By day, Margret looked after her three children and filled the traditional role of wife and mother. In the evenings she devoted herself to Freyja, as well as giving suffrage lectures in the Icelandic community. This committed and energetic activist was the primary motivator behind various Icelandic suffrage organizations in Manitoba.[4] In 1908, she created what she called the “first Icelandic Suffrage Association of America”[5] in Winnipeg, serving as president. She then linked it with the Canada Suffrage Association (and was invited to several meetings), and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
Icelandic suffragette groups soon sprung up in other communities, all of which sent petitions to the government of Manitoba in 1910. The organizations also submitted a joint petition in 1912. Margret deserved some of the credit when — on January 28, 1916 — Manitoba became the first province to grant women the right to vote and hold office in the government. Acting Premier T.H. Johnson, who co-introduced the bill, was the son of an Icelandic suffragist.
But Margret had already left Manitoba by then. She and Sigfus had often shared their differing opinions about divorce and marriage in Freyja: Sigfus argued that married women were dependents and Margret wanted them to be equal partners. The simmering discord escalated to the point that Sigfus locked up the printing press in 1910.[6] That ended Freyja and the marriage. Margaret divorced Sigfus and moved to Washington State with her children in 1912.
While Margret was overshadowed by nationally prominent suffragists like Nellie McClung, Professor Anne Brydon has suggested that she merits greater recognition as “a symbol of Icelandic fortitude.”[7] Overcoming the challenges of her humble origins in Iceland, the ambitious immigrant became an influential champion of women’s rights in Canada.
Quote:
“Angry and distressed I read the laments of oppressed persons, unhappily married women, and the misfortunes of young girls. And it is this evil that aroused in me … a yearning to break down all the fetters that tie people to evil and distress.”[8]
Myra Grimsley in England.
Courtesy of Trevor Bennett
Florence Nightingale of the North
Myra Bennett
1890–1990
The British nurse brought desperately needed medical care to isolated outports in Newfoundland. Even when there was no money to pay her.
“I have been wonderful lucky that I could help a woman like that,” Angus Bennett said of his wife Myra.[1] Residents of the rugged northwest coast of Newfoundland were equally fortunate. For half a century the heroic nurse Myra Bennett (née Grimsley) provided nursing and medical services there.
The daughter of an interior decorator, Myra grew up in a family of nine children in London, England. By the time she was fourteen, she was working as a tailor and chatting in Yiddish to German Jewish customers. She saved money to train as a nurse at the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies, and later took courses at the famous Clapham School of Midwifery. The classes in anesthesia and operative midwifery would prove to be particularly useful in the years ahead. By the time the young woman decided to serve in the Canadian wilderness, she had a decade of solid nursing experience, including working through the air raids and blackouts of the First World War and dealing with the horrors of North London slums.
The sensitive nurse decided to apply for a posting in Saskatchewan after reading the tragic account of a woman who died in childbirth there due to the absence of medical assistance. Persuaded by Lady Harris (wife of the governor of Newfoundland) that the need for her services was even more pressing on The Rock, Myra boarded a ship for St. John’s on April 13, 1921. She accepted a two-year contract with a monthly payment of $75, and was posted to work by herself at Daniel’s Harbour. Bursting with enthusiasm for the adventures ahead, the well-trained nurse and midwife arrived in the tiny hamlet on the Great Northern Peninsula, tasked with caring for residents of a 200-mile stretch of lonely coast. The community was very isolated, accessible only by a coastal steamer that operated in the summer. The nearest hospital was Dr. Grenfell’s mission at St. Anthony, several hundred miles north and impossible to reach.
“The need for medical help is beyond my power of description,” Myra wrote soon after her arrival in Daniel’s Harbour. [2] Appalled at the widespread poverty, harsh living conditions, and low levels of education, Myra nevertheless marvelled at the resourcefulness of the Newfoundlanders who soon began shyly approaching her about their illnesses. She settled into the community, marrying an ex-merchant mariner, Angus Bennett, who was a fisherman, trapper, and woodsman. She prided herself on learning local customs and the skills of independent living. She baked bread from scratch, grew vegetables, sheared sheep and wove clothing, milked cows, hooked rugs, and made seal-skin boots and garments.
In 1922, the newlyweds moved into their two-storey wooden house; it would serve as the home for their three children, as well as her clinic. When her two-year contract expired, the government informed her it was broke and couldn’t pay her. Unwilling to abandon those in need, Myra worked for free until 1934 when she began receiving a token annual salary of $250.
Myra served not only as a nurse and midwife, but also as dentist, veterinarian, and educator. She delivered more than 700 babies and pulled at least 3,000 teeth, without anesthetic. Nurse Bennett tried to teach her patients that tuberculosis was contagious, breastfeeding was preferable to non-pasteurized milk, and that toothaches could not be cured with charms. When her brother-in-law Alex cut off his foot while sawing lumber, she miraculously sewed the severed foot back onto the leg.
Nurse Bennett devoted her life to caring for the residents in her area. She often operated on her kitchen table and kept patients in her home for long periods. Sometimes she’d be away from Daniel’s Harbour for weeks delivering babies and tending to patients. She travelled to her patients by boat, dogsled, or horse-drawn sleigh, and always found a way to help the sick. A mistress of improvisation, she often came up with novel ways to treat people in desperate situations. For keeping a broken limb in traction, for example, Nurse Bennett created her own device using beach rocks as weights.
Once her boat crashed into a rocky shore during a squall, and she had to be pulled up a cliff before speeding off in a horse-drawn sled to an expectant mother. Another time, the dedicated nurse risked her life to set out by schooner in a raging storm to save a dying woman. The woman had recently given birth, and was severely swollen and convulsing after being unconscious for two days. “God help me! A case of eclampsia in a two-roomed cottage,” Myra remembered.[3]
Her exploits were legendary: she became known as The Florence Nightingale of Newfoundland. Even after officially retiring in 1953, she continued to provide nursing care. Myra’s selfless service was recognized in many ways, including the King George V Jubilee Medal, Coronation Medals from George VI and Elizabeth II, the Member of the British Empire Medal, the Order of Canada, and an honorary doctorate from Memorial University. A CBC documentary celebrated this heroic nurse, and author H. Gordon Green wrote a book about her. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” she told Green. “I went where I wanted to go and I stayed because the need was there.”
Myra Bennett died in 1990 at the age of 100. Her longtime home in Daniel’s Harbour is now preserved as a provincial heritage home. Robert Chafe’s play, Tempting Province, brings to life the remarkable story of this Canadian heroine. [4] As pioneer medical officer Dr. Noel Murphy noted, “there will never be another Nurse Bennett, we hope there will never be such dire need and deplorable conditions.”[5]
Nurse Bennett (back) with women in Daniel’s Harbour, 1921.
Courtesy of Trevor Bennett
Quote:
“There are people, you know, who are rather happier when they can move into the eye of the hurricane. I suppose I was always one of them.”[6]
There is no image of Mary Bibb. This is her husband Henry Bibb, 1849.
The Not-So-Promised Land
Mary Bibb
circa 1820–1877
A zealous ant
i-slavery leader, she helped black fugitives who dreamed of a better life.
Mary Bibb fought to end slavery and believed that black people should seek freedom in Canada. But she also knew that it was not the promised land, and that the desperate (and destitute) refugees faced great challenges despite the absence of legalized racism.
Mary Elizabeth Miles was born free in Rhode Island, one of the fortunate few black people of her time to be so privileged. Her parents were free black Quakers who encouraged her education. Mary graduated from a normal school in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she was strongly influenced by the abolitionist principal’s promotion of black education and women’s rights. She became one of the first black women in North America to become a teacher and devoted most of her life to the emancipation and advancement of her race.
Mary supported herself by teaching in black schools in Albany, Boston, and Cincinnati. As she moved from place to place, she got involved with anti-slavery activities, including an 1847 meeting in New York at which she met her future husband. Henry Bibb, an escaped slave and prominent abolitionist, remembered his pleasure at being introduced to Miss Miles: “a lady whom I had frequently heard very highly spoken of, for her activity and devotion to the anti-slavery cause, as well as her talents and learning, and benevolence in the cause of reform generally.”[1]
Mary was an independent woman of twenty-eight when she married Henry in 1848 and moved to Boston. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the United States in 1850, the Bibbs and thousands of other black people fled to Canada, terrified by the knowledge that runaways and even free blacks could be re-enslaved. The couple first settled in Sandwich, and later Windsor, in Canada West. Windsor was a major terminus of the Underground Railroad, and the Bibbs often sheltered destitute fugitives in their home. They began working together on a number of initiatives intended to help refugees make the transition to permanent citizenship by equipping them with literacy, land, and information.
In January 1851, the Bibbs began publishing the Voice of the Fugitive, the first major newspaper created by and for African Canadians. With the well-educated Mary Bibb as co-editor, they developed an important communication tool that raised black consciousness and provided an international forum for discussion of issues related to abolition of slavery and settlement. The publication reported on events, promoted education, and countered racist articles in the mainstream press.
Some historians consider Mary Bibb as the first female black journalist in Canada due to her important role in the Voice.[2] Mary frequently supervised production of the newspaper on her own, and this was certainly the case during most of 1851 when her husband was away lecturing. An excellent writer, she penned articles on a wide variety of topics, including women’s rights, anti-slavery activities for women, fashion, and style — she also managed a dressmaking business. As Mary had many important contacts with influential abolitionists in the United States, she also played a vital fundraising role for the newspaper.
Voice of the Fugitive served as the official communication tool of the Refugee Home Society (RHS), an organization established to secure land for former slaves who settled in an all-black community. Mary and her husband were among the leaders of the society, which succeeded in providing twenty-five-acre plots for more than 200 families near Sandwich, Canada West, as well as building two schools and several churches. The Bibbs also played key roles in organizing the North American Colored Convention, which was held in Toronto on September 11, 1851.
Advancing education for black people was probably Mary’s primary goal, and she taught school for at least twenty years.[3] While involved with the Voice, she struggled to establish a number of schools for black children who were barred from attending regular schools due to opposition from white parents. She ran a school for children in her home in Sandwich, and created another after settling in Windsor in 1852. Mary taught reading and writing to adults at Sunday schools. She supported herself by teaching in schools after her husband died suddenly in the summer of 1854. The couple was childless.
Mary later remarried and managed a shop from approximately 1865 to 1871 before moving to Brooklyn, New York. Though her many achievements are often overshadowed by those of her famous first-husband, she was a notable figure in her own right — accomplished as well as beautiful, according to abolitionist William Wells Brown, whom she met in 1861.[4] A prominent and influential anti-slavery advocate, a pioneer teacher, and a journalist, Mary Bibb was recognized as a person of national historic significance by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in 2002.
Quote:
“What shall we say of those who have again taken their lives in their hands and escaped to this desolate, cold country, where they are again strangers in a strange land … Is not the person who can improve under such circumstances a hero ...?”[5]
Georgina Binnie-Clark in Dorset.
Homesteads for Women?
Georgina Binnie-Clark
1871–1947
She showed that a single lady could succeed as a wheat farmer. And demanded that women have the right to free land — just like men.
Her friends and family thought she was mad. What else could explain the British writer’s plan to move to Saskatchewan and become a wheat farmer, with no agricultural experience?
Born in Dorset in 1871, Georgina Binnie-Clark was a well-educated gentlewoman with limited options for supporting herself in England; a one million surplus of women made marriage unlikely and there were few suitable job opportunities for those of her class. In her early thirties, she visited her brother on his farm in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan. She loved the untamed West and penned a travel book called A Summer on the Canadian Prairie. After observing how poorly her brother was doing as a farmer, Georgina decided she could do better. She moved to the Prairies in 1905, but as a single woman she was not eligible for the 160 acres of free land like her sibling had been. Married women were also excluded.
Unlike the more equitable homestead laws in the United States, the Canadian West’s policies allowed only widows, divorcees, or abandoned women with children to qualify for the same land grant as men. While men were only required to pay $975 in fees and could acquire an additional 160 acres at minimal cost, Georgina had to come up with $5,000 to purchase the same amount of land.[1] Though she bought an established farm with machinery, two cows, and three horses, Georgina still needed capital to operate it. She managed to get bank loans, as well as some financial support from her father.
As a wheat farmer, Georgina faced the same challenges as men, but resented the fact that she and other single women could not start off on equal footing. She chronicled her experiences during her first three years of farming in a book entitled Wheat and Woman, which was published in 1914 as a guide to other potential female homesteaders. Georgina hoped that her advice would encourage other British women to become homesteaders. She advised her readers that women could achieve independence, and eventually wealth, as farmers — if they didn’t have to pay extra for their land:
She may be the best farmer in Canada, she may buy land, work it, take prizes for seed and stock, but she is denied the right to claim from the Government the 160-acres of land held out as a bait to every man.[2]
In the fall of 1908, Georgina went on a one-woman mission to Ottawa but achieved nothing. She joined others who had already been fighting for the cause, including Winnipeg journalists Cora Hind and Isabel Graham, who was the influential leader of the campaign.[3] Georgina became an important advocate in the feminist battle to change the Homestead Act.
In 1909, after a meeting with Georgina, Isabel Graham wrote a passionate article about homestead rights in the Grain Growers’ Guide. The article exemplified Georgina as a modern farmer: “an English woman of moderate means, considerable culture, unusual enterprise, and rare pluck … continues to make a brilliant success of [farming in the West].”[4] The publication encouraged a flood of inquiries to Ottawa about homesteads for women, but the rigid policies remained —
even after the government received a petition signed by 11,000 men in 1913 and organized by Isabel.
The homesteads-for-women movement reached peak activity between 1909 and 1913, but continued until 1930. That year, the three Prairie provinces gained control of their public lands, which did not include a lot of land for homesteading. Many solo women had become farmers despite inequalities in the homestead laws; one study showed that there were more than 283 women landowners in southwestern Manitoba at the time Georgina farmed.[5]
In 1910, Gerogina started training prospective women farmers from England, earning some welcome cash to pay her bills. From 1929 to 1935, the ever-persistent Georgina worked in Saskatchewan on the Union Jack Farm Settlement (UJFS). The plan proposed helping British immigrants by teaching them to farm and helping them find jobs. It was launched at the onset of the depression, but never fully materialized despite the considerable effort she put into it.
During the First World War, the British government appointed Georgina and six other agriculturalists to train women to work the land; she was assigned the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire districts. During the war years, she wrote a book for children and donated the proceeds to help wounded soldiers and their horses. She also managed a small shop selling patterns for dresses and hats in London until the 1930s. From at least the beginning of the Second World War until her death in 1947, Georgina kept a flat in Chelsea, London, on the poor side of Cheyne Walk by the Thames. When she wasn’t living there, Georgina depended on the rent money to help run her farm in Canada.
100 More Canadian Heroines Page 6
