Silk Sails (23 page)

Women modeled leadership for other women in church and community activities throughout Newfoundland. The Wesleyan-Methodist Church was particularly adept at this, mainly because of Susannah Wesley's influence on her son John Wesley, founder of the movement. Women were trained along with men as class leaders by Wesleyan-Methodist clergy. It was a rigorous training and required reading, study, record-keeping and counseling, and women were given responsibility to teach and supervise classes of women, and when there were insufficient male class leaders, men were enrolled in a woman's class. These same skills were used in
their teaching of children and youth in Sunday School classes. Hannah Eliza Evans, a class leader and Sunday School teacher at Northern Arm, also operated a branch store for the George J. Carter fishery firm at Herring Neck; the skills she learned in the class meetings were transferrable to the business world. In the same way that the religious revivals of the early nineteenth century in the United States helped to encourage strong female activism in the suffragist, abolitionist and temperance movements, so the early Methodist revivals in Newfoundland (strongly opposed and threatened by the “mother church,” the Church of England), with their deep emotional dimension, gave women both a strong confidence in their own abilities and the skills to take active leadership roles in their communities.

A further conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence presented is that it is time to dispense with the near-myth of the passive woman in this early society. There are those who persist in portraying women as weak and powerless in early society, perhaps in some cases because it has become a convenient tool in the present to help redress the wrongs done to women through the centuries. However, passive women are not the picture that emerges from the court records or census records or the plantation books of Newfoundland, among other sources. We cannot discount the courageous, feisty, bold women who stand out in these records because they would not suffer wrongs to be done to them or their families, and they used every means to ensure that their cases were heard and action taken. They did not always win the individual case, but their voices were heard, and word spread.

There are at least four patterns of relationship between a woman and her partner(s) that emerge in the records. It may be instructive to look at these patterns as a way of determining whether women played an active or passive role in ownership matters. I would characterize them in this way:

a.
Women were subordinate in the relationship.

A good example of this pattern is the beach women of Grand Bank. These women were gainfully employed; they worked for the large business firms, not for their own family business. They worked in teams, a boss woman being in charge of nine other women. They were the experts at curing fish. When the fish was brought to the beach from the harbour, these groups of women were responsible for the finished product that was then taken back to the harbour and shipped to Europe or the Indies. The last word on the curing was never the woman's. There was a man (a “culler”) appointed to inspect the fish and to give the final word on the product. I have never read of an instance in which the boss woman was promoted to the job of “culler.” The women, important as their role was, were in a subordinate relationship.

Other cases of women in subordinate roles may be those whose husbands registered their ships in the wife's name in order to escape indebtedness to the merchant. It is impossible to identify these with any degree of certainty, but one case may have been Susannah Parsons of Glovertown, who from 1918 to 1922 was technically the owner of the ship
George V. Parsons
, named after her husband. I have it from personal testimony that Susannah was ill for much of her life and was in no way involved in the fishing venture. Susannah was originally from Carbonear and may have come to Glovertown as a teacher. If that is not so, she may still have had sufficient schooling to keep the books and handle the money. In all such cases we must remember the viability of the family as the primary economic unit; everything was subordinate to the family's survival.

b.
A woman was subordinate in a real partnership.

This pattern would have been true of Myrtle and Henry Hatcher in Rose Blanche. And from my visit with them in 1994, I don't think Myrtle would have had it any other way. It was a good and fair partnership. It appears that Henry was
ensuring his wife's financial security, perhaps against a possible claim by one of the children from his first marriage. Myrtle was a smart, savvy woman, but it was the family's survival that was uppermost in her mind, and I think she would have deferred to her husband on most issues.

Merchants' wives who owned a few shares in the family firm's ships and who played a supporting role may have belonged in this category. Emma Wheeler of Frenchman's Cove, Bay of Islands, was a joint owner of the ship
Spring Bird
with her husband Symeon in 1896. Symeon was a lobster packer. This was a joint venture, with Emma almost surely playing a supporting role. Eleanor Tibbo and Mary Florence Forward of Grand Bank were real partners with their husbands in the Forward & Tibbo firm, though most of their activity was from behind the scenes.

c.
A woman was in an equal partnership with her partner(s).

It may well be that Simeon and Maud Billard of Harbour Le Cou had such a partnership, where “he handled the business and she handled the money.” Each had complementary skills and they were deployed in a relationship of trust.

A clearer example would be Chesley and Mary Yarn. Chesley carried on his business with his own ships in Mose Ambrose, and Mary had a complementary business with a ship, of which Chesley had made her the managing owner, in nearby English Harbour West. My visit with Mary in 1994 confirmed this arrangement.

Annie Northover Berkshire of Spencer's Cove, Placentia Bay, was appointed managing owner of their ship in 1959 and she sold 24 of her 40 shares to other family members. Her husband was a fisherman and perhaps he was recognizing his wife's schooling and business ability by placing her in charge of the ship. Eliza Pafford (Eddy) of North Harbour was married consecutively to two businessmen and was intimately involved in the operation of the business. For eleven years Laura Garland of Gaultois
was manager of the Baddeck-built ship
Teresa G,
on which Thomas Garland Ltd. had taken a $75,000 mortgage. The mortgage was discharged after only 14 months. It is assumed that Thomas Garland was still living but only the firm is mentioned in the record. Mary Wilmot Sheaves of Channel shared an equal partnership with her husband.

Women who were traders, such as Ellen Roach of Branch, St. Mary's Bay, Ann J. Tuck of Fortune, Anne Farrell of St. Jacques, and possibly Gertrude Newman of Boyd's Cove, and Elizabeth Freake of Joe Batt's Arm, were certainly equal partners in terms of putting money into the ventures, sharing the risks and the profits, and very probably working on board ship during these coastal journeys. We saw that on the south coast women sometimes handled the money on board ship.

A whimsical story in the literature gives us a good example of a real partnership between husband and wife. Justus S. Wetmore and his wife of Clifton Village on the Kingston Peninsula of New Brunswick were partners in shipbuilding, farming, a sawmill and a granite quarry. Stanley T. Spicer writes in
Masters of Sail
: “that such was his role in the community and that of his wife that he was well known as ‘He Boss' and she, ‘She Boss.'”

d.
A woman is in charge; she is head of the operation.

Mary Gosse of Spaniard's Bay was an excellent example of a woman in charge of an operation. She studied her six grown sons and appointed each to a specific task, and then operated the business until she was ready to pass it over. Alice Murphy of King's Cove, widow of Michael, operated the old MacBraire business for 30-plus years after her husband's death. Abigail Horwood of Harbour Le Cou also operated the family business for several years after her husband Todd died.

And, of course, the premier examples of independent leadership abilities were displayed in Ada Annie Petite of Mose Ambrose and Marie Smart Penny of Burgeo, and currently in Debbie Petite of English Harbour West.

I would conclude from these patterns and the cases cited that there seems to be little evidence that women were playing a passive role in ownership. I realize, of course, that the lack of precise documentation makes some of these conclusions tentative. But the weight of the material available seems to portray an active role taken by women.

To substantiate the case for dispensing with the near-myth of the passive women I can also cite the biographies I wrote in the summer of 2005 of fifteen women in the Bay of Exploits area, women who were active from the 1880s to the recent present. There was not a woman among them that I would characterize as passive. One, Mary Winsor, was a co-partner in a large sawmill operation in the Botwood area from 1889 to 1892. Another, Elizabeth Manuel, was the wife of the prominent Exploits Island merchant, Josiah Manuel. Josiah used to say: “I command the ship but my wife commands when I come off the ship.” Michael Harris, in his book on the Crosbies, asserts that Elizabeth was the first one up every morning, ensuring that the men, maids and gardeners were at their chores. Another woman was Effie Cobb, owner and manager of the Transatlantic Inn in Botwood from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, when Pan-American Airways, British Airways, and American Export Airlines were using Botwood as a stopover between North America and Europe. Her hotel, restaurant and shop were located immediately adjacent to the headquarters of the three airlines and to the Canadian military base during World War II. Then there were the three Mi'kmaq women of Wigwam Point – Ellen, Fanny and Mary Paul – who were suppliers to the Winsor & Vallance Sawmill from the 1870s to the 1890s. There were the Evans women of Northern Arm – Hannah Eliza, Naomi and Selina – whose musically and dramatically talented daughters were constantly on call to the lodges and the A. N. D. Co. and for other social events in Botwood through the first years of the new company in the early 1900s. Another woman, Effie Taylor, born in Scotland and married to a World War I veteran from Botwood, became the first pensioned female from the A. N. D. Co. when she retired as stenographer in 1959.

In addition, there were many other women in the area who were midwives, nurses, postmistresses, bookkeepers, typists, stenographers, and so forth. Miss Lily Martin was transferred to Baie Verte in 1903 to manage the business firm of James Jackman, Esq.; she had been a clerk in Jackman's firm at Tilt Cove. Miss Harding of Pilley's Island was appointed stenographer to the very large Newlands Lumber Co. at Norris Arm in 1907, succeeding Walter Hopkins. And when James P. Howley of the Newfoundland Geological Survey completed his survey of the Botwood area, seven of the land speculators who bought sizable tracts of land were women, five of them married women. And elsewhere on the island, Miss Minnie Harding was appointed manager of the Samuel Harris, Esq., business at Grand Bank in 1907. None of these women, nor countless others of like mind, could be characterized as passive.

I also want to provide some details about the two women to whom this book is lovingly dedicated: my mother and my mother-in-law, both now deceased. My mother had only a grade-school education but she had worked as a domestic with a St. John's family and then as cook with the Herder family, of
Evening Telegram
fame, in the 1920s. She was worldly wise and used her experience in “the big city” to prepare me mentally and physically, with proper manners and social graces, when I left home in July 1948 to attend summer school in St. John's and again when I returned to Memorial University College in September 1948. My mother provided practically all the leadership in the family. From my father, being a man of few words, we learned only by example. My mother did not defer to my father, nor did she ever challenge him publicly. She complemented him in the sense that she supplied what he lacked. She was the real life and energy of the family. She set the tone with her ideas and her actions in emphasizing the need for a good education and in planning future careers for her sons (there were no daughters). My father was away from home a lot, working in the lumber woods and in a nearby town, and my mother planned and supervised the work for her sons: preparing and maintaining the gardens, making hay, ensuring that there was
sufficient firewood, that the water barrel was always full, and that the animals were cared for and the barn and sheds kept clean. What self-fulfilment my mother experienced was through her involvement in church and community events and family visits. There was no time for competition between the sexes. Our home was a gathering place for women of the community, from young adults to young married women to older women. As young children we tried to eavesdrop on some of these conversations, which were conducted in whispered tones when they discussed family tragedies or grave community events.

My mother-in-law was from Twillingate and became a teacher at nearby Manuels and Crow Head. She married and moved to Botwood about 1927. As a young mother she enrolled in a correspondence course with the Chicago School of Nursing and completed the very detailed 53 lessons of 1937, which still exist today in a book that is fully three inches thick. On completion of the course she received a cap, pin and certificate. She thus became a resource person for many women in the community of Botwood, and there were women who would not allow the resident doctor to perform procedures on them unless my mother-in-law was present. She nursed her husband's two young brothers in her home until they both died and cared for her husband's father at her home until his death. She lost three young children and raised seven. She was among the first group of women in Botwood to be awarded a certificate and pin for Volunteer Nursing Service by the Canadian Red Cross after completing a requisite course of instruction and supervised practice which “fully qualified her to act as a nursing assistant without remuneration.” She gave music lessons, learned shorthand in her later years, and was involved in leadership roles in church and lodge, at the local, provincial and national levels.