(1977)
When I was growing up in the 1950s, everyone who had heard of it at all “knew” that the “Suffragist” movement was composed of a bunch of eccentric old spinsters. Similarly, we “knew” that the WCTU and the Ladies’ Aid and Missionary Society and any organizations with similar names were populated by steel-jawed, steel-corseted biddies with dead foxes around their necks. Nellie McClung was remembered, as she is on the recent stamp commemorating her, as a rather ugly, abrasive middle-aged battleaxe. I’m not sure who circulated these ideas, but, as the editors of this book (who also grew up in the 1950s) point out, it was the age of “Mom and Debbie Reynolds singing French Heeled Shoes’.”
A Harvest Yet To Reap is a book that shatters, both by its beautifully chosen text and its resonant pictures, all the above stereotypes. (The WCTU was young! Nellie McClung was not only pretty, she was funny!) Though its slant is feminist, its appeal is general. It has a scrapbook format, with excerpts from letters, speeches, government propaganda, newspaper articles, and books arranged to provide an insightful history of Prairie women from the point of view of those who actually lived the experience. The period covered is roughly 1885 to 1925, and some of the excerpts are from interviews with women who are still alive. Though the sepia tones and period costumes give the material the flavour of ancient times, this is recent history.
The book is a grab-bag and a gold-mine. It achieves some of its best effects through juxtaposition and contrast. The Government of Canada leaflets designed to lure women to the Prairies, where they were badly needed —as everyone agreed, you couldn’t run a family farm without a family—picture a life of light labour, with flower-hatted maidens in genteel frilled dresses marketing their eggs in the afternoons and spending the evenings in music and “book-lore” to “keep up the tone of the men.” But not much tone could be kept up in the sod shacks of early Prairie reality pictured a few pages later, where eight people were often crammed into a single leaking room and women had to do field-labour as well as all the gardening, poultry-keeping, nursing, food preparation, child-bearing, and whatever cleaning was possible. In the hard work, the isolation, and the absence of women friends, the lives of these women were similar to those of Ontario pioneer women of 100 years earlier, though the Prairies were even colder and the distances between neighbours greater; but their heads were cluttered up with 60 years of velvet-covered Victorian poop about dependency and fragility. Catherine Parr Traill, whatever else concened her, did not have to worry about being ethereal while she milked the cows.
And the laws were worse. In the 1880s, “dower right” had been confiscated, and a Prairie wife could not inherit by right any of the farm she might have spent her life working on. Fathers were the sole legal parents of children; they could even put them up for adoption without the consent of the mother. Men could get a quarter-section of free land; women—unlike their counterparts in the U.S.—could not. However, if a man sold his farm and absconded with the money, leaving his wife with the children, it was she who became responsible for their support. Laws like this explain something of the missionary fervour behind the WCTU: if a man spent all his money on drink, his wife couldn’t stop him, and the children really did starve. There was no welfare.
Women put up with this state of affairs at first because they were told it was divinely ordained. Also, as Nellie McClung says, because they had no time to protest; they were working too hard. But when the land was more widely settled and they had a little time, they did protest. They were, on the whole, better organized and more energetic than their sisters in the East, partly because the conditions against which they were fighting were not only unfair but also inhumane. Some of the most telling bits in this section of the book come from their opponents, but it’s to the credit of the Prairies that much of the support came from male-run newspapers and grain growers’ organizations. One of the questions the book raises but does not answer is the reason for the collapse of these movements after the vote was finally won.
The book is suggestive rather than exhaustive. It abounds with fascinating snippets, asides, things you never knew, things you would like to follow up. Birth control, for instance, was a taboo subject, but friends passed their secret recipes back and forth. (These included cocoa butter and sponges soaked in soapsuds.) There are popular songs, newspaper verses, cartoons, advice columns, and a report of the famous Mock Parliament put on by Nellie McClung and cohorts, in which women debated the pros and cons of giving the vote to men. There are pictures of women from all walks of life —farm women, soldiers, prostitutes, factory women —and of all ages, including several grotesque photos of little girls dressed as people thought they should be —and many nationalities. As the editors say, the book is heavy on English-speaking white women because neither Indian women nor European women left many records, but the Central European wedding portraits, with the fanatic-eyed husbands and their cowed, unsmiling wives, are among the most haunting in the book.
There are a few minor shortcomings. The index is not as reliable as it might be, and there are some details that could have been explained. (What is a “barrowcoat”?) On the whole, though, the book is a fine rediscovery, an excavation. That the history and the women it salutes should have been buried so deep, so quickly, is one of the puzzles that prompted the editors to create it: “How did it happen, we wondered, that their lives had been so completely forgotten?”