A Flannel Shirt and Liberty: British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West, 1880-1914

Lin Good, a consultant, was Associate Librarian at Queen’s University.

This fascinating collection illustrates the impact on history caused by the fact that there was a surplus of women in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, and a shortage of them in the Canadian West. The obvious solution was to persuade the women to immigrate.

In the excellent introduction to this book, Professor Susan Jackel, a member of the Department of Canadian Studies at the University of Alberta, explains how this was achieved. The surplus women were educated gentlewomen; the demand in the colonies was for domestic servants, dressmakers, sturdy working women. Therefore, organizations were formed in England, such as the Female Middle-class Emigration Society, whose aims were to prepare the gentlewomen for a new and difficult life.

These accounts were written by women who undertook the adventure and who found in Canada the labour markets, and marriage, denied them at home. They helped to found the early pioneer communities, and their legacy is seen today in the background and traditions of the West.

The narratives are literate and perceptive, viewpoints of gentlewomen trained only for marriage in households with servants but coping with the chores of working-class wives — cooking, cleaning, raising poultry, and growing vegetables.

Yet the women mostly adapted to their new environment. Marian Scran, in “A Woman in Canada,” states that “every woman is a servant where labor is so scarce” (p. 163), and Georgina Binn-Clark in “A Summer on the Canadian Prairies” states the same philosophy: “rich and poor, gentle and simple, Canadian or immigrant, we are all of us working women.”

Obviously, the new country held its own appeal. An Anglo-Irish woman, Agnes Skrine, in “A Lady’s Life on a Ranch” vividly describes its charm in an article written to rebut “The English Ranch Woman,” a dreary picture of life on an American ranch, the only selection written by a man. Although the ranch there described is American, it is similar to those in Canada. However, the picture is of a life of deprivation, only to be borne with Christian fortitude and resignation.

The usual history of Canada pays scant attention to women. Susan Jackel helps to redress the balance with this readable contribution to the richness of our inheritance.