking additional courses and writing the RN examination. Because the British system defined obstetrical, and sometimes pediatric, training as separate qualifications not included in the regular RN stream, there were some who lacked this crucial component necessary for Canadian licensure. Practitioners who did not undertake separate midwifery or pediatric training at home had to write an exam (or complete a special course) within three to six months of their arrival in Canada; they were then granted RN status. Calliste is generally correct in that Caribbean nurses did have to take a three-month obstetrics course in order to be eligible for registration and obtain their landed immigrant status. With respect to racial origin, either the nurses did not remember or were not asked, or the automatic assumption by the nurses’ association was that since they were from the Caribbean they were black. Most of the nurses interviewed for this project did not recall being asked about their racial origin prior to

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migration. Others said no; still, some maintained that given the time period, it would not have been unusual if they were asked about their racial origin, and as a result it would not have been etched in their memory as extraordinary. A third group refused to undertake extra training or examinations, or failed in their efforts, and thus remained in a subsidiary category of nurse-worker. For example, Myrna Blackman was a registered mental nurse (RMN) in Britain who immigrated to Canada in 1971. Blackman felt that she should have been granted her RN status without having to upgrade. And so she refused to upgrade and chose to work instead as a registered nursing assistant (RNA) because she felt that her additional Canadian training would still be limited or unsatisfying compared with her training in England. Finally, there were specific groups of immigrant nurses whose qualifications were not accepted at all and who would have had to complete a full RN or RNA program or work in non-professional categories of nursing work, for instance, as nurse’s aides or health care aides. For example, Britain’s state enrolled nurses (SENs) were similar to nursing assistants in Canada. When Elaine Mcleod immigrated in 1969, she was told by the College of Nurses that she did not have enough pediatric background and needed a further twenty-one hours in training to be considered a Registered Nursing Assistant. Mcleod then inquired at the school where the course was being offered, and was told by the administrators that she had to go through the entire program even though the College of Nurses stated that she needed only twenty-one hours. Even though it was the nursing school and not the college who told Mcleod she had to repeat the program, she blamed the College of Nurses because it was the body responsible for adjudicating immigrant nurses’ qualifications. In making reference to the College of Nurses, Mcleod contended, “They didn’t think it was up to their standard having done two years [in England] when theirs [in Canada] is just a 10 month program.” Similarly, Brenda Lewis, an RN in Trinidad with training in psychiatry, immigrated to Canada in 1970 and was told by the College of Nurses that she had to redo the entire program. Lewis worked as a nurse’s aide while attending Ryerson at night. It remains unclear as to why Lewis’s qualifications did not at least enable her to work as an RNA, rather than as a nurse’s aide. Although most of the nurses who worked as RNAs or nursing assistants did eventually upgrade, many remained convinced that the process of credential evaluation disadvantaged them. Thus, while black

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activists like Donald Moore continued to criticize the process whereby the Canadian state impeded the immigration of Caribbean nurses, for many practitioners it was their professional colleagues in Canada, not state officials, who frustrated the migration process. Deskilling and Working in Canadian Hospitals Nurses who migrated from the Caribbean or Britain to Canada entered a health care system that was undergoing dramatic change. During the period following the Second World War there emerged in hospitals a two-tier system of nurse-managers (RNs) and nurse-workers in hospital wards. Furthermore, the introduction of subsidiary workers (RNAs) in nursing meant that the personal care tasks that were once the domain of RNs were now given over to these new groups of workers.17 These changes constituted deskilling, the process whereby certain skills once central to a job are no longer used. Deskilling in nursing was accomplished through the introduction of technology, the fragmentation of tasks, and the introduction of subsidiary workers. Because many Caribbean immigrant nurses had to work in subsidiary areas where their substantial experience and training were underutilized, for black and immigrant nurses the process of deskilling was further intensified by race and migration. One group who experienced deskilling were those nurses whose credentials were not recognized and as a result were concentrated in subordinate positions and made responsible for tasks for which they were overqualified. Immigrant nurses who worked as assistants, health care aides, and nursing assistants, according to Evelyn Nakanno Glenn, “constituted the hands that performed routine work that were directed by others.”18 Caribbean nurses who required upgrading were often concentrated in these subordinate positions. The autonomy Caribbean SENs and other specialized nurses were accustomed to in England and the Caribbean was replaced in Canada with repetitious and monotonous duties subject to the authority of white nurse-managers. Lewis, who had previously worked as an RN in Trinidad, after migration worked as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home, a shift that she considered demoralizing. Making reference to her responsibilities as an RN in Trinidad, she said, “As an RN, you had more responsibilities and being in charge. Here [I] was doing baths, changing patients, really back breaking work … I wasn’t used to that sort of thing, being under somebody and having to do this kind of work. And then you were working

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with people who never had any skills at all in regards to nursing. They just hire them because they needed somebody.” For Lewis, the menial and unskilled tasks of her job were inappropriate to the qualifications she earned in Trinidad. Mcleod’s experience on the ward was similar in that she classified her responsibilities as “non-educational tasks,” that is, tasks that had no theoretical support. Immigrant nurses who were granted RN status in Canada experienced deskilling in different ways. RNs took on more leadership and administrative roles, they performed patient care duties, which the nursing leadership felt was an indication of professionalism. Conversely, British-trained RNs felt that the fragmentation of work actually deskilled the job of caring. For example, Cudjoe pointed out that patient care was the essence of “real” skill, something that Canadian nurses lacked. In making reference to patient care in England, Cudjoe commented, “The job of nursing a patient was different in England. We spent time with the patient and that meant a lot psychologically. It was very good medicine. We knew that to be true.” For nurses such as Cudjoe, patient care that she considered central to the occupation was being replaced with more administrative duties. Just as some Caribbean nurses experienced deskilling in terms of their position in the nursing hierarchy, and others criticized the way Canadians “do nursing,” practising midwives were further deskilled due to the lack of recognition for midwifery generally in Canada. Writing about midwifery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Diane Dodd asserts that the medicalization of childbirth with an emphasis on “physician-controlled and eventually hospital birthing” was part of male practitioners’ dominance over the midwifery role.19 Doctors’ hegemony over the birthing process continued well into the twentieth century with practising midwives virtually eliminated in most provinces. By contrast, midwives continued to play a central role in the Caribbean and Britain. In fact, many RNs in those countries went on to do extensive obstetrical nursing training and to license as midwives. Caribbean- and British-trained midwives viewed Canadian nurses as lacking in autonomy particularly around childbirth, and argued vehemently that managing childbirth ought to be within nurses’ domain. The experience of British-trained Nancy Ward who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s illustrates the contradictory positions licensed midwives faced. Ward had difficulty finding employment because, according to the Ontario College of Nurses, she lacked “Canadian experience.” Ward recalled that “when I came here, they said I needed

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Canadian experience. Every hospital you went to it was Canadian experience. I went back to the College of Nurses; they said they would send me to a place. It was a thousand miles away, away from Toronto.” Ward refused to relocate because of family commitments. A trained midwife, she drew on her own experience as a pregnant mother to illustrate how limited general nurses’ training in Canada was, but also to show the power of the doctors in obstetrics. Ward who in 2001 was working at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto remembered, “When I was pregnant, no one told me anything. I didn’t tell them that I was a nurse. I didn’t go to the doctor until I was six months. I knew I was having a good pregnancy, no complications. I had the child and still no one told me what to do. If I were a new mother, I wouldn’t know what to do.” Ward further explained the difference between the doctor’s role in childbirth in England and Canada: “Over here, most of the doctors do the delivery. I took that to mean that the nurses really had nothing to do in terms of examining the baby. In England when you do midwifery, you have to know everything about labour. The nurse is there, even if it’s a student nurse [she] examines you. You were told everything about the pregnancy and what to look for. You don’t have to be a midwife to know that.” According to Ward, student nurses in Britain were expected to check for abnormalities once a pregnant patient entered the hospital, a procedure that nurses did not perform in Canada. Getting acquainted and accustomed to the Canadian system would have been a challenge for Ward had she not been employed in a hospital with a number of white British-trained nurses. Still, Ward recalled, the nurses at the hospital where she worked found it hard to stay practised in some of the procedures that they were taught in England. She pointed out that “when I came here, some of the girls would say, you can tell us some of the things we forgot.” Lillie Johnson had an extensive career in England and Scotland as a midwife before immigrating to Canada in 1960. Johnson concurred with Ward regarding the gendered division of labour in Canada, but captured how patriarchy defined the relationship between doctors and nurses: “They give you no responsibility. The doctor has to order to everything. Although it seems to be getting better, it seems all [the doctors] want is a handmaiden. There are so many British-trained nurses who have their midwifery training, but none of them are accredited for it here.” Johnson’s experience working in Canada and the United States, especially her assessment of the role of doctors in both countries,

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ultimately influenced the choice she made when seeking employment. Johnson decided to never work on the obstetrics floor once in Canada. She commented: There was no way I could supervise anyone in the first stage in labour and see that she is ready for delivery, and tell her to wait for the anesthetist and the doctor. We didn’t have all that before and we didn’t have women sticking up their feet in pedals and we went ahead and delivered the baby, whether you are a practising midwife or not. We were the ones who taught the doctors in England how to deliver babies. The business of doctors delivering babies is a North American concept.

Similarly, Eileen Jacobson, another trained midwife who worked on the pediatrics floor, criticized the role of Canadian doctors and claimed their monopoly over certain procedures undermined the role of nurses. Mackenzie, who worked at the University of the West Indies Hospital in Jamaica before immigrating to Canada, also expressed criticism about the respective roles of nurses and doctors. Mackenzie maintained that, in Jamaica, “the doctor would leave you to make a bit more decisions. If a patient has a headache, we give the patient the medication, and tell the doctor when they come. [In Canada] they take away a lot of the responsibility that you used to carry. I don’t know if it’s because they have more doctors. You have to go to them for everything.” These examples reveal how Caribbean nurses’ experience of deskilling varied depending on time of migration, and how skills and experience were being assessed at the time. The almost non-existent practice of midwifery in Canada further deskilled those who had midwifery training. Over all, the nurses used their performance, skill, and experience of the British system, which in their perception was superior, to challenge the Canadian system. In response to what some nurses perceived as an unfair system, Caribbean immigrant nurses emphasized their own sense of professionalism. Maintaining that they were good nurses who were better than white Canadian nurses helped to shape their identity as immigrant nurses working within a different system, and also offset the racism within that system. Racism within Nursing In examining power relations in health care, it is generally accepted that a system of social stratification exists between doctors and nurses

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that shapes the roles of both groups. The argument is that the power accorded doctors results in an unequal relationship between them and nurses whereby the latter occupy a subordinate position in a maledominated profession.20 Inherent sexism arising from gender inequality is evident in that the medical profession is male-dominated; nursing is female-dominated. While scholars acknowledge how patriarchy defines and influences the relationship between nurses and doctors, gender remains the primary lens through which feminists examine power relationships in health care. Much less attention is paid to how racism shapes the experiences of black nurses. How black nurses experienced and dealt with racism and the day-to-day realities of nursing depended on the period in which they immigrated and the extent to which racism was politicized in Canadian society. Whether the nurses immigrated directly from the Caribbean or from Britain also played a role in their interpretations of racism. Furthermore, transformations in the structure of the occupation continued to be a major factor influencing black nurses’ experiences, which sometimes obscured the reality of racism. In contrast to the overt racism against blacks in Britain generally, nurses interviewed for this study who came to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s recalled that they did not face much racism in Canada. If an incident occurred that could be construed as racist, it only appeared to have racial overtones in the context of today’s society. These early migrants pointed out that they were accepted and treated well because of the nursing shortage and because racism was tempered due to the small population of blacks in Canada. Mitchell, for example, pointed out that “I have often said to people that when I came to Canada the first time, I was comfortable. I never heard all this black and white thing, and my feeling is that my group did not represent a threat to white people. Now I think my group is a threat.” Cudjoe expressed similar sentiments: “The issue of racism was not evident and apparent at that time as it is now. There were so few of us here that they [meaning whites] had not begun to panic, to feel afraid or intimidated by our presence. On the other hand, in the hospital we were a minority, and we were just concerned about doing our work. They seemed to want us more than anything else.” Heaven, who was mentioned earlier, recounted how she was exoticized because there were few or no blacks in these remote areas. Heaven maintained that “in BC I was a novelty. A lot of people had never seen anyone black where I was in Trail. Some days it was fun, some days it was annoying.” For Heaven and her friend, having fun meant observing

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the stares and reactions of people who were unable to hide their curiosity. At the same time, the ongoing questions about their identity, coupled with the feeling of being constantly on display, irritated the two women. They eventually left for Toronto. These immigrant nurses were more concerned with their general survival in terms of being in a new country than focusing on racism. Mackenzie suggested that she did not experience any racism at the Oshawa General Hospital primarily because she did not have a clear understanding of what it meant to be identified as black until she immigrated to Canada. Describing her experiences around “race,” and thinking about being black at her first place of employment, Mackenzie said, “It was 1960, and at the time there were not too many black nurses, and it was okay. You know, I realized that I was new, that the colour of my skin was new, they were very polite. It was so very funny how children did not see too many black nurses. I remember this little threeyear-old looked at me and says, ‘oh you are burnt,’ and I just smiled and I said, ‘poor little thing, you have never seen a black nurse.’” Theorist Stuart Hall has observed that until he left Jamaica in the 1950s, he had never heard anyone call themselves or refer to anyone else as “black.” In the Caribbean, there were many different ways of identifying people ranging from different shades of brown, quality of hair, the quality of family one came from, and even the street a person lived on. Hall says that it was not until the 1970s, “for the first time that black people recognized themselves as blacks. It was the most profound cultural revolution in the Caribbean, much greater than they have ever had.”21 For those nurses who immigrated to Britain and then to Canada, the cultural revolution to which Hall alludes would have not been part of their experience; they would have missed this process of identification as black that was taking place in the Caribbean. It also explains why these nurses did not attach too much significance to racial status, or their identity as blacks until later because, for the most part, they were just learning how to be black. Even if incidents or certain actions were not construed as racist at the time, in retrospect these nurses were able to find some defining moments in their careers when they wondered about particular acts of injustice. In thinking about whether she had ever experienced racism, Cudjoe said, “I was not aware of racism at that time, but in hindsight, I think there was because there were times when people were being unfair and you didn’t know why. You never thought it was because of me being black. You were more concerned with the actual victimization of

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what’s being done to you and trying to work it out and resolve it rather than point at somebody else and call them a racist.” Tensions, especially between white and black nurses, which could be interpreted today as having racial undertones, were explained using other non-racial explanations. On many occasions, nurses would point to personality, education, or position in the nursing hierarchy as reasons for tensions as opposed to racism. For other nurses, conflicts emerged on the wards between black nurses who had more experience and education than their white counterparts. Black nurses felt that despite having the education and training, white personnel were still granted more authority even if they had less education. Black RNs found that white nursing assistants, for example, attempted to assume RN responsibilities when black nurses were in charge. Mackenzie found that this happened quite frequently throughout her career. She recalled, “You will find some of those nursing assistants want to act like RNs, especially the white ones. When the doctors come, they are there with the charts, and they can’t write on the chart, they have the doctor write the chart. I have worked with a nursing assistant where the doctor was having a hard time realizing that she is not the RN.” Though Mackenzie later acknowledged that race was a factor in these relationships, she only realized the significance of these assistants’ actions much later on. That racism did not figure prominently in these women’s memories illustrates the changing nature and meaning of racism within specific contexts. At the same time, black nurses were not always concerned with issues of racism because it was not a major issue of contention at the time. Others were, as Cudjoe pointed out, “just concerned with doing our work.” While racism may not have been recognizable to the nurses who immigrated during the 1950s and 1960s, those who immigrated in the 1970s and 1980s were more cognizant of the ways in which race structured social relations in the hospitals. These nurses recognized the power imbalance between white and non-white nurses, and the types of work or wards where black nurses predominated. These nurses recognized that racism influenced white nurses’ perceptions of Caribbean nurses. Carmencita Gomez, who immigrated to Canada during the late 1970s, felt that black nurses who spoke out or asked questions that offended the head nurse or supervisor were more likely to be penalized than their white counterparts. Gomez recalled working on a floor where the nurse-manager made a decision to remove nurses from other areas of the ward to care for a sick child who came from a wealthy family.

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Gomez questioned her decision in light of the fact that other patients would be left unattended. Perturbed that Gomez questioned her decision, the nurse-manager asked Gomez to leave because she did not want to be told how to run her ward. Gomez was subsequently placed on another ward and forbidden to return to the floor for a year. Although Gomez realized that she was being penalized for questioning the head nurse, she appreciated the move because it allowed her to work independently even if it meant being isolated from her peers. According to Gomez, “I was not allowed to go upstairs where all the other nurses were; there were just two of us downstairs.” Gomez also felt some satisfaction from being outspoken because the nurse-manager did address her concern regarding the lack of nurses on the ward that evening. Gomez pointed out that “despite the fact that she put me down, whatever I said, she knew it was [the truth] and at least there was extra coverage and that [child] wasn’t getting just two nurses and the rest of the ward was suffering.” Despite being ostracized, Gomez focused on the issue of patient care, the independence she gained working with fewer nurses, and the freedom of not having to interact with the head nurse, rather than on racism. Gomez’s experience was not an isolated incident but captured an important dimension of those nurses who immigrated in later decades. Tania Das Gupta’s research in the 1990s noted the way in which black nurses were racialized within nursing.22 Racialization is the process whereby certain meanings are attached to the presence of black nurses in nursing that influences not only how they are viewed but also their interactions with their white counterparts. According to Das Gupta, the idea that blacks constitute a problem is a phenomenon that is endemic to nursing; the perceptions of outspoken black nurses and the reaction of white supervisors and administrators demonstrates an attempt to keep black nurses in a defined place. Das Gupta points out that incidents such as that experienced by Gomez are indicative of “what can happen in a racist and sexist culture where black women workers with high levels of skill and leadership qualities challenge the status quo. Individuals who have much to gain from the status quo, i.e., those with relative power, White in most instances, struggle to put black women back in their ‘ascribed’ place.”23 Although none of the nurses in this chapter were fired for speaking out, they were acquainted with, or knew of, nurses who were fired, or demoted, or were themselves reprimanded in some ways for questioning their superiors. For example, Dorothy Jones, who immigrated to Canada from Britain in 1971, describes one

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particular nurse who spoke out against racism and other inequities that took place on the ward: “This one girl in particular, she would stand up for her rights and you always find when you stand up for your rights, you’re a troublemaker. She was branded a troublemaker because she was able to stand up to them. And of course, they didn’t like this girl at all, but you know she didn’t care.” Jones pointed out that even though other black nurses agreed with this nurse and the steps she pursued to ensure that she was taken seriously, the majority of the nurses, both black and white, neglected to publicly support her for fear they would lose their jobs. Racism also manifested itself with respect to the number of patients black nurses were assigned. A number of nurses noted that they always had the heavier and more difficult patients, while white nurses had lighter patients. Janet Barrett, who emigrated from Jamaica in 1968, attended night school in Canada and obtained her nursing diploma in 1974. Barrett explained a typical scenario in relation to patient care: “If you were a black nurse and you’re working a twelve-hour shift and you have this patient from 7:30 a.m., but there was somebody that wasn’t black coming in, a Canadian (white) that was coming on at 3:30 p.m., instead of leaving you with that patient, what they would do is take away your light patients from you at 3:30 p.m. and give it to that person.” Having worked with patients for the entire day, Barrett refused to change her lighter patients for heavier ones. According to Barrett, “I was known at work to stand up for myself. If it’s a new staff they would say to her, ‘If you upset her, you will hear about it. And if she’s right, she ain’t going to change.’” For the most part, black nurses in this study developed other methods of dealing with inequities within nursing, such as being silent in the face of adversity. Other relied on their friends, community, and religious networks to provide a space free from the racism experienced at work. Some nurses pointed out that obtaining holiday vacations was another contentious issue that surfaced repeatedly. Regardless of holiday policies that ensured that nurses only work one of the statutory holidays, black nurses would be scheduled to work on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. As one nurse described it, “These were the subtleties of racism.” Racist incidents on the wards were rarely dealt with in ways that would bring about change, and as result, the problems continued. If and when the issue was raised, Jones said, “Somehow it always got resolved, but without blaming the white ones.” While black nurses were penalized for challenging their white superiors, these same

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superiors ignored or downplayed the racial harassment meted out towards black nurses. The gendered and ideological premise on which nursing was constructed contributed to the difficulties in discussing and naming racism in the occupation. Nurses interviewed for this study never explicitly discussed the racism at the hands of white nurses. However, the majority of nurses could relate to instances of racism on the part of patients. The idea that black hands were touching their white bodies disturbed many patients. These patients would request, sometimes subtly and other times more blatantly, if there were “other” nurses (read: white) available. Mackenzie, who initially maintained that she did not experience any racism working at Oshawa General Hospital, was able to identify acts of racism from patients in later years. Mackenzie remembered elderly patients who would say, “Take your black hands off of me.” To which Mackenzie responded “Who is going to bathe you? You can’t even wash your face, so I’m going to bathe you whether you like it or not. This black nurse is going to look after you, so you better get accustomed to it.” Having been given “their rights,” the majority of patients, according to Mackenzie, often refused to comment further. Acts of racism from patients or white nurses towards black nurses were rarely dealt with in any systematic way, which for black nurses contributed to the ongoing problems within the occupation. If, for example, a patient refused to be examined by a white nurse, often the patient’s request would be granted. Although the racism faced in the workplace took many forms, one of the most common complaints was with respect to discrimination in housing. After repeatedly being turned down by property mangers who refused to lease their apartments to blacks, one nurse placed the following advertisement in the newspaper: “coloured couple require apartment …” Bennett, the first immigrant in this study, pointed out that the ongoing racism she faced when attempting to rent a room compelled her to purchase her own home, which she used to entertain other Caribbean immigrants. She recalled, “After being [in Canada] for two years, I bought a house. You think they had apartments then? You had to rent out rooms. And when you come they would slam the door in your face because you are black. And when you call, they say ‘yes,’ but when you came they said it was gone. And even if they had a kitchen, you have to use a hot plate in the bedroom.” In 1966, the Canadian Nurse decided to investigate racism within the profession after Gloria Baylis won a discrimination suit against the

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Queen Elizabeth Hotel, operated by Hilton of Canada in Montreal, acknowledging that “discrimination occurred more frequently than is generally recognized.”24 The three Caribbean nurses interviewed by the magazine were described as “well-established, competent nurses.”25 Two of the women had extensive education and held leadership positions. They did, however, admit that discrimination existed “to some degree in their social environment.” The three women were able to identify racism and individual acts of discrimination outside of their workplace. For example, Miss Nichols, one of the nurses interviewed, pointed out that “relations among white and coloured persons in Canada are bad … and will not improve as long as the both races continue to deny the existence of prejudice and discrimination.”26 The Canadian Nurse reported that, when asked about racism within the occupation, the women “agree that there is little or no discrimination in their profession.”27 The failure of these women to acknowledge that racism existed among nurses may have reflected their positions. These women exemplified the epitome of professionalism in terms of education and status within nursing and were most likely among only a few black nurses working in the hospitals. Conclusion Despite the fact that Caribbean nurses experienced frustration and sometimes racism dealing with immigration agents, with landlords and neighbours, with co-workers and supervisors, none of the nurses expressed any regrets over migrating to Canada. By focusing on their identities as professional women with concrete skills needed in the Canadian health care system, and as professionals trained in what they perceived as a superior British system, they were able to overcome some of the difficulties they faced. Nurses who immigrated during the 1950s and 1960s were less likely to acknowledge racism as a fundamental feature of their experience even when they realized that only one, or a few, black nurses worked in the hospital. To a certain extent, these nurses were exoticized and were rarely seen as a threat because they were so few in number. Interviews with black nurses who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s through 1980s reveal a range of experiences with racism in the workplace and community. Yet these nurses did not always acquiesce to the difficulties they faced but rather developed forms of resistance that enabled them to work and live in environments not always hospitable to their presence.

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In her historiographical treatment of Canadian immigration history, Franca Iacovetta noted that certain racialized groups, such as the Chinese and Japanese, were for too long understood primarily as targets or victims of racism, while their own perspectives and strategies, mental maps, and family and community lives were largely ignored.28 Caribbean women in Canada have similarly often been treated, by historians and social scientists, as one-dimensional female subjects – the labour recruits of a racist rich-world country and economically selfserving immigration policy. While fully agreeing with this premise, this essay suggests that a great deal of work still needs to be done in recovering the complex lives of Caribbean women immigrants in Canada, in writing a Canadian feminist labour history of black nurses, and in multiracial and gendered relations in the workplace. This study has aimed to create a multidimensional portrait of Caribbean women immigrants that acknowledges the range and diversity of their social experiences both in the workplace and community.

NOTES 1 Frances Henry, The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 2 See, for example, B. Singh Bolaria and Peter S. Li, Racial Oppression in Canada (Toronto: Garamond, 1985); Linda Carty, “African Canadian Women and the State: Labour Only Please,” in Peggy Bristow et al., “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up:” Essays in African Canadian Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 193−229; Dionne Brand, “A Working Paper on Black Women in Toronto: Gender, Race and Class,” in Himani Bannerji, ed., Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1993), 270-97. 3 Makeda Silvera, Silenced, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1989); Agnes Calliste, “Canada’s Immigration Policy and Domestics from the Caribbean: The Second Domestic Scheme,” in Jesse Vorst et al., eds., Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers, rev. ed. (Toronto: Garamond Press in cooperation with the Society for Socialist Studies, 1991), 136-68; Patricia Daenzer, Regulating Class Privilege: Immigrant Servants in Canada, 1940s–1990s (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1993). 4 Three of the women were interviewed in 1993 for this study. The remaining interviews took place during 1995–2000. The interviewees were identified using a snowball method and occasional referrals.

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5 Franca Iacovetta, “Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities, and Defiant Domestics: Writing about Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship,” Labour/Le Travail 36 (Fall 1995): 227. 6 Lisa Marie Jakubowski, Immigration and the Legalization of Racism (Halifax: Fernwood, 1997), 17. 7 Ibid. 8 Agnes Calliste, “Women of ‘Exceptional Merit’: Immigration of Caribbean Nurses to Canada,” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 6, 1 (1993): 91. 9 Ibid. 10 Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 213. 11 Calliste, “Women of ‘Exceptional Merit,’” 93. 12 Donald Moore, Don Moore: An Autobiography (Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 1985), 139–50. 13 Ibid. 14 Carty, “African Canadian Women and the State,” 212. 15 Calliste, “Women of ‘Exceptional Merit,’” 91. 16 Ibid., 88. 17 McPherson, Bedside Matters, 205. 18 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labour,” in Vicki L. Ruíz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 427. 19 Dionne Dodd and Helen MacMurchy, “Popular Midwifery and Maternity Services for Canadian Pioneer Women,” in Dianne Dodd and Deborah Gorman, eds., Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994), 135. 20 See, for example, Pat Armstrong, Jacqueline Choiniere, and Elaine Day, Vital Signs: Nursing in Transition (Toronto: Garamond, 1993); Barbara Keddy et al., “Nurses’ Work World: Scientific or Womanly Ministering,” Resources for Feminist Research 7, 3 (1987): 99–102; McPherson, Bedside Matters. 21 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities,” in Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 150. 22 Tania Das Gupta, Racism and Paid Work (Toronto: Garamond, 1996); Agnes Calliste, “Anti-Racism Organizing and Resistance in Nursing: African-Canadian Women,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 3, 33 (1996): 360–90. 23 Das Gupta, “Racism in Nursing,” 87.

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24 “Do Canadians Agree on Racial Equality?” Canadian Nurse 62, 4 (April 1966): 49; See also, Rusell Gillience, “Charge of Discrimination Presented,” The Gazette, April 13, 1965 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Iacovetta, “Manly Militants.”

The Mother of God Wears a Maple Leaf: History, Gender, and Ethnic Identity in Sacred Space F ra nc es Swyripa

Introduction Since the mid-1990s worshippers in Holy Cross Ukrainian Catholic Church in northeast Edmonton have prayed before an icon called “Our Lady of Canada,” in which the Mother of God wears a mantle embroidered in gold, red-veined maple leaves. Traditionally, Christ’s instruments of torture (the spear, vinegar-soaked sponge on a rod, crown of thorns, cross) appear in the upper corners. But here a red-robed angel on the left and a blue-robed angel on the right each hold a golden globe: one features a map of Canada, the other a red maple leaf.1 This Mother of God is indisputably both female and holy or spiritual in function. Yet her image has been co-opted independently of her sex for purely secular political purposes, telling everyone that members of this Ukrainian parish are also good Canadians. The ambiguous relationship of gender to the interplay among religion, ethnicity, and collective memory or identity in the sacred space of ethnic communities in western Canada is complicated. It is reflected best in how ethnic churches access and manipulate images and symbols in the interests of group-specific agendas that address the parameters of belonging within Canadian society. First, the mobilization of history and expressions of secular consciousness in the Prairie region’s (im)migrant churches reveal that many ethnic groups identify simultaneously as diasporas, in communion with the homeland

This chapter is shortened from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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and as Canadians with roots in the local community. Second, religion acts not only as a crucial element of ethnic identity but also as a measure of ethnic power and legitimacy that privileges certain groups over others. Gender is irrelevant to the articulation of collective memory and group agenda in that the images chosen draw freely on male and female historical figures that tie the local ethnic community to its counterparts worldwide. The attributes of femininity or masculinity clearly matter less than individuals’ significance, whether as national symbols in the homeland or as ethnic symbols in Canada, to the messages the keepers of these sacred spaces wish to communicate. When collective memory and group agenda are constructed around a congregation’s own past or Prairie regional experience, however, men and male imagery are valued more. The marginalization or exclusion of flesh-andblood women, in contrast to the politicized symbolism ascribed to their sisters from the distant past, reminds us that sacred space reflects the male privilege that has historically prevailed in both Christian churches and secular Western society. More difficult to evaluate is how the presence or absence of women in this visual imagery, or the use of specifically female and male images (especially when they embody gendered qualities of excellence and example), affects female worshippers. Edmonton Case Study Whenever religion is important to defining the nation or state, it helps to inform a sense of peoplehood. Accordingly, faith tends to merge with national or political identity, and sacred space, through its visual images and rituals, becomes a crucial meeting place where the two interact. To cultivate and reinforce people’s sense of belonging to a secular community, churches turn to history; they also accept custodianship of the “imagined” past around which that sense of belonging is constructed. Moreover, by providing the setting for and participating in the rites of state occasions or landmark moments in the nation’s life, churches themselves become active partners in making history and inventing tradition. (E)migration challenges the power and status that national or quasinational religious institutions enjoy. The impact is particularly acute when they move from mature communities marked by a high degree of cultural, “racial,” and/or religious cohesiveness and a strong historical consciousness to a more fluid environment, initially without entrenched interests and shared memory. In the new setting, they must often negotiate for position, influence, and the right to belong. Just as often they must

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readjust their self-image and learn to function, at least in dealings with the surrounding society, as minority ethnic organizations. Edmonton offers an excellent site for examining how Canadian ethnic groups and their churches use sacred space as politicized and gendered places to deal with the demotion of (e)migration and to promote new secular identities grounded in both the homeland and the Canadian experience. The city has been a multiethnic reality since its founding as a fur trade post in 1795, and during the settlement era that began a century later it attracted a variety of peoples who came in significant numbers at roughly the same time. As part of a coalescing frontier society, “non-establishment” groups could potentially assert themselves and their institutions as important participants in community- and/or nation-building. The Edmonton context (frontier, multiethnic) also transformed both the French Roman Catholic and the English Anglican churches from national into ethnic institutions, forced to behave differently than they had in their home settings. The two denominations founded missions when Edmonton was still a fort, but neither could presume upon a privileged pre-(im)migration status to secure similar dominance either then or in the settlement period that followed. In fact, without any rules or consensus automatically elevating one church over the other, especially with respect to secular community ritual, they had to jockey for position in a political contest that (perhaps inevitably) the Anglican Church with its British establishment connections won. Two of the six churches whose sacred space and visual imagery are under scrutiny originated in the fur trade era and represent Canada’s “charter peoples.” The older, St Joachim’s Roman Catholic parish was named a mission by the archbishop of St Boniface in 1854, sixteen years after two itinerant priests first visited Edmonton. By the time the present building was consecrated in 1899, St Joachim’s focus had moved from its Native/Metis roots to Edmonton’s fledgling French community, assuming an ethnic identity it retains today.2 All Saints Anglican began in 1875 with the arrival of English-born Reverend William Newton, supported by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in England. The present cathedral opened in 1956.3 The origins of two other churches are tied to the early settlement period and attest to the impact of the large Slavic immigration to the Edmonton area beginning in the 1890s. St Josaphat’s Ukrainian Catholic Church was built in 1904; noted Prairie church architect the Reverend Philip Ruh designed the current structure, completed between 1939 and 1947. Served by the Ukrainian Order of St Basil the Great since its inception, St Josaphat’s

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became the cathedral church of the eastern-rite Edmonton Ukrainian Catholic eparchy in 1948.4 Both St Josaphat’s and St Joachim’s are registered Alberta Historic Sites … In 1913, two years after initiating discussions with Bishop Legal of St Albert to create a separate Roman Catholic Polish parish in the city, Father Paweł Kulawy celebrated the first mass in Holy Rosary Church on New Year’s Day. The present building was erected between 1953 and 1956.5 The final churches portray the ethnic character of more contemporary Edmonton. Consecrated in 1987, St  Emeric’s Roman Catholic Church ministers to a Hungarian parish, formed in 1958 around individuals arriving after the 1956 antiCommunist uprising in Hungary.6 Lastly, in 1993 the old downtown Sacred Heart Church was designated the “official parish for the Catholic First Nations Peoples of Edmonton and surrounding communities.”7 None of these churches, as physical spaces incorporating an array of objects and images, has remained static over time.8 The secular statements they make in the twenty-first century can thus embrace the world view of successive generations. As for the material things that give them form, these various perspectives are unevenly represented and often sit uneasily with one another … It is also not unusual for inertia or loyalty to tradition to obstruct change, so that the continued presence of certain objects and images perpetuates points of view that members as a whole no longer support. In other instances, the messages projected illustrate accommodation by current congregations with the multilayered legacies of their predecessors. Yet the sacred space of each church nurtures and celebrates a peculiar sense of place and belonging, or ethnic identity, which is constructed around some combination and interpretation of the following: Canadian national or state symbols, the homeland heritage, and evolution as part of an Edmonton community. At different moments the imagery employed is unabashedly secular and nationalistic, appropriates and politicizes the religious, and elevates the worldly to sacred. It also vacillates between being conscious of and indifferent to gender. Sometimes female and male figures are mobilized equally, so that neither functions in a gendered fashion; other times, men are privileged, reflecting and reinforcing gender stereotypes that disadvantage women. Canadian Consciousness The ways in which the sacred space of the six churches expresses the ethnic groups’ attachment to the Canadian nation and state – identifying with its formal symbols and landmark events – illustrates the

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ambiguous role of gender. It does not, for example, enter into a decision to hang the Maple Leaf flag. All Saints is unusual for an Anglican church in the absence of flags in the interior, although that this was not always the case remains controversial.9 However, three of the ethnic Catholic churches – the exceptions are Sacred Heart and Holy Rosary – announce their loyalty to Canada by standing the national flag near the altar. St Josaphat’s also displays the Alberta flag (and uses the Alberta rose, with the Ukrainian sunflower, as a motif on the ceiling above the iconostasis).10 But as a site of remembering and honouring Canadian landmark events, sacred space becomes inevitably, if inadvertently, gendered. The memorabilia dedicated to a parish’s military past, for example, reinforce women’s traditional exclusion from spheres considered integral to nation-building. Not only are the targets of commemoration overwhelmingly men as combatants, but sacred space also collaborates in privileging this male theatre of activity and its heroes around ideals such as patriotism, freedom, and sacrifice. The sacrifice of its men in turn binds the parish to the nation and the ideals for which they fought and died. Yet the churches differ significantly regarding the visible symbols tying them to Canada and its wars, as historical exclusion from or inclusion in Canadian nation-building coloured ethnic-group collective memory and identity. The differences also demonstrate that if their maleness benefited some men, ethnicity disempowered others: the sacred space of these Edmonton churches mirrors the secular dominance of the British in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian society, and reinforces and reflects the marginality of Natives, the French, and Slavic immigrants. All Saints Anglican, long referred to as “the English church,” attests to a lengthy, intimate, and proud association with Canada’s (para)military institutions and their activities.11 Besides the articles and furnishings donated in memory of parishioners lost in war, or in thanks for their safe return, are a handful of wall plaques that form a permanent part of the nave. Some are personal, remembering dead husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. In others, a community pays homage to its men’s courage and sacrifice. The Canadian Mounted Rifles eulogize “a brave and gallant comrade” killed trying to save a wounded fellow officer in the Boer War. On a grander scale, sixty-eight names in gilt lettering engraved in marble remember “the men of this congregation who gave up their lives in the Great War 1914–1918.” This plaque substitutes for what was envisaged, in plans for the present church, as a “Soldiers’ Corner,” and replaces the original honour roll burned in the 1919 fire that destroyed the existing church.12 Despite discussions in the 1960s,

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there is no memorial to parishioners who fought in the Second World War.13 Nor, although the Royal Canadian Navy flag was once hung, are there any military banners or standards, or reminders of their one-time presence, formally tying All Saints to the local representative institutions of “official Canada.” But the Griesbach Memorial Window, commemorating two members of this prominent Edmonton family (and by name only their wives), more than compensates. Major General William Antribus Griesbach (CB, CMG, DSO, VD) founded the 49th Battalion, Edmonton Regiment, 1915; Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Henry Griesbach was the first enlisted member of the North-West Mounted Police, 1873.14 Not only are the men’s military credentials impeccable, opening All Saints to the grand narrative of Canadian history, but they also establish a special relationship between the parish and the police force whose heroic trek west and image of manly courage and integrity are so much part of regional Prairie identity. In fact, the cathedral functioned as the home church of the RCMP in the area, and in 1974 it hosted the force’s local centennial service. The five Catholic churches contain no evidence of such mainstreaming through Canadian military memorabilia and its associated nationbuilding implications …15 Hungarians did not come to Edmonton in significant numbers until 1956, and the parish is even more recent, putting Canada’s two great wars outside their experience. French Canadian support of both world wars, as British “imperialist” ventures, was lukewarm, even outside Quebec. The nationalist St Jean Baptiste Society had existed at St Joachim’s since 1894, its mixed political-cultural and religious program proclaiming solidarity with all French Canada.16 First Nations were disfranchised and confined largely to reserves, although some served in 1939–45 especially. A sign that symbols of Sacred Heart’s mainstream past do not belong to its Native present, the parish’s wartime honour roll hangs in the vestibule outside the place of worship itself. Ukrainians and Poles, as former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, faced widespread prejudice as well as enemy-alien status (if unnaturalized) during the First World War, which excluded them from military service. That neither St Josaphat’s nor Holy Rosary possesses, or chooses to display, a memorial from the Second World War is more intriguing. By then both Ukrainian and Polish ethnic groups had almost half a century of Canadian and Edmonton roots behind them, and both communities anxiously encouraged wartime service as proof of patriotism. Perhaps, despite the best exhortations of their leaders, Ukrainians and Poles in these two pioneer parishes did not volunteer in satisfactory

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numbers. Perhaps imperfect Canadianization left them detached from the honour rolls generated by the thousands for community groups across Canada. Or perhaps they rejected their sacred space as a suitable place for such secular, Canadian statements.17 The bottom line is that in all five non-Anglo churches the special gendered (male) nature of the sacred space cultivated at All Saints by virtue of its Canadian military memorials is missing. But far from saying that non-British women enjoy an equality with their men denied to British women, its absence indicates how the priorities and impositions of ethnic-group membership have reduced non-British men to the status of women, outside the great enterprise of nation-building. Homeland Heritage All Saints’ unique position is further underlined by how the six churches express their homeland ties and identity. While the Anglican imagery is largely genderless, and divorced from actual historical figures, the Catholic churches draw on both men and women in their nations’ pasts and use them independently of any gendered associations. Also, All Saints has historically enjoyed a comfortable symmetry between “Canadian” and “homeland,” in which expressions of Britishness and British ties were understood by the parish (and others) to be synonymous with Canadian. For both the soldiers commemorated within the nave and their descendants, there was no conflict between old and new homelands, in whose joint names these parishioners volunteered for service and made the supreme sacrifice. The Boer War plaque, for example, represents unity with imperial aims and adventures, and will have counterparts in Australia and New Zealand as well as Britain itself. The historically privileged “establishment” church, All Saints was long the host of choice for state or semi-official ceremonial occasions, emphasizing the British tie and putting it at the centre of Edmonton’s corporate ritualistic life … In the 1990s, its dean deemed the cathedral the “natural” venue for a memorial service for Diana, Princess of Wales, although in the mid-1980s, he had deemed it unsuitable for commemorating the Battle of the Atlantic and controversially cancelled its annual May service. These two contradictory positions suggest at least a partial shift away from a politicized British identity. Yet there are crucial differences between an Anglican parish distancing itself from secular homeland nationalism and ethnic churches for whom this is not a mainstream issue …

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For Polish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian immigrant ethnics, sacred space is a legitimate site in which to express ongoing, often ideologically coloured, identification with a homeland and people that are not synonymous (and are often in tension) with “Canadian.” The more these three Catholic congregations see themselves as diasporas in continuity with the homeland and its history, the more the visual images they evoke are rooted in sources external to Canada. National flags become especially powerful tools if forbidden or repressed in the homeland because they symbolize a vision of the nation, and thus an opposition, anathema to the ruling regime. But while it can be daring, even dangerous, to brandish such symbols in political protest at home, emigrants in a country like Canada can use them freely – to assert solidarity with “captive” compatriots in the homeland and in defiance of their oppressors. Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the congregations of St Josaphat’s and St Emeric’s adamantly opposed the Communist regimes in Ukraine and Hungary. The outlawed blueand-yellow Ukrainian nationalist flag (and later the flag of post-Soviet independent Ukraine) in the one, and the red-white-and-green flag of Hungary bearing the traditional coat of arms, plus the flag of the Hungarian Scouts (banned under Communism), in the other, once made strong political statements and still appeal emotionally. At Holy Rosary, the red-and-white Polish national flag is flown on the anniversary of the 3 May 1791 constitution, when there is a special service attended by Polish veterans. The extent to which these three ethnic groups, as religious communities, dwell mentally outside Canada in a world inhabited by the heroes and villains of Eastern Europe is best illustrated by the painting of the Last Judgment in St Josaphat’s Cathedral. The work of Julian Bucmaniuk, who immigrated to Canada as a Displaced Person after 1945, its heaven and hell were peopled with famous figures from recent Ukrainian history, including Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin burning with the damned … Conspicuous among the saved were Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, head of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia from 1900 to 1944; and Josyf Cardinal Slipyj, who survived almost twenty years in the Gulag to become titular head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the free world. That much of the politicized homeland imagery in the sacred space of the three Eastern European churches is religious in nature, or blurs the line between religious and secular, underscores the highly politicized nature of the religious past in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, and

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the importance of religion to the identity of the secular nation and/or state in those countries. For Edmonton, it also illustrates how the peculiarities of their respective Old World pasts cut across common Catholicism in Canada. National churches in the homeland, in other words, have become distinctive ethnic institutions in emigration, where symbols and images regarded as normal and familiar in the sacred space of one are alien or incongruous in the others. Moreover, these symbols and images are simultaneously often gender-specific, in that they draw freely on both male and female historical figures, yet innocent of gender, in that it is their national function or service to the nation, not feminine/masculine attributes, that determines their presence. Individual saints might have been revered and canonized for holy virtues tied to stereotypically “female” or “male” behaviour and traits. But they appear in these churches as much for political and nationalistic (ethnic-specific) as for spiritual reasons, rather than because they reflect qualities identified with gender.18 Three large portraits dominate the interior of St Emeric’s. One is of St  Emeric himself, son of St Stephen, the eleventh-century king who united and Christianized the Magyars to found the Hungarian nation. Another is of “Our Lady of Hungary” (Stephen dedicated his nation to Mary on his deathbed) – crowned, dressed in red and blue, and holding her son. The third is of St Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), known for her kindness and severe penance, who was given to God before her birth by her parents, Bela IV and Marie Laskaris, in gratitude for Hungary’s liberation from the Tatars.19 The Ukrainian cathedral honours its own array of national-religious figures, beginning with its patron saint, the monk and bishop St Josaphat of Polotsk. Martyred for his faith following the Union of Brest in 1596, which carved the Ukrainian world into Catholic and Orthodox spheres, he was canonized in 1867. There are also millennium mosaics of SS Olha and Volodymyr, the convert princess and her grandson, who, as ruler, Christianized Kievan Rus’ in 988. The pair are also present alongside early monks SS Antonii Pechersky and Teodosii Pechersky, politicized against a background of tridents, the Ukrainian national emblem banned in the Soviet Union.20 Holy Rosary, too, ties itself to the religious underpinnings of secular Poland. The stained-glass window in the south transept marks the millennium of the baptism of Poland in 1966. The individuals on the windows in the choir loft include St Casimir, son of Casimir IV of Poland and supporter of the poor, named patron saint of his country in 1602; St  Stanisław Kostka, eleventh-century bishop of Cracow and martyr,

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murdered by Bolesław II for criticizing his private conduct, and canonized as a symbol of Poland’s unity; St John of Kanti, fifteenth-century priest revered in his native Poland, especially for his generosity to Cracow’s poor; and St Cecilia, patron of musicians and popular Polish saint.21 Holy Rosary also possesses a relic of St Stanisław, a gift from Karol Cardinal Wojtyła in 1970, following his visit to the parish well before election as pontiff made him a celebrity far beyond the Polish community.22 At All Saints Anglican, the homeland associations are less nationalistic, largely invisible, depersonalized, and ungendered. There are no English kings or queens, or saints, or martyrs (except for a small cross of St George, patron saint of England, on the Griesbach Memorial Window).23 The mobilization of homeland imagery differs profoundly at Sacred Heart and St Joachim’s. Most importantly, it shows Natives and FrancoAlbertans behaving as ethnic communities whose historical roots and memory lie not outside but inside Canada. This domesticated concept of “homeland” is reflected in their saints. St Joachim’s has a stainedglass window of St Anne – wife of St Joachim, mother of Mary, patron saint of Canada and Quebec, and historically the protectress of Canadian voyageurs and fur traders. In 1844 the pioneer Oblates named their mission northwest of Edmonton Lac-Ste-Anne, and the annual pilgrimage to the lake’s shores on her feast day still lures thousands of Natives.24 Both St Joachim’s and Sacred Heart, as Oblate parishes, contain icons of St Eugene de Mazenod, the French founder of the order that has served western Canada, and its Native Christian converts, since the fur trade. But St Eugene has a special bond with Sacred Heart: one of his miracles (he was canonized in 1995) occurred in northern Alberta, curing a young Native boy of tuberculosis.25 Although Polish Holy Rosary is also an Oblate parish, the order’s founder is not honoured with an image.26 At Sacred Heart the spot St Eugene now occupies was once held by Louis Riel, the Metis leader in the Red River uprising of 1869–70 and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, but his picture was removed and destroyed after a Native elder decided that the eyes were bad medicine.27 In a side chapel, sainthood and Canadian Native history merge more canonically, showing that Native saints can act like their Eastern European counterparts as national figures blind to gender. It contains a statue of the Iroquois virgin and ascetic, Kateri Tekakwitha, venerated in New France after her death in 1680, and beatified in 1980 as part of Pope John Paul II’s campaign to give indigenous peoples their own saints. (She achieved sainthood in 2013.28) While Sacred Heart has

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images of only the two saints, St Joachim’s depicts several on its stainedglass windows. Certain ones specifically acknowledge the non-French immigrants the pioneer parish served: St Patrick (Irish), SS Anthony of Padua and Stanisław Kostka (Polish), St Basil the Great (Ukrainian). The last window, presented by the “Galician Night School Girls,”29 and featuring the founder of the monastic order that supplied Canada (and Edmonton) with its first permanent Ukrainian priests, makes the local multicultural connection explicit. St Joachim’s interior also maintains links with France: a stained-glass image of St François de Sales and the names of French-born pioneer priests – Grouard, Lemarchand, and Leduc.30 The more explicitly recognized psychological homeland is Quebec, albeit outside not inside the church. In 1934 the parish erected a cross to Jacques Cartier, father of Quebec and “discoverer” of Canada, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of his voyage up the St Lawrence River. Overall, however, St Joachim’s is curiously rootless. Ironically, given that St Joseph’s was formed (1910) as an English-speaking parish to counter the Frenchness of St Joachim’s, the Roman Catholic cathedral is more visually assertive in its appropriation of Quebec as homeland. But elevation to cathedral status in 1922 (which confirmed Anglo ascendancy in local affairs) forced the church to look beyond itself for historical legitimacy and embrace, as the diocese (and later archdiocese), heritage and ethnic associations it had once, as a parish, fled. Four windows in the present cathedral celebrate Quebec, its sons and daughters, and its missionary record in western Canada. One features “Blessed Mother d’Youville,” who in 1737 founded the Sisters of Charity or Grey Nuns in New France. A century later they entered the Native mission field in the West, coming to present-day Alberta (Lac-Ste-Anne) in 1859; in 1895 they opened the General Hospital as part of the French Catholic complex coalescing around St Joachim’s. Two windows remember local figures: Father Albert Lacombe, Quebec-born missionary to the First Nations, above the church he built in nearby St Albert in 1861; and French-born Bishop Vital Grandin, above the 1872 cathedral, also in St Albert. In the fourth window a male Native convert in a blue blanket and red undergarment stands above a teepee camp outside a stockaded fort.31 The Canadian homeland evoked in Sacred Heart is at once broader and narrower than that claimed in St Joachim’s (or St Joseph’s). As the church interior was redone to show parishioners’ Native heritage, it embraced a historical past that was both Canada-wide (Kateri) and regional (Louis Riel). Not only did Riel draw in the Metis, but at one point

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the homeland is implicitly equated with pre-1870 Red River, from which collective memory says the Metis were exiled.32 Paralleling this evocation of a Canadian homeland is the Canadianization of the biblical story via First Nations history and symbols, making faith potentially more personal but also highly politicized. On the wall above St Eugene, a teepee, igloo, longhouse, canoe, and kayak are sketched in a landscape of mountains, forest, and river; superimposed over them, two enjoined hands imitate Michelangelo’s God creating Adam. A statue of an Indigenous Christ – dark-skinned, an eagle feather in his hand – sits on the adjacent side altar. Behind him a vivid wall painting, dominated by a huge teepee and immense blue sky with a distant mountain range on the horizon, collapses the Bible into a few images and key events using stylized Native figures. At the top is the Ghost Buffalo or Creator. Below to the left, a circle holds Mary, her infant son, and three teepees representing the Three Wise Men. Next, along a downwardly spiralling ribbon, an outline of the Rocky Mountains holds the silhouette of a small male figure leading an ox as it pulls a Red River cart – symbolizing both the Metis exodus from Red River and the Flight into Egypt. At the bottom of the ribbon a crucified Christ hangs on the cross, a bowed figure kneels at its foot, the mountains behind are dark and foreboding. A soaring orange eagle above Christ’s head heralds the Resurrection. Other instances of Nativizing Christ’s life lack the same Canadian political pointedness, although they are more consciously gendered. In the chapel dedicated to Kateri, the wall paintings by Barbara Marquis include three grey-haired women based on parish members (fellow painter, Sheldon Meek, had objected to female figures in the chapel).33 The Stations of the Cross, which atypically circle the nave clockwise, following nature, eschew images of Roman soldiers and the Holy Land in favour of Native reference points. The First Fall (no. 3) captures Native connectedness to nature (even the trees are falling); at the Second Fall (no. 7), the Northern Lights blaze across the sky; and the Tomb (no. 14) is a raised Indian bier … If these, as Canadian images, are more cultural and spiritual than political, The Women (no. 8) is not only avowedly political but also transcends Canada to express unity with Aboriginal peoples and their suffering worldwide. An open white palm print on the face of a full moon rising over the mountains represents the thousands of Disappeared in Latin America; the four figures kneeling in front of an outstretched hand are the mothers and wives who grieve for them.

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The Local Community While Sacred Heart fully embraces its secular and spiritual Canadian Native past, the only references to a specifically Edmonton or Alberta identity are the incongruous military honour roll in the vestibule and, for worshippers who know their miracles, the icon of St Eugene. This feeling of dislocation from the larger community speaks to First Nations marginalization from mainstream society, past and present. The sacred space of the other five churches does tie parish and ethnic groups to their local secular roots, although significantly no correlation exists between high rank in Canada’s ethnic hierarchy and the creation or assertion of local identity stemming from a sense of participation and therefore entitlement as community builders. Rather, sacred space is one of the few “public” spaces non-charter peoples control, allowing them to present an uncontested alternative version of history and their place in it. That both Polish Holy Rosary and Ukrainian St  Josaphat’s have deliberately used their churches to make group claims as Edmontonians and Albertans, while English All Saints and French St Joachim’s have not, testifies to this imbalance of opportunity and to Eastern Europeans’ particular hunger for recognition and inclusion. In constructing their local credentials, Poles and Ukrainians (and to a lesser extent, Hungarians) appeal to a series of disparate historical legacies, ingeniously synthesizing Old and New worlds, their people and mainstream Canada, themselves and other Albertans and Edmontonians. St Joachim’s and All Saints have done little, symbolically, to link their ethnic congregations with Edmonton’s French and English pioneers, or to use them as a vehicle of validation, perhaps because they feel no need to do so. That pioneer contribution and the Anglo-French pre-eminence it affirms are clear without special prodding by their descendants. In this local secular sphere, when maleness or femaleness is not irrelevant or subsumed under the ethnic message, the imagery (like traditional history itself) is almost exclusively male. Seldom acknowledged as individual and independent actors, flesh-and-blood women who appear do so passively – named on donor plaques or memorial windows and gifts to the parish – as appendages of their husbands, seldom on their own. They are not even present as nuns. A noticeable exception, especially considering the absence of any recognition of the pioneer labours of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, is the presence in St Josaphat’s of the standard of the Ukrainian Catholic Women’s League alongside that of the Ukrainian Catholic Brotherhood. All Saints alone

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directly acknowledges women’s contribution, but only to the church not the larger Edmonton community, in personal memorials to a handful of parish workers, and in a generic stained-glass window dedicated “To the glory of God and with deep thankfulness for the service of the faithful women.”34 No male equivalent of this exists. Instead, individual men are named and acknowledged personally, with or without underlining their role in the larger community. Also, excluding priests and parish functionaries, they are not identified with (beyond financial contribution) or confined to parish activities. In some instances, men and male activities become privileged through what the parish, and the ethnic group, value as crucial to their collective priorities and identity. In other instances, such is the overriding significance attached to both priorities and identity that neither maleness nor femaleness matters as much as the message about the ethnic group that the visual imagery is intended to make. In keeping with the late arrival of Hungarians to Edmonton, evidence of identification by either the parish or local Hungarians with the surrounding society is sparse at St Emeric’s. The Hungarian homeland and its struggles clearly eclipse any sense of Canadianness or attachment to Edmonton and its history. Yet Edmonton and Hungary are brought together … in a monument, topped by the Crown of St Stephen, which stands outside the church/hall complex and broadly commemorates those who lived and died for their country between 896 and 1956. The English text reads: “This memorial honours the heroes who sacrificed their lives for the freedom and basic human rights of their compatriots during the Hungarian freedom fight in 1956, erected by those Edmonton citizens of Hungarian origin.” The Hungarian text, a stirring patriotic verse by the poet Petöfi, is more generic and omits the Edmonton reference.35 Not only is the sex of these heroes irrelevant, but the priority of place and honour accorded their sacrifice in the name of Hungary also opens up their ranks to men and women equally. In contrast, at the English and French “mainstream” churches, the gendered imagery denoting the local roots and identity of the parish and its members is decidedly male. Claims to Edmonton history, and to the city’s French and English ethnic communities, are in any case muted. Only two items in St Joachim’s deliberately forge a link between past and present; both are inward-looking and not part of the church interior’s permanent fabric. Four photographs depict the 1859, 1886, 1899, and present churches, while a painted banner of the current building links it to its 1838 Oblate roots. Despite the parish’s origins in the

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fur trade and nearby Native communities, neither is commemorated in its visual imagery. St Joachim’s settlement-era credentials, in contrast, are preserved through the donors of the stained-glass windows installed soon after the present church was built – names like Lessard, Gariepy, and Larue, representing the French secular elite in pioneer Edmonton. Like the stained-glass saints acknowledging St Joachim’s contemporary immigrant parishioners, united by their common Catholicism, these men reinforce an identity and sphere of activity increasingly outside Edmonton’s crystallizing Anglo-Protestant ethos. The latter’s influence is illustrated, without fanfare, at All Saints, … whose stained-glass memorial windows are a veritable who’s who of early Edmontonians. Besides the military Griesbachs, they include Henry Allen Gray, first Anglican bishop and juvenile court judge; Richard Secord, affluent merchant; and Ernest Sheldon, mathematician at the University of Alberta. Romanticized and nostalgic, but specific to nowhere, the secular images below the traditional biblical scenes also celebrate the frontier: an early model car, a log cabin in the bush, stereotypical Victorians (top hat, fur muff), a Prairie street with false-fronted buildings, a lake and canoe. Both Holy Rosary and St Josaphat’s identify, self-consciously and politically, with Canada and the local community. Within their sacred space, the Poles are less assertive in their Canadianness and in historical claims for ethnic-group status, but overall their message is the more overtly secular and all-encompassing. While Polish symbols proper dominate in Holy Rosary, the congregation’s local roots are acknowledged in a bronze plaque near the main door commemorating the pioneer priest and founder of the parish, Paweł Kulawy. The text, however, makes no mainstream claims on behalf of Polish Edmontonians; indeed, Kulawy’s death in Auschwitz ties Polish pioneers in Canada to the wartime martyrdom of Poles in the homeland.36 But outside the church, the Polish community has marshalled an array of symbols to effect a three-way link among Poland, Canada, and themselves. A cement monument with the words “Polonia semper fidelis” (Polish diaspora always faithful) and the numbers 100 and 1,000 across the front features a cross, mosaics of the Alberta coat of arms and the crowned Polish eagle against a red maple leaf, and three bronze plaques. One, the stylized Canadian Centennial maple leaf, attributes the monument project to the Holy Rosary Men’s Club; the others (in English and Polish) read: “In honour of the Polish pioneers of Alberta on the occasion of the Polish millennium of Christianity and Canadian

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Centennial.”37 An amalgam of Polish imperial and religious history, Canadian nation-building, and the local (Alberta) Polish pioneer experience, the monument offers this complex legacy to Poles of both sexes. St Josaphat’s claim on behalf of its Ukrainian pioneers occurs solely within sacred space. Moreover, it celebrates only the achievements of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, specifically its male religious, the Basilian Fathers. In major respects, the church interior functions as a historical record of Basilian activity and Ukrainian Catholicism in east-central Alberta since 1902, the visual imagery proclaiming that this is a Canadian institution proud of its past and sure of its place. On the walls of the central nave and both transepts large likenesses of important Basilians and other clerics unite Ukraine, Canada, Alberta, and Edmonton. In addition to Metropolitan Sheptytsky, who visited his emigrant flock in 1910, are the first two bishops of the Canadian church; the first bishop of the Edmonton eparchy; the first missionary; the priest who began regular pastoral work in Edmonton and laid the base for St Josaphat’s; his contemporary and the order’s superior in Galicia; two former Canadian heads, one holding the Basilian Rules with a “Canadianized” crest, the other in office when the idea for the present church took shape; and the pioneer missionary who served as second priest of St Josaphat’s.38 Besides these Basilian figures, two silhouettes on the ceiling to the right and left of the iconostasis reach outward. One, a collapsed skyline of rural Alberta where the first Basilians founded their mission, moves from the original chapel at Beaverlake to the imposing Basilian monastery and first SS Peter and Paul church in nearby Mundare. The second, a collapsed Edmonton skyline, is more ambitious in its presumptions: beginning with St Josaphat’s cathedral, it moves through the downtown core to end with St Joachim’s and the Legislature Building. Both cryptic and bold, the implication of shared legitimacy shows how Ukrainians understand sacred space as a place to assert their sense of partnership in the Canadian community to which they belong and which they helped build. Conclusion The female imagery in the sacred space of these Prairie ethnic churches often has little to do with women as such. The images are there because the persons concerned – saints, queens, and princesses who lived in a far-away time and place – symbolize the aspirations of their people or nation. Saintliness alone was not enough to secure their presence, or the

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Native Kateri would be in Ukrainian St Josaphat’s, Ukrainian St Olha in Hungarian St Emeric’s, and Hungarian St Margaret in Native Sacred Heart. Even the Mother of God, or the Virgin Mary, has been appropriated and nationalized. Although fewer in number, these politicized figures perform the same function as their male counterparts in the same space. When the imagery moves from the overarching narrative of their people or nation to the local experience and collective memory of the ethnic group itself, gender becomes significant. Women and female images are either absent (military memorabilia), recalled but invisible (articles bought in their name), or subordinated to men and male images (handmaidens to the parish but not priests or captains of business). More positively, women are sometimes included by implication (generic pioneer memorials). How these six churches use the past to construct their secular identity around a sense of community, then, is simultaneously free of gender bias, giving priority to the nation or ethnic group, and gendered in a way that privileges men and male activities. Overall, they are more comfortable with women and female imagery in their sacred space when it is passive and remote than when it is close and familiar … Contemporary female worshippers expected to look at female images and symbols as role models receive a mixed message. On the one hand, national saints encourage them to identify strongly as Native, Ukrainian, Hungarian, French, Polish, or English, with explicit or implicit instructions to serve the cause of their people or nation. On the other, the virtues celebrated in these female holy figures and secular symbols encourage stereotypically female behaviour: motherhood, sexual purity, dedicated service, piety, helpfulness, modesty. These values are reinforced by the ways in which contemporary female parishioners’ own predecessors are treated or commemorated. As participants in and co-builders of the religious and ethnic communities represented in the sacred space of these six Edmonton churches, women remain junior partners slotted into roles that reinforce their difference.

NOTES 1 The iconographer was André Prevost. On the Mother of God in the iconography of Ukrainian Canadian women’s organizations, see my Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 131–7.

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2 Fieldwork at St Joachim’s (9928 – 110 Street) was conducted between November 1997 and May 2000, initially with Sister Edna. See also “Historical Overview of the St Joachim Parish” (photocopy, 22 August 1992) produced for visitors; the official jubilee history, France LevasseurOuimet, Saint-Joachim, la première paroisse catholique d’Edmonton, 1899–1999 (Edmonton: Author, 1999); and related video, Le Comité des Fêtes du Centenaire, Saint Joachim: Première paroisse catholique d’Edmonton (Edmonton: Patenaude Communications, 1999). 3 All Saints (11039 – 103 Street) was visited in September 1997 and May 2001; conversations with the Reverend Harold Munn, dean, and Dr Gust Olson, warden. Other sources include Lewis G. Thomas, “Establishing an Anglican Presence,” in Bob Hesketh and Frances Swyripa, eds., Edmonton: The Life of a City (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1995), 21–30; anniversary booklets, Cathedral Church of All Saints, 1875–1935, and Jean Monckton, All Saints Anglican Cathedral, 1875–1975; the brochure, “A Walking Tour of the Edmonton Cathedral of All Saints” (n.d.); and Records of the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Ed.15/All Saints and Acc.95.31, Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton, AB. 4 St Josaphat’s (10825 – 97 Street) was visited in September 1997 and May 2000. Additional information came from Orest Kupranets, Katedra sv. Iosafata v. Edmontoni (Edmonton: Ukrainska katolytska eparkhiia Edmontonu, 1979); visitor pamphlet (n.d.), St Josaphat’s Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, prepared by the cathedral branch of the Ukrainian Catholic Women’s League of Canada; Mykhailo Khomiak, ed., Iuliian Butsmaniuk (Edmonton: Kanadske naukove tovarystvo im. Shevchenka, oseredok na Zakhidniu Kanadu, 1982); and Bucmaniuk’s archives in the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, AB. 5 Holy Rosary (11485 – 106 Street) was visited in September 1997, accompanied by Fr Stanislaw Kowal, and May 2000. See also John Huculak, History of the Holy Rosary Parish in Edmonton, 1913–1988 (Edmonton: Holy Rosary Parish, 1988); Teofil Szendzielarz’s summary, Dom Ojca na Zachodzie, forms Part III. 6 St Emeric’s (12960 – 112 Street) was visited in September 1997, with the Reverend Joseph Occhio and Gabor Botar, and informally several times since. 7 Fieldwork was undertaken at Sacred Heart (10821 – 96 Street) in September 1997 and May 2000; Reverend James Holland discussed the meaning of the objects and symbols in the sanctuary. See also brochure, Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples (n.d.).

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8 Note that the following observations reflect the situation when the fieldwork was done for the original chapter in the late 1990s. 9 On flag issues in All Saints over the decades, from the Union Jack to the standards of First Troop Boy Scouts and Beaver Lodge IODE, see Records of the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Ed.15, esp. files 52–54, 56–58, 78, 80, 106–109, 116, 117a. Currently, the Canadian and Anglican Church of Canada flags fly outside the church. 10 The UCWL pamphlet, St Josaphat’s Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, ascribes only religious significance to the rose (St Josaphat’s “crest,” symbolizing the Mother of God) and sunflower (symbolizing humility and obedience and the Christian’s duty always to face Christ just as the sunflower always faces the sun). 11 Thomas, “Establishing an Anglican Presence,” 28. 12 On the loss of the honour roll and battalion colours, see Rector Goulding, Edmonton Parish Magazine, January 1920, and Records of the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Ed.15, file 117a; on the proposed Soldiers’ Corner, see fundraising pamphlets (especially “c,” blueprint/Plate B) published by the Building Fund Committee in the 1950s, files 106–9. 13 The dean broached a “memorial for those who had lost their lives in the Second World War” just after Remembrance Day in 1961; ibid., file 57, vestry minutes, 14 November 1961. 14 Ibid., files 52 and 54, vestry minutes, 13 November 1933, 13 November 1950. Also Acc.95.31, box 1, letter, George McClellan, Office of the Ombudsman, 25 October 1973; letter, Randall Ivany, Dean, to Peter Lougheed, Premier, 15 March 1972; and vestry minutes, 11 February 1974. 15 In contrast, St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Cathedral – intended as an “English-speaking” parish when it was formed in 1910 – has two rolls of honour: one in the vestibule and a second off to its side flanked by the Canadian and Vatican flags. 16 Levasseur-Ouimet, Saint-Joachim, 57–60, 101–2, 123–31, 175–91; this book identifies sixty-two parishioners who served in the Second World War (178) but also notes that the local newspaper, La Survivance, encouraged Franco-Albertans to vote no to conscription in 1942 (177); no names or numbers of volunteers are provided for the Great War. 17 On Ukrainians’ wartime experience, see John Herd Thompson and Frances Swyripa, eds., Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada and the Great War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1983); and Gordon Panchuk, ed., Memorial Souvenir Book 1: Ukrainian Branches, Royal Canadian Legion (Montreal: Ukrainian Canadian Veterans Association, 1986). During

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Frances Swyripa both world wars the fate of their homeland (a resurrected Polish state in 1914–18, its security in 1939) and Polish Canadians’ own agenda dovetailed with Canadian and allied interests. Viktor Turek, Poles in Manitoba (Toronto: Canadian Polish Congress, 1967), 139–40, acknowledges as much, while deploring Poles’ enemy-alien status in the Great War until Ottawa recognized the “absurdity” of the situation. William Makowski, History and Integration of Poles in Canada (Niagara Peninsula: Canadian Polish Congress, 1967), 179–84, ignores the enemy-alien issue altogether. Other ethnic Catholic churches in Edmonton reinforce this point: Our Lady of Fatima (Portuguese), Our Lady of Guadalupe (Latin American), Our Lady Queen of Poland (Polish), Queen of Martyrs (Vietnamese), and Santa Maria Goretti (Italian). See also Kenneth Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 115, 122–4, 152, 222. See, for example, Michael Freze, Patron Saints (Huntingdon, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1992), 24, 76, 201–2; and Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 223, 304–5. See Attwater, Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 47–8, 312–13. See, for example, Freze, Patron Saints, 27–8, 30; and Attwater, Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 38, 77, 81, 191. Huculak, History of Holy Rosary Parish, 36. Indicative of All Saints’ mindset are objects like a silver chalice rededicated to service in the cathedral after “300 years of use in an unknown English church,” and a Children’s Processional Cross “made from nails from Coventry Cathedral … blitzed in 1941”; see Records of the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton, Ed.15, file 111. The shrine at Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, for whom Lac-Ste-Anne was named, has attracted pilgrims seeking its miraculous cures since 1658; see the “Patron Saints Index: Anne” at www.catholic-forum.com/saints; the Oblate version of the Alberta mission as a healing site and place of pilgrimage beginning in 1889 is found in E.O. Drouin, Lac Ste-Anne Sakahigan (Edmonton: Editions de l’Érmitage, 1973), 52–63. Alfred Hubenig, Living in the Spirit’s Fire: St Eugene de Mazenod, Founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Toronto: Novalis, 1995), was published at the time of Eugene’s canonization; his Canadian miracles are reported in the Order of Service, Mass of Thanksgiving, St Joseph’s Basilica, Edmonton, 16 February 1996; the case of the Native boy, David Courteoreille, in de Mazenod’s cause was presented 8 December 1937 by Ferdinand Thiry, the Oblate postular general.

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26 Yet the seventy-fifth jubilee history of Holy Rosary contains brief pieces on the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Indians of Canada, and the fur trade origins of the diocese of St Albert; Huculak, History of Holy Rosary Parish, 109–14. 27 After removal of the picture, Fr Holland insists, parish life revived; conversation, 16 September 1997. The priest would also like to commission what he termed a “proper icon” of Riel. 28 The parish possesses an icon of Kateri Tekakwitha, not yet installed, painted by Robert Lentz for Bridge Building Images company; one of two choices sold by the company, whose iconographic offerings include Mohandas Gandhi, it features a turtle (Kateri was from the Turtle clan) with an evergreen on its back and a flying eagle above (symbolizing God). On Kateri Tekakwitha, see Ferdinand Holböck, New Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church, 1979–83, vol. 1, translated by Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2001), 45–7; popular hagiographies, Lillian Fisher, Kateri Tekakwitha: The Lily of the Mohawks (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1996), and Margaret Bunson, Kateri Tekakwitha: Mystic of the Wilderness (Huntingdon, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1992); K. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethnohistory 40, 2 (1993): 277–306; Allan Greer, “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race and Hagiography in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, 2 (2000): 323–48; and “Patron Saints Index: Kateri Tekakwitha” at www.catholic-forum.com/saints. 29 The school was run by the Sisters Faithful Companions of Jesus for Ukrainian immigrant girls working in Edmonton. Upon arrival in 1902, the Ukrainian Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate lived in the attic of old St Joachim’s, west of the present building. 30 See Gaston Carrière, Dictionnaire biographique des Oblats de Marie-Immaculée au Canada, vol. 2 (Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1977), 116–17 (Emile Grouard), 288–9 (Hippolyte Leduc), 309 (Alphonse Lemarchand). 31 Mary Pauline Fitts, Hands to the Needy: Blessed Marguerite d’Youville, Apostle to the Poor (Yardley, PA: Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, 2000); Thérèse Castonguay, A Leap in Faith: The Grey Nun Ministries in Western and Northern Canada, vol. 1 (Edmonton: Grey Nuns of Alberta, 1999), esp. 179–216; and Carrière, Dictionnaire biographique des Oblats de Marie-Immaculée au Canada, vol. 2, 106–7 (Vital-Justin Grandin), 219–21 (Albert Lacombe). 32 Gerhard Ens, From Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

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33 The others depict the story of the loaves and fishes (in which Christ wears an eagle headdress) and the fishermen casting their nets on the other side from a West Coast canoe; Meek’s objection comes from Fr Holland. The Stations of the Cross, 1992, are by Meek, though he and Barbara Marquis shared the work. 34 The dedication on a stained-glass window at nearby Christ Church Anglican, also a pioneer parish, is similarly generic. 35 Anna Könye translated the Hungarian text. A second monument outside the St Emeric complex is a bronze relief of Cardinal Mindzenty, “The Spiritual Leader of Hungary.” 36 See also Carrière, Dictionnaire biographique des Oblats de Marie-Immaculée au Canada, 2: 209–10. 37 The monument was designed by Mr Strzelski and Mrs Mirska did the mosaics (Huculak, History of Holy Rosary Parish, 35). 38 They are identified in Kupranets, Katedra sv. Iosafata v. Edmontoni, 184–5.

PART NINE Trauma, Violence, and Memory

Many immigrant women, past and present, arrive in Canada with histories of persecution, violence, and other traumatic experiences that were primary motivators for leaving their homelands. This was true for Loyalist women who settled in eastern Canada after the American Revolution, for black women who escaped to Canada on the Underground Railroad, and for Displaced Persons who came to Canada after surviving the Second World War. This is also true for the diverse groups of refugees who arrived in Canada in the late twentieth century and up to the present. Many of the recent refugee migrations were prompted by wars of liberation, civil strife, and persecution by dictatorships – all of which resulted in long-term manifestations of trauma in the lives of immigrant women in Canada. However, trauma occurred within Canada’s borders as well, a consequence of racialized violence against minority ethnic groups perpetrated by the Canadian government. The three chapters in this section are drawn together by the common experience of violence and resultant trauma in the lives of the immigrant and racialized women profiled. They also have in common the use of oral history as a means of uncovering and understanding the life stories of the women in question. Oral interviews have long been recognized as one of the best – and sometimes the only – method for gaining entry into the past lives of immigrant women, and they continue to be a crucial source for obtaining the first-person experiences of littlestudied groups. However, the ways in which oral interviews are used by historians have changed and multiplied in intentions, approaches, and outcomes. Thus, recent studies do not just use (and sometimes in fact reject) oral interviews to supply “information” or anecdote, but analyse the manner and meaning in women’s oral narratives, drawing

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on concepts of “social” and “collective” memory, as well as subjectivity, and the interpretive material that emerges from the relationship between interviewer/historian and interviewee/subject. In many ways discussions of “shared authority” – a term that is used variously to refer to a collaborative relationship between interviewer and interviewee – or the meaning of silences, are now as central to oral interview-based studies as the subject matter itself. Many oral interviews, along with other autobiographical sources such as memoirs, diaries, and letters, are also being interpreted with respect to theories of memory, which propose that “how” people remember the past is equally important to “what” they recall. Paula Draper’s study of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Canada is based on one of the first large-scale oral history projects with survivors of this Second World War genocide. Analysing the complexity of memory in the stories told to her, Draper demonstrates that what is remembered from the past is a central part of people’s present-day identity. Her study illustrates in very poignant ways how successful post-migration lives can belie ongoing struggles with the pre-migration tragedy experienced by their families and community. Similarly, Pamela Sugiman’s chapter on Japanese Canadian Nisei (second generation) women who were interned by the Canadian state during the Second World War utilizes the concept of memory to break down the dichotomy of past and present and demonstrates how women’s oral narratives reveal how much their past trauma was still very “present” in their lives. Unlike refugee women from elsewhere – though Sugiman describes them as “internally displaced” – Japanese Canadian women continue to live within the state that enacted political violence against them. Their ongoing suffering as they relive the past does not end because of the official Redress Settlement of 1988. The end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries has seen an increasing number of immigrants, some of whom are refugees from predominantly Muslim countries. This has added new dimensions to understanding the challenges facing immigrant and racialized women in Canada. Nadia Jones-Gailani interviewed different groups of women in Toronto (Canada), Detroit (US), and Amman (Jordan) who fled their home country of Iraq because of war, hunger, displacement, and persecution. Her study explores the hybrid and diasporic identities that women were creating outside of their homeland. But in particular, Jones-Gailani finds that the interviews she conducted provided a “safe space” in which refugee women could feel empowered to speak

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candidly about opinions they would normally keep silent out of fear or repression. Doing oral history in informal, safe spaces allowed her to analyse gendered counter-narratives which undermine the masculine national myth of a unified Iraq. How might the refugee experience be different for women compared with men? What is the impact of pre-migration violence and trauma on immigrant women in Canada? How does the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee influence the outcome of an oral history project? Can you think of other ethnic groups in Canada with similar experiences or commonalities between traumatized refugees and indigenous peoples?

SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READINGS Agnew, Vijay, ed. Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Epp, Marlene. “The Memory of Violence: Soviet and East European Mennonite Refugees and Rape in the Second World War.” Journal of Women’s History 9, 1 (1997): 58–87. Freund, Alexander. Oral History and Ethnic History. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2014. High, Steven, ed. Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015. Iacovetta, Franca. “Post-Modern Ethnography, Historical Materialism, and Decentring the (Male) Authorial Voice: A Feminist Conversation.” Histoire sociale/ Social History 32, 64 (November 1999): 275–93. Llewellyn, Kristina R., Alexander Freund, and Nolan Reilly. The Canadian Oral History Reader. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Oikawa, Mona. Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Patai, Daphne, and Sherna Berger Gluck, eds. Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Saujani, Sheyfali. “Empathy and Authority in Oral Testimony: Feminist Debates, Multicultural Mandates, and Reassessing the Interviewer and Her ‘Disagreeable’ Subjects.” Histoire sociale/Social History 45, 90 (November 2012): 361–91. Zembrzycki, Stacey. According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014.

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Surviving Their Survival: Women, Memory, and the Holocaust Pau la J. Dr ap e r

Introduction What does it mean to be a survivor of the Holocaust?1 This is the question that has informed my research over the years, as I’ve listened to hundreds of Canadian survivors recount their life stories. As a scholar collecting, on both audio and video tapes, the stories of individuals who experienced the Holocaust, and as a Holocaust educator who has presented these stories to numerous audiences, I have learned that this particular history is not static, and that its implications continue to resonate in the lives of those who lived through it. For understanding and presenting history includes exploring and explaining how people live their personal and collective histories today.2 In the past decade or so, practitioners and theorists of oral history have increasingly been asking the question, “How do people remember?” This question arose from the recognition that when people tell of their past lives, in some cases decades after the actual events, their accounts are filtered through a complex memory process that is created through an interplay of who they were then and who they are now.3 Understanding history then becomes not only learning “what really happened” but also gaining a sense of how past events continue to influence and shape the lives of individuals and groups who were in the midst of those events. Especially for those who experienced a history of great trauma such as Holocaust survivors, the past is often lived very much in the present. Henry Greenspan warns that by “celebrating

This chapter is from the 2004 edition of Sisters or Strangers.

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survivors’ ongoing lives, we tend to ignore their ongoing deaths,” yet by looking only at the tragedy and trauma, “we miss the vitality of their ongoing lives.”4 The individuals whom I have interviewed were born in almost every country in Europe. When the Holocaust overtook them, some were infants, many were children and teenagers, and some were parents with children of their own. Most were concentration camp survivors. Others hid, passed on false papers, fought in resistance groups, or moved from place to place, one step ahead of death. Those whose stories I was able to hear did escape death, but their personal histories did not end with their Liberation.5 They came to Canada, had families, achieved financial security, and became reasonably content with their new lives. Yet the Holocaust continued to shape who they were and are, both in terms of the actual impact of family losses and psychological trauma on their developing identities, and how their memories of the past were constructed and fitted into their sense of the present. Despite their remarkable accomplishments, and living what many describe as a socalled normal life, there is much to be seen behind the façade. As Brana Gurewitsch remarks about Holocaust testimonies, there are no “happy endings”; because most survivors “still live in their identities, their memories are part of their post-Holocaust identities, informing their lives on a day-to-day basis.”6 One man I interviewed stated that survivors are great actors, never really able to be themselves around those who did not share their experiences.7 For others, the trauma of the Holocaust continues to diminish their ability to live full lives. For instance, Vera Glaser was not yet fifteen when she was liberated in 1945. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, she had managed to live through terms at the Theresienstadt, AuschwitzBirkenau, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.8 Interviewed fortysix years later in Montreal, she was asked how her experiences had affected her. Vera responded, “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of living.”9 Her comments demonstrate the “permanent irresolution”10 between the events of the present and the shadows of the past that shape the daily lives and thoughts of survivors. Those who endured to see Liberation, yet live every day with their memories of the horrors of the Holocaust, are in many ways still trying to survive their survival.11 While my larger research project explores the stories of both male and female survivors, this essay will focus on women’s stories. Most studies of the Holocaust have not attempted to discern how men and women may have experienced those events differently. Indeed, the

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argument has repeatedly been made that a gendered analysis of the Holocaust “meant doing an injustice to the larger issue: the annihilation of both men and women as Jews.”12 Or, as Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman have observed, many fear “that a focus on gender could diminish the importance of the Holocaust as a singular cataclysmic event and thereby add to the banalization and trivialization of the Holocaust.”13 Another difficulty in reaching a gender conceptualization of the Holocaust, according to Judith Tydor Baumel, has to do with “an overwhelming tendency to focus upon the death process which made little distinction between men and women, while shunting any discussion of the survival process.”14 More recently, however, scholars have argued that gender identity was one of the variables that shaped an individual’s experience of the Holocaust. And that the testimonies of women survivors illuminate ways in which gender shapes a woman’s reflections on her past. As Sara Horowitz recently put it, “Jewish women survivors experienced, and reflect back upon, the war both as Jews and as women.”15 Even so, women survivors of the Holocaust do not themselves often interpret and reflect upon dimensions of their stories that are gendered. Their postwar lives mesh into the narratives of immigrants and refugees, with the appropriate gendered roles. By examining various themes in the recollections of survivors, this chapter will raise questions and offer some speculation regarding the gendered nature of Holocaust memories, but will stop short of a conclusive thesis on that point. The discussion that follows examines the theme of survival in the life stories of female Holocaust survivors with a focus on topics of escaping death, psychological health, relationships with family and community, attitudes towards faith and religious observance, adjustment to life in Canada, and struggles with bereavement. Psychological Impact Most of those women and men interviewed for this study arrived in Canada as children, teenagers, and young adults in the early postwar years. Psychological trauma, manifested in nightmares, depression, and somatic illness, was especially pronounced in those early years.16 Elizabeth De Jong survived the medical experiments conducted on Dutch women in Auschwitz. When she returned to her home in the Netherlands, she was haunted by dreams about family members who had died: “In the night I dreamed always that my mother was there,

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and in the day time she wasn’t … I didn’t believe she was dead, and I saw her go, that was the crazy thing.” She also spent three months in the hospital for undiagnosed stomach pain, likely a somatic manifestation of her emotional pain. Elizabeth’s dreams continue to plague her and she has been under psychiatric care since the war. She laments, “For me, they won the war anyway. Mentally, I’m never normal again.”17 Similarly, Sue Kohn was still frustrated in 1981 by the “noise in her head.” Her nightmares began in 1940 when she was a child in a Polish ghetto and her mother would try waking her as she screamed in her sleep. Seeking help from a neurologist, Sue’s mother was told, “What do you expect? She’s frightened, every day she’s frightened.”18 For children in their formative years, the Holocaust challenged development of their personalities. Returning to her home in Hungary from Auschwitz, one survivor realized she was “a completely changed person. From an outgoing, lively, friendly child,” she said she had become “gloomy, terribly depressed, lonely and introvert[ed].”19 In Toronto, the Jewish Family and Child Service became legal guardian of the orphans who arrived as wards of the Jewish community in Canada. The case files are filled with tragic stories of survivors who succumbed to their psychic wounds. “Helen” was twenty-three in 1953 when she suffered a complete mental breakdown. An account of her behaviour says she walked around naked and refused to speak. “She had bizarre delusions regarding her own body,” the social worker wrote, “and stated that she was dead, and that she had been killed by Hitler. She made an attempt to strangle herself. She responded to auditory hallucinations.” Helen was given electric shock treatment and was eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic. She was institutionalized and spent only fourteen months of the next twenty years out of the hospital. Agency social workers visited her, prevented the government from deporting her, and tried unsuccessfully to find her a home.20 Her “liberation” from the Nazis had left her imprisoned by psychological trauma and a permanent ward of the state. For some survivors, especially children, the full psychological impact of their experiences was not felt until many years later. Susanne Reich was fourteen when she emerged from the camps. She struggled to keep her memories buried for a long time, and, in fact, thought that perhaps her youth had protected her. She said, “[My youth] was my advantage and disadvantage at the same time, because I did not understand what was happening, and that probably helped me [and maintained] my sanity. But, at the same time, the understanding had to come some time.”

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Susanne’s understanding did come, in 1961, when the publicity of the Eichmann trial led her to seek psychiatric help.21 “Even though I did not die in Auschwitz,” she said, “I died later.”22 There were individuals who sought relief in death. Suicides were not uncommon just after the war. To overcome the loss of everything that gave a person identity, to be alone, with no one – neither family nor community – who knew you before, was a tremendous burden. To this day, suicide has remained an option for those who feel they can no longer live with their survival. While some survivors dealt with their trauma by suppressing their memories and not talking about their experiences, others avoided seeking assistance because of the stigma, held by many Europeans, towards psychological therapy. There was also the fear that once the wounds of the past were opened, no one would know how to heal them. Many survivors made a few visits to psychiatrists when applying for restitution, but long-term therapy was seldom sought, nor was it often successful.23 Renata Zajdman was advised to attempt ongoing therapy after filing her claim for restitution in 1963. Her family doctor, however, advised against it, saying, “Don’t do it, they’ll destroy you. They’ll rip you apart and they won’t be able to put you back together.”24 Indeed, psychiatry was not yet equipped to aid this group, and long-term therapy has seldom been a successful remedy. The psychological effects of the Holocaust changed as the survivors aged, though certain elements have remained or been exacerbated by the aging process. Some former partisan fighters keep licensed guns in their homes for self-defence, maintaining a sense of power distinct from the powerlessness of their past. Some who came as refugees before the war never purchase real estate, choosing to rent their homes and thus be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Eleanor Simkevitz survived in hiding in Belgium. Now she leaves every door open inside her house, even the bathroom. “I have phobias,” she explained. “You’ll never get me. I cannot stand closed doors. I have to have a valid passport. I have to be able to find all my belongings … everything has to be in its place. I have to be able to find everything in the dark. We were hiding, we were blacked out, we couldn’t turn on any lights so if we had to run, we had to go and find whatever we needed … in the dark.”25 Similar phobias – fear of showers and hoarding of food, for instance – are being documented today in the Jewish Homes for the Aged and by children who are aware of their parents’ paranoia. For instance, one man was said to have four deadbolts on his door which he rises to check throughout the night.

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Other ongoing effects include anger towards parents who died in the Holocaust and whose children felt abandoned. Martha Shemtov is still tortured by the anger she feels towards her mother for abandoning her through her death, and at her father, who survived, for letting her believe her stepmother was her mother until she was sixteen.26 A Romanian survivor fights the hatred that sometimes overcomes her: “If I were to hate all my life, I think Hitler will have even hurt me to the end of my days. If I permit hate to really stay and destroy the joy that I have in life, then he has succeeded. But you do hate. You put them together in a block and when the pictures come on, you feel violent against every one of them who speaks German. And there was a long time when I went on the street and I saw a uniform and I broke out in sweat. Anytime that anybody would appear like a German.”27 For most survivors, their struggle is against a general sense of unhappiness and a constant feeling of loss. As Valerie Good remarks, “I try sometimes to smile, to be happy about certain things, but I can never be really … like I see people laugh and be very joyful, I can never be like that.”28 For some who survived, the physical and mental trauma of the Holocaust continues to manifest itself in a variety of psychological ailments and somatic illnesses. Reconstituting Families The most important step towards recovering a semblance of joy was to create life. And so survivors married, had children, and reconstituted families as quickly as they could in order to recapture their losses. Often the sole survivors of large extended families, couples sought to create ties among groups of survivors. As the next generation was born without relatives, so other survivors became their “aunts” and “uncles,” other children their “cousins.” Marriage brought hope for the future, but it was bittersweet. Valerie Good’s husband Mendel said the happiest day of his life was his wedding day “because finally my life started to be normal. And yet it was totally tempered with tragedy, because there are [only] two people standing there … how can we be totally happy?”29 Many survivors married soon after their Liberation, motivated by the simple need to bond with another person who had some connection to their past. As Abram Schwemer expressed it, “You look always for somebody that you know. After the war, you look for somebody, because you want somebody … anybody. I said to [my wife] Fela, ‘It’s no use, you’ve got

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nobody, I haven’t got nobody, so let’s get married.’”30 Shared losses and trauma that nobody else could possibly understand drew couples together and created marriages with unique dynamics. And if psychological therapy was considered taboo or was unsuccessful, loved ones could sometimes play the same role. Larry and Esther Brandt met when they arrived in Winnipeg in 1947 on the Orphan Scheme and married in 1951.31 At the age of twenty-seven, with two small children, Esther suffered a nervous breakdown and began a long period of therapy for her depression. Yet she remains sceptical of the results of this professional help. Rather, she said, “I think the best psychiatrist was Larry, because he was able to understand what I was going through and he was able to help me to become strong, because I just couldn’t do it.”32 Bearing children was a means for survivors to re-establish their murdered families. The child of one survivor, who carries the name of murdered relatives, said he often felt “that I am eighty-five people.”33 Yet having children also triggered tremendous fears. Could their babies be deformed as a result of the torture their parents had endured? Could children deprived of their own childhoods be good parents? One of the women who had been raped by liberating Soviet soldiers was told by doctors in Germany that she would never be able to have a child. After two dangerous deliveries, she did have her children, but she then had terrible dreams that her own children were being tortured. She would hover by their rooms at night, watching them sleep.34 Helene Kravitz was eleven years old when she was liberated in Belgium. She lamented the fact that she had no role models to teach her mothering skills. In Helene’s words: “I remember thinking very often how I wish I had a mother to be able to show me. I felt I wasn’t a good mother, but I didn’t know how to be a mother.”35 Many survivors became overprotective and fearful for their children, hoping to shield them from knowledge of their suffering and also from experiences that might cause pain. Most only began to lift the veil on their past when their children became teenagers. Bertha Weisz said she could never find the right time: “I didn’t want to hurt my children because I felt it’s not their fault, they had nothing to do with it.”36 Yet survivors believed that their past did affect the way they raised the second generation, and that they did pass on their fears and anguish to their offspring. As well, some felt they didn’t have the capacity for expressing love that was needed for parenting. Rosa Rubin said, “I always felt that I missed something in life … the love and affection of a mother. And in turn, I was never to this day, able to really show this to

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my children and my grandchildren. I love them all but I can’t express myself or show it to them. And this is the cross that I bear since the war.”37 Other parents focused on creating close family ties, and took extraordinary efforts to pass on a certain kind of legacy to their children. For instance, Kitty Salsberg, an orphan of the Holocaust, filled her home with foster children in addition to her biological children. She didn’t realize the frightening effect she had on her teenagers when she left them an “ethical will” every time she went out of town. She had no value system handed down from her parents, so she wanted to be sure she passed her own values on to her children.38 For the most part, children of survivors are very proud of their parents. Judith Leitner’s father Bernard has spent every day of the last fifteen years caring for his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease. They survived the war together, hiding in Belgium, and then raised their two orphaned nieces with their own children. Judith said of her father, “Here was a quiet, unassuming man who had committed such wonderful, amazing acts of bravery. This taught us a lot about being humble. We all grew up in a household that was full of joy, humour, laughter, optimism and looking towards the future. Take care of the things that matter the most to you. Through his life he showed us this.”39 When survivors lost their own children through disease, accident, or suicide, the tragedy of loss was replicated and sharpened. Sara Dickerman named her first child after her murdered mother, but the baby died at four weeks old. “It was very hard,” she remembered. “I told myself I don’t want to live anymore. I remember I used to say, there is no God anymore. How could you do this to me? I went through hell in my life … please God, you took away my parents, my brothers and sisters, and now the best thing in my life.”40 Similarly, Lucy Rapuch recorded, “We went through a lot of heartache here, we lost a son here, our first-born was killed by a car, and that again made me wonder, why did I survive? Sometimes I’m still thinking that I survived to suffer. But as the years went by, you got used to it, time heals everything.”41 It is possible that women’s capacity to bear children and become mothers made their memories and experience of survival gendered in particular ways. Lawrence Langer observes that some women survivors were unable to celebrate the birth of their own children because they had “tainted memories” of pregnant women and mothers with children who were murdered in concentration camps.42 The process of reconstituting families in Canada was especially important for women who, in the context of home-based rituals, were often viewed as the primary

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conveyors of Jewish culture through the generations. The challenge of maintaining the “primacy of the Jewish family” when almost all other connective tissue was broken, was a task taken up mainly by women. Faith and Religion As with the family, Jewish women traditionally carried special responsibility for preserving their culture through religious observance in the home. Religious belief and individual faith were also severely challenged by the near annihilation of the Jewish people. Ethnicity and religious identity are intertwined in the Jewish community, so that even if individuals were not observant, the experience of the Holocaust compelled most survivors to question and re-evaluate their faith and beliefs.43 The responses varied. For some individuals, whether questioners or believers prior to the war, their experiences led to a complete rejection of traditional Jewish beliefs in God. Nate Leipciger, as a thirteenyear-old in camp “was very angry with God.” He could never understand why, if God was “forgiving and good,” “pious and religious people [were] the first ones to go to the gas chamber.” “What did my mother do that she deserved to, to go through this? What did I do?” he asked. For Nate, “there was no answer.”44 Some survivors rejected their Jewish identity and faith and chose to convert, often to protect their children from what they had suffered. One woman said she could not set foot in a synagogue because it would invoke painful memories of her lost childhood. When she contemplated recording her story, she insisted she could not be identified by her married name because she was fearful that her children would be persecuted if their Jewish roots were uncovered. Much to her astonishment, her children reacted with pride to the revelation that they were half-Jewish, a fact they insisted on broadcasting to their friends.45 Other survivors, however, attest to a strengthening of Jewish religious belief and practice as a consequence of their experiences. Myra Guttman, for instance, discovered a new faith after the war, which she ascribed to the “miracle” of survival. In her words: “We came out of it, and we came out as human beings. You form families, you continue a beautiful life. I think it’s a miracle that we survived.”46 Even when their religious faith weakened, or was lost altogether, most survivors maintained an unwavering sense of their Jewish identity. Yet the early postwar years were a time when some Jews, often from very observant backgrounds, decided to go into a kind of spiritual

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hiding. One woman escaped Vienna on a Kindertransport when she was twelve and was sent to live with a Christian family in a small English town. Although raised as an observant Jew, she loved the nuns at the convent school she attended. She recalled, “I felt good being Christian because I was accepted.” She later married a Christian and raised a family who knew nothing of her past or her identity.47 Another form of hidden Jews were those who never denied their ethnicity, yet chose to live their lives detached from community and religion. A Czech couple who had survived three years in Theresienstadt with their baby son, determined that after the war there were only two choices, “either you go to Israel … or you try to forget your past and let the children assimilate so they will never have to suffer again. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe now I would do it differently, but in 1946 that’s how I felt.”48 The greatest challenge to religious identity faced those Jewish children who were hidden and protected by Christian families. For them, memories of their Jewish identity were laced with ignorance and fear, while their experiences of Christianity consisted of safety and comfort. Some of these hidden children did not learn about Judaism until they were adults. Renata Zajdman came out of Poland “terrified of synagogues. I was never a religious Jew. I was brought up as a Catholic, and thank God I was not a deep thinker or I’d probably be a nun in a monastery. A lot of my friends were.” She says she still has “unfinished business with God.”49 Eve Bergstein’s experience was different. She was ten years old after the war when her uncle found her and had to drag her away from the Polish couple that had saved her. It was only after he placed her in a Jewish orphanage in France that she came to realize the importance of regaining her Jewish identity. Eve came to feel that by continuing in her Jewish heritage, she could “avenge the deaths” of her family members: “How important that I continue what they couldn’t. So I became a very strong Jew.”50 Some “hidden Jews” were brought back to their Jewish roots only many years later. After her British husband died in 1984, the child who found refuge in England began to long for her childhood Shabbat meals and the warm feelings associated with those rituals. She finally decided to tell her children, who at first didn’t believe her, but many of her friends said, “We knew all along you were Jewish. It’s no big deal.”51 There were different forms to assert one’s Jewish ethnic and/or religious identity. For some it was religious observance, for others ethnic rituals, and for still others, passing on their heritage to their children in

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a variety of ways. For many survivors, this meant obtaining a Jewish education for their children, even for those who had lost their faith in God. One of the many survivors who arrived in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s from Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia recounted how she tried to join one of the larger Toronto synagogues in 1965. A divorced single mother, she was anxious that her only child attend Hebrew school. The synagogue demanded a flat fee of $800 and when she asked if she could pay in monthly instalments, she was refused. The humiliation of her treatment kept her away from the organized Jewish community. When Mania and Moishe Kay married in Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp, their first purchase was a pair of Shabbat candlesticks. Mania explained, “From that time we decided that we are going to be kosher and Jewish, that if we gonna have children they should know, they should have their background.” She recalled that her commitment to her Jewish faith “hesitated” while she was in Auschwitz-Birkenau. But later she decided, “If you are born with a belief, it’s not easy to shake it. So I believe.”52 Although some survivors continue to question their faith, others find it strengthened. Perhaps most representative is an outlook that places an emphasis on human values and behaviour over and above religious beliefs. As Lucy Rapuch testified, “I stopped believing in God, where was He when we needed him most? I come from a very religious home, and I’m not religious at all because I think that religion is not important. Important is what you are inside, if you are a good person or a bad person and that’s what matters most.”53 Adjustment to Canada Upon immigrating to Canada, along with masses of other refugees and Displaced Persons after the war, survivors faced another stage in the process of dealing with a painful past. This was adjusting to a postwar society in the midst of economic boom and trying to establish social normalcy after the disruption of the Second World War.54 Even while individuals sought to reconstitute family life as part of personal and cultural survival, they were also conforming, however subconsciously and unintentionally, to postwar Canadian ideals “that everybody ought to live within the confines of a private single-family household and that men and women performed gender-specific roles.” As well, the tendency to repress and not talk about the trauma of the Holocaust may

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have been reinforced by a host of authorities and experts who viewed the newcomers as “dysfunctional.”55 For those survivors who chose to hide their Jewish identity, absorption into the Canadian mosaic was easiest, despite the generally negative attitudes directed towards all newcomers. Anti-Semitism was still a strong factor in Canadian life and a painful reminder of what they had hoped to leave behind in Europe.56 Survivors were often met with attitudes of ignorance and suspicion, even on the part of Canadian Jews with whom they had so hoped to create a new community. Indeed, there was a widely held assumption that those who survived must have collaborated in some way, or must have “done something” questionable in order to cheat death. Renata Zajdman explained that she began to avoid the Jews in Montreal: “I was afraid that they look at me in suspicion that since I’m a refugee I probably did something bad, ’cause usually when you tell them that you’re a survivor, they look at you, what did you do, how did you survive, so that was a horrible feeling, that guilt … My generation of Canadian-born Jews, they wouldn’t even look at us! The called us ‘muckies’ – you come from muck.”57 Few Canadians, Jew or non-Jew, seemed willing to hear survivors’ stories. Either they were preoccupied with their own wartime experiences, or they didn’t want to process the idea of such tremendous suffering, or sometimes because they didn’t believe the stories at all. Henry Greenspan observes that not only was there a lack of response to the stories of survivors, but there was also “an active process of suppression and stigmatization.”58 Renata, who is a frequent public speaker, says that she still finds it difficult to deal with her own generation of Canadian Jews who have only a kind of voyeuristic curiosity. She remarks that some people are more interested in seeing a number tattooed on her arm to prove the truth of her account. In Renata’s eyes, “We suffered [and] there was no empathy at all.”59 Ellen Tissenbaum was a hidden child from the Netherlands. She too began to push her memories back because, she said, “If I started talking, people would say, stop making up those stories. It’s not true.”60 Because of these reactions, many survivors chose to bury their pasts and not tell anyone about their experiences. Survivors looked to family as the last connection to an old life and the comfort of shared memory. Anita Ekstein was just fourteen when she came to Toronto with her aunt, Sala Stern, whose husband and children had perished. Anita recalled how her aunt wanted to talk but her own sister, who had come to the United States before the war, would

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not listen: “[Aunt Sala] wanted to pour her heart out to her … She never got over the fact that her sister didn’t understand what she went through and that she lost her children and [her sister] is telling her about coupons for butter.” Anita felt talking about the Holocaust was taboo, that it was too soon, or “survivors didn’t want to talk about it or they figured nobody cared so why bother.” But Anita, who had been hidden with Poles in Ukraine during the war, heard the stories from the other camp survivors who visited, and from her aunt as well. It was Anita who was silent. She said, “Some survivors made you feel … you were a kid, what do you know, you were hidden. When I knew what my aunt went through, she lost her children and the hell she went through … how could I possibly talk to her … about what I felt.”61 Anita quickly integrated, made friends with Canadians, and lost her accent. No one asked what had happened to her. She was simply an orphan from Europe. Yet there was another aspect to these early years. Survivors themselves found the retelling too painful, preferring to bury the memories in the hope they would fade. Yet memory continued to inform their lives, always near the surface. It was only at the first Gathering of Child Survivors in New York City in 1991 that Anita realized the depth of the impact the Holocaust had had on her life. And how being denied a voice had crippled her. Mourning the Losses Much of the ongoing psychological trauma and obstacles to adjustment, as well as difficulties reconstituting family life has to do with the burden of bereavement. Every Holocaust survivor and refugee lost family members, murdered by the Nazis or their collaborators. Only a few know the exact fate of their loved ones and only a handful have a grave to visit. The absence of memorial sites and the impossibility of a normative grieving process has had a profound and lasting effect on survivors. Ellen Tissenbaum has never found anyone who can verify the fate of her parents and so continues to scan photos of the Holocaust, in books and on television, searching for images of them. With no concrete evidence of death, survivors maintain faint hopes that their loved ones might still be alive. When Esther Brandt visits Israel she scans faces in the crowds, looking for a woman in her nineties who might be her lost mother.62 Attendance at yearly Yizkor services and Yom HaShoah, and the erection of memorials in Jewish cemeteries are examples of rituals that

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have created a forum for public mourning.63 Mania Kay explains why the grief has never left: “When we say the Yizkor prayer in the shul, I don’t look into the siddur, I see like a movie in front of my eyes, I see the people, I see the places and I see everything what happened, and that’s my Yizkor prayer.”64 Some survivors have found tangible ways to commemorate those who perished in the Holocaust. Ilse Steinhart and her husband were German Jewish refugees. When Ilse erected a double tombstone after her husband’s death in 1991, she had the names of their murdered parents and siblings inscribed on the back. On summer weekends she takes her grandchildren to visit the grave and tells them stories of their lost family.65 For many survivors the grieving process was delayed until immediate family members died years later in Canada. When Renata Zajdman’s husband died suddenly in 1983, she was overwhelmed. “I couldn’t cope with death,” she said. “I never saw death, I saw only murder. I didn’t know how to act, I didn’t know how to take it. I never knew what grieving is. Never had a chance.”66 Faced with the deaths of their spouses, survivors found the walls they had so carefully built over the decades crumble around them. One woman fell apart and had to seek therapy when her husband died. She realized she “was mourning for my parents too, because I never really even mourned for them. It was a double whammy.” Her psychiatrist suggested that she enlarge her parents’ passport photos and put them in her bedroom. Which she did, though it took about five years for the intense pain of mourning to subside.67 Some survivors describe the other extreme, a complete lack of affect. Not even the funerals of their friends touched them. Eugenia Pernal was a nurse in the Warsaw Ghetto and says she became “immune” to death. It took a long time for her to feel and cry again.68 Kitty Salsberg did cry “when somebody else had a nice funeral, and I thought that my father would be lying in a ditch like a dog. The indignity of it bothered me. But I also grieve with pride, by living and surviving and having as many children as I could … To have their issue survive and continue … I live every day in honour of them.”69 Conclusion The lessons of the Holocaust do not lie solely in the need to understand the past so as not to repeat it. They lie also in the courageous lives of the survivors who have struggled so hard to overcome, to rebuild, and to bring new life into the world. The life histories of women who survived

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the Holocaust did not end when they were liberated from the Nazis and their collaborators. Their anguish and survival were ongoing, as they attempted to create new lives, new families, indeed new identities, in Canada. Yet the burden of memory keeps them forever strangers.

NOTES 1 The term Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew) originally meant a sacrifice totally burnt by fire. It was adopted in the 1950s to describe the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War. See Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 681. 2 The past two decades have seen a marked increase in the awareness, study, and teaching of the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors have been at the forefront of many of these activities, speaking about their experiences to school groups and coming forward to have their life stories recorded in a variety of large and small oral history projects. Some of these testimony collections are cited in this essay, along with private interviews completed with the author. This essay is part of a larger research project focusing on the postwar experiences of Canadian Holocaust survivors. 3 Of particular interest for Holocaust scholars interested in memory history are Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); Aaron Haas, The Aftermath: Living with the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 4 Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, 169. 5 Liberation is the term used by survivors to describe the moment they regained their freedom by the arrival of Allied soldiers. 6 Brana Gurewitsch, ed., Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 314. 7 Author’s interview with Mendel Good, 13 January 1994, Toronto. Unless otherwise indicated, the interviews were conducted by the author. 8 Camp survivors experienced years of forced labour and abuse, often in more than one camp. There were transit camps, where entire families were housed in preparation for deportation to the “east.” One of these was Theresienstadt, a unique camp in Czechoslovakia that the Nazis used as a model to hide their crimes. Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp in Germany. Most of the Jews liberated there in 1945 had come on forced

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11

12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

Paula J. Draper “death marches” from camps in the east. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was both a death camp, where gas chambers murdered over a million Jews, as well as a complex of forced labour camps. Interview with Vera Glaser, Canadian Jewish Congress Archives/Montreal (hereafter CJC), Montreal, 29 October 1981. Interviewer: Josh Freed. See Henry Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness,” in Hilene Franzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 48. In Calgary, as I packed up my tape recorder, Bronia Cyngiser surprised me with her comment. After several hours discussing her life after the war, Bronia joked, “I survived the survival!” Interview with Bronia Cyngiser, Calgary, 17 October 1993. Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998), xii. “Introduction: The Role of Gender in the Holocaust,” in Lenore J. Weitzman and Dalia Ofer, eds., Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 12. Baumel, Double Jeopardy, 26. Sara R. Horowitz, “Women in Holocaust Literature: Engendering Trauma Memory,” in Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 365. Much of the literature on Holocaust survivors and their descendants regards their psychological responses to trauma. See Morton Weinfeld and John Sigal, Trauma and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989); Robert Krell and Marc Sherman, eds., Medical and Psychological Effects of Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors (Jerusalem: Transaction Publishers/Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1997); Leo Etinger and Robert Krell, Psychological and Medical Effects of Concentration Camps and Related Persecutions on Survivors of the Holocaust: A Research Bibliography (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1985). Interview with Elizabeth De Jong, Holocaust Education and Memorial Centre/Toronto (hereafter HC), Toronto, 2 September 1987. Interviewer: Marion Seftel. Interview with Sue Kohn, CJC/Montreal, Halifax, 7 August 1981. Interviewer: Josh Freed. Interview with Clara Forrai, CJC/Montreal, Vancouver, 11 January 1982. Interviewer: Josh Freed. Jewish Family and Child Service Toronto (JFCS) case file 13019. For almost two decades after the end of the Second World War little was said or written about the Holocaust. In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann – one of the chief architects of the murder of European Jewry – was kidnapped

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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in Argentina and brought to Israel to stand trial. This trial, held in Jerusalem in 1961–2, detailed the Nazi crimes against the Jewish people and was highly publicized. Many survivors cite this as a turning point in their struggle to come to terms with their past. The trial and execution of Eichmann also began a new awareness and interest in the genocide of the Jews that persists to this day. Interview with Susanne Reich, CJC/Montreal, Montreal, 22 October 1981. Interviewer: Josh Freed. Beginning in the 1950s payments of restitution were made by the German government to victims of Nazi oppression. Proof of physical or psychological damage was sometimes a requirement for payment. Many Canadian survivors met briefly with psychiatrists in order make their claims. Interview with Renata Zajdman, Toronto, 13 November 1993. Interview with Eleanor Simkevitz, CJC/Montreal, Montreal, 1981. Interviewer: Josh Freed. Interview with Martha Shemtov, HC/Toronto, 23 March 1993. Interviewer: Janice Karlinsky. Interview, name restricted, Saskatoon, 1 November 1993. Interview with Valerie Good, Toronto, 13 January 1994. Interview with Mendel Good, Toronto, 13 January 1994. Abram Schwemer, interview by Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (hereafter SF), Winnipeg, 27 August 1996. Interviewer: Evita Smordin. On 18 September 1947 the first of a group of 1,116 child survivors of the Holocaust entered Canada as wards of the Jewish community. They were placed in Jewish homes across Canada, and local Jewish social service agencies became their guardians. Interview with Esther Brandt, Vancouver, 26 October 1993. Rabbi Charles Grysman and Meyer Grysman, SF, Winnipeg, 7 July 1997. Interviewer: Francesca David. Interview with FK, Toronto, 23 November 1993. Helene Kravitz, SF, Montreal, 19 January 1997. Interviewer: Marilyn Krelenbaum. Bertha Weisz, SF, Guelph, Ontario, 27 May 1997. Interviewer: Linda Davidson. Rosa Rubin, SF, Montreal, 19 January 1997. Interviewer: Marilyn Krelenbaum. Kitty created a list of moral rules for her children to follow. Interview with Kitty Salsberg, Toronto, 12 June 1998. Bernard Leitner, SF, London, Ontario, 6 February 1995. Interviewer: Richard Bassett.

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40 Sarah Dickerman, SF, Montreal, 24 February 1997. Interviewer: Sylvia Aikens. 41 Lucy Rapuch, HC/Toronto, 4 November 1988. Interviewer: Cheryl Wetstein. 42 Lawrence L. Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust, 354–5. Note that pregnant women and women with young children were, without exception, murdered immediately after their arrival at the death camps. 43 For information on Holocaust survivors and faith, see Reeve Robert Brenner, The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors (New York: Jason Aronson, 1997). 44 Interview with Nathan Leipciger, CJC/Montreal, Toronto, 23 November 1981. 45 Telephone conversation with BG, November 1987. 46 Interview with Myra Guttman, CJC/Montreal, Montreal, 22 October 1981. Interviewer: Josh Freed. 47 Interview, name restricted, Vancouver, 27 October 1993. 48 Interview, name restricted, Saskatoon, 31 October 1993. 49 Interview with Renata Zajdman. 50 Eve Bergstein, SF, Waterloo, Ontario, 5 September 1995. Interviewer: Judy Schwartz. 51 Interview, name restricted, Vancouver. 52 Interview with Mania Kay, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, 26 December 1993. 53 Interview with Lucy Rapuch. 54 For more on the early years of survivors in Canada, see Paula J. Draper, “Canadian Holocaust Survivors: From Liberation to Rebirth,” Canadian Jewish Studies 4–5, Special issue on New Perspectives on Canada: The Holocaust and Survivors (1996–7): 39–62; Franklin Bialystok, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000). 55 Franca Iacovetta, “Remaking Their Lives: Women Immigrants, Survivors, and Refugees,” in Joy Parr, ed., A Diversity of Women: Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 135–67. 56 On anti-Semitism in Canada during the war years, see Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). For the postwar years, see Bialystok, Delayed Impact; Alan Davies, ed., Anti-Semitism in Canada: History and Interpretation (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992). 57 Interview with Renata Zajdman. 58 Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors,” 50.

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59 Ibid. 60 Ellen Tissenbaum, SF, Montreal, 22 January 1997. Interviewer: Rachel Alkallay. 61 Interview with Anita Ekstein, Toronto, 15 April 1994. 62 Interview with Esther Brandt. 63 The Yizkor service on the high holiday of Yom Kippur is a memorial service for relatives who have died. Yom HaShoah is the annual community commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust. 64 Mania Kay (Audio), Kitchener. 65 Interview with Ilse Steinhart, Holocaust Remembrance Committee/ Toronto, n.d. 66 Interview with Renata Zajdman. 67 Interview, name restricted, Vancouver. 68 Interview with Eugenia Pernal, Toronto, 15 April 1994. 69 Kitty Salsberg (Audio), Toronto.

“Days You Remember”: Japanese Canadian Women and the Violence of Internment Pa mela Sug im an

Introduction On 22 September 1988, after a concerted campaign led by the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), the Government of Canada formally acknowledged that its treatment of persons of Japanese ancestry during and after the Second World War was unjust and in violation of human rights’ principles, as officially upheld in the contemporary period. The prime minister of Canada pledged furthermore to ensure that such events not happen again, and publicly recognized the strength of Japanese Canadians in their steadfast commitment and loyalty to the nation.1 As a symbolic redress for past wrongs, the government also agreed to pay individual compensation packages to living internment survivors, in addition to making a financial contribution to various organizations whose goal was to promote cultural understanding and racial harmony.2 Most significantly, the movement for redress touched the memory of the Japanese Canadian community, contributing to a liberation of feeling and thought among its people. Restored by a renewed sense of cultural identity, as well as legitimized feelings of anger and pain, many Japanese Canadians have recently been attempting to reclaim lost or stolen parts of themselves. …

This chapter is reprinted with permission in a shortened version from Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed and Nazilla Khanlo, eds., Not Born a Refugee Woman: How Refugee Women Reclaim Their Identities in Research, Education, Policy and Creativity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 113–34.

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In this chapter, I add another layer to the ever-growing project of historical reconstruction by drawing on the narratives of thirty-eight Japanese Canadian Nisei (second-generation) women, varying in age, class-ranking, site of internment,3 and current residence.4 I sought these narratives with a particular interest in the enduring impact of state violence on women’s lives. I listened to them, moreover, with attentiveness, honed over many years of feminist study and reflection, for the complex ways in which intersecting social processes of gender, race, and class shape identities, relationships, and the institutional framework within which we carry out our lives.5 My interpretation was guided by an understanding that the wartime actions taken by the state were gendered and racialized, and strongly directed by a capitalist logic.6 Though most never crossed a national border, these women may be described as refugees, internally displaced. Rather than transnational, their flight and journey were from coast to coast, from western Canada to parts of this nation located east of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Canadian state espoused a rhetorical commitment to the principles of liberal democracy, equality, and justice, the government in power blatantly violated the rights of this group, solely on the basis of “racial” origin. By definition, all Nisei were Canadian-born citizens. Yet they were denied citizenship rights and subjected to a host of violations and indignities.7 Such violations were legitimized by the War Measures Act, an Act that provided an opportunity for the blatant “abuse of power.”8 Through Orders in Council made under the War Measures Act, persons of Japanese descent were forced from their homes on the west coast of British Columbia (hereafter, BC), placed in filthy detainment centres, and dispossessed of houses, businesses, automobiles, and most personal belongings. Some were exiled to parts of the BC Interior; others were banished to “self-supporting camps,” or put to work in family units on Alberta or Manitoba beet farms. After at least three years of such uncertain living, Prime Minister Mackenzie King completed his attempt to geographically disperse Japanese Canadians and obliterate the community. On 4 August 1944, the King government forced persons of Japanese origin to “choose” to relocate either east of the Rockies (Ontario and Quebec) or across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, a country that was foreign to most. The official rationale for this order was national security. Never, however, has there been evidence that Japanese Canadians posed a security threat. It is these incongruities, the incredulity of this story that Japanese Canadians still grapple with. Though they never held an official refugee status, their treatment at the hands

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of the state suggests a refugee experience. Like many other people who have endured forced migration, Japanese Canadians have negotiated the trauma of displacement: uprooting, homelessness, forced movement, physical confinement, material loss, and disrupted identities, with a mixture of silence and telling, sharing and secrecy.9 Though many of the women in this account have never before narrated these days of their lives, the experience has by no means faded with the passing of years. What resonates throughout the women’s testimonies is the theme of time, the relationship between past and present. Their stories do not only add to, confirm, or dispute the official historical record. Importantly, they also tell us something about the ways in which women currently remember and communicate indignities that happened many years ago. After all, attempts to reclaim identity and constitute oneself in the present are situated in projects to recover parts of one’s past. As many of the women in this study have noted, such reclamation projects are mediated by memory (personal and collective). In presenting the women’s stories of internment, I draw on the concept of memory to break down the dichotomy of past and present.10 And in so doing, I explore the concept of passing time as a link between the two. While many women clearly demarcate the past (former selves, earlier events, and previous circumstances) from the present, at the same time their narratives suggest that the political events of years gone by have profoundly shaped who they are and how they live today. For many women, these long-ago times are indeed inescapable … Crafting Identities in the Face of Political Violence: Then and Now Nisei women experienced the internment within the context of family relationships as daughters, sisters, and, in a minority of cases, wives and mothers. Family relationships understandably were, and continue to be, important for the transmission of feelings, thoughts, and reflections on the war years … Now elderly themselves, most having raised families of their own, Nisei women remember the internment not only through their own eyes, but through the eyes of mother, father, and less often, a husband. Thoughts about their parents’ hardship and suffering in particular have shaped the ways in which the women present their own experiences and emotions. In remembering, Kay comments on age and retrospection, as well as an evolving framework for understanding political injustice. She stated:

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My parents struggled. When I recall now, and when you hear about these immigrants coming into Canada, refugees … and through our Church helping them, I could see it … I still remember … not too much about how we were living or anything like that because at that time it didn’t dawn on me. But I’ve grown older too. And I read all these stories of people. And so on. They go through exactly what my parents went through.

The time that suddenly becomes available upon reaching old age in this culture opens up for Kay a space in which to reflect on the past. She continued, “When I think back … after the war and all that, we were so busy trying to make a living and helping our parents, you know, and having a family again, like togetherness, that I forgot a lot of the past. But it comes back to you, as you’re getting older.” While a “race” discourse often obscures the centrality of gender in internment narratives, the gendered nature of government policy, as well as the pre-war sexual division of labour within families ensured that women and men experienced hardship in distinct ways. Women frequently bring up these differences, without making explicit reference to the function of gender. While many husbands, fathers, brothers, and boyfriends were incarcerated as prisoners of war in Ontario or forced to perform exhausting labour in road camps or lumber camps, women withstood their own hardships in the feminized sites of internment. Within these sites, Nisei daughters were most often in close physical proximity to their mothers. Mother seemed to be fixed in place, securely attached to home and family. In thinking back, Nisei women express admiration for their mothers’ initiative, resolve, and resourcefulness in the face of scarcity and adversity. Survival, the burden of familial responsibility, and making do on very little were themes recurrent in their testimonies. Their memories of mother not surprisingly produce enduring images of food in particular: bologna, rice, shoyu, miso, and chicken.11 Sadako remembers her mother hiding such things under the floorboards, ingredients for cooking. “[I]n order to stretch the rice supply, Mom used to put barley in it,” she recalls. In some cases, food imagery is embedded in an emotional response to effort on the one hand and waste on the other. Kay, for example, conjured up the sad image of her mother’s futile attempts to feed her family on their voyage to the Interior: I remember it [the trip from Hastings Park, Vancouver to the BC Interior] was at night and during the day, and at night. It was a long, dirty ride. And

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I remember you had to make our own food. And I remember some chicken that my mother had made. And it rotted because we didn’t have any icebox or anything of that sort. And it got thrown out.

Some Issei (first-generation) mothers were also left with the responsibility of raising children in their husband’s absence. This responsibility included both meeting their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter, and providing moral guidance and protection. Some women now recognize that in this capacity, a mother was thrust into a “public” role for the first time in her life. With the departure of father and elder sons, the onus fell on mothers to negotiate for supplies with the BC Security Commission, or to seek permission from the RCMP guard to leave the internment site for the afternoon. In some cases, the Issei woman indeed became the family’s representative. Kay further described her mother’s efforts to provide: My mother … she had it [money] all bound into a strap on her body. Would you believe it? During the night, I still remember because I was half awake. And you’re kind of wary about everything, even at that age. And these guards, the [female] security guards [in Hastings Park] came along … And you know what they were doing? They were looking for money. They all knew that the women had some money tied around them …

One of the strongest memories of mother is that of sacrifice. Mother was remembered as stoic and selfless, and primarily as maternal. Pauline stated, “Well, my mother. How do you explain your own mother? She was never complaining. She raised the six of us. I never heard mother complain about anything. And she was a good mother. She was always home.” … While these maternal images were no doubt the product of truly hard times, the memory of a selfless mother is accentuated by Nisei women’s present-day circumstances. The material comforts that many women (now retired) currently enjoy (the time and savings to travel, bowl, and enjoy cultural centre events, restaurant lunches with friends, and trips to the zoo with grandchildren) stand in stark contrast to a mother’s efforts to scavenge for pieces of coal to heat a leaky tarpaper shack in the cold of winter. The women tend to engage as well in what Mona Oikawa terms the relational construction of memory.12 In remembering, they highlight differences in their own situation from that of their Issei mothers. While many Nisei, then young women, had good times, fun, carefree days, lacking in responsibility, their mothers did not. Sadako commented:

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I think a lot of people had resentment by being moved away from the coast. At my age, I was too naïve for my age to know. So, I didn’t know what was going on. My parents never talked about it. We never knew anything. But to me, I don’t remember having any hardships because of the evacuation … I thought, “Oh, this life is better than when I was in Vancouver” [with laughter] …

The political violence towards Japanese Canadians produced many different kinds of losses. Issei parents lost property, livelihoods, years of hard work, and savings. They bore the burden of caring for families while their own freedoms were severely curtailed. And they suffered indignities in full view of their offspring. As noted, many young men were forced to perform demanding and unsafe physical labour on work projects in BC and Ontario. Those men who voiced even a hint of resistance to government officials faced emotional and physical penalties as prisoners of war. Yet Nisei women also suffered losses. As girls and young women, they lost opportunities and aspirations. Many of the women were never able to finish high school. Some were just months from graduating when they were moved from their homes. A few remember the kindness of high school principals who issued them their diplomas, though they themselves could not be physically present to graduate. Moreover, many were routed into feminized and racialized jobs in which they had little interest, from which they never moved. Says Gloria, “My dreams, I don’t think I had hardly any dreams to talk about.” Those women, who remained in the ghost towns long after their friends had moved to Ontario or Quebec, endured a sense of timelessness, isolation, and sheer boredom. Other young females, whose parents decided to relocate to Japan, followed them, contrary to their own desires. Some Nisei daughters refused to abide by their parents’ commands and stayed in Canada, thereby jeopardizing close familial bonds. Yet Nisei women tend to negate or at least downplay these costs. They minimize their own suffering in relation to their mothers’, fathers’, and husbands’ painful stories. Many women speak also of another elusive cost – the psychic damage incurred by continued exposure to racism in its multiple guises.13 In narrating their pre-war lives, they offer various interpretations of “race.” Some say that when they were young girls, they had little consciousness of the social process of racism and no sense of themselves as racialized. In their recollections, they were no different than the Hakujin children at school or in the neighbourhood. Others remember instances of racist treatment, yet they normalize this racism. “Of course there was

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racism, but we didn’t think much about it,” remarked one woman. And yet others explain that while they were certainly aware of racial difference and discrimination, they could travel comfortably from one world to the other, from a Japanese world (home and family, community, language school) to a non-Japanese, typically Hakujin existence (public school, Canadian Girls in Training, public society at large). The women’s understanding of “race” was shaped in large part by the demographic makeup of the community in which they resided. While some Japanese Canadians were numerically in the minority, others lived in areas that were heavily populated by persons of Japanese origin.14 The latter group was least likely to remember racism as an issue in their early lives. As the women situate their memories in the war years, however, there is a greater convergence of feeling.15 The outbreak of war and the heightened anti-Japanese propaganda that followed gave new meaning to their “racial blood.” The normalization of racism that some women had experienced previously was, as a result, severely disrupted. The two worlds, Japanese and Hakujin, could no longer be traversed. The government confined those of Japanese descent to just one world. Japanese Canadians became the “racialized other,” with what to many seemed like a suddenness. According to Michiko: “We were well liked but when the war broke, all of a sudden we were dirty Japs.” Likewise, Sachi remarked: Every major thing that have happened were created by the thought of racial prejudice … See, when Japan caused Pearl Harbor, we thought it was terrible … We hated Japan for doing that … we didn’t see ourselves as Japanese, whereas the Occidentals saw us as Japanese.

Racialized images scar the women’s memories of the war and immediate postwar years. Gloria remembers having to line up for food at Hastings Park, with people driving by gawking and pointing at “the Japs from the coast.” Dorothy recalls trick-or-treating with her sister, only to discover the looks of alarm in people’s eyes as they saw two “Japanese” faces staring back at them. And Sachi does not forget how the dean of a women’s residence at McMaster University handed her a list of off-campus accommodations – denying her outright her space in the campus building. To the Hakujin world, the Japanese face and body (black hair, “slanted eyes”) conveyed meaning about the inner self. The physical markers of Japanese origin thus took on enhanced meaning for the women themselves. This externally imposed label prompted

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women to repeatedly underline the distinction between nationality and territoriality – between being Japanese living in Japan and being Japanese Canadian, born and raised in Canada. More importantly, this racialization resulted in a separation of the inner self from the physical self. The Nisei knew that inside they were Canadians, yet they were treated as though they were Japanese. As part of this dichotomization, many of the women ultimately attempted to deracialize themselves. It became imperative to escape the physical markers of racial difference. Years later, Jean communicated a self-consciousness about her “Japanese looks.” This was something that she experienced both in childhood and in the present. In her words, “There was discrimination and prejudice and even ’till now I feel that going into a strange place and … I’m Japanese. And they’re looking at me. And I have that feeling where my kids don’t have that.” The psychic impact of racialization is enduring … Over time, the women adopted various strategies for achieving self-respect and preserving dignity in the face of a racially hostile nation. They have made concerted efforts to integrate themselves into the dominant society, largely by trying to “blend in” and not draw too much attention to themselves … Some women note that during the war years, in an attempt to resist the essentialist category “Asian,” Chinese Canadians would wear tags or other markers that distinguished them from those of Japanese origin. Ironically, in the decades following the Second World War, Japanese Canadian women and men tried to dissociate themselves from those of Chinese background. They related feeling embarrassment at how Chinese Canadians would not only speak in a “foreign” tongue on the public transit but that they would converse loudly. To this day, some women fear that they will be mistaken for a Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese woman, commenting on the high visibility of such groups. Unlike the Chinese in Canada, says Sue, “We’d never speak Japanese in front of Hakujin.” With the same fear of visible foreignness, most women did not teach their Sansei (third-generation) children the Japanese language or other Japanese cultural symbols. Furthermore, it became common practice to give Sansei children “English sounding” first names, with a (seldom used) Japanese middle name. Sachi explained: When we were parenting, when my children came along, we refused to give them Japanese names … because of the rift and the problems we had at school. And we thought it was bad enough with the last name “Oye.” So we just gave them English names.

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Paradoxically, though, because the Nisei did not marry outside of the Japanese “race,” their own children, too, bore the physical markers of “Japanese-ness,” in spite of the erosion of culture and community. Consequently, Sansei daughters and sons faced racist sentiment as well while growing up in Canada. The face of racism endured by the Sansei, however, was different. Unlike their parents, they grew up in an era of equal opportunity. They did not experience the institutional discrimination (e.g., in housing, employment, recreation, and formal education) that their parents and grandparents had known. The Sansei were more likely to confront racism face-to-face in the school playground or on the streets, especially as young children in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nevertheless, a number of Nisei mothers deny that their children, now grown, ever suffered racism of any kind. They present the experiences of their offspring as dramatically different from their own. For instance, Amy stated: I don’t really think my children felt any prejudice here [in Montreal]. I remember my daughter when she was going to McGill, she’s always combing her hair, you know … she looked up and she said, “Mom, I look just like the Chinese kids.” She didn’t think she was Japanese. She always supposed she was English. I never let her know about any prejudice or anything like that …

Another shield of protection, as well as a strategy of empowerment among Japanese Canadians, has been the acquisition of formal education and entry into the professions, both of which have resulted in notable upward class mobility. From childhood, many Nisei recognized the importance of formal schooling. As they were growing up, some of the women repeatedly heard their Issei parents extol the values of educational success as a resource to help pave one’s way in a racist society. Sue explained, “You know why our parents said, ‘You got to do well’? Because you’re Japanese, you’ve got to do better than the Hakujin – to prove yourself … Oh yes. They always say that.” However, as noted, the government’s wartime policies presented the Nisei with formidable barriers. By the postwar years, many Nisei had lost years of regular public schooling or university/college training, their parents had been robbed of their savings, and aspirations had been dampened. In addition, the minority of women who did manage to further their postsecondary education were confronted with persistent discrimination in most Canadian universities and in the professions. In

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order to meet the needs of middle-class Hakujin Canadian families, many Nisei women were directed by the BC Security Commission into low-paid domestic service. Others found employment in the needle trades, in the Jewish-owned textile factories of Montreal and Toronto. Women repeatedly told stories of kindness from Jewish employers in postwar Ontario and Quebec, one of the few groups who would hire them in other than domestic positions. In addition, many of the families that had relocated to the sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba or to berry farms in Ontario remained in agricultural work long after the war’s end. Over time, a minority of the women became teachers, nurses, or social workers. Most, however, remained in clerical, secretarial, or manual working-class jobs. As they married and raised their own families with working-class husbands, they experienced financial hardship and struggle. But over the course of these years, they also placed a strong emphasis on educational achievement in their Sansei children. In reflecting on the war years, many women speak of their powerlessness. They explain that without money, without political influence, they could do little formally to resist their treatment. But as mothers, in the postwar period, they were intent on empowering their own children, thereby shielding them from the violations and indignities to which they themselves had been subjected. While the Sansei today constitute a diverse socio-economic group, they demonstrate a higher than average level of formal education. Among the mothers in this study, a striking number have sons or daughters who are professionals: lawyers, professors, physicists, chemists, physicians, teachers, and high-level computer programmers.16 In some families, as a result, there is a significant contrast in the material circumstances of the Nisei and their children. Importantly, there is a palpable difference in the life histories of mothers and now grown children … Notwithstanding the many loving mother-child bonds, there is thus a symbolic space between some Nisei women on the one hand and their Sansei children and Yonsei (fourth-generation) grandchildren on the other.17 The Sansei and their children inhabit worlds that some Nisei mothers themselves still have mixed feelings about: a middle-class world, a Hakujin society. In our middle-class existence, some mothers, moreover, reveal a slight embarrassment about their working-class lives. It is curious that while class interests unabashedly permeated the government’s wartime treatment of Japanese Canadians (much of it was about economic competitiveness and the need for cheap

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labour), little has been spoken or written about this dimension. One consequence is that in some families class tensions permeate intimate and loving bonds. Citizenship and Home The Nisei were displaced from their homes. Their national loyalties were questioned. Their rights as citizens were breached. It is not surprising that those who became mothers used their resources to make Canada a safe place for their children. It is also not surprising that in reflecting on the war years, the themes of belonging, citizenship, and national loyalty remain prominent. Indeed, the distinction between the physical self and the inner self (discussed above) was often drawn along the lines of national identity. The true inner self was a loyal Canadian, though the body may have looked Japanese and thereby like a dangerous, traitorous, “enemy alien.” And while the popular view has long been that Japanese Canadians are a quiescent and forgiving people, many Nisei women today present a passionate critique of the government’s wartime policy, condemning it as unjust, while at the same time declaring their unwavering allegiance to the nation. In some respects, these themes lie at the heart of the political analysis put forward by some women. Pat, for instance, stated: I’m sure we felt the anger. We were Canadian-born. Why were we being uprooted and you know, our homes taken away from us? And they never found any signs of people trying to obstruct the Government. We were so law abiding … They accepted what the government said and they told us we’d be back in a few months. Well, that never was.

One recurring symbol of the violation of citizenship rights was the compulsory registration card that all persons of Japanese origin had to carry upon reaching the age of sixteen. While sharing their stories, a number of women paused to bring out their registration cards, now tattered and yellowed with age. They produced these cards, preserved through many moves, over the course of more than sixty years, as tangible proof of the injustices. Polly remembered: I turned sixteen in the camp. So there was a rule that we had to be registered with the Government as enemy aliens. I got my little registration card … you felt like a criminal … But you didn’t have to have a record like

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that, unless you did something bad … That’s what it came down to. But we did it because we thought we had to do it. Anyways, I mean we had no choice. We were considered enemy aliens, not Canadian citizens. We were a non-status people …

Among a series of violations, another of the most unpardonable ones was the government’s decision to force Japanese Canadians either to “repatriate” to Japan or move east of the Rockies. Sue commented on how the term “repatriation” was a misnomer, as very few Nisei had ever lived in Japan. To all of these women, Canada was home. And a rootedness in this country was most strongly articulated by the women who left it. At the war’s end, obligated to comply with her parents’ decision, for example, Chieko relocated to Japan. Ultimately, she married a Japanese man and gave birth to two daughters. However, Chieko says that, longing deeply to return to Canada, she cried every day. After residing in Japan for eleven years, Chieko decided to return to her homeland. Leaving her husband and two young children behind, she travelled to Canada, found a home and a job, and later sent for the rest of her family: “Although I was doing well in Japan by then. But I never felt at home, I guess. I was always thinking of Canada. Canada.” Upon returning, Chieko settled in Montreal. Not until 1949, four years after the war’s end, however, could “cleared” Japanese Canadians again call British Columbia home. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, some families returned to what remained of their homes on the West Coast, though many did not: Those who now live in Ontario and Quebec claim that they could no longer consider BC to be their homeland. With bitterness, some women explain their decision to remain in the East. It would be too difficult to return to the site of violence, they say. It is the following generations, the Sansei and Yonsei, who seek to return to the place of internment, in their own efforts to reclaim lost identities and a stolen history. Conclusion For Nisei women, the years of internment marked days to remember. These days were experienced in youth, within a cohesive ethnic and cultural community that would later be dispersed geographically and dismantled as a result of the government’s act of cultural genocide.18 These days were also memorable because of their profound and enduring impact. These years of internment were momentous both in their material consequences and in their impact on individual subjectivities.

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The women’s narratives prompt us to think about the passing of time: day after day, year after year. And in doing so, we must reconsider the dichotomization of past and present. The past is not something that is over and complete; the present does not originate only in the current period. Women continue to experience events that happened many years ago. Their identities are strongly shaped by what they have already lived through. The current period mediates their memories. In order to understand the internment narratives of Japanese Canadian women, we must, then, think about the intermingling of past and present, and the sociological function of time in this process of mediation. At first blush, it may seem that in the act of remembering the women themselves neatly demarcate junctures in time. Many women declare, for example, that what happened before is now over and done with. On close view, however, one wonders if this tidy temporal separation may serve a recuperative function. Like silence itself, it may represent an attempt to bring closure to a set of painful experiences. Sadako stated: So, you know, life on the whole, I mean I’ve had a hard life but … like some people even to this day, resent the fact that they were moved away from the Coast. I don’t have that. Past is past and forget about it. Think about the good days. And so nothing really bad. No. To me, that is, I don’t know how my sisters felt.

The same theme of looking forward, leaving behind the tragedies of the past, is echoed by many women. We have moved on, and we have survived. We were naive then, but we know better now. Such a gross injustice will not be repeated. But the complexity of these statements is apparent in the women’s comments about the Redress Settlement and its implications for the wider political context in which they currently exist. In thinking about Redress, many narrators say that although the war years have long passed, on a personal level suffering continues, memories do not fade, and, in spite of monetary compensation, some wounds will never heal. Sachi expressed these feelings: Money didn’t pay for all the suffering we went through. Suffering. I mean humiliation more. And then denial of our rights more than anything. I don’t know that there was a just treatment that was ever compensated … Because it was too much taken away from us at that point. Money will not pay for that.

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Kim also commented, “Redress does not make up. It does not make up for what we lost. What my mother had lost. And that’s what I was sorry about.” As these remarks suggest, many women believe that the most meaningful gain of the Redress Settlement has been the liberation of personal memories and the restoration of a collective memory. “At least it came out in public that it was a horrible thing,” asserted Yoshiye. Polly likewise explained: In many ways I feel that people went through so much hardship. I’m sure they don’t even want to talk about it. And maybe some people just – they might just come out freely because they feel more comfortable to talk about it now that more people know about it … And more of the injustices that happen to minorities in a multicultural country like ours, I think, should be pointed out.

Pauline shared these sentiments, stating: I believe that is a good thing for children from the next generation to come along and see what can happen to people that lose their freedom. And let’s hope that there’ll be more of a tolerance. I don’t think discrimination will ever be eradicated. There is some way or some thing that will come up. But at least, that we’re more understanding about what discrimination can be and will be.

It is notable that, upon reflecting, some women contextualize their individual experiences, as well as those of the Japanese Canadian community, within the contemporary global setting. Though they are more likely to draw on a general concept of “injustice” rather than point to specific state policies and international political developments, they do lament the current plight of First Nations people, African Canadians, and those of Arab background throughout North America. Linking personal subjectivity and biography to history, they caution that in spite of their own rootedness as citizens of Canada, somewhat shielded by the gains they have made in formal education and intergenerational upward social mobility, marginalized and vulnerable groups can still be found in this society. Thus, the line between past and present is mutable, and changes in individual lives remain distinct from fundamental social transformation. These women have not left the past behind. They recognize that “small and fragile communities of memory matter in the overall picture

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of the dynamics of remembrance.”19 In Irwin-Zarecka’s words, “The ‘realities of the past’ as they pertain to individuals are not carbon copies of publicly available accounts. They are often worked out within smaller and larger communities of memory, their shape and texture reflecting a complex mixture of history and biography.” The Redress Movement may have made it easier for Nisei women to speak by lending legitimacy to the very issue of political violence and its impact on people’s lives, but also by providing a framework within which individual women may weave personal and unique stories. Few women contest the public or “master” narrative. Most are loyal to it. Indeed, they regard the publicized story of internment as the story, a product of their own community’s struggle, their collective “face” to the wider (Hakujin) society. Yet this story is one that they themselves have not authored. Many women thereby intersperse personal vignettes with “historical events” and measure historical time with the milestones of their lives. In doing so, the women place themselves in history. Moreover, in reconstructing identities, in looking back, for example, at one’s youth, in piecing together the fragments of a life, the narratives and the very act of narration unify an individual woman’s life. The task and product of such an act is not typically neat nor is it objectively logical. But in the process of narrating, most women develop their own logic, one that transcends time, bridging past and present.

NOTES 1 See R. Miki and C. Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1991), 9. 2 See also ibid., 138–9. 3 I use the term “internment” loosely to refer to a broad range of violations including, for example, relocation to ghost towns in British Columbia’s Interior, “self-supporting” projects, sugar beet farms, incarceration in prisoner of war camps, “repatriation” to Japan, and government-regulated movement east of the Rockies. The federal government preferred to employ the euphemism “evacuation,” restricting the use of the term “internment” to describe the incarceration of men in prisoner of war sites. 4 In this chapter, I draw on the narratives of women who currently reside in Ontario, Quebec, or British Columbia. At the outset of the war, most of these women were adolescents or young adults. Only two were very young. Their fathers were farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen,

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a printer, a physician, and small-scale entrepreneurs. Most mothers worked at home raising children, farming, sewing, cooking, and sporadically taking on agricultural labour or cannery work for cash. All of the women were born in British Columbia. At the outbreak of war, the women departed to various parts of the province: Lillooet, Bridge River, Tashme, Greenwood, Slocan (Slocan City, Lemon Creek, Popoff, Bay Farm, Rosebery), New Denver, Sandon, and Kaslo. All had at least one male relative (father, brother, uncle, husband) in a prisoner of war camp or general road camp in Angler or Petawawa, Ontario. 5 This analysis has been informed by the writings of a number of scholars who have addressed the intersectionality of race, gender, and class over the past few decades. See, for instance, V. Agnew, “Canadian Feminism and Women of Colour,” Women’s Studies International Forum 16, 3 (1993): 217–27; F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 1993); H. Bannerji, ed., Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Sexism and Feminist Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993); R.M. Brewer, “Theorizing Race, Class and Gender,” in R. Hennessy and C. Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class Difference and Women’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997), 236–47. I approached the task of listening to women’s narratives with a set of principles informed by various feminist researchers/oral historians including R. Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); S. Fleishman, “Gender, the Personal, and the Voice of Scholarship: A Viewpoint,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, 4 (1998): 975–1016; F. Iacovetta, “Postmodern Ethnography, Historical Materialism, and Decentring the (Male) Authorial Voice: A Feminist Conversation,” Histoire sociale/Social History 32, 64 (1999): 275–93; L. Passerini, “Women’s Personal Narratives: Myths, Experiences, and Emotions,” in Joy Webster et al., eds., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1989), 189–97; J. Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” in R. Perks and A. Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 87–100; and especially A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 6 There is strong evidence to suggest that many of the policies and events of the internment were guided by the (gendered and racialized) economic interests of capital. For example, after confiscating the property and possessions (land, fishing boats, stores, houses, and so on) of Japanese Canadian families, the government sold the latter to Hakujin businessmen for a

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Pamela Sugiman fraction of their market value. The BCSC also directed Nisei women to fill low-wage positions as domestics in the homes of Hakujin families, largely in Montreal and Toronto. See K. Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991) and A.G. Sunahara, The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War (Toronto: Lorimer, 1980). In 1942, approximately twenty-two thousand persons of Japanese ancestry were exiled from their homes on the west coast of British Columbia. Seventy-five percent of these were naturalized or Canadian-born citizens. Many were given less than twenty-four hours notice. Under the War Measures Act, the powers of Parliament were transferred to the governor in council or to the Cabinet, thereby exonerating then Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government from public accountability. See also, Miki and Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time, 25. See M. Hajdukowski-Ahmed, “On the Borders of Language, Language without Borders: Non-Verbal Forms of Communication of Women Survivors of Torture,” in M. Stroinska and V. Cecchetto, eds., Exile, Language and Identity (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 213–29, for a thoughtful discussion of refugee women’s experiences of violence and meanings of silence and non-verbal communication. For an analysis of silence and telling among Japanese Canadian women, see P. Sugiman, “Understanding Silence: Finding Meaning in Oral Testimonies of Nisei Women in Canada,” in J.F. Kess, H. Noro, M.M. Ayukawa, and H. Lansdowne, eds., Changing Japanese Identities in Multicultural Canada (Victoria, BC: Centre for Asian Pacific Initiatives, 2003), 353–63. For a fuller discussion of memory and women’s experience, see, for example, M. Epp, “The Memory of Violence: Soviet and East European Mennonite Refugees and Rape in the Second World War,” Journal of Women’s History 9, 1 (1997): 58–87; Passerini, “Women’s Personal Narratives: Myths, Experiences, and Emotions”; Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History”; P. Sugiman, “Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women’s Life Stories,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 29, 3 (2004): 359–88. Also note the special edition on gender and memory in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 1 (2002). For an excellent analysis of memories of war in the context of motherdaughter relationships, see, for instance, Epp, “The Memory of Violence” and Mona Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory, and the Subjects of the Internment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). Writing about Mennonite women’s memories of rape during

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the Second World War, M. Epp notes that narratives of wartime suffering typically depict women, particularly mothers, as “suffering quietly, submitting themselves to fate, or giving themselves into God’s hands for protection” (75–6). Daughters and sons, she finds, often speak of their mother with reverence. Oikawa, Cartographies of Violence. There is now an abundant literature on the psychological impact of the internment on the Nisei and Sansei. In this essay, I only allude to the psychic costs from a sociological perspective. Steveston and Vancouver, for instance, were locations in which there were Japanese communities (cultural, business, and residential). I do not mean to suggest, however, that all of the women in this study related instances of racism during the war years and in the postwar period. Many of the women who were interned in ghost towns were segregated from Hakujin and in the absence of direct face-to-face contact say (paradoxically) that they didn’t experience racism while interned. In addition, a handful of women claim that once they settled in Ontario or Quebec, they never experienced racism. Here, what is most interesting is the women’s definition of “racism.” Many relate incidents in which they were told that they could not be hired or enter a recreational establishment because they were “Japanese,” yet at other points in their narratives, they declare an absence of racism. In the latter phase of my research, I also gathered the stories of a small group of Nisei women in Manitoba. It is notable that the women narrators from Manitoba do not speak of the same upward class mobility on the part of offspring. Because of the high rates of interracial marriage (over 90 per cent) among the Sansei, the Yonsei are of mixed race. See A. Kobayashi, A Demographic Profile of Japanese Canadian and Social Implications for the Future (Ottawa: Department of the Secretary of State, 1989). The concept of “master narrative” is introduced by Epp, “The Memory of Violence,” 69. Epp refers to master narratives as “stories or myths that structure meaning and that can in fact mask the particularities of an individual’s situation.” Master narratives shape personal life histories. Iwona Irvin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 55–6.

Feminist Oral History and Assessing the Duelling Narratives of Iraqi Women in Diaspora N a d i a J on es- Gail an i

Introduction On a cold Saturday in January 2010, a young Sunni Muslim refugee woman and I sat on hard plastic chairs in a Toronto mall exchanging personal stories over a cup of coffee, the prelude, I hoped, to a rich and revealing formal interview that did not happen. As the short and disappointing taped interview ended, I put away my tape recorder and gathered my things to leave. She hesitated, surveyed the crowd, and then leaning into me asked, “Do you know my greatest fear?” I shook my head no. “When the phone rings at night,” she whispered, “My heart stops, and I think they will say my father is dead.” For a moment, I thought I had imagined it, the jovial bustle of the food court where we sat contrasting so starkly with the gravity of her words. When I asked why her father was still living in Baghdad, she replied, “You see, he must, because otherwise they will take everything – the house, the business, our things. You know, they have tried to kidnap him several times before.” “The Shi’as,” she practically spat out, referring to Shi’i Muslims, Iraq’s predominant ethno-religious group, “they are the ones – always they are the ones … the cause of all our problems. They come from Iran and take over our country and kill our people.” “They are not Iraqis,” she insisted, “but in the end they will have Iraq for themselves.” Caught off guard, I wondered what to say, but before I could decide, this remarkably intimate moment – a window into the women’s traumatic past – was over. She stood up, smoothed her clothes, and after holding my gaze for several seconds, said, “This is the way for the Iraqi women. What can we do? We must sit and pray for the men to be safe.”1

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As this opening anecdote suggests, the oral narratives of women in the Iraqi diaspora create personal testaments to their lived experiences of trauma, loss, and migration, and also reveal the complex process of remembering and retelling the past. Like others interviewed for a project on the diasporic lives of Iraqi refugee women who lived, initially in exile in Amman (Jordan), and then settled in Toronto or Detroit, this young Sunni Muslim Arab woman shaped her narratives, both formal and informal, with the full awareness of the dominant metanarrative of Iraqi history enforced by the Ba’th regime under Saddam Husayn’s autocratic rule (1979–2003) and internalized by many of Iraq’s suppressed ethno-religious groups.2 Drawing on familiar ideas about common blood and national belonging, Husayn’s “Rewriting History Project” promoted a version of Iraqi history, one based on the fiction that it was rooted in one people who shared a common Sunni Muslim origin, in order to secure his minority government rule and the ascension of the Sunni Muslim elite to which he belonged. Through the widespread use of visual, cultural, and intellectual propaganda, the project upheld an official collective narrative that was patriarchal as well as imperialist.3 The central question driving this chapter is how diverse groups of Iraqi women living outside of the homeland, and whose experiences did not conform to the national myth, negotiate this official ideology in diaspora. In addressing this question, I engage debates within feminist oral history theory and method, drawing primarily on the work of nonWestern feminist scholars who, having interviewed diasporic women from authoritarian regimes, observe that the interview can create a space in which women are able to speak critically about the dominant patriarchal and imperialist interests that have shaped official collective national memories. Moreover, by drawing on their own subjective experiences as women whose lives do not conform to a national myth, they can also be empowered to retell a different past, one reflective of their own lives.4 As in our opening example, the Iraqi women who offered counternarratives that undermined the masculine national myth of a unified Iraq in interviews with me in many cases did so off the record, and usually after the conclusion of the formal taped interview in which their stories complied with the officially imposed myth. And they narrated their counter-narratives primarily through an account of personal experiences of trauma and fear that gave a lie to the Ba’th regime ideology. In short, subjective experiences shared in an informal safe space engendered counter-narratives.

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As an exploration of how Iraqi refugee women, most of whom later settled in North America, particularly Toronto, reconciled the imposed collective memory of Iraq’s past with their particular ethno-religious and gendered experiences, this chapter documents and seeks to account for the two distinct – and competing – narratives of the past that emerge in the oral history archive I created with over a hundred Iraqi women interviewed in Amman, Toronto, and Detroit. The first is an official narrative informed by the Iraqi “myth of nation,” and, the second, an unofficial (and often unrecorded) counter-narrative that emerged out of women’s efforts to deal with the demands of the imposed official nationalism as well as trauma and displacement. I highlight the sense of “loss” communicated in the interview space and the role of fear, both in Amman, where women live in close proximity to the homeland, and in diaspora, in locales like Mississauga, a suburb east of Toronto which has the largest community of Iraqis in Canada, during the current war on terror. I also consider some examples from interviews conducted in Detroit. Duelling Narratives Western feminist oral historians have claimed that by capturing the subjective experiences, or subjectivities, of their female informants, they have corrected the power imbalance that normally privileges men, and attached equal weight to women’s experiences and their interpretations.5 However, as Third World feminist scholars have argued in response, the oral research methods designed to include women in the historical narrative have been applied almost exclusively to secular constructions of womanhood, the implication being that religious women of colour, particularly of Muslim origin, represent a subservient class and thus are victims in need of saving.6 As a female researcher of mixed British-Iraqi heritage, I am privileged to be able to access Iraqi women through family or private sphere contacts. This alone, however, cannot correct the imbalance of authority and power that privileges secular Western women’s conceptions of non-Western women. Indeed, in conversations with me, many of the female participants moulded their narrative to appeal to secular Western sensibilities of womanhood and were hesitant to talk about religion on the record. By contrast, informal discussions that emerged after the recorded interview was completed initiated a space in which they were willing to talk about faith, their views on feminism, and the role of women in the family.

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The biggest challenge I faced in the process of interviewing Iraqi women was gaining the trust of recent victims of disruption, loss, repression, and violence. Here, the role of my stepmother Shehede as facilitator was essential to brokering contacts in the community of Iraqi refugees awaiting exit visas in Amman, and in communities of recently settled Iraqis in Toronto.7 As I developed a reputation within the community based upon my connections to a prominent “old” Iraqi family, I was later able to initiate contact with participants in North America without such assistance.8 In Iraqi culture, the relationship to class and between classes informs all social interactions and an important element in determining female reputation is the social status of the father’s family.9 Operating within this social framework, I was not simply a researcher, but a member of the “respected” Al-Gailani Sunni Muslim family. One woman began her interview with a knowing smile and reverent nod, saying, “I know who you are my dear. You come from an old family. You are a good girl.”10 References to my own supposed modesty and reputation were also closely connected to the respect and social standing of my kin group. The moral regulation of women and gender inequalities that organize the patriarchal structure of Iraqi families also shapes the negotiation of female memory, informing the construction of dual narratives.11 As a woman with hybrid status, I stood on the fringe of this community, at once belonging but also distant enough to be entrusted with the personal experiences and recollections of traumatic pasts in an uncertain present. In the informal space, female participants not only opened up about their memories of the homeland and migration experiences but also about their particular role in the violent past of the nation. Off the record, some women felt secure enough to share their experiences of war and loss and even of how they negotiated their role as religious or Muslim feminists. In one such case, a former participant in Kurdish guerilla forces operating in the region of Sulaymaniyah,12 who has been living in Canada since 1997, provided narratives that were diametrically opposed to one another, and were thus difficult for me to navigate as an interviewer. In the recorded interview, she gave no clear indication of her affiliation to the militant group, and her answers to my questions adhered closely to the “myth of nation.” According to this myth, all of the different religious and ethnic groups in the region had coexisted for centuries without bitterness or conflict before outside influences overturned this delicate balance in the aftermath of the US invasion. This collective memory of a unified Iraqi past was a common

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trope used to construct narratives in the formal interview space for participants of various ethno-religious backgrounds. In the taped interview, this woman gave only one indication of her family’s involvement in the paramilitary organization fighting for an independent Kurdish nation, when she acknowledged the traumatic nature of living in Kurdistan during the attack on the Kurdish north following the failed 1991 uprising in Sulaymaniyah against Saddam Husayn. She lost several family members in the civil conflict that ensued.13 However, many hours after the interview was over, and she had served coffee and relayed in animated form her fond memories of home, she took out a photo album and with a matter-of-fact tone began to recite her individual experiences of war, loss, and trauma.14 As her brothers and father fought on the “front lines” of the independence movement, she, like other militant women both past and present, took part in the less obviously public but also dangerous activity of guarding the cache of weapons the family had amassed from detection by the Ba’th troops stationed in Sulaymaniyah who carried out regular checks on suspected Kurds.15 Her detailed accounts of losing her brother and father were intertwined with sweeter memories of childhood and political activism, and how she had come to identify as a feminist. She used fond memories from her past to retell her trauma, threading past hurt with joy, and loss with love. The most striking use of this means of remembrance in her narrative was in the following excerpt: I remember the day my father was taken away. He was such a sweet man, so kind, everyone loved him. When I close my eyes I can still smell his aftershave and remember how he used to hold my hand as he walked down the street greeting everyone, doing his business. He was an important man, my father. High up and very well respected. All my family were like this, oh yes, educated and respected – we were a good family. They killed him and would not return the body. Because he was tortured.16

The woman’s remembering of personal trauma and loss in the postinterview space gave rise to a subjective narrative of the past that stood in opposition to the official one. Iraqi women like those already described constructed dual narratives through various means, but, most commonly, offering coffee and tea signified a shift from formal to informal interview spaces. A visit in an Iraqi home usually involves coffee with home-baked Iraqi sweets and delicacies, and I began to chart the importance that coffee played as

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an indicator of social standing, time, and intimacy. Failing to provide coffee is considered an insult towards the family of the guest, while the care and presentation of coffee reflects a family’s means and their guest’s social standing. I soon came to realize that coffee served immediately upon my arrival meant the interview should last only as long as a polite cup of coffee, and I was not invited to linger afterwards. This often occurred with interviews conducted outside the home in places of business, social aid facilities, or coffee shops. In several home interviews, women served tea during the interview, but their offer of coffee after the formal interview was over invited a more leisurely period of discussion and gossip, opening up an informal interview space. Upon arriving at the home of an Iraqi Jewish participant in the fall of 2010, I was immediately served instant coffee in a mug. Aware of the possible connotations of this snub, I carefully skirted around the questions about religion and memory I had hoped to ask. She rushed through her answers, pausing only to ask me about my family and how I had come to research Iraqi migration. As soon as I mentioned that my father’s family was from Iraq, she began to apologize profusely. Confused, it took me a few minutes to realize she had assumed I was British over the phone (I have a Welsh accent). “Had I known that you are Iraqi,” she said, “I would have served you good coffee in a proper cup.” Relieved (and amused), I accepted her offer of kleche (Iraqi cookies made with dates and pistachios) and an informal chat once the interview was over. The participant had used coffee to indicate her perception of my social standing and background, and to limit the interview time. Viewing the formal interview space as official and rigid, she withheld her personal experiences until we inhabited more intimate space after the tape recorder was shut off. This pattern of using coffee to divide the interview space was replicated many times, and it was in the post-coffee space that women were most likely to tell personal stories that contradicted the official views of nationalism captured on tape. This is particularly true of references to religion and sectarian divides within Iraq. My questions were meant to explore how sectarianism and nationalism has shaped the women’s identity over the past three generations, and how and whether it informed the construction of Iraqi communities in diaspora. The current civil violence and the clash of religious sectarianism caused by the tribal struggle for control over Iraq’s governing body means that religion has become increasingly politicized and divisive for Iraqis in the diaspora. When asked about religion, the women tended to rely upon

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official narratives during the taped interview, stating that religious minorities had coexisted in harmony for centuries in Iraq, and that the current crisis was a result of outside influences. During informal conversations following the official interview, however, women often contradicted this history and were quick to point the finger at those they felt truly at fault for the current conflict. Following the taped interview, a distinct shift also occurred in tone and subject, a sombre and formal account of religion giving way to gossip, fortune telling (from coffee grinds), and other informal topics, the better to establish intimacy in a comfortable environment.17 And, again, the stark contrast between the assumed and lived experiences of Iraqi women can be accessed. Narratives of Religion Religion offered a site for the articulation of subjectivities in the interview space. In many cases, women obviously sought to mould their narratives to appeal to what they considered to be secular Western sensibilities of womanhood and religion. This was especially true of Muslim participants who were hesitant to discuss religion during the taped interview, though several expressed their indignation towards Western women for assuming they were subjugated by their husbands. But in informal discussions after the recorded interview, many more opened up about faith and women’s role in religion. This occurred during a group interview in Detroit with eight Sunni, Shi’a, and Christian Iraqi women. Following an interesting but polite discussion of the changing role of religion in Iraqi politics, we stayed seated around the dining table while I explained the consent forms to the group. As they began to talk among themselves about issues I had raised, one of the Kurdish Muslim women said they actually rarely thought about women and religion. She started questioning the Christian women, asking why they revered Mary, the mother of Christ, since she was a “whore.” As the conversation developed before me and I sat there speechless, silently wishing the tape recorder was playing, I realized that this off-the-record debate spoke more clearly to the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraq than what had transpired previously. And, indeed, as I thanked each of them individually for signing the permission form, each one told me what she considered to be the primary causes of internal strife in Iraq. As the gloves came off, each offered her views on Iraqi sectarianism in the homeland and diaspora, and who, in her view, was ultimately responsible for the current civil chaos.18

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These women’s official narratives complied with the accepted patriarchal and gendered norms of the Ba’th narrative, and their public performance of it in the formal group interview suggests women conforming to the gendered cultural norms expected of them.19 Having recently fled a totalitarian regime, women are also fearful of state surveillance and retaliation, which might also help explain this behaviour. There is a heavy emphasis on a “civilized” Iraq in the narratives relayed in the official interview space, suggesting, perhaps, that the women perceive it as a colonial arena in which they, as colonized subjects, are forced to prove their civility.20 But even as their counternarratives might point to a less than civil Iraqi state and history, they waver more between official and unofficial narratives.21 It seems clear that the colonial framework by which they are judged in diaspora has created something of an identity crisis for Iraqis, who in a Western setting are often difficult to distinguish from other Muslim racial/ethnic groups. In response, Iraqis are quick to identify themselves as the most “civilized” of the Arabs given the illustrious history of Iraq as the  birthplace of the Mesopotamian civilization. This notion of being “civilized” is a strong underlying theme binding various expressions of their collective past, and is strongly linked to a unifying sense of nationalism that all ethno-religious groups aspire to. The group interview reflects the hesitancy of Iraqis to discuss the current sectarian fighting in the homeland even though it is a reality of daily life in Iraq. Still, in the informal space, the women broke down the barriers of civility and divulged personal opinions and experiences of sectarianism and violence that painted a picture of Iraq’s past and present as far different from that of the unified collective narrative presented during the taped interview. Giving voice to a subjective narrative in opposition to the collective (or celebrated civic) narrative also enables Iraqi women to break free of the patriarchal bonds of nationalism as well as the expectations of female friends and family. In group settings, women tended to withhold their opinion on religious divisions “back there” or “here” if they were not intimately connected to the other parties participating in the interview. This was also true of family interviews, in which the younger, second-generation women often did not challenge the opinions of first-generation women until after the interview was over and we had a chance to discuss their personal experiences. The most striking case of discord following a group interview occurred in Toronto during the winter of 2008 and involved a religious “deviant.” This woman, an

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acquaintance of mine, had invited all of her closest friends – all of them Kurds originating from Sulaymaniyah – to a dinner party so I might explain my project and interview them in an informal setting.22 Over food, coffee, music, and more than my fair share of sweets, I engaged the group in conversations about living in the Kurdish north and what part the Kurds played in the myth of nationalism. The women were far more eager to discuss the fallacy of a united Iraq and the trauma they had experienced as a result of the Ba’th campaigns to rid the north of political opponents. Kurdish Muslims, they said, were culturally different than Arab Sunni Muslims in thought and behaviour, particularly in the greater respect and social standing that women enjoyed. As the gathering dissipated after many hours of enjoyable conversation and eating, one woman lingered behind the rest and asked if she could talk to me privately. She wanted to tell me her story, and hers are among the most remarkable memories of trauma and loss that I have recorded. As an activist in Iraqi Kurdistan, she fled in the early 1990s to the Iranian border on foot with her brothers, where she was captured and held in a detention camp for many months. Having endured unimaginable physical and sexual torture, she eventually made her way to Canada. She explained that during her captivity in Iran, she was informed that her parents had been murdered by Ba’th soldiers. In a tragic accident shortly after arriving in Canada, one of her brothers accidentally shot the other brother, and in his grief was subsequently admitted to a mental health facility. In response to her traumatic past, she declared herself an atheist, yet was fearful of sharing her personal religious beliefs with the others, but openly critical of theirs: How can they believe in God? What God would do this? God is dead. He will never exist to me again. My heart is broken because of my brother. They are hypocrites, making me feel like an outcast because of my hair, my clothes, the way I act, [the fact that] I am not married. Who are they to tell me how to feel?23

She explained, too, that the women refused to acknowledge her fiancée because he was not “suitable,” being of a lower social class, less educated, and a Shi’i Muslim. Nevertheless, these subjective narratives offer her a means by which to subvert the collective, and hegemonic, framework governing the Ba’th “myth of nation” and religious unity. Since the “dialectic of memory and counter memory” is informed by repression and dispossession, historical memory is a key component in

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understanding how myths of origin and belonging are formulated in Iraq,24 and carried into the diaspora. As recent immigrants, women in Toronto and Amman have left behind friends and family, and the threat of loss looms heavily over their daily lives. Much like the young participant of the opening anecdote, women in Toronto repeatedly expressed their fear of hearing the phone ring late at night, and both recent refugees in Amman (where proximity to the regime instilled much fear) and Toronto said they phoned home frequently to check on friends and family. Anxiety and the threat of loss runs through the interviews with second-generation foreign-born Iraqi women in Toronto, and many confessed to trouble sleeping, eating disorders, and anxiety disorders or depression. Also like the woman of our opening story, many of these young women are intimately tied to the homeland through technologies providing direct contact with family and friends in Iraq on a daily basis.25 Fathers or husbands continue to live in Iraq and send back remittances to families settled as refugees in Canada. All of this also heightened a sense of alienation in the new context: they did not identify with Canadian women whom they felt could not understand what it was like to live every day in such fear. In the interviews where women shared their deepest fears, I frequently felt the weight of their stories, which they had shared in part to lighten the burden of needing to remain emotionally strong for their families. Female counter-expressions of the past and of religious identity and their place in the Iraqi diaspora do shift over time and in relation to their location within the diaspora. In several cases, I was able to carry out follow-up interviews with women interviewed in Amman26 after they arrived as refugees in Toronto. A Sunni woman I interviewed with her three daughters in Amman in 2008 openly expressed her dislike of Iraq’s minority religious groups, blaming them for the disintegration of a once great nation. She stressed that the Sunnis alone had created the great civilization of Mesopotamia. Several times, she referred to the Iraqis as the “only civilized people in the world” and said she hated the thought of migrating to Canada where there “is no history and no culture, only snow.” In 2008, she had been in Amman for three years, and her narrative expressed her psychological connection to the homeland. Conveying her adherence to the Ba’th Sunni “myth of nation,” she spoke of returning home soon to help in the rebuilding of a “greater Iraq.”27 In a follow-up interview in Toronto in 2011, however, she confessed even during the formal interview to liking Canada very much and being

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impressed with “the opportunities, so many different foods – my God, everywhere you turn there is Thai or Sushi or Indian [food]. You can really do anything you want here and no one can tell you what to do.” When I recalled her previous hesitancy and views of Canada she replied, “My eyes have been opened. Once I came here I saw so many different people and they are all living together and no one is being killed. What more can you ask for? Only that it is hard for us to find jobs, but in time, insha’Allah this will change.” Over time and distance, her Canadian experiences had also changed her views on Iraq’s past, as indicated by her approval of the Chaldeans she has met in Windsor and Detroit, saying, “They are all very successful because they are helping each other” whereas Muslims were not, but “only seeing it as what can you do to help me.” Moreover, she attributed the Chaldeans’ success to the fact that they had “kept the old ways alive more than us,” ascribing to this minority Christian group “traditional” Iraqi characteristics of mutual support.28 There was an even greater transition in her daughters’ narratives between Amman and Toronto. Much of my discussion with her daughters in Amman had focused on their experiences in diaspora as young women under the age of thirty. One of the daughters was recently married when I first interviewed her in 2008, and the other two were attending private colleges in Amman. The eldest married daughter considered moving to Canada as positive, since her children “will never have to experience what it is like to live in a war. What it is like not to know if your family will be alive the next day. Who can live like this?” The unmarried daughters lamented leaving their home in Iraq and refused to entertain the notion of migrating to Canada, explaining that they would never be able to find an Iraqi husband and raise their children “like in Iraq.” Now in Toronto, in this follow-up interview, the married daughter was far more negative about the influence of living in Canada, commenting, “It makes good Muslims bad, and Iraqis forget who they are here.” Her unmarried sisters were, on the other hand, far more positive about the opportunities for women: “You can do anything you want here in the university. They have courses for everything. Women can do more jobs in Canada.” As for finding a potential husband, both agreed there were many “good” families in Windsor and Hamilton and far more Iraqis in Canada than they had expected. Moreover, marriage was no longer their foremost concern; as one sister noted, “I am not worried about marriage now, I just want to study and be a doctor.” They explained that the opportunity to be a working mother in Canada without

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the stigma experienced in Iraq encouraged them to choose a higher education before a marriage partner.29 Time and distance, then, had displaced the desire of these four women to return to the homeland and had also tempered the pressing homesickness and anger they felt as recent refugees in Amman. In Amman they remained tied to the homeland and to notions of normative roles for women within Iraqi society. In Toronto, all four women discussed a newfound sense of independence, more explicitly in the case of the unmarried daughters who no longer focused on marriage exclusively and instead considered choices that in turn gave them a sense of freedom and independence not expressed in Amman. Examples of successful Chaldean communities in Toronto and Detroit shifted the mother’s long-held dismissal of Iraq’s religious minorities. The married daughter remained optimistic about the prospect of returning to work after having children, remarking, “In Iraq this would not have been possible for me, people will talk and my husband will not like this.” Even though their financial situation in Canada was the primary reason for returning to the workforce, she nevertheless embraced it as a new and liberating opportunity. Interestingly, none of the family members (including the father) consider themselves as part of the “Iraqi community” in Windsor. Instead, they embraced their independence from what the mother called “the old ways … where everyone is watching what you are doing, what you are buying, who are you eating with, who does your daughter marry.”30 This shift from the “old ways” to “new” ways embodies the metaphorical and physical shift from East to West, in this case, emboldening the women undergoing the transition. It also bears noting that the dual narrative pattern highlighted here did not apply evenly across the board. In my interviews with Chaldean and Kurdish Iraqis who have been living in Toronto and Detroit since the early 1990s, there was less resistance overall to speaking critically “on the record” and a greater degree of consistency between formal and informal narratives. Women who had fled Iraq during this earlier period of upheaval tended to be far more critical of the state’s violent policies against its people. Kurdish women who left Iraq during its crackdown on its political enemies in the north were particularly vocal about their experiences at the hands of the Ba’th army, and their painful memories of the occupations of Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. Also less fearful of making political statements on the record were those who had emigrated even earlier, namely, before the US invasion of Iraq in 1980. When asked about religious minorities in Iraq, one of these women boldly

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declared, “Iraq was a mosaic under the oppression and force of obligation living together under one roof. The moment they [religious minorities] could get away, they did – now every group is asking for their own nation.”31 Yet, even in these cases, loss and trauma were noticeably absent from their formal narratives. Even in informal discussions, Kurdish women typically discussed loss without emotion and in the third person, suggesting that, like other survivors, they found that in order to cope in the present, they needed to disassociate themselves from this traumatic past.32 In similar fashion to Arab Iraqi women, Kurdish women who left Iraq after the 2003 US invasion also promoted a collective national identity in their narratives, adding credence to accounts of Iraqi unity and solidarity before the most recent rise in sectarian-based conflict. No doubt, this reflected their political affiliations, as many of the former freely admitted a desire to see a sovereign Kurdistan restored. They did, however, conform to the view that religious groups in Iraq had lived in relative harmony for millennia before the present troubles, indicating their partiality as Muslims to the foundational notions imbedded in the myth of nation that Iraq was founded on Islamic principles that predate the spread of Islam through this region of ancient Mesopotamia.33 Paradoxically, Chaldean American women who are US-born and second-generation Iraqis in Detroit, and who might be expected to show even more distance from trauma narratives, actually embrace the traumatic history of their community as passed down through their families. Despite having lived in the United States their whole lives, their Chaldean American identity has formed around community-led commemorations of past traumas and the ongoing persecution of Chaldeans in Iraq. Constructing their identity in relation to past persecutions of Chaldeans, these women connect the past traumas of their families with the current plight of present-day Chaldean refugees fleeing Iraq. Through their involvement in settlement and refugee aid work in organizations such as the Chaldean American Ladies of Charity, these women remain connected to the Chaldean community in Iraq and continue to reconfigure their identity as hyphenated Chaldeans in America. In helping to counsel refugees, these second-generation women often adopt the refugees’ narratives of displacement and loss as their own, claiming, “We are still suffering in Iraq” and “even though we have lived in Iraq since the dawn of time, they are still killing us and saying we are not Iraqi.”34 Embracing the persecution of this minority group strengthens the lineage of the foreign-born Chaldean women refugees while also legitimizing their own claims to the homeland.

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New Narratives in Diaspora The differences in the construction and delivery of narratives that emerged in the interviews conducted with women in Amman, Toronto, and Detroit between 2008 and 2010 suggests that time and distance alter  the relationship between the individual and her ethno-religious group and also her connection to the homeland. In diaspora, the women’s perspectives on the place of religious groups in Iraq’s collective past shift as the threat of loss is distracted by more pressing daily concerns like education, marriage, employment, and integration. New identities are forged as communities reconvene (as in the case of Chaldeans in Detroit), and nationalisms are reconsidered and reconstructed in the aftermath of life under the Ba’th regime. As Saskia Witteborn notes, “The diasporic imaginations of Iraqis are characterized by resistance and survival and transcend national, social and political spaces.”35 Over time, Iraqi women find new ways to express lived histories and to understand their place in Iraq’s past. Second-generation Chaldean American women in Detroit are an active part of reimagining Chaldean identity and the history of this community in Iraq, claiming their place in its future. As Toronto’s second-generation Iraqi women come of age, they too become part of the process of redefining the identity of this diasporic community through their own experiences of war and trauma, and collective memories commemorated through the oral retelling of family histories. Conclusion As we have seen, Iraqi women articulate two very different and often conflicting narratives. The first is defined by the gendered interpretation of the Iraqi collective past, reflecting a masculine collective memory structured to confirm the Ba’th national narrative, and the second is shaped by the subjective reality of Iraqi women’s experiences, past and present, that challenges that official myth. This is not to say that the formal or taped interviews cannot yield useful insights into the creation of Iraqi memory. Some women use the formal interviews to “educate” a Western audience on the role of Iraqi women in the public and private spheres, while others promote political platforms. Still, as the interviews with Kurdish and Arab Muslim women in Amman and Toronto suggest, one needs to incorporate elements of both narratives in order to understand the whole. In this way, I as the interviewer met the need

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to “listen in stereo, receiving both dominant and muted channels clearly and tuning into them carefully to understand the relationship between them.”36 This process of “listening in stereo” to formal and informal, official and subjective, narratives enabled me to reconstruct the composition of memory derived from lived experiences in the homeland, gendered interpretations of nation and national unity, and the new realities of displacement. As we have also seen, the interview can open up a “third space,” a safe space, but also a site of resistance within which women can reproduce official narratives in conjunction with the subjective (and conflicting) female experiences of trauma, war, and dislocation. If we stuck only to the formal interview, so much would be lost, and these women, still very much “strangers” (and certainly never “sisters”) in Canadian women’s history, would remain merely stereotypes of Western feminists, among them Canadian women historians who thus far have shown little interest in Muslim women of colour.37 Adopting a “thick description” approach, one that explores the intersectionality between official and unofficial narratives, helps enormously, as does contextualizing these encounters within a framework of social and cultural interactions.38 Omitting the unofficial histories of women would produce a fractured and incomplete account of Iraqi women’s past and thus their present. These women fill the silences of the interview (public) space with counter-narratives shared in the informal (private) space after the interview, taking comfort in this particular “female” space. The character of Iraqi women’s narratives suggest, too, the importance of being culturally sensitive in our interpretations of ethical guidelines governing the interview space, which often confine the researcher to write only about formal interviews documented and recorded on tape.

NOTES 1 Interview by author, Toronto, 24 January 2010. 2 Iraq is a Muslim majority country, with a Shi’a majority and Sunni minority. In order to build his Sunni-dominant political apparatus and avoid ethnic conflict, Saddam Husayn immediately set about making changes to limit potential political uprisings from the Shi’i majority, as well as the Kurds, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims but have a long history of conflict with the central government owing to their desire to establish a sovereign

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nation-state in Northern Iraq. The regime also engaged in the suppression of smaller ethno-religious minority groups, including the Armenians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Assyrians, and the Iraqi Jews. Eric Davies, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 282–3. Parin Dossa, Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Storied Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 21. Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010), 74. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80; Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?: Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104, 3 (2002): 785. See also Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack, “Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analysis,” in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 11. Oral history research on women in diaspora, in particular tends to draw on personal and familial contacts within the community. The difficulty of accessing the female voice is particularly (though certainly not exclusively) true of groups migrating from the “Third World” where women are more isolated upon settlement in North America. Other important elements that can hinder access to migrant women are linguistic/cultural boundaries, traditional etiquette, and generational shift. Vijay Agnew, “A Diasporic Bounty: Cultural History and Heritage,” in Vijay Agnew, ed., Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A Search for Home (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 171–87; Pamela Sugiman, “Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories,” in ibid., 48–81; Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Odars and ‘Others’: Intermarriage and the Retention of Armenian Ethnic Identity,” in Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds., Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, 1st ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 341–65; Shahnaz Khan, Zina, Transnational Feminism, and the Moral Regulation of Pakistani Women (Vancouver: UBC, 2006). Reputation and social standing in Iraqi culture are defined by the class status of the father’s family, and the access I had to upper- and middle-class Sunni and Kurdish women through family contacts initially restricted me to this social spectrum of Iraqi society. Hanna Batatu discusses the formation of the class system in Iraq in his foundational work, The Old Social

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Nadia Jones-Gailani Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baɂthists, and Free Officers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Batatu, “Introduction,” in ibid. The emphasis on “good” implied that I was a woman of virtue from a respectable family, or a woman of virtue because I am from a respectable family. Interview by author, Amman, Jordan, 12 September 2008. This regulation of femininity and sexuality by diasporic communities as well as Western onlookers has become the focus of women’s histories of diasporic groups in North America. The concept operates in other cultures, but on female modesty as it relates to Iraqi women, see Shanaz Khan, Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2002); Yvonne Haddad, “Islamic Values among American Muslims,” in B. Bilge and Barbara Aswad, eds., Family and Gender among American Muslims: Issues facing Middle Eastern Immigrants and their Descendants (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996), 1–13; Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Nadje Al-Ali, Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (London: Zed Books, 2007). The militant group was associated with the Kurdish Democratic Party in the 1980s, fighting against Ba’th forces to establish the political autonomy of the Kurdish parliament. Interview by author, Toronto, 10 December 2008. In his discussion of the ways in which survivors deal with trauma, Des Pres notes they often recount great suffering without emotion as a means to cope with painful memories. Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 229–30. For just one historical example of this gendered pattern, see the essays on militant women in an earlier Italian diaspora in Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Interview by author, 10 December 2008. Kristina Minister, “A Feminist Frame for the Oral History Interview,” in Gluck and Patai, Women’s Words, 30. Group interview with two Sabean, three Kurdish, and two Chaldean women and a Sunni Iraqi woman, Rochester, MI, 5 November 2009. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

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20 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 62. 21 Although intersubjectivity is typically used in oral history theory to describe the interaction between the two subjectivities of interviewer and interviewee, it is applied here to understand why women oscillate between normative and counter-narratives. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 58. 22 Group interview conducted with eight Kurdish women and one Arab Muslim Iraqi woman, Toronto, 8 November 2008. 23 Ibid. 24 Davies, Memories of State, 282–3. 25 Georges E. Fouron and Nina Glick-Schiller, “The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second Generation within a Transnational Social Field,” in Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters, eds., The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 176. 26 There were large numbers of middle-class Iraqis living in Amman in 2008 and 2009 when I conducted the interviews. Educated Sunni professionals in particular created social networks of friends and family who lived near each other and gathered on a regular basis to celebrate holidays and events. Their situation in Amman was temporary; although many Sunni families lived in relative comfort, their narratives reflected the precarious uncertainly that plagued their lives. See also, Jeff Crisp, Jane Janz, and José Riera, Surviving in the City: A Review of UNHCR’s Operation for Iraqi Refugees in Urban Areas of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria (UNCHR Policy Development and Evaluation Service, July 2009), 8–9. http://www .unhcr.org/4a69ad639.html 27 Interview by author, Jordan, 15 September 2008. 28 Interview by author, Toronto, 6 September 2010. 29 Interviews by author, Jordan, 15 September 2008, and Toronto, 6 September 2010. 30 Interview by author, Toronto, 6 September 2010. 31 Interview by author, Toronto, 10 December 2008. 32 See also Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” 33 Davies, Memories of State, 273–8. 34 Group interview with five Chaldean-American women, Detroit, 6 November 2009; original emphasis. 35 Saskia Witteborn, “Identity Mobilization Practices of Refugees: The Case of Iraqis in the United States and the War in Iraq,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 1, 3 (August 2008), 216. 36 Anderson and Jack, “Learning to Listen,” 11.

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37 This is certainly not true of all Canadian women’s historians, some of whom have embraced this new trajectory within the field, but I have found presenting on this subject far easier in the United States and beyond, whereas my work has been met with a far cooler and more hesitant reception within the Canadian academy. 38 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.

Contributors

Ashleigh Androsoff is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Saskatchewan. Using the Doukhobors in Russia and in Canada as a case study, her research focuses on the construction of national and ethnic identity narratives over time. Her book, Spirit Wrestling: The “Doukhobor Problem” in Russia and in Canada, is forthcoming with UBC Press. Marilyn Barber was an associate professor and is currently adjunct research professor in the History Department at Carleton University. She has written extensively on immigrant domestic servants in Canada, including Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada (Canadian Historical Association, 1991). Most recently she is co-author of an oral history, Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945 (University of Manitoba Press, 2015). Laurie K. Bertram is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. A research scholar and public historian whose interests focus on gender, material culture, and ways of seeing in Canada, Iceland, and the global North, she is completing a book entitled Immigrant Threads: Fashioning Icelandic-North American Culture, 1870 onwards. Glenda Tibe Bonifacio is an associate professor in the Department of Women & Gender Studies, University of Lethbridge. Her research and publications are on the themes of women, gender, migration, and citizenship, with a focus on Filipino women. She is the author of Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities (UBC Press, 2013).

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Sonia Cancian teaches at Zayed University’s Department of Interdisciplinary Studies (University College) in Dubai, U.A.E. Her research interests include international migration, gender and women’s history, family history, the history of emotions, and epistolary narratives. She is the author of Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2010). Lisa Chilton is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her research, writing, and teaching focus on international migrations, Canadian history, and British imperialism. Her publications include Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and articles in a variety of edited books and journals. Afua Cooper holds the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University and is a leading scholar of the African diaspora in Canada who also researches and teaches on critical race theory, decolonization studies, the body, gender and slavery, and abolition and freedom. Her publications include The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (HarperCollins, 2006) and the co-authored collection We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History (University of Toronto Press, 1994), which won the Joseph Brant History Prize. Paula J. Draper is a Holocaust historian specializing in memory history who has published widely on Canada and the Holocaust, and is the founder of the Toronto-based Holocaust Documentation Project. An active educator, she has taught university courses, served as vicepresident of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, and participated in Holocaust-related projects such as the Royal Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, and as Lead International Trainer for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Enakshi Dua is an associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University and a long-time anti-racist activist. She has published extensively on theorizing racism and antiracism, the racialized and gendered histories of immigration, racism in Canadian universities, equity policies, and the racialization of masculinity and femininity. Her publications include Scratching the Surface:

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Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought (Women’s Press, 1999) and “Decolonising Anti-Racism” in Racism, Colonialism and Indigeneity in Canada (Oxford University Press, 2011). Marlene Epp is a professor of history and peace and conflict studies at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo. She is author of Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2000), Mennonite Women in Canada: A History (University of Manitoba Press, 2008), and co-editor (in addition to this volume) of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (University of Toronto Press, 2012). Lesley Erickson is a historian and editor whose work explores the dislocations and upheavals that accompanied the settlement of the Canadian Prairies. She is the co-editor of Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History (University of Calgary Press, 2005) and the author of Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society (UBC Press/Osgoode, 2011). Karen Flynn is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of African-American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of numerous publications in African Canadian women’s and nursing history, including the book Moving beyond Borders: A History of  Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Julie Guard is an associate professor of history and labour studies and Coordinator of the Labour Studies Program at the University of Manitoba. Her work on radical consumer activists, anti-communism and police surveillance, and on gender and ethnicity in left, labour, and social justice movements has appeared in Labour/Le travail, Journal of Women’s History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, and International Labor and Working-Class History. Co-editor of Bankruptcies and Bailouts, she has a forthcoming book on Canada’s radical consumer movement. Franca Iacovetta is a professor of history at University of Toronto, past president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and recipient of the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. Macdonald

606

Contributors

prize for Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Between the Lines, 2006). A feminist historian of migration, she is completing a book on women’s community-based pluralism in North America and research on transnational radical women exiles from fascist Italy. Nadia Jones-Gailani is currently a Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of South Florida. Her book, Iraqi Women in Diaspora: A Transnational Study of Women’s Life Histories in Amman, Detroit, and Toronto, is under review with the University of Toronto Press. Her work has been published in the Journal of Canadian Ethnic Studies, and in a Palgrave edited collection, Oral History off the Record: Towards an Ethnography of Practice. Varpu Lindström passed away in 2012. She was a professor of history and women’s studies, University Professor, and a senior administrator at York University. The author of the pioneering Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women, 1890–1930 and many other publications, she conducted the research for the award-winning documentary Letters from Karelia, about the Canadian Finns lured back by Stalin’s promises of prosperity only to be killed in his purges in the 1930s. She was awarded the Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (1991), and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012). Willeen Keough is an associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University whose research interests include gender, migration, ethnicity, communal violence, and oral history. Her publications include The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750–1760 (Columbia University Press, 2006), which received a Gutenberg-e Prize from the Arthur Mellon Foundation, and a co-authored reader (with Lara Campbell), Gender and History: Canadian Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is currently completing a book-length project entitled Seal Wars: Conflicting Masculinities at the Labrador Front. Valerie J. Korinek is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the author of numerous publications in Canadian feminist popular culture, histories of sexuality, and gender history, including Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and

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Sixties (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Her forthcoming book is entitled Prairie Fairies: A History of Western Canadian Queer Communities. Laura Madokoro is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. Her research explores the intersection of race, citizenship, humanitarianism, and migration in the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, Modern Asian Studies, Journal of the Overseas Chinese, Refuge, Journal of Refugee Studies and Histoire Sociale/Social History. Lisa R. Mar is the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies and an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. An immigration historian, her research focuses on the experiences of the Chinese in Canada and the United States. Her Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (University of Toronto Press, 2010) won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Lorna R. McLean is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. Her research areas include gender, the history of citizenship education, Social Studies and teaching from a global perspective. She co-edited the award winning book, Framing Our Past: Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (McGill-Queen’s, 2001). Noula Mina recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Toronto. Focussing on Greeks in twentieth-century Canada, her dissertation examines various forms of transnationalism (humanitarian, political, familial, and cultural) to demonstrate how such public acts nurtured a diasporic space that drew Greek Canadians into a dialogue over the meaning of Greek immigrant identity. Her latest work explores more deeply the gendered nature of transnationalism and ethnic public performance. Susana Miranda completed a PhD in History at York University in 2010. She is a co-Director of the Portuguese-Canadian History Project, and currently works for the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities and the Ministry of Education. Drawing on her dissertation-based research, she is writing a book on Portuguese immigrant women in post1945 Canada.

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Contributors

Cecilia Morgan is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the University of Toronto. Her most recent book is Creating Colonial Pasts: History and Memory in Southern Ontario, 1860– 1980 (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She is currently completing a manuscript on the history of settler societies in the British Empire, 1783–1920 and a book on Indigenous travellers from British America to Britain and beyond, 1770–1914. Adele Perry is a professor of history at the University of Manitoba and Senior Fellow, St. John’s College. Most recently she is the author of Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and co-editor, with Karen Dubinsky and Henry Yu, of Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Kim Raine is a professor in the Centre for Health Promotion Studies, School of Public Health, University of Alberta. She is a Registered Dietitian and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Her research explores the social organization of inequities in nutritional health as well as community-based and policy approaches to addressing health inequities. Grace L. Sanders Johnson is a Vice Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Africana Studies. A historian of gender, migration, oral history, and Caribbean Studies, she is currently completing her book manuscript, Feminist Frequencies: Women’s Rights, Transnational Politics and Haitian Feminist Thought, 1915–1965. Pamela Sugiman is a professor of sociology and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University. A third-generation Japanese Canadian, she has spent the past couple of decades writing about personal memory, gender, race and the internment of Japanese Canadians. Head of the Oral History research cluster of the SSHRC-funded project, Landscapes of Injustice, her most recent research is on memory and witnesses to internment and racial oppression in Canada. Frances Swyripa is professor emerita in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. She has researched and published widely on the history of Ukrainians in Canada. Her publications in-

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clude Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891–1991 (University of Toronto Press, 1993), and Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies (University of Manitoba Press, 2010). Helen Vallianatos is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching focuses on the topics of food, gender, body, and health, with a current emphasis on migration and foodways in immigrant communities. She is also collaborating on projects examining how place shapes health and food practices and outcomes, including work with immigrant and Canadian-born people, and how people’s perceptions of food, body, and health influence their food and health practices and uptake of health messages.

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Credits

J.A. Brock & Co. Collection of Eyrarbakki Icelandic Heritage Centre, Hnausa, Manitoba. Vancouver Sun: George Diack (photographer), c. 1962. Library and Archives Canada: Doukhobors collection/C-000681. Montreal Standard: “Finnish Girls Are Fair,” 9 December 1939; Fanni Luukkonen, 9 December 1939. Montreal Star: “Women Behind Finland’s Lines,” 29 December 1939; “Help for Heroic Finland,” n.d. Toronto Star: “Women in Finland Stand…,” 5 December 1939; “She Watches …,” 17 January 1940; “Draft Women to Fight Reds,” 8 January 1940; “Finnish Fighters Supported by Toronto Kin,” 6 December 1939; “For Their Beloved Ancestral Finland …,” 6 December 1939; “Far from Home,” 4 January 1940; “For War Work,” 4 January 1940. Toronto Star Weekly: “Typical of the hardy …,” 16 December 1939; Tuuliki Paanen, 30 December 1939; Finnish women street cleaners, 30 December 1939. Mennonite Central Committee Photography Collection: Archives of the Mennonite Church, Goshen, Indiana: Mennonite women preparing meal. Chatelaine: “Meals Off the Shelf,” February 1955; “Feed a Family of Five,” January 1961.