100 More Canadian Heroines

by Merna Forster

  May organized volunteers to meet hospital vessels in the port of Halifax during the war and played a key role in establishing the first convalescent home in the country, which provided vocational training for returning soldiers. May’s war effort left her exhausted and suffering from kidney disease. Though she was able to enjoy a European vacation with her husband in 1921, May was forced to withdraw from public life after 1918 — the year that women in Nova Scotia finally won the vote.

  May was someone who would “prefer to wear out rather than to rust out.”[6] Just forty-three when she died in 1923, May left behind a daughter still in high school and a son preparing for college exams. There was a flood of tributes to a “brilliant woman who devoted herself and her splendid ability unselfishly to work for the public weal.”[7] An enormous crowd — including the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, the premier, and the chief justice — attended the funeral of the highly esteemed activist at her home.

  The Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women recognized May Sexton as one of the province’s Foremothers in Equality. In 2011, Dalhousie University created the May Best Sexton Scholarship for Women in Engineering.[8]

  Quote:

  “What we need … is an Industrial School for Girls. Each year a large number of girls are obliged to leave the public schools at the ages between 13 and 17 and go to work…. They have no trade, no resource, and no chance to learn a trade as boys have.”[9]

  Norma Shearer, 1920.

  Visual Sound Archives/Library and Archives Canada/e002343845

  From Montreal to MGM

  Norma Shearer

  1902–1983

  She refused to let heavy thighs, short stature, and a drooping eyelid stop her from becoming a superstar.

  “Where are all the Norma Shearers of the world?”[1] lamented the famed director Alfred Hitchcock. Actress Norma Shearer was once Hollywood’s ultimate leading lady.

  From the mid-1920s until her retirement in 1942, Norma was the Queen of MGM, the top studio in Hollywood. The talented actress played groundbreaking roles, depicting bold women who could sizzle with sex appeal while maintaining their respectability. She appeared in more than thirty films and won a Best Actress Oscar for the film The Divorcee (1930). Norma received five other Academy Award nominations.

  As a child in Montreal’s exclusive Westmount district, Norma Shearer studied dance and piano. She loved horseback riding and attending special events, like a vaudeville show featuring the Dolly Sisters, who inspired her dream to become an actress. Norma’s privileged lifestyle suddenly vanished when her father’s construction business failed after the First World War. Her parents separated, and her mother, Edith, moved her daughters into a dingy boarding house.

  Edith decided to move the family to New York to try their luck in motion pictures, but they needed cash to get there. With $400 from selling Norma’s piano and another $30 from selling their dog, the threesome arrived in New York in January 1920. They lived in a squalid room while Edith worked as a clerk and the girls tried to find acting parts. Norma met Florenz Ziegfeld and D.W. Griffith, but both directors told the seventeen-year-old that she had no future in showbiz: she was too short and had a dumpy figure, crooked teeth, heavy legs, and a cast in her right eye that made her look cross-eyed.

  Norma refused to give up. She continued looking for work and used some of her dwindling savings to consult an eye specialist. In the summer of 1920, she got a big break, landing her first feature role in a silent movie called The Stealers. By 1923, Louis B. Mayer Productions (which soon merged with other studios to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) in Los Angeles hired the determined actress. She made a successful transition to talkies, beginning with the smash hit The Trial of Mary Dugan. The increasingly confident and skillful Norma Shearer became the queen of the talkies and one of the most popular actresses in the world.

  Physical fitness was extremely important to the naturally athletic young star. Norma swam and played tennis, as well as exercised vigorously at a fitness studio nicknamed The Torture Chamber. She strived to maximize her best attributes and camouflage the rest with costume designer Adrian’s help. But she could never overcome the anguish of her family secret: serious mental illness which affected her sister, father, and eventually her mother.

  In 1927, Norma married Irving G. Thalberg, a brilliant young producer who later became a vice-president at MGM. The powerful couple played key roles in MGM’s impressive growth, as Norma transformed into an elegant and sophisticated movie star. The versatile and talented actress gave one of her best performances in the gripping anti-Nazi film Escape (1940), and starred in many other dramas, comedies, and historical films. The glamorous star played opposite famous leading men, including Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Robert Montgomery, and Leslie Howard.

  The Thalbergs had two children. When the couple married, Norma knew she’d married a fragile genius who wasn’t expected to have a long life. He had a weak heart, and had two heart attacks before dying at

  Postage stamp featuring Norma Shearer.

  © Canada Post Corporation 2008. Reproduced with Permission.

  thirty-seven. Thirty-two-year-old Norma proved to be a formidable opponent in the ensuing legal struggle to retain her shares in MGM. She starred in several more films, including Marie Antoinette and The Women, but retired from acting in 1942. She married ski instructor and real-estate promoter Martin Arrougé (and was one of the first stars to have a pre-nuptial agreement). After her death in 1983, she was buried beside her first husband in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles.

  Norma Shearer was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2008. That same year Canada Post honoured the silver screen star by issuing a commemorative stamp in its Canadians in Hollywood series. Memories of the determined actress faded after the 1940s. With recent TV and DVD releases of some of her forgotten films, a new generation of film buffs is discovering the legacy of the Queen of the Lot.

  Quote:

  “Scarlett O’Hara is going to be a difficult and thankless role. The part I’d like to play is Rhett Butler.”[2]

  — Norma’s explanation of why she turned down a starring role in Gone with the Wind.

  Nell Shipman.

  The Girl from God’s Country

  Nell Shipman

  1892–1970

  The first lady of Canadian filmmaking brought us heroines who defeated villains. And rescued the men.

  Nell Shipman’s stunt double was pregnant and terrified of leaping thirty feet into whitewater while filming Baree, Son of Kazan in 1918. The film’s star didn’t mind tackling the river herself. In fact, she relished the outdoor exploits her roles frequently required in silent movies of the early twentieth century. Nell jumped. She passed out from the shock of the icy water but was hauled safely to shore.

  Nell also wrote screenplays, directed, and produced. She was the first Canadian woman to make a feature film, and one of the few Canadians to produce silent movies.[1] Many of her films were outdoor adventures featuring the Canadian wilds: God’s country. She was a pioneer of shooting primarily on location rather than in studios. Nell’s films often featured some of the animals from her own zoo, including both domestic and wild animals, such as her famous bear Brownie, wolves, a cougar, elk, and a skunk. She trained them herself, and advocated the humane treatment of animals in movie-making.

  Nell grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, as Helen Foster Barnham. The family moved to nearby Seattle when she was twelve, and the young girl studied acting and music. At thirteen she won a role in a vaudeville show and toured with Paul Gilmore’s company. Her mother sometimes accompanied the young girl on the road. Nell performed on stages across North America, travelling from California to New York City and Alaska. She followed this vagabond lifestyle for most of her life.

  By eighteen Nell had become the fourth wife of Canadian film producer and impresario Ernest Shipman, a charming man twenty-one years her senior. They moved to Hollywood, where she began acting in short films. Nell gave birth to
their son, Barry, in 1912, and plunged into scriptwriting. She sold screenplays to Universal, Selig, and Vitagraph, and published one as a novel. In 1914, she directed her first film.

  In 1916, Nell’s career took off. She wrote the screenplay for the successful production of God’s Country and the Woman, based on a novel by James Oliver Curwood. Nell also played the role of the heroine, gaining renown as the “girl from God’s country” — a parka-clad beauty snowshoeing in the frozen North. She had become a star.

  Nell was hired as screenwriter and lead actress for a follow-up film, and her husband signed on as producer. He convinced businessmen in Calgary to finance the film, which was released in 1919 as Back to God’s Country. The investors were not disappointed. The melodrama earned them a 300 percent profit, becoming the most successful Canadian silent film in history. It grossed more than $1.5 million and added to Nell’s fame.

  Much of Back to God’s Country was filmed in northern Alberta near Lesser Slave Lake. Some scenes were filmed at 60 degrees below zero. The leading man, Ronald Bryan, caught pneumonia and died during shooting, and manager Bert Van Tuyle had to have some fingers amputated after suffering frostbite. It was all part of the challenge of making a movie in the Great White North, a setting that Nell loved.

  Nell often played the heroine in the wilderness: the strong, athletic woman who canoed on wild rivers and shot villains. Her independent heroines rescued themselves, as well as the men. Nell always saved the day.

  Samuel Goldwyn offered Nell a lucrative seven-year contract that would have made her a wealthy and famous woman. She turned it down in 1917, opting to follow her dream of becoming a successful independent filmmaker. Nell didn’t want any interference in her films. She paid a high price for the decision.

  Nell divorced Ernest in 1920 and launched Nell Shipman Productions the following year. She continued to write, direct, produce, and star in her own films, including The Girl from God’s Country in 1921. Some were produced at her remote camp-studio in Priest Lake, Idaho, where she moved in 1922 with her son and her new partner, Bert Van Tuyle.

  The emergence of the major Hollywood studios made it increasingly difficult for independent filmmakers to operate. Nell’s company went bankrupt in 1924. She separated from Bert and moved to New York. Unlucky in love, she married several more times and gave birth to twins in 1926 while living in Spain with then-husband Charles Ayers.

  Nell was involved in a few more films, writing the story for 1935’s Wings in the Dark, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. She is credited in as many as thirty films, though some have been lost. She continued to write throughout her life, penning novels and magazine articles as well as scripts. Always trying to revive her movie career, she still had an agent sending out her proposals when she was seventy-five. Nell died alone and broke at seventy-nine, while living in the desert of Cabazon, California.

  She left behind volume one of an unpublished autobiography. Thanks to Professor Tom Trusky from Boise State University, who spent years ensuring Nell’s legacy was preserved, both the autobiography and a collection of her letters were published. The latter showed an enduring attachment to Canada, as in a 1963 letter about her hopes of getting “back home” to make movies.[2]

  In The Girl from God’s Country, author Kay Armatage calls Nell Shipman a pioneer of both Canadian and American cinema. Armatage notes that Canadian scholars have neglected Nell because she worked in the United States, while American scholars consider her Canadian.

  Quote:

  “I did not like the way they dressed their contract players. This was in the period of curly blondes with cupid’s bow mouths.… This long-legged, lanky, outdoors gal, who usually loped across the silver screen in fur parkas and mukluks, simply gagged at such costuming. And had the nerve to refuse it.”[3]

  Angela Sidney.

  Yukon Archives, Anglican Church, Diocese of Yukon fonds, ACC 86/61 #331

  Tagish and Tlingit Tales

  Angela Sidney

  1902–1991

  She devoted her life to preserving the language, dances, traditions, and stories of her people — and passing them on to a new generation.

  When Angela Sidney died in 1991, she was a beloved and respected Tagish Elder of the Deisheetaan (Crow) Nation. Awarded the Order of Canada in 1986 for her significant contributions to preserving Native cultural heritage, she was the first woman from the Yukon to receive this honour. The humble lady proudly showed her photo of the ceremony in Ottawa at which Governor General Jeanne Sauvé presented her medal.[1]

  Born near Carcross in the southern Yukon, she was given the English name Angela after an adoring prospector said she looked like an angel. She was also given the Tlingit name Stóow and the Tagish name Ch’óonehte’ Ma because of her mixed ancestry: her father was Tagish and her mother was Tlingit.

  Angela spent much of her life trapping, hunting, and fishing with her family. As a child, she occasionally attended school at the Anglican mission in Carcross, but spent most of her time participating in her community’s traditional lifestyle. She grew up speaking both Tagish and Tlingit, and learned some Tahltan, Southern Tutchone, and Kaska, as well as English. Angela loved hearing old Tagish and Tlingit stories from her mother and other relatives.

  During Angela’s lifetime, many of the cultural traditions of the First Nations in the Yukon were threatened by the influx of outsiders, first during the Klondike Gold Rush and later the construction of the Alaska Highway. She witnessed first-hand some of the effects of the rush as close relatives (including Kate Carmack and Skookum Jim) were in the party that struck gold on Bonanza Creek. At fourteen Angela wed twenty-eight-year-old George Sidney at the encouragement of her parents. She was first married simply in the custom of her people and later — at the insistence of her former teacher — in a formal ceremony in an Anglican church.

  During the first winter of their marriage, Angela and George — whom she called Old Man — shared a twelve-by-fourteen-foot tent with her parents to save on wood. While Old Man was off working as a section hand on the Yukon White Pass Railway, Angela played: “I still felt like a kid even though I was living with Old Man — I was just like a child then!”[2]

  Old Man was proud when his teenage bride once surprised him by catching some gophers and cooking them for supper. Pregnancy soon brought an end to Angela’s childhood when she was fifteen. “I got in family way 1917. Gee, isn’t that lucky? I was lucky I never got like that before!”[3]

  She gave birth to seven children, but four died. Angela noted that when labour began the expectant mother would go to a camp behind the family house and hold on to a stick driven into the ground. After the birth the mother was given Hudson’s Bay tea. They would hang the afterbirth of a boy in a tree for a Canada Jay to eat (so the boy would become a good hunter), and bury the afterbirth of a girl in a gopher den (so the girls became expert at catching gophers). Such traditions disappeared as missionaries and settlers moved in.

  Angela wanted to make sure that her children and other First Nations people didn’t lose their customs, history, legends, songs, or language. In the mid-1970s, she began recording and sharing the rich cultural knowledge she’d been gathering. She published Taglit and Tlingit stories in a number of books, including My Stories Are My Wealth (1977) and Tagish Tlaagu (1982). Other books documented Tagish and Tlingit place names, as well as six generations of her family history. Angela spent many years collaborating with linguists and anthropologists Catharine McClellan and Julie Cruikshank, who helped her record traditional knowledge. Without Angela’s devotion, much of the Tagish and Tlingit traditionals would have been lost.

  By the time Angela Sidney died at eighty-nine, she was a renowned historian and storyteller, and the last of her people who spoke fluent Tagish. Her legacy includes the Yukon Storytelling Festival and the invaluable oral and written records of her community. Angela’s death was mourned with a traditional potlatch in Carcross. Ch’óonehte’Ma Stóow is fondly remembered as a noble and generous woman.

/>   Quote:

  “I have no money to leave for my grandchildren. My stories are my wealth.”[4]

  Statue of David Thompson and Charlotte Small, Invermere, British Columbia.

  Courtesy of photographer Ross MacDonald

  Woman of the Paddle Song

  Charlotte Small

  1785–1857

  Across the continent’s rivers, mountains, and trails, she travelled farther than any other woman of her time[1] — and supported David Thompson as he mapped a nation.

  The exploration party crossed and recrossed the foaming white swells in the Blaeberry River, clinging to their horses to avoid being swept away. Surveyor David Thompson was attempting to open a new route for fur traders across the Rocky Mountains. All the adventurers survived the harrowing ordeal, including the lone woman and her three small children.

  Today she is recognized as a national historic person (more than eighty years after her husband received the same honour), a remarkable Aboriginal woman whose Cree language and many skills were essential to her husband’s explorations during fur-trading days. She was commemorated with Thompson in a statue unveiled in Invermere, British Columbia, in 2003, and historians continue to try to piece together her story. Who was this woman?