THE WOMEN OF CANADA
The Revolution marked an era in the social as in the political history
of the United States, and the transition furnishes an opportunity to
tell something of the women of Canada. For the sake of completeness, it
is needful also to cast a fleeting glance at those strange hyperboreans,
the Eskimo, and this chapter has seemed the most convenient and
appropriate place for such consideration.
There is no necessity to give any detailed account of the dwellers of
the ice-bound coast region. Ethnologists are not agreed on even the main
points of their origin and history, and recessive statements could be
but speculation. Of the actual conditions of Eskimo life,--these
conditions being simple and few,--most people know all that is to be
known. Yet it may be well to remark in the inception of this account
that the name "Eskimo" is ungrateful to the people whom we thus
designate; it was bestowed upon them by their enemies, the northern
Indians, and in the Indian language signifies "eaters of fish," a term
of disdain. The people term themselves, and should in common courtesy be
termed, the Innuits, which means simply "Our Folks." Thus, therefore,
shall they be called in this account.
The Innuits are a nomadic people, living during the winter in _igloos_,
or ice huts, during the summer in skin tents called _tupies_, but moving
from place to place as chance or the necessity of sustenance suggests.
They have not attained a high degree of civilization and may indeed be
termed semi-savages; yet they have some excellent traits, together with
some contradictory ones. Thus, they will steal anything on which they
can lay their hands; but they hold a lie in utter detestation, and to
_shay-va-loo_ (tell a lie) is to brand the teller as worthy of social
ostracism. The first of these traits may arise from the existence among
them of some of the socialistic theories of our own civilization; but
the second is not a purely civilized trait, as civilization is known to
us.
Living in a community of most primitive conditions of existence, even in
the household, morals are not at a high standard among the Innuits. Yet
there is to be found among them a high degree of domesticity in certain
directions, and their women appear to be affectionately cared for and
held in high esteem for semi-savages. The personal appearance of these
ladies is far from captivating to a Caucasian eye, they being as a rule
of a figure only to be described as "pudgy," while their features are
coarse and unintelligent. Their dress is the same as that of the men:
Long stockings of reindeer skin, with the hair next the person; socks of
eider-duck skin, with feathers on both sides; socks of seal skin, with
the hair outside; boots, the legs of reindeer skin, the hair outside,
the soles of seal skin; and a jacket of reindeer skin, fitting to the
form, though not tightly. In this latter article of apparel is to be
found the sole difference between the male and female costume, the women
attaching to their jackets long tails, which reach almost to the ground,
while their jackets also have hoods, frequently used for carrying their
children. The women also, as is natural, adorn their costumes to a
degree not common among the men; one belle was described by Mr. Hall,
who spent two winters among this curious race, as having a fringe of
colored beads across the neck of her jacket, bowls of Britannia-metal
teaspoons down the front flap, and a double row of copper cents,
surmounted by a bell from an old-fashioned clock, down the tail, which
was bordered by a beading of elongated lead shot. But such extravagance
of adornment as this is rare and can be attained only by the most
wealthy. The ladies also wear finger rings and headbands of polished
brass.
Such is the normal winter dress of the Innuit women; and the summer
costume, while less characteristic, varies but little in general form
from that of the colder months. Their life is monotonous and absolutely
tame, according to civilized ideas. They play at times upon the
_keeloun_, a kind of tambourine; but as a rule their merrymaking is
confined to feasting, and of the conduct at these feasts the less said
the better. Monogamy is the rule among the Innuits, and the women are
generally affectionate wives and mothers, especially the latter. When
Tookoolito and her husband, Ebierbing, visited America in the middle of
the late century, they lost their child, "Butterfly," an infant of about
a year old, and poor little Tookoolito was inconsolable; she longed to
die, that she might find again her lost "Butterfly," and she tended the
little grave, made in the burial ground at Groton, Connecticut, with the
tenderest care, placing thereon, according to the Innuit superstition,
the favorite toys of the little one, that it might have them in its
sojourn in the beyond. The love of parents for their children is indeed
one of the most pronounced and most estimable traits of the Innuit
character.
This brief sketch of the women of the hyperboreans must suffice, for
there are more important matters of feminine history demanding
attention, and indeed the Innuit culture, if so it may be termed,
presents few salient features as to the condition of its women. In
status and conditions they occupy a place about midway between the woman
of the Indian tribes and her of the lower phases of our own
civilization.
Southward now to the land of the mixed blood, where the two ancient
enemies, France and England, have joined in a race that owes allegiance
to the latter but retains many of the characteristics of the former. To
write the history of Canadian women is largely to speak of individuals,
since there has been but little alteration or development of conditions
of a social nature. Yet some may be noted.
The first settlement of Canada, in which term is of course included
Acadia, or, as it is now known, Nova Scotia, was touched by a strange
romance. The Sieur de Roberval was on his voyage to join the great
Jacques Cartier and with him to found a colony, when he discovered that
his niece, Marguerite de Roberval, loved, more fondly than was
consistent with the Sieur's conceptions of right, a young cavalier of
his company. A lonely island, known as the Isle of Demons, was sighted
soon after this discovery was made; and Roberval sternly condemned his
niece to perpetual imprisonment on this barren rock. Her lover jumped
overboard and swam after his beloved; and together they lived, forgotten
of men, on the island, thus founding the first Canadian home. A child
was born to them, but it died early, and Marguerite's lover, whose name
has not come down to us, soon followed his infant. Marguerite with her
own hands hollowed the graves of those she loved, and then she lived on,
more lonely than even Alexander Selkirk, on this island which was for
her full of terrors, real and imagined; the nature of the latter may be
guessed from the name bestowed upon the place. She was clad in skins and
learned to use the guns with which, in strange mercy, she had been
provided by her uncle; and it was not until more than two years had
passed that she was rescued by some Maloine fishermen and found her way
to her native land. Here she lived in seclusion until her death, which
did not come until she had passed the number of years allotted to man.
So the first Canadian home was founded in romance, and, better yet, in
true love; and Marguerite de Roberval, faithful wife in fact if not by
title, deserves to be held in honor among Canadian traditions as the
tutelary saint of the Canadian household. Nor was there lack of romance
in the further story of the women of Canada, while love and faith are
also to be found prominent in that story.
Of the condition of the women in the Acadian colony but little is known.
It was probably, as a rule, that which was common to the French
peasantry of the time; but there was in the settlement a lack of women,
as we know from the account of Marc Lescarbot in 1507, wherein he tells
us that it was owing to the want of good housewives that the cows which
had been imported at so many pains died soon after their arrival; and
much of his treatise is given up to bewailing the absence from the
colony of women in sufficient numbers to make it pleasant and thriving.
Yet among these colonists, who were rudely driven from their homes by
the strong hand of England, there were women, as we know from the
poetical story of Evangeline, too familiar in Longfellow's poem to be
narrated here, as well as from the later story of the Lady de la Tour, a
Huguenot girl who had married Charles la Tour, the seigneur of Port
Royal. It was a time of conspiracy and internecine strife among the
people of Acadia, and though conspiracy and strife were petty enough in
cause and action and result, they were none the less important to the
actors in them. There arose on the part of Charles de Menou, Seigneur
d'Aulnay de Charnisay, a plot to deprive La Tour of his seigniory, which
Charnisay, whose lands adjoined those of his rival, claimed as his own.
The French court and the governor's house at Boston, then tenanted by
the stern John Endicott, were made in turn arenas of dispute, but we are
concerned more with the appeal to force which came at last. Charles La
Tour had gone to Boston to seek aid against his rival, leaving his fort
in the hands of his wife, who had already been of sterling service in
baffling the intrigues of Charnisay, when his opponent, hearing that the
chatelaine was alone in command of the fort and had but fifty retainers
and little ammunition, determined to take by force that which he
coveted. So he sailed into the Bay of Saint John, where stood Fort La
Tour, and summoned the garrison to surrender. But the Lady de la Tour
was as dauntless in courage as she was faithful in heart to the fortunes
of her husband, and she answered with cannon balls. Charnisay replied in
kind, but the lady had the better of the argument, though conducted on
principles not congenial to her sex, and she forced her foe to retire in
discomfiture, notwithstanding his superiority in men and arms. She
herself directed and inspired the defence, and it is said that she even
laid some of the guns with her own hands. Her triumph was brief,
however, for Charnisay returned in two months' time; and though she
again gallantly defended her home and her husband's stronghold, her
situation grew at last so desperate that she yielded to fair proffers of
treaty and surrendered. But the victor had no intention of holding to
his plighted word, and he promptly hanged every man in the garrison,
with the exception of one who turned hangman as the price of his own
miserable life. To make the blot upon his escutcheon yet fouler,
Charnisay actually had the rope placed around the neck of the chatelaine
herself; but, though her heroic spirit disdained to plead for safety to
such a monster, either whim or some fear of results, for he could not be
accused of any humane impulse, caused him to remit the sentence. It
might almost as well have been carried out, however, for in a few days
the lady died from grief at her defeat and the baseness of treachery to
which she and her followers had been subjected.
Whittier has sung the wrath of the husband of the Lady de la Tour; but
he omits to mention, nor would it chime well with the rest of the poem,
that years afterward that husband married the widow of the man who had
placed the rope around the neck of the heroic lady, and who had been
drowned in the Penobscot River while on a voyage. The marriage, which
found its celebrants at an advanced age for matrimonial union, settled
forever the sternest struggle that Acadia had known; but even this
desirable result scarcely enables us to forgive the Seigneur de la Tour
for his treason to the memory of his devoted wife in thus allying
himself to the house of him who had done her to death.
With this story of the most famous of the women of Acadia let us turn to
Canada proper. It was not for some time after the first futile and later
partially successful attempts to found a colony upon the bleak shores of
the Saint Lawrence that there was to be found on those shores the
refining influence that comes from feminine companionship. The first
permanent colony, however, which established itself on the heights of
Quebec, held among its members one of the gentler sex, Dame Hebert, the
wife of Louis Hebert, who had been an Acadian. His wife was a woman of
courage and resource, as befitted a pioneer colonist; and she had need
of both qualities in her fight with the conditions that pressed so
hardly upon the new colonists. She first set her foot upon Canadian soil
in 1617, and she lived through the most remarkable of the mutations of
the first colony, including the surrender to the English and the treaty
of Saint Germain which again gave Canada to France. For the first three
years of her sojourn in the new land she was the only woman on those
shores; and when in 1620 she was joined in her isolation by Helene de
Champlain, wife of the great pioneer of New France, it was but for a
time, hardly four years in all. At the expiration of that period Madame
de Champlain returned, broken in health and spirits by her exile, to her
beloved France, held by her in higher esteem than her gallant but cold
husband, and there she entered a convent, leaving behind her a memory as
one of the two women who first inhabited the wilderness of New France,
and leaving also her name to an island in the Saint Lawrence. Though
much may be said in extenuation of the homesickness and lack of
endurance found in the young wife of the great Champlain, she was no
heroine as was Dame Hebert, and her easy acceptance of the Catholic
faith as her own after her marriage,--she had been a staunch
Huguenot,--moved thereto rather by the atmosphere of her new home than
by any conviction, is suggestive of the real lack of strength in her
character. Yet she is worthy of remembrance as one of the women pioneers
of Canada. Those of her sex who followed in her westward footsteps were
generally made of sterner stuff than the faint-hearted Helene; but it
was long before she knew a successor as one of the women of New France,
for her return to the land of her birth was in 1624, and it was not
until 1634 that the third woman, the wife of the surgeon Giffard, came
to found a home amid the wilds of the west. It is true that there were
two girls, the daughters of Dame Hebert, in the colony even before the
coming of Madame de Champlain; but these could be considered only as
involuntary pioneers and do not deserve to be placed among those who
came of their free will, or for love of their husbands. One of these
daughters of Dame Hebert, however, furnished in her union with Stephen
Jonquest occasion for the first marriage ceremony celebrated in Canada,
a ceremony which preceded by more than two years that first celebrated
in New England.
For more than two decades after the death of Champlain in 1635, the tide
of immigration was very feeble; but it bore on its bosom two notable
women in the annals of Canada Madame de la Peltrie, the founder of the
first girls' school ever opened in the province, and Mother Marie
Guyard, the honored head of that school. In 1659 these two and five
other women, three calling themselves Hospitalières, arrived at the
little settlement of Quebec, consisting of scarcely two hundred and
fifty souls. They came for the glory of God, to work His work among the
Indians; and they were received with all the honors the little colony
could compass. Madame de la Peltrie, the head of the peaceful
expedition, found the state of affairs worse than she had been told by
the missionaries who had urged her coming; but she faced the
difficulties and discouragements of the situation with a heart as
gallant as that of those of her sex who dared "battle, murder, and
sudden death" at the hands of the Indians in their search for a home,
and the Ursuline Convent at Quebec is an enduring monument to the memory
of the women who did so much for the uplifting of the Indians of Canada.
Her coadjutor, Mother Marie Guyard, left behind her a name no less
honored than that of Madame de la Peltrie a name unexcelled for the
virtues of piety, constancy, self-sacrifice, and devotion to the cause
of degraded humanity. Her work among the Indians bore noble fruit, even
if hardly to the extent of her wishes. She had many discouragements to
face and obstacles to overcome; among them, not a few at the hands of
those who should have been her allies. In 1661 the new governor, Baron
Dubois d'Avaugour, moved thereto by an ill-advised plea on the part of a
missionary for the commutation of the sentence passed upon a woman for
violating the law that no brandy should be sold to the Indians, gave
free license to the sale of spirituous liquors throughout the dominion.
The result was deplorable and almost nullified the work of a score of
weary years; and Mother Marie, sick at heart, wrote thus to her son:
"I have told you in another letter about a cross that is far harder to
bear than the incursions of the Iroquois. There are in this country
certain Frenchmen so despicable and so little touched by the fear of God
that they are ruining all our new Christians by giving them strong
drink, such as wine and brandy, to get their beaver-skins from them."
It was because of this and kindred causes that Mother Marie deemed her
life-work a failure at last; but the thought was erroneous. She left her
influence in the hearts of many of her Indian pupils, and she gave to
Canada by her efforts the school which is one of the noblest monuments
of the past of Quebec.
The Hospitalières, who had come over in the same ship with the founders
of the girls' school, founded the hospital that is now known as Quebec's
Hotel-Dieu; at first, their philanthropic efforts on behalf of the
Indians found nothing but failure as reward, for an unfortunate epidemic
that broke out soon after the establishment of the hospital in an old
storeroom, and the death of most of the patients there treated,
persuaded the red men that the hospital was a scheme devised for their
extinction rather than for their good. But here, too, perseverance in
good works overcame stupendous difficulties, though here again, as well,
the result did not take the form which was at first intended. Yet none
the lighter is the praise to be awarded to the noble women who undertook
the work and who carried it on in the face of danger and failure, and
the names of such women as Marie Irwin, Catherine Chevalier, and Madame
d'Ailleboust, the wife of the third governor of Quebec, are still
deservedly held in honor by the dwellers in New France.
In the younger sister colony to Quebec, that of Montreal, Jeanne Mance
founded a hospital with the money supplied her by Madame Bullion, a rich
and pious widow living in Old France but interested in all projects for
the amelioration of existent conditions in the new land. The hospital
was of excellent service in caring for the wounded who had done battle
with the fierce Iroquois, and many a stricken soldier blessed the name
of its founder. Marguerite de Bourgeoys, of whom Parkman writes as the
"fair ideal of Christian womanhood, a flower of earth expanding in the
rays of heaven," on her part founded in Montreal a girls' school, and
her work so prospered that she actually built by her own efforts a
church, now known, though in its second building, as "Notre Dame de
Bonsecours." She and Jeanne Mance were known as "the two mothers of
Montreal," and well did they deserve the honorable title.
The work and character of Marguerite de Bourgeoys are thus admirably
summed up by a recent biographer:
"The visible result of Marguerite de Bourgeoys' long life in Canada was
the institution of a band of young women who were bound by vows to teach
the young, the building of a church, and the establishment of schools
for the instruction of Indian and French children. She died January 12,
1700. Her heart, which had beaten with pain at the cry of suffering
childhood, with agony at the shriek of the tortured victim of Iroquois
cruelty, with shame at the contentions of Christian brotherhoods, and
with rapture when even one little child received the anointing drops of
baptism, that heart, encased in its silver covering, now rests in the
chapel of a convent where she so long labored and loved."
These were the triumphs of peace, won by heroines of endurance and
patience rather than of fiery physical courage; but of the latter
quality there were many brilliant examples among the women of the French
settlers of Canada. Madeleine de Verchères is both famous and typical
among these sterner heroines. She was but fourteen years old when she
found herself in charge of her father's fort, that fort suddenly burst
upon by the savage Iroquois, and she with a garrison consisting of two
soldiers, two boys, and an old man of eighty. There were women and
children also, but these were detriments, not aids. The gallant girl,
though actually surprised in the fields by the marauders, managed to
close the gates, took command of the panic-stricken company,--the
soldiers were as frightened and helpless as the rest,--and soon
organized a defence which lasted for a week, and was ended by the
arrival of a succoring force. Her little brothers, but ten and twelve
years of age respectively, nobly seconded her efforts; but the whole
glory of the splendid defence was due to Madeleine, whose account of the
occurrence is extant. She inherited heroic blood on the distaff side,
for her mother, two years before, had held the same fort with but four
armed men against an attack by the Iroquois, the siege lasting two days.
The conditions of the first half century of Canadian colonization were
generally similar to those existing in New England, of course, with a
difference of racial impulses and customs. That half century saw but
slow development of the country; but between 1665 and 1667 the coming of
the Carignan regiment, sent by Louis XIV. to establish firmly his hold
upon the new dominion, brought about a change. In order to prevent
desertion and make the soldiers truly at home in the land, it was soon
found necessary that there should be established homes, and to this end
women were necessary. But women were precisely the rarest treasure in
the Canadas, and there was therefore adopted the plan, already executed
in the English colonies of the South, of importing girls as wives.
Accordingly, from time to time, there arrived consignments of maidens,
called "the king's girls," and semi-annual wife-markets were held in
Quebec and Montreal. The character of these imported ladies was not
invariably of the best; but a trifle such as this did not affect the
soldiers of the baser sort, who were willing to overlook past
peccadillos in consideration of the dowry which their wives brought them
and in hope of gaining the bounty offered for the rearing of large
families. Moreover, there was passed a law which provided that every
unmarried young man, who had not within two weeks of the arrival of a
company, entered into the matrimonial state should be deprived of the
privileges of hunting, fishing, and trading, while the persistent
bachelors were to be excluded from all places of honor and
responsibility, and it was even suggested that they should be branded as
felons. Marriage was certainly esteemed honorable in those days. The
account of La Hontan, a witty officer of the Canadian forces, of the
first coming of "the king's girls" is worth quoting in part:
"After these first inhabitants there came a folk useful to the country
and a good riddance to the Kingdom. There arrived one day at Quebec a
small fleet loaded with Amazons and crowds of females, Nuns of Paphos or
of Cythera conducting this precious cargo. I have been told the
circumstances of their coming, and I cannot resist the pleasure of
sharing the story with you.
"This chaste folk was led to the pasture by old and prudish
Shepherdesses. As soon as they had arrived, these wrinkled dames passed
their soldiery in review, and having separated them into three classes,
each group entered a different room. As they had to crowd quite close
together on account of the smallness of the place, they made rather a
pleasant decoration, and the good merchant Cupid had no reason to be
ashamed of his wares. Never had he made a better assortment. Blonde,
brunette, red, black, fat, thin, large, small,--he could satisfy the
most bizarre and most fastidious tastes.
"The report of the new cargo being spread abroad, all the
well-intentioned in the way of multiplication hastened thither. As it
was not permitted to examine all and still less to take them on trial,
it was a case of buying a pig in a poke, or rather of buying the whole
piece from the sample. But the disposal of them was none the less rapid
on this account. Each selected his partner, and in a fortnight these
three lots of venison had been taken away with all the seasoning that
could be taken with them.
"The next day the Governor-general caused to be distributed to them
enough provisions to give them courage to embark upon this stormy sea.
They went to housekeeping almost as did Noah in the Ark, with an ox, a
cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and a
piece of money. The officers were more fastidious than the soldiers and
allied themselves with the daughters of other officers or of the richer
settlers who had been established in the country for nearly a century."
The coming of these girls in such numbers, followed or accompanied as
they were by many young Frenchmen of gay, if not dissolute habits,
produced a natural change in the aspect of the social conditions.
Simplicity became a thing of the past, and the merriment, as in New
England, at last became scandalous to those of graver trend of thought.
Some restrictive laws were passed, among others one which provided that
all girls and women should be in their houses by nine of the night; but
as some who incurred the penalty were dragged from their beds and
whipped by officers of the town, the punishment seems hardly less
conducive to lesion of good morals than the crime itself. As in New
England, laws regulating personal adornment were passed, and the wearer
of a top-knot was refused admission to the communion; and all these
stern enactments had about as much repressive effect as their fellows in
the lower colonies,--practically none.
From this time forward there began to grow in New France the follies and
frivolities of her mother country, and there arose that which is termed
"society," at least in the growing towns. Quebec and Montreal
flourished, and the young, and also the old at times, frolicked and
danced and made merry. On the frontiers there was still some of the fine
simplicity of olden days; but those frontiers were being pushed further
and further away from proximity to the towns. At last there came the
time when the infamous Bigot ruled in Quebec, caring for nothing but to
fill his purse and take his pleasures; and then Canadian society touched
its lowest. There was thought of little beyond rout and revel; Bigot
ruled as if king of New France, and emulated his sovereign in Old France
by having his Pompadour in the person of Angelique de Pean, who was as
grasping and reckless as was her French compeer. She was a beautiful
woman, the wife of Monsieur de Pean,--who considered the surrender of
his wife to Bigot but a fair return for certain lucrative offices,--and
she did not, as it is said, though not proved, hesitate to stain her
hands with blood in order to maintain her influence over the Intendant.
At last came Nemesis; the English were at the gates of Quebec. Not all
the influence and efforts of the noble Montcalm could avert the coming
disaster, and Quebec fell. With it fell the ascendency of French ways in
"Our Lady of the Snows." After the coming of the English and the partial
amalgamation of the two races, there was a steady development of
society; but it was along normal lines and was not of a nature to call
for remark. It did not tend to any individuality of type; it produced
very charming women, but not a typical woman as differing from the
representatives of other modern races. This is said of the cities of
Canada. There were mutations of fashion and custom and thought and
conditions; but these were not individual but rather reflexes of the
universal movements of society, save that they were a little modified by
the circumstances which were imposed by natural causes upon their
progress. It is true that Canadian society was peculiar in its
preservation, in certain ways, of the lines distinguishing the Latin and
the Teuton; but these lines grew fainter and fainter, and even when most
distinctly marked held on the one side or the other nothing that was not
of European origin and method. Therefore there remains nothing to be
said of the Canadian woman of the cities. There were many individuals
doubtless worthy of mention for special graces or attributes, but they
were not typical of any peculiar culture. They represented nothing,
being but projections of English or French womanhood in its variant
aspects. With the coming of the English ends the story of Canadian women
as found in the strongholds of femininity.
Still the story is not yet completely told, for there were then and have
been ever since outlying posts of womanhood in the Dominion, where there
has been preserved a certain individuality of type. The Gallic blood
runs almost uncontaminated, giving impulse of Gallic thought and custom,
in the veins of those who are called the _habitants_ the
French-Canadians of olden type. Their very title is suggestive; it tells
of "unreconstructed" alliance to the spirit of their original country,
that "pleasant land of France." They are but inhabitants, not citizens
in truth of the land over which floats the banner of England; they are
French at heart as in origin.
So we can still find in Canada an individual type of womanhood, though
to do so we must go somewhat far afield. Even so, the type is not of
pronounced peculiarity; it touches and even blends with other types of
the Latin countries of Europe and meets at certain points even the lines
of our own Teutonic culture. But this latter meeting is brought about by
circumstances rather than inherent tendency and is not racial. It is
indeed a remnant of the old conditions of pioneer life, which imposes
upon Latin as well as Teuton certain fixed and imperative needs, to be
met only by equally fixed methods.
If we go into the French-Canadian villages, where alone we can find an
individual womanhood in the Dominion, we shall find conditions that do
not exist in exactly similar form elsewhere, and which have been brought
about by racial modification of accepted circumstances. The woman of the
habitants is in many respects primitive in the sense of the primitive
culture of America while still in its infancy of Caucasian settlement.
It is true that with the growth of towns and the development of the
railway systems there is constantly coming change in the conditions of
the habitants, and that it is becoming more and more needful to extend
our pilgrimage to the remoter quarters of the country if we would find
the more primitive conditions; but they still exist. Some of these
enduring customs are peculiarly connected with womanhood. The use of the
loom, for example, is still known in some of the far-away villages of
the French-Canadians, and in those villages little is worn that is not
the product of home toil. It may be that this is the only quarter of the
western hemisphere where the hand loom is not a thing of the past; but
here it exists, and with it as its natural accompaniment some of the
more old-fashioned traits of womanhood. The wife of the _habitant_ is
industrious, thrifty, cleanly, and simple in ideas and manners. She is
economical to a degree that is rarely found among the Latin races, and
she has other virtues that are not common among those of like racial
origin. She is moral and religious; indeed, in the latter quality she
may be excessive in one way, being entirely under the dominion of her
spiritual pastor. But then she has good reason for this filial
obedience, for the relations of the French-Canadian bishop or priest
with his flock are in all ways commendable. She is fond of innocent
gaiety and not averse to adornment of person when this does not conflict
with her love of economy; but when, as sometimes happens, the bishop
issues a pastoral in which he commands the relinquishment of certain
modes of amusement, such as the waltz, or reprehends certain named
frivolities of costume, she abandons the forbidden thing with a quiet
obedience which may be unmodern in spirit, but which is pleasant to see
in its cheerful submission to an authority which she considers as the
highest that can be evoked and one which it were sin to despise or
disobey.
The wife of the _habitant_ has also a virtue which is not in high esteem
among her sisters of a higher culture, but which is still held in
respect among the more primitive communities: she is highly prolific.
Families of fifteen children are common among the French-Canadians, and
the mother of but a paltry half-dozen feels that she has not done her
duty to humanity and her country. Early marriages are the rule among the
_habitants_, being wisely encouraged by the priests in the interests of
morality. It is a sociable race, and the women vie with each other in
promoting the innocent gaiety which makes up a large part of their
lives. Because of this love for social merriment as well as of their
religious feeling, the fêtes of the Church are celebrated in French
Canada as nowhere else in northern America, and the industry of the
women is tempered by the frequent holidays which call for enjoyment.
Their dress is as a rule simple and, in the further outlying
communities, which are chiefly referred to here, frequently entirely of
homespun material, the fruit of their own labors.
One of the chief traits of the French-Canadians, male and female, is
their love of music; yet to the cause of music the women of French
Canada have furnished but one noted contribution, Madame Albani, the
famous opera singer, who owns birth as one of this people, though hardly
as a true _habitante_, in the more limited sense of the word. But music
is the greatest passion of the French-Canadians, and the violin holds an
honored place in all their communities. It is in the simple pleasure of
listening to the music of the violin, or of dancing to its merry
strains, that the woman of the habitants finds her chief respite from
the toils of her daily life.
Such is the most characteristic type of womanhood of the Canada of
to-day. It is a good type and a comely; but it is not fitted to endure
before the changes which our present culture brings about where it
enters. The _habitants_ form the nearest approach to a peasantry, as
found in European lands, that this country can show; and peasantry is
doomed to extinction, be it sooner or later. In the case of the simple
people of French Canada, it would seem that it will be sooner.
In the history of her women, Canada need veil her face before the claims
of no other country of the globe. No land has been graced by nobler
types, either by birth or adoption, than the Dominion; yet she has
failed to produce a racial type, and it may be that her lot is the
happier that it is so. It is enough for her that she can point to such
daughters, whether of their own wills or by birthright, as Madame de la
Peltrie, Mother Marie Guyard, Jeanne Mance, Marguerite de Bourgeoys, and
others who labored in the cause of degraded humanity. With such names
inscribed upon her banner, we may well forgive her such as the infamous
Angelique de Pean and forget the madness that came upon her when Bigot
lorded it in Quebec and virtue and honor were looked upon by most of the
women of that city as encumbrances to pleasure or ambition. To-day her
women worthily sustain the standard which has been left them as a legacy
by their noble sisters of the past; so Canada may well be content in
this wise, even though she has furnished no leaders in the march of
present-day womanhood toward its desired goal.