Pop 89: Don’t Mess With Them

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

On the 23rd of this month, I’m giving a talk at The Jasper Centre in Maple Creek on some Victorian-era Not-to-Be-Trifled-with Women. For the last few years, I’ve been plugging away at my novel about one woman who answers a lonely hearts request in a London newspaper, only to find herself jilted and stranded on the prairie. The more research I do, the fatter the book gets; the tangled roots of many stories cling to the rich soil of history that has fed us and directed us, most often without us knowing. I love following the threads that lead from story to story; with every new discovery, I get a stronger grasp on what our female ancestors were dealing with. I hasten to add that I am not simply speaking of our settler ancestors - but all our relations, in this case, our Cree and Metis ancestors as well.

It’s no secret that writing about other people’s lives is a zone fraught with condemnation and criticism these days. And yet, I have chosen a topic - or perhaps it chose me - that necessitates imaging a great deal about other people’s lives - people not simply of another era but of a different gender and different racial antecedents. My research has taken me into the lives of my own Metis ancestors, what little I know of them, and into the diaries of women headed westward in both the States and Canada in an age of empire era called “Victorian.”

The end of the Victorian era in England when industry and manufacturing took over and God was being replaced by Science and “facts” and hence, newspapers. A guiding force in my writing is this quote from the book “Parallel Lives” by Phyllis Rose: “The history of the nineteenth-century thought is the record of various people’s substitute sources of authority.” With the dawn of the age of rapid transportation, scientific discovery, and cheap forms of printing also came the dawning of an idea that maybe the Old Testament God didn’t have all the answers. However, the evangelicalism of the new American empire still put men at the centre of a woman’s universe.

Most Victorian women were expected to drift about the room as “Household Angels,” content to be guided in all decisions by their husbands. And while we know writers and reporters like Florence Nightingale in England, Margaret Fuller, Nelly Bly and Victoria Woodhull in the States, and Cora Hind in Canada resisted such constraint; it’s important to remember how difficult and dangerous such resistance was in their time. So many contemporary and post-modern novels and movies portray Victorian women as feisty, sexy, cocky gals with never a care for the stuffy prudery of the day.

But the overwhelming belief was that too much excitement and stimulation was bad for a woman. It wasn’t just societal opinion, it was considered scientific fact. Dr. Edward Clarke toured the world with his popular book “Sex In Education.” He subtitled it “A Fair Chance for Girls,” which no doubt brought a few young minds to his lectures in the hopes of seeing themselves fairly represented. Unfortunately, what they heard was that adolescent girls should halt all education during the years of bleeding, as an overworked brain leads to shrinking of the ovaries. And imagine your poor daughter expelling all that energy on learning only to become a withered old hag before her prime, a woman no one wants or needs.

I wish I were kidding, but I’m not.

There was also the belief that many women were prone to hysteria - “ vivid mental emotions brought on by anger, fright, reading exciting books, or seeing disagreeable sights.” We have the American physician Frederick Hollick to thank for that quote. And for recommending those women be committed to asylums.

We can now see how getting out from under the gaze of these learned men was the best escape route for brilliant women. Even when going along with the decisions of the men in their families, many immigrating Victorian women would later come to learn, on the land, that they were perfectly capable of handling “fright, anger, and excitement.” They bore witness to the pain and sorrow of others as well as themselves. In fact, not only were they capable, they were indispensable. They were heroes in their own right. They had their consciousness raised not by social conditioning but by the very wild itself.

Which brings us to the influence of Indigenous women. Many of us know Elizabeth Cady Stanton was behind the first-ever women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY, But who has heard of the journalist Mathilda Gage who stood alongside her friend Stanton and who wrote about and pointed often to her Haudensosaunee (Iroquois) neighbours’ lives as a model upon which to build their vision of an egalitarian world.

Gage kept track of the social, economic, spiritual and political differences between the lives of her white, Christian sisters and her Native sisters. While EuroAmerican women had no rights to property, children and even their own bodies, her Native sisters worked under the direction of women, sharing the land which was the Mother of all people. Women chose their chief, held offices, voted by consensus lived communally.

Even white Christian men marvelled at the way the Iroquois beheld women. One told a New York Herald reporter: “I have seen young white women going out searching for botanical specimens. And the Indian men help them. Where else can a girl be safe from men she does not know?”

Last year I came across Martha Maxwell, a famous American taxidermist. She trapped, hunted and shot the animals she subsequently stuffed. Cougar, beaver, moose, bear, raptors and songbirds, etc., were posed to look as if they were still alive, ready to pounce or fly away. I’d like to tell you more about her and others, but you’ll just have to show up on October 23rd at 2 pm for more stories and revelations.

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