Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador-a Collage

Margaret Conrad is the Nancy Rowell Jackman Chair of Women’s Studies
at Mount Saint Vincent University, and the editor of Intimate Relations:
Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800.

Like most societies, Newfoundland and Labrador have a history that until
recently was constructed around the narratives of heroic men, especially
men in the fisheries. This book offers another history, one equally rich
and heroic in its own way. Consisting of previously published and
unpublished academic papers, journalistic accounts, short stories, and
poetry, it captures glimpses of a millennium of women’s experiences on
the rugged terrain of this continent’s northeast coast. As the editors
admit, some of this material is raw, alarming, and depressing, but
balance is achieved by including narratives of survival and even
triumph. There is material in this book that will make readers laugh,
cry, and marvel at women’s creativity and diversity at all “times”
in Newfoundland’s human history.

Like other successful collages, this one is carefully crafted. The
material is divided roughly into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the
history of First Nations women, the migratory fishery and early European
settlement, and the impact of urbanization and modern values on
women’s lives. Part 2 ranges widely across women’s individual and
collective experience in recent times, with pieces, for example, on
nuns, abortion clinics, factory workers, and protesters fighting against
low-level military flights. Throughout both sections, women’s voices
ring loud and clear.

A highly readable volume, Their Lives and Times serves both as a
textbook and as a starting place for anyone interested in this
extraordinary chapter of Canadian women’s history. The editors include
a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources and
acknow-ledge gaps in the story that still need to be filled. All that is
missing is an index so that readers can find, amid the wealth of
information, the references to the Beothuk, Jubilee Guilds,
“pissquicks,” or whatever captures their interest.