Tupper was instrumental in passing the Free School Act in 1864 and a taxation act that would support the schools. No doubt he was both loved and hated for this twin blessing and curse. Along with the other premiers, Tupper had been part of Confederation talks. He believed that unification was a wonderful, monumental idea and Nova Scotia should play a key role in the provinces coming together. When he went to the conference in Charlottetown to discuss Maritime union with the premiers of P.E.I. and New Brunswick, the delegates from Upper and Lower Canada had already arrived to push for a larger confederation.
The move toward a larger union was partly due to fear of American military strength as apparent in the American Civil WarS. Tupper continued to meet with the other premiers in Quebec and London and, as representative of Nova Scotia, he endorsed Confederation in 1867.
Very few Nova Scotians actually supported their premier in this and so Tupper put off his re-election as long as he could until later in 1867, after the deal was already signed. The Conservatives were soundly defeated but the deal was already done.
Tupper persuaded Howe to get involved in federal politics at that point and he himself went on to undertake a series of ministerial duties at the federal level. In 1896 Charles Tupper, upon the resignation of Mackenzie Bowell, became prime minister but he had a short tenure. The Conservative party was unpopular by then as Tupper took up the post of Leader of the Opposition until the turn of the century. After that, he retired and spent a goodly amount of time in England. Perhaps there was a little of the philosopher king in Tupper. A well-educated man with a vision, he was willing to overrule the views of the majority in favour of an idea like Confederation, which he personally thought was good for Nova Scotians. Friend or foe of the people, Tupper was a principal figure in Nova Scotian history and painted a sharp contrast to his feisty rivanl, Joseph Howe, who had so wished for a more truly democratic form of government for Nova Scotians.
Avoiding Annexation
Confederation spelled the end of political autonomy for Nova Scotia. The people had been taken against their will into the arrangement by means that were nothing short of unscrupulous. The changes ahead would be both political and economic. The rail link with the West would begin to shift the political, economic and social focus away from the sea and toward the continent. While Nova Scotia had once been at the very hub of internationala trade activity, it would soon find itself on the fringe of both trade and industrial growth that was taking off in the interior of the continent.
Would Nova Scotia have survived on its own as an independent nation? Could the Maritimes, and possibly Newfoundland, form its own strong union? Charles Tupper ensured that these questions could never be answered by history. Howe’s passion for democracy, free speech and Nova Scotian independence looks very appealing in retrospect but Tupper’s vision may have been more clear. Had this province not aligned with Canada, it might have found itself eventually annexed to the United States. Trade and family ties with New England were already very strong. Undoubtedly, annexation would have led to unrelenting economic and political dominance by American interests. For Nova Scotia this would have been a disaster much greater than the loss of autonomy that occurred during Confederation. Charles Tupper, acting more like a philosopher sking than a democratically elected leader, may have spared us this fate. Yet here in the early twenty-first century, the separation of Quebec and the potential disintegration of Canada remain a real possibility. We may once again find ourselves wrestling with questio*ns of political independence or alliance not unlike those faced by Howe and Tupper.
Chapter 28
Chapter 28
Limited Rights or No Rights at All
As was the case throughout North America, equal rights for women in Nova Scotia were slow to evolve. Laws gradually emerged in the nineteenth century, initially recognizing some privileges for women in terms of property and family. Nonetheless, an inflexible, patriarchal notion of the institution of marriage remained at the heart of these laws.
Women played a vital role in the economic well-being of a family and it was fairly common for a rural wife to supplement the household income by weaving. In the city, she took in boarders and provided meals for them. Men owned almost all property, housing and the means to generate an income – a fishing boat, for example. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, women had, at best, limited rights under the law to protection and safety from harm, but the law itself could only do a symbolic job of enforcement, particularly in domestic situations.
Wife battering was all too common in Nova Scotian homes. To a great degree, it was tolerated by the male-dominated society and only rarely surfaced in the court system. If a man deserted his wife and family, the woman was left in a very difficult and vulnerable situation because she had no legal ownership of anything belonging to the family. Everything technically belonged to the husband, whether he was there or not. Later in the century a court might allow a woman ownership of her family’s house and goods, if her husband could be proven to be a drunk or otherwise “worthless.”
When women became essential in the public workplace, some changes in their legal status were unavoidable. In 1838, for example, the Nova Scotia Assembly discovered there was a desperate need for teachers in the province. Not enough men saw the occupation as worthwhile and, besides, the pay being offered was pitifully low. To meet this crisis, the Assembly magnanimously decided that women could now be hired and receive personal wages, riather than having the money paid directly to a husband or father. This legislation also set a standard for double standards regarding wages for men and women in the province. Despite the lower pay for women, forty years later women would occupy two-thirds of the teaching positions in Nova Scotia.
It seems that poorer counties enlisted more women than men for the teaching ranks – to save money presumably. While there continued to be some staunch political opposition to women working at all, Joseph Howe didn’t see what the fuss was all about. He argued that these women would be married soon enough anyway, so they posed no threat to any male income earner. Once married, women teachers were expected to give up their jobs and take care of the husband and home. Even if there were not enough qualified male teachers to replace them, there were always plenty more young women to fill the jobs until they too took an early retirement into matrimony.
Legislators, lawyers and judges were painfully slow to consider the needs of women. It was not until 1866 that an enlightened law was passed to protect a wife from debts incurred by her husband and further along, in 188 2, women were officially decreed to be individuals with personal rights, including the right to collect children’s wages if they were needed to help pay household expenses. Few married women in these days could earn an eincome outside of the home, so, whenever possible, boys in the family were put to work at menial jobs to bring money into the house. It wasn’t until 1897 that the laws fully permitted a woman to have her own possessions during marriage, including a right to personal savings.
“A Nest of Brothels and Dance Houses”
While women endured a decidedly hard life in rural Nova Scotia, their counterparts in Halifax during much of the nineteenth century may have had it even worse. In her book The Dark Side of Life in Victorian Halifax, historian Judith Fingard documents the dire straits of the so-called “underclass.” Women of low economic means suffered from all manner of mistreatment, often without much hope of ever improving their lot in life. Nowhere was the situation worse than on the notorious Barrack Street at the base of the Citadel, which was lined with drinking dens known as grog shops, brothels and pitiful tenement housing. Visitors to Halifax were appalled by begging children, filth, squalor, prostitutes and, of course, drunkenness. While the military presence cannot be blamed entirely for the problems, Fingard points out that the economy of this district was based on providading female companionship and cheap, plentiful booze for the multitude of soldiers and sailors in the city.
R.H. Dana, legendary author of Two Years Before the Mast,
visited Halifax around this time and described Barrack Street as a “nest of the brothels and dance houses.” He saw prostitutes who were “broken down by disease and strong drink,” and felt much pity for them.
Halifax was a crime-ridden city and newspapers prospered by publishing lurid stories about notorious criminals, both men and women. In her book, Fingard resurrects the sorry tale of one Margaret Howard and how the legal system failed to help this down-and-out character who the Morning Chronicle of the time publicized as the “Wickedest Woman in Halifax.” Margaret Howard first went to court in 1863 when she was twenty, charged with drunkenness, and went on to serve more than fifty-two sentences in jail, although sometimes she was able to avoid a stay behind bars by paying a fine of one dollar. Unlike many other criminals from the lower class who actually committed crimes to have the luxury of the shelter of a jail cell and regular meals, Howard preferred to be free on the streets and avoided jail whenever she could. She escaped from Rockhead Prison at least once, increasing her notoriety, but little or nothing was ever undertaken by the authorities to improve her lot in life.
What heinous crimes had Ms. Howard committed to earn the tide of “wickedest woman in Halifax”? Well, she drank quite a bit on many occasions and raised a ruckus, she got into fights and she tried to commit suicide durin(g one of her jail terms by hanging herself with pieces of cloth from her dress. Newspapers of the day reveal the moral repugnance felt by the middle and upper class for women like Howard, who was undoubtedly a product of much hardship brought on by Halifax poverty.
Margaret Howard was viewed as an out-and-out criminal, but most city prostitutes were tolerated by authorities as nothing more than a nuisance. Fingard suggests, “In terms of income, prostitution was an attractive alternative to the drudgery of household service. For some women it was an occupation which led to capital accumulation and upward mobility.” Most, but not all, of the customers were in the military, who made up nearly twenty-five percent of the adult male population of Halifax. For the most part, the legal system tried to ignore prostitution altogether. Brothels were located close to the military bases and away from the middle- and upper-class homes, so most Haligonians preferred to ignore the problem, if they saw it as a problem at all.
The army discouraged its men from marrying, preferring to keep them unattached and ready to move out to the next campaign when needed. Only about six percent of the soldiers in Halifax succeeded in gaining permission from their commanding officers to marry, mostly to women who had been domestic servants. Many Halifax women, however, became unofficial wives, living on and off with army men or sailors. Such an arrangement might provide some companionship and financial support for a while, but it was also quite unstable and an unofficial army wife might find herself at any time left to fend for herself if her husband was ordered to a new posting.
While prostitution may not have been respectable, it was one of the few avenues for a lower-class Halifax woman of these Victorian times to earn a steady income. By the mid 1860s there were somewhere between 600 and 1,000 women earning a living through prostitution, although there may have been many more part-timers.
If the law, for whatever reasons, wanted to apply pressure or control over any woman engaged as a prostitute, she could be charged with vagrancy, lewd or disorderly behaviour, or indecency. Most who ended up before a judge were women of the street rather than regular employees in bawdy houses. If men and women were caught in the act, invariably the women were charged and not the men. Men had many privileges under the law, but women had few.
Not unlike today, prostitution was a perilous trade, fraught with dangers of venereal disease, alcohol problems, pregnancy, unsafe abortions and physical abuse. Women who became prostitutes did so out of desperation. Viectorian culture also forced single women into a catch-22 situation. A woman living alone or abandoned on the street was ·considered to be disreputable; once she was disreputable, she could no longer hope for respectablet employment or be considered as a good prospect for a wife. Hence, she had nowhere to turn but to a life as a “dishonourable” woman who could at least earn an income.
Taking Note of “Improper Conduct”
Not everyone turned a blind eye to the abuse of women that was so prevalent in Nova Scotia. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty was established in 1876, with its initial focus on animals, but it soon recognized the dimension of the human problem as well, particularly the plight of women and children. As a result of the SPC lobbying, husbands could now be dealt with in the courts for negligence or battering. Even then, a woman only went to the law under the most desperate conditions, because if her husband was locked up she would most likely be left without any form of income whatsoever. Sometimes she turned to the courts for help if her man was constantly drunk or if her children’s lives were in danger. The SPC would become directly involved in these cases and documented the proceedings. (The society never kept written records of sexual abuse, however, arguing that it was too distasteful to be written down.)
Nonetheless, the SPC continued to bring more and more cases of child and wife abuse before the courts and also attempted to improve laws to relieve the plight of victims. Matthew Richey, a Member of Parliament who was also the president of the Nova Scotia SPC, failed in his attempts in 1881 to pass federal legislation for the protection of children, but the organization forged ahead in Halifax in its efforts to ensure criminal punishment for men proven to be cruel to or neglectful of their families. SPC secretary-iagent John Naylor, a driving force in the organization, recorded in 1884 and 1885 cases involving neglect or harm by a drunken husband, husbands eloping with other women or “improperly conducting themselves with their wife’s sister,” as well as cases of outright murders of wives by their husbands. Similar cases involving harm to children were also investigated. nIt’s safe to say, however, that most instances of physical harm by men to wives and children still went unreported, despite the best efforts of reformers and social activists. P
As women entered the workforce beyond the classroom, they found themselves in low-paying factory or fish-plant jobs. Only the fairly destitute remained working after marriage; these ladies were often abandoned or widowead wives. Even by the turn of the century, a female worker in a cotton textile factory in Halifax could expect little in the way of generosity from her employer. This young, unmarried woman would work through an unpaid training period of five or six weeks. When wages started, they were low, and if she had come in from out of town, up to half of her salary might end up going to pay for her lodging in a rooming-house. At work, fines were imposed for lateness, poor work, breakage or even talking to other workers. The bosses might also alter the way women were paid to save factory costs, according to whether it was a busy or a slow week.
If women and men worked at the same task, men were paid a higher wage. Women endured long hours in noisy, unhealthy environments. It wasn’t until 1906 that some limits were set on time: a work week of seventy-two hours was ordained as the limit for women under sixteen and boys under fourteen. If a woman tried to organize even a small protest or suggest some form of union, she was quickly released from her job.
Chapter 29
Chapter 29
Never Give Up the Ship
The coast of Nova Scotia is a rocky one and there’s very little of it that has not seen some sort of shipwreck over the years. There are countless stories along this coast of drownings, rescues and recoveries. Whatever the fate of a foundering vessel, shore-dwellers often harvested the goods – anything that floated ashore. Houses and fisherman’s shacks sometimes displayed the most curious and sometimes expensive items that would literally wash up on the doorstep. The old law of the Nova Scotia shore was that if it arrived by sea and you found it, it was yours – whether it be a few good boards, a barrel of rum or a chest of money.
In April of 1873, for example, the White Star liner Atlantic smashed up against some unyielding rocks on a stormy night off the coast of Prospect, not far from where the ill-fated
La Tribune sank in 1797. The steel hull of the ship was pounded into scrap and 560 people on board died that night as they were swept overboard. The story goes that the coast was strewn with the bodies, many of the women still wearing expensive jewels. Not all of the jewellery lay intact when the bodies were carried off to the morgue.
Sea disasters do not always end in tragedy, and many times Nova Scotian seafarers have been pushed to their mental and physical limits to outwit the forces of nature. Such was the case with the Research, a vessel built in Yarmouth in 1861, weighing in at 1,459 tons, the largest ship constructed there to that time. Her price tag was a walloping $65,000. Toward the end of November in 1866 she was sailing from Quebec to Scotland with a heavy load of timber. Sailing out of the dangerous Strait of Belle Isle and into the Atlantic, Captain George Washington Churchill ran up against a monster gale and heavy seas that were to test his abilities. The topmast sail was ripped away and, worse yet, the rudder was broken off.
The bad weather persevered while the crew jury-rigged a rudder out of spare parts. In order to fix the rudder in place, Aaron Churchill, first mate and nephew of the captain, was let down over the side in a bowline. Figuring that wet, freezing clothes would impede his progress, the brave young man did the job totally naked. A newspaper would report later that the younger Churchill, “when taken back on board wasn insensible but recovered.”
Unfortunately for all aboard, this rudder too was wrecked by the continued hammering of the storm. Another one was painstakingly constructed as the ship was driven along by the storm. As the new rudder was being lowereend over the side for placement, a wave smacked into it hard enough to send it floating away. The undaunted crew created a huge manual pole-like rudder from the timber aboard but it too proved useless. Mountains of water smashed over the ship and wrecked the deckhouse where the men lived, sweeping away many of the provisions. To add to the calamity, the oakum began to work its way loose between the boards and the ship started to take on water below. Heavy with wood, the ship and its cargo wouldn’t exactly go the bottom of the sea but everything was becoming waterlogged and soon the ship would be a helpless pile of floating wreckage at the mercy of the unforgiving winter Atlantic. A third rudder was put into place and the men pumped away to get rid of the constant flush of water. Rudder three was lost, as was rudder four.
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