Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790-1840

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and the
editor of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800.

While women constituted almost half the population of Upper Canada
between 1790 and 1840, the books written on their contribution to
colonial society can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Errington’s careful delineation of women’s work and roles in Upper
Canada is therefore a welcome addition to the literature in the field.
Although her sources are elusive, she skilfully reads between the lines
of letters, court records, advice literature, and obituaries to develop
a richly textured account of what it meant to be a woman in
pre-industrial Ontario. Thematic chapters address marriage and
motherhood, affluent and ordinary women, servants and charity workers,
tradeswomen and teachers. Although the voices of some women remain mute
(minority women are particularly hard to trace), the author does a
masterful job of describing colonial women in a variety of contexts
based on age, location, class, culture, and time.

Errington’s book is important not only because it adds flesh to the
bare bones of what is known about women in this period, but also for
what the author maintains are the larger implications of her findings.
If the role of women as marriage partners, mothers, household producers,
teachers, tradeswomen, charity workers, and reformers is taken
seriously, she argues, then it must be factored into the “larger”
economic histories of the period. Moreover, in taking women into
account, it is necessary to redefine what is meant by work to include
reproduction and nonpaid work in the domestic sphere.

Although the author suggests that most women in Upper Canada could ill
afford to embrace the new cult of domesticity that was gaining momentum
in the Western world, her evidence suggests that it was the frame
through which most women were measured, even before it was fully
articulated. There may, of course, be other women’s cultures that
surviving sources fail to tap, but this book documents the speed with
which ideological concepts and social conventions penetrated the
Canadian frontier, and how short-lived was the influence of frontier
conditions on women’s subsequent sense of womanhood.