787 10 13630 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/1690071e6b95bcd824a9769e450c4549.mp3 1247d40a046f7a13647619b30603b6cb https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a8bfe6fa8bb733add91208fa7fe85f9d.mp3 e5dc5c3bb17141deb98c760a67343d23 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Maryon Kantaroff Description An account of the resource An oral history record from artist and women's advocate, Maryon Kantaroff. The presentation is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) The tape records a presentation by Maryon Kantaroff at the Northwestern Women's Conference, April 6th 1973. Maryon shares that women’s movements have the potential to change relationships with others and with oneself. Maryon talks about radical feminism in relation to selflessness, and the importance of speaking up for oneself as a woman. The presentation recants her personal experience in joining the Canadian Women’s Movement and consciousness for camaraderie. The talk is a critical look at the history of social oppression and the power patriarchies have to shape identity. Tracing significant historical events through her discussion of gender, sexuality, religion and culture, the talk by Maryon emphasizes the importance for women to work together for widespread cultural change. Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973-04-06 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/9d0e03c1b6a2becead656fbb5a5657aa.mp3 e50cd4d3bbbf71aa1e89d517371f2fc8 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/228f33ad35ca0e96ab89a3645765c26b.mp3 176c26d76985842bd6259dea59e428b2 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/250e2ceb33cd67407f2655792adcd896.pdf 387d2dcde4afa4919f4b5840770071d5 PDF Text Text HERSTORY PROJECT Mrs. Duggan interviewed by Helen Lovekin Q. Mrs. Duggan, can you tell me when you were born? A. Q. A. May 18, 1891. And you have been a lifelong Thunder Bay resident? No. I was from Renfrew County in Eastern Ontario near Ottawa. Q. A. and I lived there until I was 21. What made you come up to Thunder Bay? I came to live here in 1937, prior to that for 21 years I lived in Sc~eiber / and how I came to be in this part of the country_; I went to normal school in North Bay and under a grant that we got we were obliged to teach in the dtstricts instead of the counties. The districts started east of North Bay and so I went to normal in North Bay and I taught near Sudbury for four years and then I came to Schreiber to teach in 1916. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. I was born there I was married in 1920 and I lived in Schreiber until 1937. So when you moved to Schreiber the war was on in Europe and Schreiber must have been very much a bush town. No, but it was strictly a railroad town. I recall there were six trains a day at that time. What was it like coming from Eastern Ontario into Schreiber? Well, naturally it was a complete change because in the area where I had lived in Eastern Ontario it was mostly farmland whereas Schreiber was strictly business connected with the railroad. It was an entirely different environment. Were the people there homesteaders there at that time? Not in Schreiber, anyone who lived in Schr.eiber, who had come from the east as the majority had, the men came there because of the railway. There was good work and the pay was good. Naturally they brought their wives and families with them. Q. Instead of getting land grants they lived within a town. A. Yes, the majority owned their own home, not on a _large area of land though, ------just on a lot and a garden. Q. When you came up in 1916 you had had previous experience teaching, how did you have to modify your lessons for the children up here? pletely different atmosphere they were living in. It would be a com- �e ... A. We had the Ontario Curriculum we had to follow and I can't say that it was a great deal different from what it was in other places. The only thing is that my early teaching days before I went to normal school, I was in rural schools where I had the full compliment of children, from grade one to grade eight. That was very difficult. After I went to normal school I always had senior classes and I taught grade seven usually and later grade eight. Q. Did you marry in Schreiber? A. No, I married in my home town in the east but I married a man from Schreiber. A railroad man. Q. The romance was all in Schreiber. What was it like for you to leave everything that you knew and branch off into Northern Ontario? A. Well, it was certainly vecy different in many ways - the customs were different. For one thing the people had more money to spend, there was more social life, although it was a small area. One thing that perhaps was a bit outstanding, the men were by far in the majority so of course the school teachers were rather popular at dances and so on. At least we always had a good time. Us- ually we went out a great deal throughout the week. Q. After you were married were you allowed to go on teaching? A. You didn't have to stop, but I did stop, I don't know why I did. At least I thought I stopped - I resigned - and when we were on our return to Schreiber after our honeymoon, we met a railroad man quite a distance down the line, and he said to me that they were waiting for me to get back there. I asked why and he told me that they wanted me to take the principal 's job because the principal had been sick for quite some time. There was a clergyman in charge of the classroom and he didn't like it and I don't think he was much of a compromise. When I went back , it was the pupil's that I had had in former years and of course they Imew what to expect. There was no trouble with discipline. Q. Was that quite unu~al to have a woma:m as a princip.al? A. Well , it was there. from the eve of time. d,ied. The principal who had been there must have been there He was there for a long time and was there until he At times after he died I was once again replacing the principal after I was married. After the original resident principal died, two principals at least took sick at different times so I replaced them. Q. But you were never given the position officially? A. No, but I didn't want it because I had young children after a few years and I wouldn't have been able to handle it. Q. What sort of social activities were present? �A. Card playing was very popular, in fact I was really bored with having to play cards. If you didn't you were a kind of an outlaw. Afternoon teas were also very popular, in fact many of the ladies had their visiting cards that was usual in those days and then dances occured at least every couple of weeks. Then in the summer there was a lake very close and many people had cottages there, and the lake was a great source of enjoyment there. Q. When you came to Schreiber it was 1916, there were still two more years left in World War I. A. What kind of effect did that war have on a small town? I think I should tell you that in 1918, the year the war ended, that was one of the years that the flu was very prevalent. We had an excellent doctor in Schreiber and there was only one person who died of the flu, but there were very few nurses and schools were closed for a while and we were asked to go on a volunteer basis to different homes especially if the mother was sick and the young children had to be attended to. So we went in fear and trembling and everybody that was strong and husky felt they should do their duty. doctor certainly couldn't have managed without the help. The I recall that the weather was dull and school was closed for about six weeks. In that time we went to various places - the teachers and women without children. I think there were one or two nurses and there were some women who had some nursing experience and they rounded us up and got us going on the project. Q. A. So it was a rather important contribut-ion. Somebody had to do it and after all, we were as able to do it a~~~ody else and we didn't have anyone depending on us as did the people with children. Q. In the First World War was there a lot of activity in the church groups, women's auxiliary etc. towards the war effort? A. Yes, knitting and that type of thing. Making of bandages. I don't recall that I had very much to do with that but then it was perhaps because thankfully _there were others with ,,.more experience along that line. We were quite active ~ practically everything that was put on in a social~· line. There wasn't too much going on socially because it wasn't wise for too many people to be in groups. I do recall one boy caine home from overseas and the doctor had issued an order on account of the flu thatfthere were to be no group meetings. This boy's mother had planned a big party for her son's return from overseas and she was ve-ry indigna.n,t to think that that was interfered. with. The doctor was quite strict about the rule and he was right of course. Q. In your teaching career, what salary did you start off with? �A. You'd be surprised - $JOO a year. Q. This of course would be less than the men would be making? A. I suppose, but there were very few men teachers in those days. No man in his right mind would take on teaching unless he was just going to earn some money and then go on to something else. Because if he planned on getting married how could anyone live on $JOO dollars a year? Q. How did you manage? A. The first year I paid $10 a month board and then I went to a different school in a farm area and I paid seven dollars a month fur three years. Later I got a raise of $325, It seems like an impossible way to live but you have to consider that it wasn't only the teachers who were poorly paid, it meant that nobody was making big wages and what you bought was not as expensive, anything like as expensive ... I remember buying blouses for .2.5¢ or ,50¢ and a young girl who was quite a dressmaker would go and stay at a house for maybe two or three days and do all the sewing for that season and she would probably be paid a dollar a day and room and board. It was all relative. Q. Did the climate affect you in any way? The long winters. A. I did find the winters in Schreiber exceedingly cold. On the way to school, quite often you had to face north and another thing, I had a cold classroom and often we would have to close in the morning because the heat didn't circulate as it should and besides I was on the cold side. This didn't hurt the feelings of the children any. Q. In your early years of marria·ge and having children, had you become quite climatized to Schreiber and Northern Ontario? A. Yes, I got accustomed to it and people's habits were a little different you know. In the east where I came from there were more relatives living in the same area whereas in a place like Schreiber it was mostly a young people's town with ha.r.dly any third or second generations. Naturally the older people preferred to live in the east where the climate was better. Q. You came to Thunder Bay in the '30 's you said. A. Yes, 1937 and that was the time of the Depression. Q. Could you tell me a little about that? A. Personally we never suffered very much from the Depression because of the fact that my husband had steady work, which very few people did have. Railroading is determined on seniority and my husband had enough that he always stood for work but quite frequently he would decide to take a day or a couple of days off and that gave somebody else a chance. The railroad peo:p1e are rather LI. �clanish and also very interested in, and sympathetic towards those who are Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. not able to get along. Did you resume your career? Periodically. I don't know how many times I went back between 1920 and when I moved here, but I was back several times. As I say I was back right after we came from our honeymoon for three months and then I was back several times and then we carne here in '37 and I think about two years later I was at the boarding school for a while, somebody suddenly became sick and I was there replacing. I did go back in '43 for a year down at the East End at a separate school - St. Joseph's. In 1945 my husband died and I went back steadily from then on until 1968. I went to the sanitarium to teach in 1945 - a tuberculosis sanitarium on the outskirts of town - and there were a great many children there, mostly Indian children. The odd white child but not too many. Then the adult Indians were just like children because many of them came from places where :they had no education and many of them I taught to write and to do arithmetic etc. I stayed at the sanitarium for seven and a half years and then I was out on Arthur St. for six months waiting for the build:¢ing of a new school on the Indian reservation. I went there in '53 and I stayed seven years. What was it that made you choose the mission schools in particular? For one thing, I wasn't as young as some of the other teachers, when I taught at the mission school I was a civil servant and the government generally pays better than the separate schools - and of course being a Catholic I couldn't teach in a public school. It was quite attractive to me because by that time my family were all away and I was able to live there due to living quarters. I must say that it paid me in the long run because ever since I left there I have been getting a pension. Aside from the monetary aspects of teaching at the mission, you were there for a good part of your career .. ?Was there something that attracted you to that type of work? Yes, I enjoyed it. I found the Indian children very easy to teach - some of them were more brainy than others - you ,find that every place you go. Some of them were more mischeivous than others too. On the whole, I had wonderful support from the parents - naturally because I was a government representative and nobody interfered with my discipline. I feel that I gave them something that perhaps nobody else was willing to give - nobody was interested.. The �majority of teachers, when they start in a city school they stay there, but I was free to change if I wanted so the - Mr. Mciver who died some years ago was the member of Parliament here and so he told me that this new school was being built with all the modern accomodations and that if I was interested., he would help me get it. got it. I suppo-se my record was fine or else I would.n 't have I was there for quite a few years and the one thing I found when I went there was that many of the Indian people had a defeatist attitude that because they were Indian they couldn't get anywhere. I drilled into the children that anybody of any nationality can get anywhere but it has to be through their own efforts. All you have to do is drive out to Chippewa and see the lovely homes and many of those homes are occupied by some of my former pupils. Q. So there is a great deal of satisfaction? A. Yes, I do feel satisfaction. The chief is a former pupil and so is his wife. They invite me to their different activites etc. I feel that I had a good relati:onship with them and of course it's like everything else, you get the kind of treatment you deserve. If you go out there with the snobby idea that you are so much better than somebody else, you won't get very far. I went there to teach the children and I did it as conscientiously as possible. Q. You sound like a person who has a lot of energy and goes into something with a very open mind. A lot of people who did come up from Southern Ontario into Northern Ontario had a snobby attitude and it could be manifested. more severly in teaching the mission schools. Insofar as women's activities went did you have anything to do with the women's organizati01s? A. You mean the Indian women's organizations? The Indian women were not really well organized. but what we did have were the Girl Guides. Guides - the women to come and start the group. I got the Girl We would have a tea every so often and the children learned how to set a table and I had taken a lot of my own things from my own home out there with me, so I had my tablecloths and my silver and the odd things. I showed them how to use them and serve and I think the children got a lot out of that. They got something out of it and they have shown over the years with - I've been invited to various activities and you certainly can tell that they know how to serve and act like anyone else. I don't take the full credit but I mean they do observe how other people do things and naturally they learn from others. Q. You did belong to the Catholic Women's League did you not? �A. Y.e s. Q. Could you tell me something about that? A. Naturally I had belonged to the Catholic Women's League in a smaller town too, when it was initiated.. Then when I caine here - I think the League started in 1921 in this area - we had a League in Schreiber and then when I came here, I'm sure I wasn't here a year when I was nominated as secretary, no,treasurer of the League. I was on the board for years, and I was on the diocesyn which means a larger area. circle. In the league there is the local group and then a wider I used to attend as a delegate the various conventions. At that time the head of our diocese was North Bay and now we have a Bishop here ~ but then we didn't have a Bishop and I was the delegate appointed to go to conventions but I don't think I waslappointed because I was smarter than anyone else, I went because I had a CPR pass. Q. What was the function of the Catholic Women's League? A. The slogan is "For God and Canada", so we tried to do anything we could to help the clergy. Many people teach catechism and I've done that quite a bit. In a small place like the rieservation, one of our projects was to raise some money by carpeting the ............. but that didn't have anything to do with the C,W.L. that was just one of our projects, that we did with the children. With the C. W.L. we had a hand in the Depression by packing clothes and we got a special rate on the railway and sent the clothing out west to the people who were desperately hard up. During the war, people made bandages and did quite a lot to help the soldiers, especially packing kits and parcels so that they got a treat from home every so ofteu. We had the names of all the boys who belonged to the congregation and everyone of them got a parcel. Those were some of the things done in war time and of course there has been a great deal done in giving burseries and awards to children who otherwise couldn't be able to go on to a higher education. Q. Does the C.W.L. set itself any goals that it wishes to achieve for soci.e ty? For instance, you must have had a lot to do with St. Joseph's Hospital. A. Yes, quite a number of the ladies who are members of the C.W.L. and are on the Auxiliary for St. Joseph's Hospital. and helped with teas etc. Naturally they made contributions Right now the C.W .L. are -very active in the abortion :problem - they are very opposed to that of course, it is against the teachings of the Church and so the C.W.L. are strong in opposition to abortion. In every group or in every tmm there are poor people and the poor are helped. We -, . �have rummage sales and people who rave a lot of children and haven't much money can come and get a whole box of clothes - the clothes might be worth $15 and they would pay a dollar. When I was· on the Indian reservation, the clothes that were left over from a couple of the churches were sent out to me and then we'd have a ten cent sale. We felt that having the people pay a little gave them a little more dignity, than to just say 'here, have this" . There again they would pro~ably get a box full of clothes for a quarter. Q. When you were teaching on the reservation and at the same time you were involved in the C.W.L. did you feel a lot of distance between yourself and the Indian women? A. It's a bit hard to get very close to some, fortunately I taught at the sanitarium previous from going to the Indian reservation and one woman from the reservation was a patient at the sanitarium and I got to know her quite well. She had gone to school in town and when I went to the reservation, I felt that there was somebody I knew and her husband was very, very good as far as any repairs or anything like that, I just had to send someone to bring him overrto look at the problem. pairing anything. I am completely useless when it comes to re- One particular item I always noticed about him, he never came to the school alone, he always brought one or two of his children with him. That was for my protection because there were neighbors around who didn't have the best thoughts and no way would he expose me to their criticism. I admired him so much for doing that, I didn't ask him to do that, I never told him that I noticed it, but I certainly had a great deal of admiration for him. He was a lot younger than I was and he and his wife used to come over in the evening to the school and he was very brilliant -in mathematics and I would get him to do rational problems on the blackboard, which I knew he enjoyed doing. Q. What was his wife like? Were you close at all? A. I was fairly close to the wife and she used to do my hair. nice person and ve-;cy socially inclined and friendly. entertainment at Christmas .... ~ ...... then put an imitation flame on it. She was a very We had a beautiful We covered the barrels with red and The people really enjoyed our Christmas pariies and another thing about the Parks Board, Mr. Art Widinol? especially, he was in charge of the Parks Board at the time and he used to bring the treats for everybody, They came from Squaw Bay, from that school and our own, we had two schools in the mission. �Q. How much co-operation was there between the women - you told me about Schreiber and about how the women managed to ward off the flu epidemic by the healthy ones taking care of the sick, you mentioned working with the C. W. L. and you mentioned you worked as a teacher/in the reservation. Would you have wished for more determined co-operation? A. No, I really was surprised by the amount of co-operation. Sometimes - Indian women won't push themselves - so sometimes you might have to suggest, but they were ver:y willing. They would have thier children dressed the way I want etc., so no, I can't say that I ever lacked help. Q. The C. W.L. was quite a unified group? A. Yes. We al.so had a group that would put on skits every so often. It took a lot less time to put on a skit than to put on a real play so often for our purposes we would use skits. al. but many laughs. We would have a skit with vecy little rehears- Certainly were given great encouragement and always asked to come back for more. Q. You found lots of avenues to explore. A. Yes, perhaps I should tell you about the boy when I was at St. Joseph's Boarding School, after I left the reservation. In 1960 I thought that well, I was getting on in years and I really tire, but the sisters had been asking me to go to St. Joseph's Boarding School on account of my long connection with the Indians. They knew I would understand the children. I went and stayed there eight years after I was supposed to retire, every year the Westfort Kiwanis in order to encourage children, and make them aware of the forest, they offered a prize for the best piece of art that showed how to prote·a t the forest. Children of all the schools were asked to co-operate so at the school they had never heard of that before, so I talked to my superior about it and she agreed. We did enter the competition and out of over 2,900 entrants, one was chosen aqthe best. The name of the chUd who did it and the school he attended was on the back and it was not visible to the judges so nobody knew whose work::.it was. The next day I had a call from a man who bel.tnged to the Kiwanis and he told me that one of my pupils won the prize. The boy had drawn a man sitting, and protecting the little animals and he did an excellent job and so they chose that. the Exi bition. The prize was a trip with an adult to Toronto and I was the adult. This boy came from a reservation way up by Armstrong and he was the eldest of a very large family and it just didn't seem the thing to ~~o. For some reason they decided that if he was going to get �very much out of the Exhibition, that I should go with him. They phoned and asked me if I would go and I said that if it was going to be for his welfare I '11 go. Mr. Badani was our member at the time. I wrote to him because I was working for the Federal Government, and I told him what the situation was and the conditions and he alerted somebody in Toronto and next to the Queen, we had the best service. We were at the Exhibtion, everything was handed to us, we· stayed at the King Edward Hotel, we had our pictures taken, and we were on T. V. there. We got plenty of publicity and it was an achievement which I am sure made the Indian children aware of their own potentialities. r,. did something for the whole district, to Imow that one of them could do that. Q. Do you think that women's roles in society have changed very much, and if so do you think that the changes were for the better or for the worse? A. They've certainly changed and of course women are better educated now than when I was growing up. On the other hand, if you judge by results, I think that the women of fifty years ago produced better children, more responsible children. Q. But surely that is not their only function - to produce children. A. No, I don't mean that but if you were to judge them that way I think that well, discipline has changed and that has an awful lot to do with the way the child turns out. I think many women of today are doing an excellent job soc- ially, I don't mean in society, I mean in trying to benefit the underdog. The underpriviledged etc. , I think the younger women are to be greatly admired for the way that they really are trying. Naturally you are going to find a certain number who are self-centered, there will always be that. I think on the wh.ole, women a.re very conscious of their obligation to their fellow men. Q. That is refreshing to hear. Quite often, we have received very negative com- ments as to how young women are today. Circumstances have changed. Criticism of working mothers for .e xample, young women can't afford to stay home if they a.re able to work. A. I think the majority of older people have a tendency to talk about the good old days. I've lived a good many yea.rs and the good old days weren't so good at all. Women naturally didn't get out and do things as today but you see, they didn't have the equipment in the home to make things any easier for them. It took them all day to do their work. I have no patience with women �who spend their afternoons in the beer parlor. But I think that is a minority. When I see my own daughters, they '11 drive their children here, and drive them there, so that they can take part in worthwhile activities and other women are doing the same thing. There are a great many women who are giving a great deaJ. of time to, volunteer work. That certainly is very commendable I think. I do find that it is generaJ.ly older women who sit back and won't do anything, of course you have lots of time to criticize then. Criticism should be con-- structive and if you can see that things should be different why not go and suggest that you will have time and give them help to do it? Q. If you were to become involved as a young woman in a project right now, in something in society right now, what would you like to do? A. As long as it wasn't work - I'm not fond of work. brains and I like to make people happy. I like to work with my rhere are a lot of serious things in this world and I think if you can do something to make people happy that's good. Some women have a pretty tough time, they work aJ.l day and perhaps work at home and often don't get any co-operation, I think that if I had any choice it would be entertainment - but it wouldn't cost anything to produce or attend. Q. Did you know that there was a play just formed recently and it was an aJ.1femaJ.e play and aJ.1-femaJ.e audience as well. 'rhat was just two weeks ago. It was a group of women who had just decided to do something, and I think they are doing it again in August. A. We just recently had the C.W.L. convention here and I was one of the characters and it was really just a show of hats but they introduced me as an 87 year old. I feel that I am young at heart - everybody has pains and aches whether you are young or not so what is the use of talking about them if somebody else has them too. I think that senior citizens today never had. it so good. It annoys me to hear them say that they don't get anything for this or that. There is plenty funded to senior citizens to live on if they are not spendthrifts and foolish with their money. As far as income for senior citizens is concerned, you have to realize whose pocket it's coming from - my children and grandchildren are paying for the comfort that I have here. children and grandchildren are doing the same thing. Everybody else's All you have to do is hear of conditions in other countries and think how fortunate we are. pension is $145 monthly The - they say that the basic salary should be about $300 but you can apply for increases and then of course the rent sidized buildings is geared on income. in these sub- After all, if you have reached retire- ID . �ment age and have never saved any money, you 're not going to start saving it after that either. You take the wages in the last twenty yea:rs or so, they've been good and surely people of 65 must have something ahead of them. My parents had to live without any old age pension and they had to save for their old age. If they are absolutely irresponsible with their money well than naturally the cheque isn't going to last long. Thank you for talking with us. \t. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Mary Erne Duggan Description An account of the resource An oral history interview done by Helen Lovekin with Mrs. Mary Erne (Maher) Duggan in Schreiber. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. The interview uses language that may no longer be considered appropriate, and discusses the schooling of Indigenous children. In this interview, Mary Erne Duggan reflects on her life and career. She was born in 1891 in Renfrew County, and moved to Schreiber in 1916 as a teacher. She married in 1920 and had children, continuing to teach occasionally after that. She moved from Schreiber to live in Thunder Bay from 1937-1968. In 1945, her husband died and she maintained her career in education. The interview focusses on Mrs. Duggan's teaching and the cultural changes she witnessed through her career. She taught in schools in North Bay, near Sudbury, in Schreiber, and in Thunder Bay at the Sanitorium, the Mission School (1953-1960), and St. Joseph's Residential School (1960-1968). In her interview, Mary Erne Duggan reflects on WWI, the flu epidemic of 1918, the Depression, and WWII, and her identities as a teacher and as a member of the Catholic Women's League. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Schreiber Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Interview is released with permission of Mary Clare Massicotte, granddaughter. https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/4552c6e5ca2f2a00dac26bf93323aca6.mp3 a1fdbff586041cc6c536102e6d5ca9d3 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/4a9137932a5e50b924250e4b2eba1b74.mp3 330c241cfc414cebf87adae2c4ec6c2a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Lillian Wolter Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs. Lillian Wolter. The interview was performed as part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. During the interview, Mrs. Wolter discusses working as a school teacher in Nipigon. She taught grades one through eight, was a shop-keeper for a time, and also played the organ and piano for churches and events. She details her experience trying to get a divorce from her husband. In order to do this she had to prove adultery, and she almost lost her job since she had moved in with another man before she was divorced. She also discusses community events in Nipigon and how the school would always host events for all ages. The recording consists of two sides of one cassette tape, available as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play each file.) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource No rights information Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Nipigon Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/8cadf7e791ed91c7c469478069965d8c.mp3 a8d89177b7c29ec37c408aacb5b3eb24 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/b824e18344d47ae6a395fabe0a35f625.pdf 25723f3037ec678a7552fa1a4f10192c PDF Text Text The interview of Mrs. & Mrs. W. Hartley Q: Uhm uhm. Mro . H: ... was a bachelor, but most of them had wives. Well, women, anyway. Some could ... well, Lars Olsen was married before he ever left Norway. And if he hadn't been married, he probably wouldn't have homesteaded here. 'Course he wouldn't have raised a family, but, I mean ... Q: They didn't have any children when they came here? Mr. H: They needed, they had to have the female to give them roots. And to have to build anything at all, or settle anywhere at all, they had to have roots. So it all, so in fact it all hinged on women in the final analysis. Q: Did they all want a farm? Mr. H: Q: Did they all want a farm? Mr. H: Q: Pardon? The women? And the men, too. Mr. H: No, no. But I mean, I'm talking in generalities. It fits these cases, but I mean, in broad generalities these ... ah, there was men who went out in the bush and started something, but to be of any permanence, it had to beo .. Q: Yeah. Mr. H: Q: .... social history of the world. Did the ah, did Olson work in a lumber camp or something? �-2Mr. H: Q: The one that originally built house? Mr. H: Q: Which Olson? No. He was .. . Sixty-eight ..... . Mr. H: ... He came from Norway. h he had been apprenticed in Norway as a turner, that's a wood turner. Q: He was married there, but And a carpenter. Is that how he built these hardwood floors, ans stuff? Mr. H: Well, the original structure of the house, the log part of it was done by these Finns, who are experts with logs and broadaxes. it And incidentally, cost a dollar a log to put this house up in those dayso Q: That's pretty expensive. Mr. H: Q: Ayh? I think that might be quite expensive. There are alot of logs. Mr. H: That was alot of money for those days, but no, there's not all that many logs. Q: They're quite .... I guess the wood was thicker. Mr. H: Ah, the wood always come from right around here. It's all Tamarac. It's resistant to rot, and came from all around here. But then, he would have done them--he did the most of the carpentry. Q: Okay, I'm just going to see if this is playing back . ... Do you mind repeating that? Mrs. H: Q: Yeah. Repeating what I said? �-3Mrs. H: Q: Well, Clara was born in ..... . Clara Olsen. Mrs. H: Yeah. Her name was Clara Christianson, and she married Lars in eighteen ninety-nine, and they came to Thunder Bay. She came with two young children, and ..... Q: When did they come to Mrs. H: Canada? Do you know? He came ah, I think it's all in there, in the book, around nineteen o-one (1901), and I think she came out in nineteen o-four (1904), and she brought two children with her. And they lived in Fort William on North Mark Street for ten years. And then he thought that the old PD railway was going to go through here .... Mr. H: Mrs. H: Mr. H: Through there. No, I thought it was down this way. The road was going to come, the piece of road that we got, the road, instead of the road where Belanger's are, this was going to be the road. Mrs. H: Mr. H: Yeah. Right through. Pearson-Pardee road. And PD was going to go along the high ground there. Mrs. H: Well, anyway, Mr. H: Mrs. H: ... they changed the route, and it went through Hymers. And so, for five years, she never left this place. Q: Except to do midwifery, and that kind of thing. �-4- Mrs. H: Oh yeah. Well then people would come to her, her daughter is Mrs. Colson, Mrs. Curtis Colson. Q: Oh, that's right, yeah. Mrs. H: And Gertie Docking is another daughter. She belongs to the south Neebing. And she , lives 7 ~ not too far from the But Gertie was Alpine. born in that corner, in there. But anyway, Clara went out, helped clear--this was all forest, and she would go out and pile things up and clear things up, and leave the children. She had some-- she must have been a marvelous mother. They speak so well of her, because she thought of ways of amusing them. that they had. Walter's found little soft balls You couldn't buy balls, so they had these made out of the old heels of socks. Or she'd tell them about the time when they were to come and call her. She'd be out working, and I guess he was in town a lot of the time. left here. She was And one day, they walked all the way down to around where Shutie's are now. I don't know whether you know that or not. Q: No. Mrs. H: Well you go down 608 ... Mr. H: (Slate?) River. Mrs. H: ... down the Oliver Lake road. The corner of the Oliver Lake road and you can go straight through there, to buy a cow. They were gone two days. They walked all the way there, and all the way �-5back; the two of them, bringing this cow. Q: The children and mother or husband .... Mrs. H: Q: The mother and the father. Oh, husband, yeah. Mrs. H: And who looked after the children, I don't know. Maybe one of the older childreno But she had her share of heartbreaks, but another thing that ... Q: How many children did she raise? Mrs. H: It's all here.(flipped through book) Mr. H; Well, little girls in those days, was six or seven or eight, started lookin' after the house, doin' housework. Mrs. H: ______ But ah ... and she would bring them porridge to bed. Now I didn't hear this until just recently that to get to, some of them slept here, and Alf, the boy, whose store you were at, slept upstairs and she had to go up a ladder. But she'd take his porridge. stove out there. She made it on a And that heated the house all night, and then she made their porridge, and brought them all porridge in bed, before they got up. And they always wanted their porridge warm, so they all sat up and ate it. Q: Breakfast in bed! Mrs. H: But imagine a woman with all that she had to do, and yet she was so wonderful with her family, and they all speak so highly of her. And she was awfully good to all her neighbours, I think. �-6Mr. H: Q: She was a doctor woman, so ... I wonder .... She was what? Mr. H: Down in (Osaks?) they called them doctor women. Midwife, and general sort of .... That book Foxfire, if you've ever read that, it--well no, yeah, Foxfire. In some parts of the States especially, the old English expression is doctor woman. Well it's a midwife and ... In those days, the doctor would come out from Fort William with a horse and buggy out here, twenty-five, thirty miles. days work for him, at least. Half a So they depended-- it had to be very serious before they went to the doctor or went to the hospital, so they depended on the local talent. Q: Naturally. Well, she was city woman, from a big city in Norway, so how did she get these skills? Mrs. H: Well, I think it was just sort of, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. her family. ~ ..... in Ingrid was eighteen when she died. She died of the flu and pneumonia, at the end of the war. Q: With that epidemic, yeah. Mrs. H: I guess they didn't--well, once again, they couldn't get out. here, .. ~nd by the time they did get a doctor o. Mro H: She'd have died in town, anyway. Mrso H; Yeah. And this Mary, one of the~ died of diptheria, Another child, she---the mother had typhoid, and �-7she lost her baby when, well, the baby was premature. And I think it lived two months or so. But it wasn't very well. So there was--out of all these, I think there were five left. Q: What, Mary, Alf,Borfield, Mrs. H: Q: Oh. Mrs. H: Q: Now this Barfield is Mrs. Colson. And the youngest was, well, the baby boy died. Why did they move to Fort William eventually, because Mr. Olson working there? Mr. H: Q: No, no. Mr. Olson died here. What year was that? Mro H: Her daughter Gertie, that lives on 61, was married to a chap named Docking, and they took over the farm. But he was away all during the war. But then he came back, they came back here, and sold-1956, wasn't it, they sold this place? Mrs. H; Yes. Mr. H: And they moved up to the Mountain road. took the old lady with them. And they The old lady died in the house, at least she died on the Mountain road, when they were living on the Mountain road. Mrs. H: But this daughter that was born here, this Gertie, is well worth talking to, because she's had a lot of ... Q: Gertie Docking, yeah. Mrs. H; ... Gertie Docking, and she lives on highway 61, just past the prison farm. Now Murray worked at �-8: :But he joined up, and the prison farm, you see. went overseas, and she and her parents ran the farm. Now she was just a young woman; you'll see pictures of her in here. Until he came home. __husband working at the country club. She's a very capable person. Q: She's sixty now? Mrs. H: Q: Yeah, she'd be sixty, but you'd never know it. And her sister's older than her, Borged? Mrs. H: Borged, yeah. here. Now this is a picture of a Christmas And this very room, when we bought this house, it was practically in the ground. Q: You didn't buy it in 1957, when they moved out, then? Mrs. H: Q: And they had it for how long? Mrs. H; Q: No, a German family moved in here. From '56 to '72. Oh yea, so you just bought it recently. Mrso H: And they really, almost, well, you'd say they abandoned it, wouldn't you? Mr. H: Mrs. H: Well, sure they abandoned it. They were going to tear it down, they didn't think it was worth fixing. Mr. H: Maybe not consciously abandon it. probably draw up some The didn't - - - -they were going to abandon the house, but it was in a state of abandonment and would never have come back and fixed it up. Never. �-9Mrs. H: Q: This is the story of the family.o. I'd like to read it. Mrs. H: Well, you can come back any time you like, or if you want to read it now. This is written by Mrs. Colson for the history book. And every story that is in this book is about families that ... Q: Oh. Are there any pictures? Mrs. H: These are the Deckings. daughter. Q: Yeah. She was the There she is. Oh, what a pretty bathing suit! Mrs. H: And this is sort of a family picture of all the families. Oh, this is the Sedwich's, but they couldn't get very much about them. But this is what this place looked like when we bought it. Q: Where did you come from? Mrs. H: You and your husband? I lived in Thunder Bay. raised there. I was born there and He came from Ottawa, but he was born in England. He grew up in Ottawa, or near Ottawa. Q: Would you say they were a fairly typical family, the Olson's, of this area? Mrs. H: Q: Yes, I would. Because, I know a lot of Scandinavians settled out here. Mrs. H: Yeah. Mrs. H: ....... I don't mean anything derogatory about them, but they're self-sufficient. They've had to be. There only meat would be what they got through hunting, so that ..... �-10- Q: What about cows and that? Mrs. H: Q: Oh yeah, they had cows. Did some of them have sheep? Mrs. H: I don't think sheep would be very practical out here. Q: I know the Kamstra's have sheep. Mrs. H: Maybe they have, but there are too many bears around. Q: Oh. Mrs. H: Even with cows they can be a danger. There's still wolves and bears. Q: What about chickens Mrs. H: ----------- Most of them still have their own chickens, but they have to provide enough to keep them going through the winter. approve of it. their survival. Q: For them, it was necessary for And ... And the women hunted too? Mrs. H: Q: So, hunting--oh, I don't I couldn't tell you whether they did or not. I know my grandmother Garrett used to carry a rifle and could shoot one. Mrs. H: Well, there have been women that have been left to raise families. It seems I heard of someone just heard about recently lef~ woman on a farm without her family and she was left with a bunch of young children, and, what else can you do? Mrs. H: ... logs, and white pine, red pine. And all through that section down where they lived, they weren't �-11- too far from the border, and so you had all these lumbar jacks, and so on. Q: So, where-abouts was the prostitution house, exactly? It says 7 -I don't know where Concession Eight and (Neebing) is. Mrs. H: Q: Well, this is Crooks. So that's closer to Fort William? Mrs. H: No, no. That's down towards the border. The last township along the American border. Q: Oh, okay. Mrs. H: So they were very close to the, not too far from the American border. Well, then you have, the Pidgeon River was used for timber, too, you see. They had all those falls .... Q: So this is woman entrepeneurs catne up from the States? Mrs. H: Q: Cecile McGuire Mrs. H: Q: Yes. McGuire, yeah. Or maybe Sicily, I guess it would be. Mrs. H: So, you see, she had a dance hall, so it was just like, well, the Yukon. They had quite a house. Now whose living there now, - I don't know, but they had all kinds of old clocks, and all kinds of antigues and things. Sunday School. Q: What a change! Mrs. H: Yes. Then it was used as a �-12Q: Is it still standing ------------- , I guess it must be. Mrs. H: Q: Yeah. But their not living there anymore .... The Held's . Mrs.H: .... , they've gone down to ah, they're living in Virginia. place now. So I don't know whose living in that We used to visit the naturalist always, made a point of calling there, because they fed birds and it was very nice, very nice area. But I think that would make a good, well, =-I would be interested . ;..... . Q: If you want to write something on that for us, we'd be glad to credit you for it. You see, what we are, are more editors than authors. We're just trying to, you know, kind of coalate the material. Mrs. H: I don't know where I'd go looking for material. People would be giving me a queer look. Q: What about the Held's? telling, I don't Mrs. H: Maybe they know more than they're know. Well, of course, as I say, they're away down in Virginia, right now. These people are very close. She ah, Mrs. Manaseau's American too. The present Mrs. Manasteau . ... hard time of it really. Q: Why do you suppose they were the pioneers? Mrs. H; Well, I can see what happens today ......... . (end of tape) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Margaret and Walter Hartley Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Description An account of the resource Oral history interview with Mrs Margaret and Mr Walter Hartley in Neebing on December 6, 1978. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of one side of a cassette tape, available here as an MP3 file. (Click on the speaker logo to play the file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. Discussions centre about Clara Christiansen who married Lars Olson in 1899 and immigrated from Norway. Arriving two years after her husband, with two young children, the Olsons lived in Fort William before moving to Neebing, then built the house the Hartley’s live in. Referencing a book, the Hartleys discuss Clara raising a family, and being a "doctor woman" (midwife). One of her daughters died of the flu epidemic, one from diphtheria, and five children survived. In 1956 the family sold the place and moved to Mountain Road. Gertie Docking, (nee Olsen), was one of the daughters who grew up on the farm. Looking at pictures, the house was owned by a German family, the Sedwich’s, from 1956-1972, and abandoned. The Hartley’s bought the house and discuss the history of the farm with cows and chickens; women on the farm raising their families; and living amidst the industry boom of lumber and mines. Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-12-06 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/c8485c0002c9706ed7a6facc42b09cfd.mp3 25f8905b2490c120d946c03575ea96f7 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/a254e34517aef8ba27de9aca11c998f7.pdf cf06c968ba5a3cbf39a65225bb84e344 PDF Text Text Interview of Mrs. D. Murray by Georgina Garrett ---@__MQmen.Ls A: In-s-tlttttes- ... my father and Mr. Cooper were friends, and I knew she was an Institute lady, and that was, I felt, part of their project. There was an Institute in Pearson, but they weren't getting, I mean, they were going along befriending everybody, but again there was no money for the, you know, with them, or for them. raising money, because nobody had any. No way of So I told, wrote to Mrs. Cooper and I told her that I had a family , or two, with children in it and so on and they were lacking this and that and the other. kids outgrow things. Could they help, because often You know how it is still today. So, by golly, they had a shower shall we call it and boxes of stuff I had my present, my husband now, he is at present but at that time he wasn't, pick up the stuff and brought it out, and so we were able to help a number of the families that way. Well then another time, a couple of families were really hard up for food. Really, you'd think living on a farm there was food, but the crops were poor and so they had potatoes and that was about all. So I wrote to her again. some help, can you help us?" I said "We need So, they did. Then jars of fruit, cans of beans, cans--anything and everything, boxes of stuff. into town. - - - - - -I married my husband and we came So east Fort William by that time--and then I was a, had joined the Institute out there. Their Secretary-Treasurer, well, just quit in the middle of a year, so who was going to take iit? And I used to go to �-2the meetings when I could, after school. So, I said, "Well I can't meet with you people at two or two-thirty, 'cause school's on. But what we could do, I saw the Inspector, and he said 'well, if the senior girls want to go to the meetings, where they could have them in the school, teach through the noon hour or give them fifteen minutes for lunch'". So that's what we did, and then the senior girls came, we had it in the school from then on. So that, and then so I took the Secretary-Treasurer for them, and finished out that year, and then as I say, jwe were married, and I catne into town. Eastfort, Westfort were both pulling me. Westfort was easier, I could walk down Brown Street to the homes; the other was way was a longer walk. The younger group in Westfort, my own age. But I felt, well, Eastfort has done so much for me, I just said ''Can you help", and help came. So that's how I got into Eastfort. Q: What year was that? A: Nineteen fourty-one. A: .... practically the same, I would say. Oh sure, each community's going to have something different, or something, but as a whole 2: But you want to get an overall picture, too. It's actually their likeness that comes across, but then that's a good thing too, because it's women united. A: That's right. 2: ... Which is really ..... . �-3A: Which is right, yeah ... Q: It's the similarities that stand out more than the differences. A: Yeah, yeah. Q: I know, yesterday in Dorion, where I was talking to Mrs. Atkinson. She was mentioning that the Women's Institute, the women were very close despite racial differences, ethnic background, whatever. So, I would sort of like to find out, is that true of the Thunder Bay rural woman? I don't really know. How close were, lets say, Finnish women farmers to people from the British Isles, or were they, did the women have to be self-sufficient. A: Well, there again, I'd say, I taught in a, first taught in a Finnish community. There were no English people in that cormnunity. Q: In Pearson? A: No, no. Q: Oh yeah. A: You see, there again, I would say, now at Chabaqua, they In Chabaquao. • didn't have an Institute. They stayed more or less to themselves .......... . Q: Well A: No. we're not just doing Institutes, you know. And there in that area the Finnish people stayed more or less to themselves. Oh there were, down at the station, the section people were Ukrainian descent, talked Ukrainian at home, Finnish ___ there, there was only one And when I was out lady, really, that talked �-4- Englishe, and she had gone to school there, and taught, and not taught but, she married, and they had a store, and so I, that was my companion. with her mother. You see, I boarded The children spoke Finnish, as soon as they--Finn or Finnish,whatever you want-- as soon as they left the school and home. And some of the parents realized that wasn't good and they said to me "Make them talk English all the time. You see, the parents couldn't, a good many of the parents, some of the men could and the odd woman, but they were afraid of putting their subject or their verb, you know, mixing it up. They were afraid of that, and so they were very hesitant about talking English to anyone, not just to me, but to anybody. We And ahm,--that could talk English. Well, you can't follow every child home. yard, I did insist after I them in In the school- Finnish, but even in the schoolyard, see, they would talk Finn. Well, naturally, that's their language. 2: Sure, it would come easiest. A: So I insisted after that, in the schoolyard, that they did. I said, ''You might, as well. you might as well learn." I loved them. You're here to learn, You know we got along well; I was out there three years, and it was just one big happy family. those people, very good. They were very good to me, Well, then when I went into Pearson, well then you had a mixture, well mostly English ... Q: Some were ScandinavianQ �A: ... --Anglo-Saxono Uhm? Q: Some were Scandinavian, the Olsen's? A: Yes, the Olsen's were Scandinavian, but, but, what will I say, as much or more Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo-Saxon. You know what I mean. There was no distinction there. There was one or two Finnish families, but they were, they were accepted, and they carried on with all the right rest of us. Maybe a little bit different ~there, I don't know what it was. But as a whole, they all got along together and worked together, and when there was something on, well they all worked, you know, they all carried on. Like I know, through the school end of it, you know, the concerts and things like that. So the families naturally were more eager to help or something. Q: Do you think the women co-operated a great deal, and helped each other out alot? A: Oh, I think so. Oh, yes. Q: In what ways? Q: Well, when there was sickness, they would help out, ayh, go and help people. Now, in Chabaqua, the lady I stayed with, as I say, it was all, mostly Finnish settlement, she had no nursing training, but whenever there was somebody sick or a baby on the way, there was an English-an Anglo-Saxon lady, young couple, what, three or four miles down the road going to have a baby, so they came ou know with the hand car rail, they borrowed one of those somehow and got her to go there. So it was the same thing in Pearson, although they went into town to have �-6babies, but at the same time, when there was illness or something, they co-operated. When somebody got burned or-- burnt out or something, they all co-operated. a happy situation. yes. It was Oh, yes, they would co-operate. Ah, Well, I don't know, maybe half a mile, a mile away from somebody, that's your neighbour. You don't care what they are, as long as ______________ ou go and talk or you have a cup of tea or something like that, ayh. 2: You know what !mean, . 1.t, . ' 1.t s . . . . . . . . . . . . Yeah. y~t probably people would integrate an awful lot better, simply because of circumstances. A: That's right, yeah, yeah. Q: Do you think farm women were treated, on the whole, as equals to the men, or were they treated sort of somewhat subserviant, next to the animals or something? A: I can only talk for two areas. Chabaqua, I would even think the women were the boss, the head of the household. to do. They sort of told, tell them what they were going No, they weren't treated as aminals or, or ... Q: Not as animals, but what I mean is .... A: No, no, I know, but I mean No, no. So far as I know, they're, and in many cases, I'm just thinking back to, oh, four or five definite families in the area, you know, where the woman was sort of the boss of the house, sort of thing. were equals. And in _?earson, I think they They would talk, any house I was in, they would talk about what they were goinna do or something, you know, and a crop had to be done, or this had to be �-7done. Women helped; they had to. You know, out in the fields and that, because there wasn't always enough help. Not all women, but some of them. this ah, no. But there was none of Not like you used to think. 'Course, I think these ahm, the father and then the mother down in the house were years and years ago. in the rural areas. Before _ ____out And certain types of people, too. Certain races. Q: So do you think the work of women was always valued as highly as that of men. Of course, I suppose the work was somewhat the same. A: Well, I think,like they knew that the--! think it was valued, because the woman did her work in the house, which was necessary to keep the man going, ayh 9 And if the haying time, and she was needed, I think the father or the husband appreciated the fact that the mother went out and helped to - - - - , or whatever had to be done. In any of the communities I were in, yes. Now in the, in the Pearson section where I was, the man would get the potatoes and so on. go out and help. The women would I often used to go after four. Out in Chabaqua, another rural area, Finnish area, the women did that sort of work. That was women's work rather than men's work, and yet the man didn't look down on woman because she did that sort of thing, you know. Q: What did the women do with the children when they did farm work? A: Took them with them if they could, or there'd be �-8- somebody else to look after them, like in the older children. I don't ever remember any child being left alone in the house. And then again, as I say, and some of those times I was there when the children were not tiny little ones. There was a few families that had little ones, but then there always bigger ones to look after the little ones if mother was out in the field or so. Q: Did you ever get the impression that maybe the women were a little disappointed with the circumstances, some of them coming from cities in Britian, or Scandinavia, and then being plunked in the middle of Northwestern Ontario bush? A: Well, there weren't too many--there were some that had come from, whose husbands had good jobs in town, and went out to the farm, because the farm was the thing to do, make a living, get the kids out on the farm, you know, out of trouble, and they'd had lovely homes and so on in town 9 But I never heard any complaints. of accepted it. They sort It was the kids they were coming out for, and they accepted it. It was harder work than in town, because you had a well to get water from and so on, and especially Anita(?) , I don't remember. Pearson it's different now. turn them on. Now again in They have taps and they But when I was out there it was well water or you hauled your water from the___ But there was always a youngster to do that, you know, mother didn't have to do that. But most of them accepted their lot. �-9One lady, of Norwegian descent I think it was, her husband was a housepainter in town. He got the idea the country was the only place, so he went out to Pardee, which is further on than Pearson. And not knowing anything about building a house, he built a house down at the bottom of the hill. Well, in the spring, the water used to leak right through the house. Now, I did hear her complain, but who wouldn't. Not complain, but say "Why did we ever leave?" They came down, they had to come down the river, in the spring when they came there, in a canoe, so they paddled their way down. in a boat, And then, she didn't know anymore about where to build a house than he did, and so as I say. But never again did I hear her ~say, "Oh, I'm going to leave", like today you hear, "Gee, I'm not puttin' up with it, I'm gettin' out, oand if you don't come, I'll go on my own". 'Course, the women didn't do that then, what thirty years ago, thirty-five, fourty years ago. Thirty-seven years, anyway. But yet, every year the same thing happened, until finally they did build another place. years and years. But this went on for No, I can't really ever say that I, maybe because the people that I came into contact with hadn't had moeny or an affluent life in the country they'd come from. I know a lady that came out, her husband went out to Scobol, and she had been well-to-do. she accepted it. Well They didn't stay there long, because I don't, I, well, a few years. She was, when my baby �-10was born, she was the nurse in the hospital. She was a nurse, and she'd had, they'd had a good living ~in ~ England, and came out, and then he got this crazy, you know, I shouldn't say crazy, but the idea your going to live on a farm. He got this piece of land in Scobol where nobody could raise anything. few years they went back to town. But after a Again, I never heard her say, "What the dickens did we do that"--she did say, "Coming from London to here", you know, but never did I hear her grumble about it. grumbling today. Q: I don't know. Were the daughters of the families treated as valuably as the boys? A: I think there's more I know that sometimes that's· ------- Well, agian I say, from what I gathered, yes. I think when you think of that idea, you're going back before my day in the country. Maybe eighteen ninety's or something, or nineteen hundred's, where they wanted boys so they could work on the farm, ayh? But in many cases, where there were no boys, the girls helped the father. So, I mean, they were, they perhaps couldn't work as hard as the boys ·, but still they did the job, too. In fact, one family out in Pearson, there were four or five boys and three girls, and the ,~i:,_: one girl, she didn't like to work in, so she worked as hard as the boys did outside. She loved that, and so she was treated as an equal by her brothers as well as by the father. The mother often used to say she shouldn't be working like that, she should be in the house doing things. But she �-11- she wanted to stay outside. Any that I have contact with, yeah. Q: How did you feel as a woman teacher out in the bush? A: In the bush. And Chabaqua was bush then, because they were just building the highway out through there. Actually, I liked it very--at first, it was a, sort of a frightening experience, because I went in where no one was talked to. You see, where I boarded, the ~l lady could say "Eat, now" or Finnish word for teacher. 0 ).- , f pe,\a.) Ct II , that's the But after the first month, I was very homesick the first month, I didn't want to eat or anything. But after that, I just loved the place. Q: How old were you when you went out? A: Twenty. Through normal school, I didn't go to University, I took University sometime after. came home once a month. And I Department of Highways was working out there, or Ministry of Highways, it's not a Department. They had a true~, and I'd get a ride with them Friday nights and go back Sunday night with one of the men that were going back to the camp. The road was passable. Q: I read that, especially among the Finns, the A women teachers were really highly respected. A: Oh, yes. I was. I didn't want to say that, but oh, yes. And through this girl whose husband had the store, through Laura, she told me that the people, oh, the Inspector told me tooo He said that they didn't know anything �-12about the system of education or any--you know, things like that. So they left it up to me, and they knew it would be all right. And I was very highly respected. And very, very well treated. Gifts at Christmas--now, again, they were hard up, too, and so it wasn't gifts of stockings, or things like that, but jars of fruit to bring home to my mother. me, but through my mother. You see, not only through Chickens and beef, and stuff like that, where in those days we didn't have a fridge, and so it was just the same, that stuff. Oh, no. And yet when I left--and they left the system of education up to me, and I did, I honestly did my best. Because of their trust, too. But then I was, I'm not meaning to boast, but I wanted to do the best I could. When I went out to Pearson, it was different. We had one family in there--it was the system, writing. first the children printed. At Well then the new system, Mr. Mustard the new Minister of Education said they must learn to write. Well it's harder for a child to write than it is to print, so I used to teach so much printing at the start and then write. And I got ever so many letters from pare--from this one particular family, about them writing. You know, (garbled). I guess they'd read the paper, and knew there was going to be writing instead of printing, and so on, in letters. Well, I didn't get any, never got a--'course they couldn't write in English at Chabaqua, but at the same time, they left it to you. For the best results. �-13- Q: Yeah. Ahm. Oh. When did you leave teaching? Did you retire in town? A: No. I taught three years at Chabaqua, five years at Pearson, and then I got married, and that was it. Q: Were you not allowed to teach as a married woman? I know that that was the case earlier. A: Well, it was to a certain extent. Well, I didn't want to, my husband was, it was war time, and my husband was wanting to get in the Air Force. him down. Well they turned So he tried to get in the army, and they turned him down, because his heart. And I had, they had wanted me to come to town, like when I got married, to teach, but at that time, if he'd gone away, I was gonna go too. And that was my, you know, my , what we were going to do. away. So I didn't get into town right And then I felt, well, I had enough to do. I was interested in making his home, and I belonged to the Institute, and you get into other things through the Women's Institute. Well then we had a daughter and then when,--! would never go to work, I said, while she was young, so when she went to kindergarten. And it wasn't 'til she was grade five that I went back to to supply teaching. But only~ two or three schools. I'd be home when she was home. Now I know today, the system was different, altogether. to do. That isn't the thing You go and you get a babysitter . . But I didn't believe in that. And then I supplied at _____ three or four years ago. I could have gone on �-14- teaching, but I didn't want to. Q: Do you think work outside the home is important for women? A: You were a teacher. That's hard to answer. individual, ahy? I think that's up to the You know, like myself,--well, I have these other interests outside the home. no money with it. There's Depends too, on what, whether the woman's working for money to get something, or what. It's up to the individual. Q: Why did you want to be a teacher? A: Uhm? Q: Why did you want to be a teacher? A: Oh, because when I was going to highschool, the depression was on, and there were three places you worked, in a store, or a nurse, or a teacher. You couldn't be--and there was no air hostesses or anything like that, you know. No. And so, I just happened, I went into teaching. I liked children, I liked teaching. We also, every sunnner used to play school when we were kids, and I was always the teacher. So the kids knew their multiplication tables when they went back to school. it. have. Oh no, I enjoyed Maybe if there'd been, if it was today I wouldn't There's so many opportunities, I might have flitted from job to job, because there's so many things that I would loved to have been ino journalist and so on. Public relations, My daughter has the life, had the life until she got married what I would have enjoyed. She went through journalism, then she worked for the �-15government, was up on the hill, you know, - - -oh, boy, and travelled the country. But . . . . Q: ? A: ? Q: So you think things are better for women now? A: Well again, !--yeah, !---they have more opportunities, don't they? Q: Uhm uhm. A: Because of more opportunities, though, do they take life--well, maybe we took it too seriously. I think anybody that was raised during the depression, they used to--ah, you people weren't? 2: ? A: No. 2: ? A: No, I know you don't. But I mean, those who went through Depression find, we took life too seriously, and I think we still have that tendency to compare today all this money back to when you had nothing, or when you had maybe had one pair of shoes; the sole wore out. As I heard the other night on the radio, ----·just stick cardboard in your shoe. Now I'm not meaning that that happened with everybody and so today on, but ahm, oh, opportunities are greater I\ And again, if a woman feels that she wants to be outside the home, I think that's between the--if she's married, between her and her husband, jor something. It's hard to make a yes or no out of that, because j �-16there are different circumstances, different ..... You hear women saying, "Well, I have the brains, why shouldn't I do this if I can still have children and get the babysitter, in?" Well, when they get married, if they both think that way, well .... Q: It's hard to make a (end of tape) This has been Georgina Garrett talking to Mrs. Doreen Murray, June 21st, 1978, in Thunder Bay South. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Doreen Murray Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Description An account of the resource An oral history interview with Mrs Doreen Murray in Thunder Bay, June 21 1978, by Georgina Garrett. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of one side of a cassette tape, available here as an MP3 file. (Click on the speaker logo to play the file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. The interview talks about what farming life was like, the need for assistance, rural Women’s Institutes, and family life in the areas of Shabaqua, Pearson and Scoble. Discussions centre around women’s work, care for children, immigration, language, learning, and the resilience of families who settled into farm life. Mrs Murray, as a teacher in Northwestern Ontario in the bush, travelled out for the week to teach. She taught for eight years before getting married, moving to town, and starting her family. Returning to supply teaching while caring for a family, Mrs Murray shares about what it means for an individual to choose a job outside the home, through the Depression and the war. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-06-21 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Fort William Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/91434b931ba2389c30926c1409a42a5d.mp3 cfddfc33726ed0a849f96837eb6cae16 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/8478f1f25a8406e24446ac2f9c18fd09.mp3 a8244c78a9f5d7c2f9a30dc686df5f4c https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/37ca34e4b1b4a4a69b6b53165f6286de.mp3 807987e817ac16f7a7512d1a0d78a793 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/2d775f760650c71f26ab1c33f2f7c5d6.pdf 4f9e48cef8f2180259a6bcbfd49827ba PDF Text Text I ) HERSTORY PROJECT Mrs. Maki intervied by Georgina Garrett Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. In what year were you born Mrs. Maki? I was born in 1911. How long did you live in South Gilles? I lived in S. Gilles for 59 years. Why did your family go to S. Gilles - how did they get there? My mother and dad came from Finland but my dad came about two years before. He worked in the States for two years then he came to Port Arthur and he sent for my mother. My mother came with three children, two boys and a girl. and the little girl died about two weeks after with the whooping cough. So, my father looked for a farm for the best territory for the family. They settled in South Gilles which was a farm with a 160 acres and a little shack.,,,., Then, he started clearing land, there was about two acres clear and they got a call on credit from somewhere so that is where they started. My father sometimes worked out ten hours a day and he'd get / up early in the summertimes, about four or five o'clock and he'd clear land and go for work about seven. He'd come home in the evening and he'd again clear land until it was dark. How many acres did he finally manage to clear? Well, they:·had four farms and they managed to clear about 150 acres total. Then my brothers grew up and the family grew too - there was eight of us children living because two had died - and when the boys grew up they had to help out with the farm work, the cows had to be milked and the herd of cattle grew, they had about ten or twelve milking cows, pigs and mixed farming. Would you say that the farming was pretty prosperous out there? No, not in the first years. My father had a team of oxen and he used to go to work for the other farmers, and he got about a dollar a day , enough to buy groceries. It was pretty hard at first. My mother worked on the farm when my dad worked out and she worked in the hay fields and she raised the family, made her own soap - everything from scratch. Picked wild berries, grew a garden and knitted all the stockings and sweaters for the children, she'd sew when the children were put to bed, she'd sew to twelve or one o'clock in the morning. She just bought the material because it was cheaper ------- \ �to buy, the clothes were more expensive, so she did all the work herself. I really can't see how she did it all, she did the work of three women. I think maybe it would take half a dozen nowadays. So the boys grew up and some of us got married, two of my brothers stayed on the farm - they were bachelors. So finally they had two barns and a big house and all the working equipment - haybailers if they went to bail hay for the farmers in the fall for about three months. This is the way my parents and we lived until we got married. Q. Do you think it was a very satisfying life for your mother or do you think it was filled with drudgery? A. A lot of drudgery and no time for play. Of course women were satisfied. in a way because most women rad to do the same thing. Maybe some were better off - maybe they didn't have to manage the barn, maybe their husbands did it. Q. When my dad worked out, the boys did most of the farming. Who looked after the children in the early years when your mother had to do the farmwork? A. The old:er children. When we got the farm my older brother was about eight I at the time and he was left with the younger children and when I was six or seven, I was left at home all day to look after the kids. \ I changed their diapers, I washed dishes - I had to stand on a little stool, and there was a mountain of dishes and I still hate washing dishes. On the farm, if you had a big family you couldn't afford to send the children to school , I know I wanted to go in the worst way. ~-~f. high I went five and a half years to public school and I passed and they told me I was good in school so I tried everything but my dad couldn •t afford it. ,l And so very few I children went to high school even though there was a lot of smart kids I - but there was no money to be had. Q. Was your family close to other Finnish settlers? A. No, this was mostly an English community, they were the only Finns there. Dad had to learn some English when he worked out and he got along all right with the English but well, it wasn't easy. About twelve or thirteen years before the other settlers there came two or three families from Finland, to locate in South Gilles. Mother would visit people along with father Nolalu - all the way they'd drive with the horses or oxen. at And then we had a nice little lady _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ , she was. ·an assistant coach - well she could understand, my mother wouldn't know a word here or there, and she'd put it all together. She used to visit our place often and I remember her �when I was little, sometimes some of the things she told us ...... And they would walk a long way - some of them used to be ten mile walks. Then of course there was the Women's Institute but my mother didn't belong because she wasn't fluent enough in English. The Women's Institute· was a wonder- ---- ful thing though because they would go once a month and they'd all gather there. They would go with the horses and the men would go too - it was in the afternoon. The men would have a meeting by themselves and talk about farming and the women would have their meeting and talk about different ways • of doing things - making soap, preserving eggs. and preserving other things. They learnt a lot of things in the Women's Institute. I think it was sort I of a university for a lot of women. They were a very good organization. Q. A. Did you ever join? Yes, I'm a life member of the Women's Institute for almost forty years. I joined the institute ten years after I got married , and I found it very rewarding. I was at the time very shy, couldn't get up to speak or say anything but finally it was hard for me to say "I second the motion". Eventually I got up and gradually I was named for many ~ffices in the _, institute. I was in the Council for three years_; on the School Board, etc. Q. All this in South Gilles? Yes. That sounds like political involvement - how did you develop that way - to A. Q. A. Q. A. want to participate in the community? I'm an avid read.er, I read a lot and I think that then, the Women's Institute and everything helped. I had learned much more after I left public school than I ever learned in public .school. Bit by bit, reading and all that I became quite a politician. I know all the Conservatives and Liberals and CCF and Social Credit. I make it my business to know their pu.atf:orms and what they want to do and what their ideas are. Of course you can't really know politicians ,you have to take it with a grain of salt. When you were young did yoµ and your husband talk about politics? We did, right from the start. My husband did not go to school very long in Finland because where he lived they didn't have public schools until he was fourteen. He went to school for about one year but he's very good in arithmetic and he reads and writes and knowledgable in world af'fairs. He's like me he reads a lot of books and magazines - too many in fact. If I had had more education I would have been a politician. But, I haven't II �Q. A. got the gift of gab, if I'd have got more education perhaps I would have got the ability to phrase the words differently. Can you describe your life when you were a young woman in Gilles? What was it like for you? What kind of expectations did you have? He didn't have too many expectations because the times weren't very good and the Depression years struck us, mostly because we didn't have a chance to go to school - the majority of women, only two that I know of, went to high school, and they only went about two years. One started teaching and the other was a clerk. What we thought about was - you get marri-oo,____....,,. and you settle on a farm. This was our big objective, we couldn't think of anything else. Married women didn't go to work and in the Depression years if you were married and if you were a teacher, you couldn't get a job. The single people were hired, you could not get a job if you were married. It was thought that you would settle on a farm and somehow get enough to get clothes for yourself. Had wood stoves and box stoves and you would use them in the winter time for heat. You got goods like milk and butter from your cows, the eggs and meat from chickens and we'd grow a garden and grow potatoes, you could pick wild berries. . There was good food, no doubt about that. We had no meat freezers then but we put the carrots in the sand;with the other vegetables and things we would use the root cellar. The cellar was dug into a little hill and you'd line it with seed and - - - - - and put double doors on it and aJ.l the vegetables would be kept there. I know sometimes in July we had carrots that were just like they'd been taken out of the garden, they'd keep so well. And the potatoes and turnips and we make pickles of all kinds. There was no -- Q. A. problem in getting food on the farm, but it was trying to get anythin_g____; else that was bad, because money was so hard to come by. Where did you learn your skills to preserve food and meat? My mother mostly and from other women talking about how they did it and I'd get tips from others. I remember my mother - moose meat was always available, there was so many moose and deer running around the fields that I know a lot of: people shot them out of season because there were too many. My mother would clean, wash and drain the meat and she'd pack the meat in jars, about 1½ quarter or 2 quarter jars and she would add about a tbsp. of salt and put alspice on top, That would boil for about six or seven hours in a big wash boiler and you'd put little sticks on the bottom so �5 that the jars wouldn't hit the bottom and then you'd boil them outside and you kept them boiling for about six to nine hours. That meat was so delicious, I can't describe it to you, it had a flavour all it's own. It was better than any other canned meat I've tasted. Some people salted it down Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. A. but it had to soak for quite a while ' and then it was boiled or roasted with pork .• if you had pork you would put it on top because moose meat is very fat and deer meat is very fat. And my mother always made real soap from the fat and the bones were put in as well ..... this was good for washing clothes. Do you think there was a lot of co-operation between the women? Yes there was, but there had to be. My mother was having problems with the language and I would know the language from going to public school, so I would interpret for her. And then they had quilting bees and things like that. Do you think there was any ostracization of certain families if they were very poor? Yes, in a way there was. I know one family that was very poor and they had quite a few children and the other children would comment about their poor clothes .... And there was no social services, they couldn't get any help, but the children turned out very well, much better than anyone ever would have expected. Can you talk about some of the social activities that went on in South Gilles? Yes, box and pte socials and the picnics and the school concert - they were something because we had very little other recreation. Pie socials well it was a pie social, everybody would bring a pie and they would be auctioned off and you have the name and you'd have them all decorated, the handle and the pie plate and then the men would bid on these. Then they'd have another for younger people, from about 13,14 to 16 year olds and then the boys would bid on these. I remember one, we were at ---School which was about five miles from Gilles School, we went mostly to Gilles School but sometimes we went out there. And then there was the teacher, she had told her boyfriend what the pie was like so all the other young men, well, they had eyes and ears. Sure enough, he started bidding because he lmew it was the teacher's. Eventually he had to pay 13 dollars, for that pay, he had to work about a whole week. Where did the money go? It went to the school and hall. It was sort of a community affair. In the winter time sometime we had a social were the women provided a lunch, there �was no dance, and we had all kinds of games. Then there were the school picnics, where a big truck would take the school children and go to the _ _ and spend the day. There were platforms put on the bottomeof the truck and they weren't very well fastened so whenever we took a tum, the whole truck would sway. And then the school concerts, we used to prepare for that two months ahead. I remember going once to S. Gilles for the con- cert and it lasted to midnight - the different costumes and the work of the mothers and teachers, was tremendous. The concert usually ended after about an hour and a half to two hours but this lasted to midnight. It was a Christmas concert and it was performed five or six days before Christmas, but now it has been discontinued which is a shame because this was a type of training for the children - they took children from the audience who would do their piece if they had courage - it was a living process. they said the children spent too many hours of school time on it. But I rem- ember when I went to school, not one hour was spent of school time on it, was noon hour and recesses that we did all the work and practise for the concert. I think they should have been kept on in the country because the children don't have the same opportunity to perform before an audience ~, Q. A. _J_/}~- Who helped you when you had your children? There were midwiYes. J The majority of the women had their babies at home, and I know my mother had ten children and she was never in the hospital once, and everything turned out fine. The first time she went to the hospital was when she was seventy years old. died in our community at birth. I don't think there was a child that I think the women were stronger in those days, they worked until they were ready to have the baby, which helped I think because when you 're on the go you 're strong. I can remember one woman saying that this man 1-iad a horse and it was in foal, and he had a hired man so he says to him that the mare is in foal but be very careful of her, when you turn corners, turn them gently. But his wife was pregnant and she worked day and night and he never told her to take it easy. The young colt was worth money but the baby was just one too many. Q. What about heal th care? Did women give each other hints on that? A. We had old time cures for different things and if it didn't help well the person died ..... Cures like this didn't always work .... Q. Is there any interesting story or anecdote about your life or another woman's life you would care to relate? A. Q. I can't think of anything. In what way? Just a story or concerning what? Something that shows your pioneer spirit, or maybe just a woman who stands �out in your mind; what she did for the community etc. A. Well, in the community I was in everything. as an individual. Politically I had never held although I had been interested in it, but I had not had enough an office education. Of course I went to all the political meetings etc. and I helped when they had an election as a scrutineer. They gave me the papers and told me how to do it and I worked on that. Q. What about in S. Gilles, what kind of work did you do there? A. I worked as a farmer's wife but then I was on the Council for years, I was still on the Council before I left. Q. Were there a lot of women on the Council? A. Not very many and I was elected yea:r: after yea:r, and then I was on the School Board for ten yea:rs, but I had to retire from the boa.rd. Q. What gave you this idea to run for office? A. Some people asked me. position myself. I think I would have been to timid to go for the I was a timid woman, I didn't put myself forward at all, I always had a low estimation of myself. Q. Do you think that is typical of farmwomen, I mean they were a pretty independant lot, why did they feel timid? A. Because I think most of them had very little education, I think most of them didn't even have grade school. The times were so, that if they got grade school educations they were lucky, most people thought that it wasn't worth educating a girl. F,ducate the boys if you can, but a girl - I remember my father saying to me - "Well you can change diapers withou;t· an education' ' . The way he put it, I would be a wife and I'd have children and I'd have a home. Q. This was the attitude of most of the community. I've heard that most rural women had more education than their husbands because the boys had to be taken out of school to do farmwork. A. This is true, as far· as the husbands go. education than their husbands. I think most of the women had more The new school was built and the old school was moved to the other side, and a new road was built. things. And yo, organized A new Ladies Aid of the United Church ..... the small church faded out of the picture after, For yea:rs, the co.:..ops existed, and then I was a member of the board of directors because there were very many co-ops then. There were many meetings I had to go to and I was the first secretary of the Hall Board, and I don 't know how I ever got the time. Q. Can you talk about your farmwork, what kind of working day you had on the farm? �q A. Well, it was niixed farming. We had chickens and cows and of course in the Depression years we worked on the farm and I did a little bit of sewing. We cleared. the land but we moved - we stayed on that farm for about three yea.rs. We moved to another farm and we built a new house and we had cows for a while but we decided to go into poultry and we built a poultry house. We found it very rewarding in the way of money as well. We got more raised than we bought actually because we bought themaa day old and they always would give us three or four extras for each hundred, so we raised more poulets than we paid for. Very few of them died. During the summer we would take many hundreds of them to Safeway - so we got double the price. Q. Did you dress them and kill them? A. We killed them and dressed them but they were New York fashion - we didn't take the insides out - we kept them cool for the night and the butcher shop did the cl ea.ning. We plucked them, my husband knew a way to kill them you know, to pierce the brain and then they were plucked and with a blow torch any hair that was left was singed, then they'd be cleaned and wrapped in wax paper. As for the eggs, we had a good market for our eggs. People say that chickens smell, well our didn't. , we had a ventilation system that was really good. We never cleaned the litter it crone up to about 10,12 inches high and it was dry. We had to clean what dropped out and the wire under the roost so that the chickens would never get under the dropping pens. In the daytime when they were scratching, all the droppings would fall into the litter and it would dry. Q. Did you like working with the animaJ.s? Did you do as much work with the chickens as your husband? A. Yes. ActuaJ.ly in the summertime he would look after the big house and feed all the chickens in the big house, while I looked after the young ones on the range. of it. We had them fenced in and good grass so that they'd eat a lot I liked the chickens, and I had the garden and about an acre of lal-m with lots of flowers and trees, and we planted about a hundred trees. When we first moved there there was nothing but jack pine so we had to cut them all and replant. Cutting that lal-m was a lot of work - three hours with that lawnmower, sometimes people would stop there and look. I remember someone telling my neighbor - "You know, I just had to stop my car and look at that place". We sold it and left it. Ue went out of the 'chicken bus- iness because it wasn't very1good any more and chicken ranches were coming up where they'd have 30,000 chickens, they ran it much more efficiently. We bought this house two and a half years before we moved here. the farm that much but I miss the neighbors. I don't miss We had good friends and that �Q. is what I miss the most. It seems that a lot of women in the country were really more involved in the community than those in the city were. Do you think that their opinion was always respected as equals to the men? A. I'm not sure but I think they were. I know a lot of women used to take part in events, and they had a Ladies Aid of the United Church and then they had the Women'·s Institute but they didn't last very long. Put the I don•~ know why. Women's Institute together and no matter what - dinners etc. they always came to the Women's Institute, and they would do it. There was a lot of co-operative women, they helped in any way they could, if someone asked them to something to raise funds for the Cancer Society, they would and everyone knew that others benefitted. Q. One person I talked to remarked that if it wasn't for the women, the communities would not have got settled because women worked with groups. A. Yes, I think it was the women in the community who worked so hard. I rem- ember when we were in the first haJ.1., it was the Women's Institute Hall, it was only insured for : two thousand dollars and it burnt - it was worth five thousand. All the equipment burnt and everything. With four thousand dollars, the Community Center was started and we put out tenders and it was the bare necessities that were put up first and later on it was renovated. It was the Women's Institute who started all this and it wouldn't have been there if not for the women. Q. They were the organizers? A. Yes they were the organizers of the Hall, of course we got the co-operation of the men too. The women planned these things and of course you had to get the men - you can't build anything without the men. Q. Do you think it was more important to the women to have community organizations? A. Yes, I think so. The women looked at things a little differently than men. They raised their children and I think the women looked ahead more than the men. Q. How did the climate and physical environment of Northwestern Ontario affect your life? A. It curtailed our social life to a great extent in the winter time because the roads weren't open and when we went to school we had to walk on the sleigh trail of the horses which had gone by previously. Later on they made a snow plow and they had about 17 horses and a dozen men behind which would go ahead of the horses and clear a little snow if there was an especially bad snowdrift. In the summertime it wasn't that bad but again �(O the roads were very poor, the ruts were six, s even inches deep, but the old Tin Lizzy would go over anything. The cars then were higher off the ground so they didn't scrape the bottom. It took us about two hours to get to the city and that's a long time. We used to walk - five miles was nothing to wa']k to a dance, so we'd walk there, dance all night, and walk back home again. I think that we wanted to go so bad that five miles was nothing. Q. What was your earliest recollection of your mother or some other woman that was important in your life? A. I think Aunt Cassy was another woman who was very important in my childhood. She was always meek and merry, she'd be always laughing and talking. She wasn't really my aunt her name was Mrs. Carson, everyone called her Aunt c~assy. Q. What qualities about her did you ad.mire? A. Actually she was very jolly and I think this was what drew me to her more than anyone else. A child likes a jolly woman - she'd talk to the child- ren and laugh - I can't re~ber anything else but her personality. Q. You didn't get the impression that she found her life greulling etc. A. No, she had a very simple life - a house with two rooms , one was used a the bedroom and the other as a dining room and kitchen. I remember as a child papering all the wa1ls with newpaper and it wasn't rea1ly effective. see some people now papering their dens with newspaper . -would do that and everything was neat and claan. I Every year she The study was inside and because of the rough boards it was rea1ly hard to paper and I don't know how many layers of peper she had to use on that. Q. She never had any children? A. No. Q. How did she gain her 0)id w 1{Q(lLiskills? A. I don't know, she came from t C East and I don't know whether she ·just practised herself or if she found out from somebody else. Q. What do you think was the hardest part of being a country woman in the old days was? A. The hardest part was the work and I don't think there was much social life. Q. • •••• Very few people could afford reading material. If someone got a book it wa : passed around the whole community ..... Do you think there has been a positive change in the woman's role �• • A. even as farmwomen? I think there has been a big change. I think after the Second World War when women went out to work, there has bit by bit been a change in the men's attitute towards women. independant. Now the majority of women work and they a.re Before I remember women had to beg for m:oney from their husbands for groceries etc. Q. There doesn't seem to be the closeness among ruraJ. women as their used to be. A. No, one goes om:J way and the other one goes another way. We used to stick together in the old days, of course then we had no recreation and no transportation. They just get into the car and go now. Everything now is youth orientated and the older people seem to be left out. I don't think it is a matter of respect, but they don't seem to care for the old folks as much as they used to. The young women nowadays a.re much more freer. I think there has been a big change. Q. Do you think they lost something not being as close to other women? A. I think in a way they have. , ...... . Q, Can you taJ.k about your work in the co-operatives? How did you get involved in the first place? A. He had just one store in the community and you would go to the store and you'd have to wait a.round for an hour or a half an hour for them to open the store, !nd when they went to dinner for an hour the store would be closed again. So the farmers were getting pretty disgusted so they said the best thing would be to open a co-op store. be open aJ.l the time. If they had a co-op it would So the people donated logs and lumber and they had one carpenter and the whole store was worth it. The men and women both worked and this is where I got involved in the store, and the store was built and people started living - it was a wonderful thing for the community. You would sell your work, and the milk was taken to the dairies - of course there was the co-op dairy for a while. their milk than they ever did. that wa:sn 't very good. People got so much more for They did have a truck hauling cream but But the milk, the money really started coming in. Then if you needed anything from the city, you di:dn 't have to go there yourself, the co-op truck would bring anything you needed. You could sell everything like your hay, at a much better price than you used to. So then I got into the committee work and then they joined with the co-operative in Port Arthur and everybody bought shares. �• Q. When did it start to decline? A. Q. What was the role of women in the co-operative? 'A.. do? Girls and young women in the community would work there. Q. Did women do any organizing work for raising funds? A. Yes. cash. What kind of work did they The co-op should not have given credit, it should have been strictly This is when it declined. because people wouldn't pay their bills. I think they just should have had it on a cash basis. We could have sold the goods much cheaper if only cash were used. Q. Can you remember the P & D and what kind of effect it had on the community? A. Yes, it was a wonderful thing at first. The farmers would haul the ties up to Hymers etc. but when the trucks came, I think this was the decline of the P & D. Because people didn't go to the city by train anymore, they got cars and when trucks came, the people started hauling wood via trucks. Q. Did you know Mr~.Mitchell at all? A. No, I didn't but I knew some people who knew her very well. down in the other end, she lived in Whitefish. She lived way She was quite a woman, and that book she wrote, I just read it. Q. You said that your mother and father were from Finland, what kindoof things did your mother do to preserve her Finnish culture? Do you think that was important to her? A. I don't think at that time. She just worked and worked, she didn't do any- thing else, and there weren't too many Finns in the community. There were three other farms which were Finnish and that was in 1920 and mother had lived in an English community for years. So I don't think she did anything to restore it, except speak the language. I started learning and she would help me with the writing and spelling. Q. How did you feel? A. I don't know ...... . Did you want to preserve your culture? � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Impi Maki Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Release form was obtained by the Herstory project, allowing the recording to be shared and used. Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Thunder Bay Canada - Ontario - South Gilles Description An account of the resource Oral history interview with Mrs. Impi (Tissari) Maki in Thunder Bay on June 27, 1978, by Georgina Garrett. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of three sides of two cassette tapes, available here as MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play the files.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. Mrs Maki was born in 1911 and lived in South Gilles for 59 years. Her father immigrated from Finland and worked in the US for two years before moving to Port Arthur and her mother then immigrated with three young children. Buying 160 acres, they cleared the land and began farming. The interview talks about her mother's work on the farm and raising a family of ten children. Discussions centre around the rural community, family life, farming, women's organizations and women's work. Mrs Maki speaks about being involved in political meetings, community leadership, the Women's Institute and the Co-op Store. The interview offers a detailed look at farm life in a rural community in Northwestern Ontario from women's lived experiences through life in the Depression, WWII and beyond. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978-06-27 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/80015bcb0b1896dd779115222e8a99d7.mp3 7864cb6fd1e2eeb6f52d49e2cd73dfa6 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/5b809326085f5e608a1cfb1c28892ba6.mp3 c6df8efcda58db1010370169bb508415 https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/5fb275888be553dc27019b0504bf328a.pdf 0d4ef5066ba8d7025f6681928ebe73ab PDF Text Text J HERSTORY PROJECT Mrs. Kamstra interviewed by Georgina Garrett Q. A. Q. A. I'd like to talk about the relationship between women out in the country were women close to each other, was there a lot of co-operation? They were all very independant ... Yes. You had to be close enough to feed a threshing gang. What do you mean, feed a threshing gang? The threshing gang would come in and the man with the machinery - there would be a man who had a threshing machine, and he made it pay by going around to farmers and threshing for them. The usual thing was the waiting for-the thresher to come around. When the threshing gang came with the thresher, which was as many neighbors as possible, so the farmer's wife has to cook a whole bunch of pies, because no farmer's wife would thin.k of having a threshing dinner without scads of pies. So the pies had to be made and the roast had to go in and you couldn't do it alone - that is when you had to be close to somebody. I used to be jealous of the men because they had a great deal going for them, they seemed to have a lot of fun, what with the dirty jokes going around, and the only person who had a hard part was the owner of the farm. He had to do the dirty work, he had to stay in the maw? that is where all the junk and charr'··goes and that is the jo·b for the family whose grain is being threshed. So th~y would go in with kerchiefs and red handkerchiefs and they would come out of it with bloodshot eyes, and it was very hot weather and that job was the hard part, but only when it was on your place. I saw that this was fun for the men and a sweat for the women, but then what I noticed about the old-timers was that they got such a big high - the women out of producing enough and with quality, then everybody would say, whether they meant it or not, what a wonderful dinner that was. The closeness that had happened in the early days, I used to wonder about it because they lived so far apart and they had to walk to visit, so that a visit meant a whole day, and they would spend a whole day with their neighbor. Then they would have it to talk about when they got home, but they weren't in each other's hair a whole lot, they would really put all their effort into going to that place for a whole day. When I came to the country, that was all over. Those \ �people were reminiscing about the good old days and what they had had and how close they were. But in reality I used to wonder how this was because it didn't happen very often that they got together. Q. Maybe it was more of the quality than the quantity. A. I think so. Q. In what year were you born? A. '20. Q. How long have you lived in South Gilles? A. I went there first in '38, I went to Scobo\!. which is in the S. Gill es area, I think the deep issues had to be dealt with on those days. three miles away from Gilles. That was my school, down there. I was there for two years. Q. Can you talk about how you became a teacher? A. Yes, I was born in England an9- I was a baby when we came to Canada. Did you say you were British? My parents came from Surrey in 1921 and my father's family had to come here in 1913, My grandfather was brought here to be the city roads supervisor and all his life he seemed to gripe a lot because when he got over here, assuming that this job was waiting for him, they had given the job to somebody else. Q. What was it like for your grandmother coming from England to Thunder Bay? A. She was another very determined little lady. She was five feet tall and my grandfather was six feet three inche~ she was so short that she had no lap. She had quite a strong temp-er and she was uneducated, she couldn't write and she had to sign her name with an 'X' I think. by his sister so he Imew how to write. My grandfather had been taught She just fought her way. When my mother came in 1921 we were afraid of Gran Adie. Q. Did your mother come over as a child? A. My mother married Gran Adie's oldest son. She came to Canada in '13, then there was the war and my father, her son, was in the war so afterwards he and his bride .... Q. So your mother was a warbride? A. No.not exactly. They had been married. in England and had my older sister, so there was a four year old and a one year old come to Canada. My grandmother had this fight to survive, so much so, that my mother could har:aJ.y survive. Have you seen the show "Upstairs, Dmmstairs", well my mother wasaa downstairs. She was a housemaid, she would be very angry if l did.n 't get her proper position. She was a parlour maid which was a little further up the rung. She had learned from the aristocracy some of the social graces and some of the fLr1er things. She had access to music and art and she wanted her children 7- �to have some of the finer things in life. earth you know, By God. My grandmother was right down to The thing to do was to make money, and making money was what my grandmother was about doing. Q. How did she go about that? A. She pushed my grandfather, and he never measured up. She was just a woman. He did the best he could. She came to Canada thinking she was going to be the wife of the city engineer and it didn't work out that way. My grandfather got the supervisor of the incinerator job down at the end of town where nobody who was a nice person was supposed to go. That was a whole part of my life, that I used to go down and visit my grandfather at the incinerator and found such lovely, warm people dmm there. My poor mother was afraid that if we went down to that end that we would be raped. It was really such an. education and right away I cuuld see the pulls as a little one. Q. Very class conscious. A. Our street in Westf ort - Brooks St. - there were Roman Catholic and Protestant fights. We were Anglicans and most of the people down that md were United Church and Methodists and Presbyterians and they were having their little thing. Besides that there were the Italian immigrants up the road that every- body caJ.led waps and we wea.-e not aJ.lowed to call waps. Then there were the Poles and the Ukrainians and there was a reaJ.ly strange thing that you couldn't figure out. We were not allowed to go out of our gate, other kids were al- lowed to play on the Francis St. playground and there was a mix-up of the races there, but from my mother's background, she had to keep us English, but my grandmother was going to stay English but she was going to fight her wa;y out there. She was rough, very class conscious, but she was go:ing to be up because she had been down in England. As I got older I discovered that this was an ingredient of the immigrants of all of the races, and the ones who came here were the fighters and that's why we had so many fights. They had to survive and the only way they knew how was to push the other down. My maternal grandmother was the same and I didn't know her but I heard and I've gotten to know some of my cousins in England and her daughters, half of her family said that she was a "proper bitch" but my mother adored her, so the other said that mother would favor a daughter - there was a lot of sibling rivalry going on. But that old girl brought all her dau&1ters - she had a family of te:n and eight survived, four girls and four ,lx>ys and she brought the daughters through the terror of the war._ by her strange strength and by J �her ability to do midwife things. People were afraid of her but she was also in charge when there were crisis situations. She was an amazing woman that none of the cousins or second cousins Imew. She wouldn't hesitate to leave the old man - she did the terrible thing of separating from the old man. Q. Was there very m'l;ich separation? How common was that in the c·ountry? A. Mrs. Turk saw for herself a role that was more than being a mother. Q. Was that because she had been a teacher? t. I think so. She had experienced being put up on a pedestal and she liked it. She had a way of talking, she didn't talk like the rest of toem, she talked with a bit of an accent, I don't know quite what it was. little American sinoe her mother was American. to have change take place in people. -- Could have been a There was a lady who was able She was able to do it with kindness and warmth and streffi.h and she was no underdog. She was quite beautiful. She kept her Anglicanism and when I first moved out into the country I was an Anglican and she used to come, she was a·bout 80 yrs. old, to our house. Our new little house, the bride in the community and we would have the priest come to our house for Communion and there was just this quality about her. +'\thought she was a lady because her behavior met with my ideals of what a woman should be. Her husband was a very amusing man, she used to do the right and proper thing and she didn't believe in booze. But old Bill Mitchell, who was the dearest, sweetest, funniest man - going through rough days but being able to see the funny side. He used to say that he unscrewed his wife's blueberries in order to get a little bit of fermented juice down. away with that - I don't know whether she knew it or not. He got From what I know of her, she probably knew it and let him get away with it. Q. How do you think they raised their daughter so that she had the gumption to leave her husband? A. I don't know. All I ever knew of Annie was that I felt sorry for her. In getting into the education thing.·:like me, you start to feel yourself being pulled away from the people that you love. Being put on some kind of a level that you '.re not prepared for and don't want. Because you have the name schoolteacher. Q. Can you talk about that level? The women teachers ..,I have talked to didn't talk about that, I know they were respected - but what kind of respeci;? A. It was resptct for a person who could lift themselves up to such a status as a teacher - they really had a high expectation of a teacher. �You couldn't live up to that because you had a certain area of expertise and it was very, very, narrow. You went into a culture that was foreign to you and you had to learn about the culture in order to funct ion. Sometimes you had to get in there and ask questions that were embarrassing. I asked too many why questions. I know that They became threatening to people - usually the wives or mothers of the families I taught. They would be people that you knew and immediately they would start play acting in some strange way that I couldn't understand. It would be a kind of "put the teacher down" game. "Put her in her place", I felt, but I couldn't understand what place. didn't understand their jokes, because it is a cultural thing. I I didn't understand why I had to be called Peaches, why couldn't I have been called Freida? You have to have a nickname here, so I tried to understand it but it didn't fit right with me. Then there were the husbands who flirted with me and who came on fast at the dances. I had to keep that to myself - I didn't understand it - I was only 18, and I was the teacher, this almighty teacher. I needed somewhere to go to talk about these funny things that were going on between the mothers of the children and the fathers. I could see that some of the fathers were doing mean things to their wives, and the wives didn't Imow. The wives were providing - they went out to the blueberry patch - although there is a side issue here since the wives got freed.om in the blueberry patch. That was also a status thing, how many better berries you can put on the table. The women had to provide the food, and I noticed that in one or two families that I boardedwwith, that the big thing for the father to do was to e;o out and hunt. in the fall to make sure there was enough meat and yet the wife had to stay home and do all the cutting of the wood to keep them warm, and harnass her kids to that. Q. You were a teacher in the time of male supremacy,- and yet most of the teachers were women, and were highly respected. A. It's not quite respect. It was respectiin the way that they were being looked at "respicio" - the latin word. at and they were being tested. And they were really being looked Tested against the former teacher. I had a Danish woman who used to come in and she had come to Canada with her husband and she was having this male-female fight. It was a fight - he used to chase her doim the road in the night and he had some kind of a drum ... it was really weird. Eventually I got to thinking that these people were crazy. She had been the former janitress and when I came, I was a new 5 �teacher and they also had a new janitor and so she was going to see what she wanted in the building because it had been hers before". She used to come around and peer through the windows and ask me questions about my program. I was scared of her and she was an example of the way the teachers were being tested. When the mothers would get together the teacher was alQ. A. way~ the topic of conversation. Do you think it was because the teacher was so important in their childrens life, and the mothers hoped that they would rise above their station, so the teacher was responsible? Yes, I'm sure, but the teacher wouldn't dare letoon ... for example, I remember one of the fathers giving me the third degree on Shakespeare. And to teach after Grade 10 and what I knew about Shakespeare was what in high school and it was Macbeth and Hamlet, and if he got me out I was sunk. But I didn't dare tell him because he was a member of I had I got of that the school Q. board. It doesn't sound like you enjoyed being a teacher that much - some of the A. other women say it was a great part of their lives. Maybe they say so but at that time, there were many of us who had great doubts and breakdowns. When we could get into town we had a Saturday where we would just talk shop all the time and we'd exchange seat work to keep the kids busy next week. Our real community on the education line had to be the teachers getting together on Saturday - had to keep that connection in order to develop our teaching skills. If you talk to me about the Christmas concerts-never have I reached that peak of power and creativity. That was mighty powerful stuff - you used your whole being and every scrap of paper and every crayon you could get a hold of and you had nothing, not even toilet paper to work with. You had to produce a Christmas concert and by God if you didn't you were fired, because the Christmas concert came right before the annual school board meeting, when you weren't there, and many teachers, if their concert didn't measure up were fired. Q. What things made the conditions of the concert so significant? A. It was the one thing that everybody went to and brought them all together with shared purpose. It took care of all the aches and pains of the year. There were tears and there was laughter and hugging, and bottles passed around. Santa Claus was usually drunk and you hadato have a few under your belt to play the part. I don't think I'm exaggerrating, everyone was there, so the �struggle for survival was forgotten, it was a ritual which mended the hurt feelings. If the teacher had a creative bent at all, then she collected a big ;high from the Christmas Concert, and a sense of power. I got the sense that this was what I was created for. , I can do this and do it well. The sad pa.rt was that like all things it got out of balance and some teachers thought that the focal point was the concert, started practising for it in September. The academic part of it was lost therefore, the inspectors dictated that the concert had to go. There doesn't seem to be a place where the community can get together now. Q. Why didn't many women have anything to do with the Women's Institute? A. That sounds as if not many did but a lot of women did and it did serve an educational meet, and a social meet. least once a month. Oh God how they needed that meet at The Women's Institute as you '11 notice is not a big organization, numbers-wise, ... Q. The number of wanen in . the countryside are shrinking. A. That's not so, maybe it is. powering. In my communitythe young women there now is over- I am so surrounded by young wives now, more than I've ever been. It's not trueethat the population of women are shrinking in my community. Q. Women, one in particular, attributed the decline of the Women's Institute' in her community with the introduction of automobiles. You are now able to drive into the city and have much more leisure time, so that rural values and comerad.erie were no longer necessary. A. There is truth in that. I suppose it is hard for any organization to be flexible enough to meet the changing needs. That's what happened in my estO imation - they d'idn 't have either the knowledge? or the understanding? who had any understanding of what was happening in the sixties? the Women's Institute understand it? input from the people. How could There was no roomiin their format for You did the 4-H program, and I also remember when I gqt into the Indian communities how badly those people asked. They wanted to Imow recipes, they wanted to Imow how to live in the present when they had to deal with food out of cans and different food. the very program that the Institute was offering. They were asking for The 4-H clubs were mar- vellous and they taught how to sew, and cook and also a lot of creative craft and they had experts in the field brought into the community so that you weren't getting old hat information - you were getting top notch infor- 7 �mation on budgeting_ and so on. The Department of Agriculture had that pro- gram, Indians were wanting it but the Department which is behind the Women's Institute - I talked to the top people in the Department personally - they couldn't do it, they couldn't change the program. That was an example of why the Institute failed. Q. It couldn't change the program to adapt to Indians? A. Yes, for inst.ance, these people couldn't write so they had to keep notes. Q. It sounds likeyyou were rather ostracized from the S. Gilles community because of your priveledged. position in your husbands' household compared to other farm women. Were you ever able to establish a feeling of closeness with neighboring farm women? A. I found that happened now, only now. Q. Did midwives ever help you? A. No, I had my children in a hospital. The only emotional experience I had with that was when I first came to the country in '38 and one of the little boys who I was teaching in Grade One, his mother had died in childbirth. Aunt Cassie had been there and the doctor from Hymers had been called but they couldn't with their expertise, save her. anything about midwifery. After that I didn't hear 6nly the very poor people took advantage of that. I remember a Hrs. Barret - she used to deliver some of her neighbor's babies. That was in the '40's. Q. How did the climate and envioronment of N.W.O. specifically affect your life? How was it different being a woman in N.W.O. as opposed to the Praries? A. Elsie Couch's father was the pioneer of H:¥Jllers. They came in and they got into the surveying and the men in those days seemed to get access to the outside world and the women got "bushed". This was the word that was used. Q. Hhat did ''bushed' mean? A. I don't really Imow, except that the women who used it to me said that "I'm getting bushed", and she hungered to be in the town where things were going on, to talk to people. It was used by other people in a sort of way the people took for meaning that someone was going crazy. eral women who went that way. I have known of sev- I'm thinking of several whose burdens were so great and there was no place to go. If they went to any tof these strong women, their message was that "you have to be strong", and they couldn't. So they just left the world of reality, and that is how I assessed beine; "bushed". Mr. Hy.mers was a beautiful, intelligent, wise man but his wife �was said to be crazy, you could.n 't communicate with Iher. She died at 60. Mrs. George Hy.mers. With the Mi tchells and with the Couchs, with the Hy.mers - these were people from affluent parts. The Couchs came from Absley Ontario and they had already raised their kids and they brought the last half of their family up here to start freshebecause of _ _ _ __ killing the old man Moses. The Hl{Illers were adventerors, and wanted to see it all. The next generation something happened, since they d.idn 't have access to education. In comes a green little school teacher and they a.re suprised at the lack of better education. One of that man's daughters told me a story of her uncle who had been caught, stuck down by a thunderbolt and she had the thunderbolt on the fireplace to prove it. Now that is just the next generation you see. Q/ A. Q. A. She didn't' know 1·rher8 China was, their world was there and that was all. It was an urban platter of e;oodies that they resented. Partly that, but there was something else. It had to do with the male-female thing because the teacher was a threat, she was someone who could, and felt it necessary, and the measure of her was how she could stand up to a man, and to the school board. The school board boys were caught in this attraction and making a man out of her too. How did you deal with that personally? I was very naive and the only thing I knew was that I was a woman and a woman gets married. It is very good that I have my teacher's certificate and I'm glad I had that training because at least I could give m~ kids something that the others didn't have. That whole thing was in my heart but then I saw how it separated - just with b~ing with me - the mothers in the country refused to realize that they were also teachers. I could.n 't do anything really worthwhile unless I took all the kids, so I got myself involved with the children. I had to go through about ten years of undoing and unlearning and to turn myself in some direction. I could function with the children because they were honest- there was no way I ought to have discussed anything with the parents - there leave you with the impression that I hated longed in the Women's Institute and that is she couldn't tolerate the Women's Institute now there was a woman who was strong in her while was no way I could. I probably all people who believed and benot so. But Vi for instance, - Vi Woodbeck, your aunt opinions about J:Ihat is worth- �She could.n 't stand all this bloody gossip - she couldn't take it - she hadn't the time for it. There was too much to be done, she had to raise all her kids and Orbie was so beautiful and sexy and women all just loved Orbie. just had it with the women. He Attractive young wives and women, he made them feel great - but he didn't know how to earn money. She had to feed the kids so she had to work and she didn't have time to spend at a bloody meeting. Q. A. Your grandmother didn't go to the Women's Institute. They were sort of solitary, they didn't open up much. Mrs. Garrett opened up to me. I found her far from solitary. She looked after my kids when I decided to go back to teaching, because they couldn't get teachers when my kids needed teaching. Q. A. This was in the fifties, '58. Well she was quite old then. Yes, I guess so. She came and looked after my kids and did the housework while I went and taught school. She was very free. There was a closeness among the women but there was also a very destructive grapevine. When things were okay - if I need your friendship right now, I'll accept your inadequacies and I will acPept you as a friend. But if a time comes that you might beat me out in a power struggle, then I'll use that information you gave me, against you. Mrs. Kamstra told me to stay out of the organization and if you go into it, be very careful of what you let out. I think that was a truism and it's a natural human thing. Q. Is there an interesting story or anecdote about your life or another woman's life you would care to relate? A. My favorite story - I'm 18 years old and Mrs. Nielson with the brown eyes and crazy look has been coming two or three times a week and harassing me. It is about quarter to nine and I'm at the school - I walked the mile to the school - some of the kids have to come three miles and some on bare feet. What they had for lunch was lard on stale bread. They also had lice in their hair and they had to have it c.u t off because they had so many scabs. coping with this as a Westf ort girl who had never been to the country. woman is coming and telling me I don't know how to run a school. she came in again and I was frightened. I'm This This day She came, up to me again and I broke down and I was so mad at myself for crying but I didn't break down when she was there. She had left and wen to get her mail where she told all the stories of what was going on in the school. I had 33 children and up to grade nine that year. Colleen Haywood nee Lark was in that school and her brother �Bill and Art, Art was 13 years old, and he had a crush on me. We were in love with each other I think, he was a terribly attractive boy and he made my life almost impossible for me because he teased me and he wouldn't do his work and he goaded me into disciplining him. He was the first one to come into school after Mrs. Nielson left - he had just walked two miles. He caught me crying and asked me what was the matter and I told him what Mrs. Neilson had said about our school. He asked me where she went and I told him that she propably went to get the mail. I then decided I had better get the work on the board and then I went to ring the bell and there were no kids. my kids with Art Lark in the lead paraded into Mrs. Nielson's yard. that I had really done it now - there's going to be war for sure. All I thought Then the kids came back and they were angels that day and when they came in Art told me that she wouldn't bother me again. And she didn't. Somehow I guess that gave me the strength - I've always relied on the kids. I became a community with the kids rather than with the parents. That is a moment in my life that stands out. Q. Do you remember Aunt Cassie at all? A. No, I just remember her horse. People had a lot of respect for her. Those two women - Vi Woodbeck and your grandmother - . the way they went about being themselves, they wore the pants in the family. father, I think he died soon after I crune. women. I am. I don't remember your grand- They were considered strong Pinky is the next generation and Elsie is quite a bit younger than They have been going all around, visiting those country people, all around the mail route, I don't know how many years. or longer. Maybe 15 .,or 20. years They had been at the pulse of the c.ommuni ty. That is were you pick up the news of who is dy.ing, who is pregnant and who is sleeping around, this kind of gossipy stuff and it's chewed over by the regular folks. You find out the values of the community right there, and those who were deviating from it. They seemed to be doing a very subservient job to people, they are waiting on their husbands a lot of them thought. I have heard over the last 3 or 4 years from someone of some of the unpaid, loving jobs that they have done because they wanted to. The lonely women who are out there get connected by that truck coming around, and the women who can't speak English or write it, depend on them. Pinky g oes out on that truck and she is all sort of rattly sometimes, and she doesn't know the value of her work at all. Even if you told her, she wouldn't believe you. . .... My salary was$690 per year. �• They kept it under $700 because of some bookwork. get a thousand dollars. It was always like that. Men doing the same would There was something so priceless and precious about men at that time because so many had been killed. Killed in the war, so that when I went to normal school there were only 8 boys and one of them is the head of education here, in town. I was a better school teacher, I know I was, I rated much higher, marks-wise. But there was no way I would aspire to be the Director of Education. Q. What were the war years like in South Gilles? A. It didn't touch us too much. of them did not go overseas. friends which affected me. Except the people whose boys went over. Most It was my high school chums and my brother's My husband had to stay on the farm, they made him stay there. It says here about the positive change in the women's role in the community - I think there is a very strong change. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Herstory Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Herstory: Freda Kamstra Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Permission to make this interview public has been given by Freda's granddaughter. Subject The topic of the resource People Women's History Description An account of the resource Oral history interview with Mrs Freda Kamstra by Georgina Garrett. The interview is a part of the Women's Decade Council Herstory project. The recording consists of two sides of a cassette tape, available here as two MP3 files. (Click on the speaker logo to play the file.) The transcript is available by clicking on the image thumbnail. The interview uses language that is no longer used and may be offensive in nature. The interview begins with Freda speaking about companionship between country women. This is spoken about through the lens of cooking large meals to feed groups of men working the threshing machines. They go on to speak about Freda's and her families past including their immigration from England to Canada. Freda speaks about her paternal grandmother and how she was quite hotheaded and determined. Freda then speaks about early life in Thunder Bay and how the mixing pot of different religions, cultures and races led to a large amount of conflict. She speaks about Mrs. Turk and her mother, her mother being a woman she seemed to find a role model in who was a teacher and whose "behaviour met with my ideals of what a woman should be". She also touches on how she felt separated from her peers due to her families' status. Freda then goes on to speak about her experiences being a school teacher and how she was put on a pedestal of which she did not care for. She explains that women teachers at this time had a great deal of expectations put on them by society that could be very difficult to keep up with. She talks about how the pressure affected her mentally and that she was constantly in fear of being fired. Freda then speaks about some of the issues with the Women's Institute and touches and the lives of some of the Indigenous People's during that time. She expands on her thoughts on the Women's Insitute, speaking on how she used to think that women were born to get married and have children and she thus clashed with many of the opinions of other women. She also did not appreciate the gossip and the on/off nature of her relationships with many of the women. Freda then reminisces on one of the great moments of her teaching career where she found community with her students, particularly a student named Art. She also states that she liked the kids and relied on them much more than the parents. The recording ends with Freda touching on the wage gap between male and female teachers and how men were treated extra special during this time due to the war. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Northwestern Ontario Women's Decade Council Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3 PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Audio Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - South Gilles https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/1/1760/111218-011.jpg d4fbc448007bba75122e208287e61004 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society Collection Subject The topic of the resource Finnish-Canadians Life in Thunder Bay Description An account of the resource Photographs collected by the Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society from a wide range of collectors, documenting Finnish immigration to and life in Thunder Bay. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Thunder Bay Finnish Canadian Historical Society Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Lakehead University Library Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Finnish Christmas post card created between 1906 and 1918 Subject The topic of the resource Communities in Northwestern Ontario Description An account of the resource Handmade colour Finnish post card of a Christmas scene including a holiday bell, farmhouse and ivy. Finnish message "Hauskaa Joulua" (Merry Christmas). There is no address on the postcard Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource On the bottom of the post card is" Ida ja Juho Johnson" (Ida and Juho Johnson Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Public domain Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Post card Language A language of the resource Finnish Type The nature or genre of the resource Still image Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context MG8,C,4,1,I21 scan 111218-011 Christmas card hand made holiday greeting https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/07241a0332240308077b5520ebdb088e.pdf 74917b0eb4b161fd6d1721b9d9333952 PDF Text Text ONTARIO COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARIANS Notice of Meeting The Ontario Council of University Librarians will meet in the Senate Chamber of University of Toronto, April ,20 and Friday, April 21. The gallery dining room at Hart House will be available for luncheons and Ur. Blackburn has arranged for us to go to the Faculty Club for dinner on Thursday evening. I am suggesting that each member be assessed $5 to cover the cost of drinks and dinner. Any surplus will be held over till the next meeting; any deficit will be made up at the time of this meeting. The Willcocks Street parking lot will be available fer those who are driving. Agenda Beginning at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 20 and continuing to 4:00 p.m. Friday, April 21. Approval of minutes. Business arising from minutes. Chairman's report on the meetings of the the Committee of Presidents April 13 and 14. Report of Liaison Committee. R. Blackburn. Report of Mechanization Committee. D. Redmond. Items held over from last agenda: Liaison with other groups and individuals. Letter from J. Martin. Letter from D. Redmond. Letter from O. Bishop. Common policy on determination of minimum salaries for professional librarians before February 1. Full discussion of tecommendation #6 of the report of the Liaison Sub~Committee which was sent back to us by the Committee of Presidents for further consideration and e~pansion. This is the recommendation concerning the establishment of a Bibliographic Centre. Other busines~ and new business. Date and place of next meeting. Adjournment. April 12, 1967. Doris E. Lewis, Chairman. Donald Redmond, Secretary-Treasurer � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Lakehead University Collection Description An account of the resource Photographs from Lakehead University's history: people, events, and campus. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ontario Council of University Librarians Notice of Meeting Subject The topic of the resource Universities Description An account of the resource Notice of meeting and agenda for The Ontario Council of University Librarians. Meeting April 20-21, 1967. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ontario Council of University Librarians Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Canada - Ontario - Port Arthur Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967-04 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context U3d https://digitalcollections.lakeheadu.ca/files/original/90068be0a1c53184842b03fe451af31a.pdf 8fe267b687d6d1195b8ca2611c0a085b PDF Text Text � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource David Belrose fonds Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ontario Human Rights Commission Media Release regarding the Lakehead District School Board Subject The topic of the resource Politics Description An account of the resource This document was a news release from the Ontario Human Rights Commission discussing the resolution of the complaint made by Gabriel Picard. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ontario Human Rights Commission Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Ontario Human Rights Commission Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2005-09 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Text