Alone in Silence: European Women in the Canadian North Before 1940

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

The myth that the Canadian Arctic was a preserve of male fur traders,
missionaries, and heroic explorers has been assailed from a number of
directions in recent years. Here, historian Barbara Kelcey recounts the
stories of dozens of European women, representing the hundreds who
experienced life in the Northwest Territories and northern Yukon between
1867 and 1939. They include wives of fur traders, nurses, Anglican
mission workers, Grey Nuns, travel writers, and others. Kelcey considers
many aspects of their lives, from domestic arrangements within their
homes to the impact of climate and the women’s sense of isolation.
There is no doubt that these are fascinating characters who led unusual
lives, and Kelcey has made an admirable sweep through the libraries and
archives of North America to find their voices.

Unlike most of the other recent literature on the subject of women in
colonial settings, this book does not address questions like the
complicity or resistance of women in the imperialist enterprise, or the
issue of whether men and women experienced that system differently.
Indeed, Kelcey explicitly refuses to engage in these debates, proposing
that first, she could find insufficient evidence to draw any sort of
general interpretations and, second, that these scholarly discussions
lead nowhere because they misuse concepts like racism and feminism to
the point where the theory becomes meaningless. As a result, Alone in
Silence reads very much like a contribution to the first wave of writing
in women’s history, now sometimes referred to as “compensatory
history,” in which the object was to “write women back in” to
histories that had told only men’s stories. As such, the book serves a
useful purpose, since very little has been published on white women in
the Arctic. It also means that scholars may find the book of limited
interest, but northern enthusiasts will certainly welcome it.