Unyielding Spirits by Maureen G. Elgersman

Author:Maureen G. Elgersman [Elgersman, Maureen G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781135677534
Google: TDqlAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-21T16:02:00+00:00

BETWEEN WOMEN

Sources suggest that Canadian society, in general, offered women limited social mobility and autonomy. Operating in a patriarchal society, Canadian women of both the French and British regimes were primarily confined to domestic spaces. Making clothes and bed coverings, in addition to the standard responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and raising children, have been identified as the primary activities of women. Where necessary, however, some wives and daughters did perform agrarian work including tending vegetable gardens. There was little opportunity for white women to have a public position unless it was in a position of service to the Church. Ironically, Mother Marie d’Youville, who operated Montreal’s General Hospital in the seventeenth century owned slaves. Other women, like Marie Joseph Angelique’s owner, Madame de Francheville, would inherit Black women as part of their husband’s estates.93

In addition to issues of labor, Black feminism explores relationships within the Black female community, and how these shared race and gender communities offered refuge from exploitation. A sampling of the bonds that were forged among Jamaican women, despite the exploitative environment in which they lived, is revealed through the narratives of Jamaica’s European residents. Jamaican planter Matthew Gregory Lewis remarks on the early morning regime in the slave quarters. He notes that while the cattle, pigs, poultry and slaves wandered out to the fields, “old women are preparing food on the lawn for the pickaninnies (the very small children), whom they keep feeding at all hours of the day.”94 In the midst of the work regime that had withered the older slaves and promised to consume the younger ones, Black women worked cooperatively to facilitate the raising of children.

Dr. Collins’s journal reveals that midwives constituted an important presence in the plantation economy and the community of slave women. He afforded them considerable authority and states that medical doctors should only be summoned “in cases pronounced of emergency, by the midwife.”95 Collins also notes the following about the plantation midwife:

Her vanity will prevent his being called too often, though she should be admonished of the danger of delay, and threatened with punishment, if any accident should happen through her neglect.96

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