by Calvin Evans
The money advanced by women mortgagees was real money. Many of these women had their own money, were receiving shares from a family business, or were involved in business transactions independent of their husbands. We saw how this worked at Grand Bank between the husband and wife team of Charles Forward and Mary Florence Forward. Women who advanced large mortgages were unafraid to take the attendant risks.
At Rose Blanche in 1994, I was told by the former owner of a long-liner that not one of his crew members earned less than $80,000 a year before the cod moratorium was imposed in 1992. A young woman in Harbour Le Cou said that before the cod moratorium, young people graduating from high school were given a car or a truck as a graduation present. She had worked for years in the fish plant for good wages, and suddenly there was no work. In a few short months they had gone from prosperity to near-poverty. When the fish plant closed, this young woman was trained in Port aux Basques as a hairdresser, but suddenly there was such a surplus of hairdressers that there was no work for most of those recently trained. All the new houses in communities along the south-west coast, like the houses with elevators along the Northern Peninsula, were built when the fishery was at its peak. So, yes there was good money being made in the fishery and women had a hand in using and saving it.
iii) Although it was real ownership, our society has collectively forgotten that there was a time in our maritime history when women’s substantial roles were being played out.
Until very recently, even maritime historians seemed largely unaware of the significant number of women who owned ships and of the significant role these women played in our early economy and society. At the same time that British public figures and parliamentarians were fighting for clear property rights for married women, several married women in Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces of Canada were already being listed in the ship registers as sole owners and joint owners. Widows and spinsters owned ships and shares in ships at least from the 1700s, and many owned boats and plantations long before that.
It is a tragic commentary on our history that we have forgotten these facts. This is “history forgotten.” Since I undertook this research project in 1993, I have had occasion to give public lectures and field questions on the subject and people have uniformly been surprised and unbelieving. When I found the first four women shipowners listed in the microfiche edition of the ship registers in 1992, my first reaction was “This must be an error. I will note it and check it out later.” Others feel similarly, I am sure.
Perhaps one of the reasons why we have forgotten this history (as we shall see in the next point) is that women stepped into roles of leadership as needed (for example, following the death of a husband) and then stepped back out of those roles as circumstances improved (for example, a prosperous voyage, sons taking over the business, remarriage). Women were better at multi-tasking than men (I think); a woman who remained at home when her husband and his crew went to sea still had to care for the family, look after the kitchen gardens and animals, organize and superviseall work on the property, help to cure the fish when it was brought home, and so forth. So, what was one more job? There is no better confirmation of this point than Hilda Chaulk Murray’s book More Than Fifty Percent: Woman’s Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900-1950. Sean Cadigan confirms this observation in his thesis.
The real history of this situation needs to be restored or reconstructed, and we must never allow our children to forget what many women accomplished in the past, often under the most trying of circumstances. We must move past the comment that this was exceptional, understood in the sense that it was occasional, sporadic, and not to be taken seriously. People who make such assertions find it easier to forget the past.
As a rough parallel, I quote an experience I had with Robert Evans in 1955. As I sat down with the last of the great Evans shipbuilders, I asked him to give me the names of the vessels which the Evanses had built. Starting from 1870, about six or eight years before he was born, he gave me the names of practically every ship the family had built, the order in which they were built, their tonnage, their fate, and their association with events of the time and how this governed the names they were given. This information was all confirmed later by my research. Though he gave me the names of the seven ships he had built at Northern Arm from 1901 to 1909, he did not mention the two three-masters he had built: the 372-ton Attainment at Thwart Island in 1917 and the 149-ton Nancy Lee at Campbellton in 1920. These omissions would have been “history forgotten” had it not been for my conversations with him in 1955. And the amazing thing is that he thought that as a shipbuilder he was doing nothing remarkable. I am sure that he would have said, “But lots of other people were doing the exact same thing.” Is that, I wonder, why we have forgotten women’s role in connection with ownership of boats, ships, and waterfront properties associated with the fishery? They were simply doing what a lot of others were doing, doing what needed to be done. This would be in accord with Mary Yarn’s comment to me in 1994 when I told her I had come to visit her because she had been a shipowner. She said, “No, I never owned a ship.” I mentioned the name Wagaymack and she said, “Oh, that was a boat. I thought you meant a big ship.” But the Wagaymack was a decked vessel and was therefore classified as a ship and required to be registered. It is a sad commentary that these kinds of things may seem to have been less remarkable because they were being done by women. No one at the time bothered to record such happenings.
iv. Ownership was a natural activity and it evolved out of situations of necessity and opportunity.
Perhaps the best example of natural ownership is described by Eric Gosse in his book The Settling of Spaniard’s Bay. When Robert Gosse III died in 1863, he left his ship Victoria to his widow Mary. “She immediately took overall command” and for the next two years, ostensibly as the cook, she fished with her six grown sons on the French Shore. One of her first acts with her sons was to rescue the crew and passengers of a ship which had gone aground at Cat Harbour (Lumsden). After two years at the fishery Mary ran the operation from the shore and sent her young daughter as cook aboard the Victoria.
This was the pattern that women followed. When a husband died prematurely, often drowned at sea, the wife became the skipper of the fishing venture, hiring the crew, outfitting the ship, taking charge of curing the fish, dealing with the merchants, and sharing the profits and the risks. Women had certain advantages: they were the experts at curing fish, they generally had more schooling than their husbands, and they had a fierce determination to ensure that the family survived as an economic unit. For many women it happened that naturally. Those who survived were durable women indeed.
v) Women possessed the requisite skills to be real partners in business ventures.
It has been clearly demonstrated from the literature and from oral sources that women were the real experts at “curing” or “dressing” fish. Whether it was in a small family operation or the kind of commercial venture that was undertaken through large business firms as in Grand Bank, it was women who usually took the main responsibility of curing the fish when it was brought home from the fishing grounds and thrown up on the stages or hauled to the drying beaches.
Women usually had more schooling than men and often kept the family’s accounts, acting as bookkeepers and being in charge of the money. I have quoted many cases to substantiate this. Taken from the book Never Done: Three Centuries of Women’s Work in Canada, this comment is very telling: “But women also had an important work role in family businesses in early Canada. Although only a small portion of the population was engaged in trade, among the group most of the married women took part as permanent partners or replacements when their husbands were away. This situation was so common that women in business were an accepted part of the culture of New France, as they were in France itself.” What was true of France and New France was correspondingly true of Great Britain and English Canada.
Women’s work on the family property complemented the work of their men, whether it was raisin
g children, keeping kitchen gardens, caring for animals, making hay, or taking leadership roles in the community.
vi) Older women modeled shipowning and property ownership for younger women.
Several examples of this modeling were cited throughout this study. While modeling seems to have reached almost an art form on the south-west coast, it seems evident in other places as well. Perhaps one of the key figures on the southwest coast was Harriet Billard of Rose Blanche, wife of Samuel, who owned the ship Ethel & Albert from 1932 to 1939 and had an engine installed in the vessel in 1936. She may in fact have modeled shipowning for other women along the south-west coast. Maud Billard of nearby Harbour Le Cou, Harriet’s niece, became a shipowner for most of the years between 1947 and 1983. Maud jointly owned the Dolores Kaye with her husband, Simeon Matthew Billard, from 1947 to 1953, and the Austin & Dianne from 1963 to 1983. Their partnership was described to me in 1994 in this way: “Simeon handled the business and Maud handled the money. Simeon passed all the money over to Maud.” The example of such women would have been felt in the entire south-west coast area. Women who sold ships to other women, or couples who sold to other couples, were consciously modeling ownership patterns.
Women from 130 Newfoundland communities owned ships in the period under study, from approximately 1800 to the 1960s, according to the ship registers. Apart from discrete areas like the south-west coast where women’s ownership would have become known by word of mouth, many women accompanied their husbands to St. John’s by ship for at least an annual outing. This kind of information would have been spread as women went “gamming” (visiting) aboard other ships in St. John’s harbour, and as they met while shopping on Water Street and Duckworth Street and especially in the milliners’ shops.
It is clear that older women modeled shipowning for younger women, whether consciously or not. It may well be that early women thought they were not doing anything extraordinary, that they were, in fact, prepared to do anything both to prove and to enhance their natural abilities. It was the survival of the family or small community group as an economic unit that was their primary motivation.
Women modeled leadership for other women in church and community activities throughout Newfoundland. The Wesleyan-Methodist Church was particularly adept at this, mainly because of Susannah Wesley’s influence on her son John Wesley, founder of the movement. Women were trained along with men as class leaders by Wesleyan-Methodist clergy. It was a rigorous training and required reading, study, record-keeping and counseling, and women were given responsibility to teach and supervise classes of women, and when there were insufficient male class leaders, men were enrolled in a woman’s class. These same skills were used in their teaching of children and youth in Sunday School classes. Hannah Eliza Evans, a class leader and Sunday School teacher at Northern Arm, also operated a branch store for the George J. Carter fishery firm at Herring Neck; the skills she learned in the class meetings were transferrable to the business world. In the same way that the religious revivals of the early nineteenth century in the United States helped to encourage strong female activism in the suffragist, abolitionist and temperance movements, so the early Methodist revivals in Newfoundland (strongly opposed and threatened by the “mother church,” the Church of England), with their deep emotional dimension, gave women both a strong confidence in their own abilities and the skills to take active leadership roles in their communities.
A further conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence presented is that it is time to dispense with the near-myth of the passive woman in this early society. There are those who persist in portraying women as weak and powerless in early society, perhaps in some cases because it has become a convenient tool in the present to help redress the wrongs done to women through the centuries. However, passive women are not the picture that emerges from the court records or census records or the plantation books of Newfoundland, among other sources. We cannot discount the courageous, feisty, bold women who stand out in these records because they would not suffer wrongs to be done to them or their families, and they used every means to ensure that their cases were heard and action taken. They did not always win the individual case, but their voices were heard, and word spread.
There are at least four patterns of relationship between a woman and her partner(s) that emerge in the records. It may be instructive to look at these patterns as a way of determining whether women played an active or passive role in ownership matters. I would characterize them in this way:
a. Women were subordinate in the relationship.
A good example of this pattern is the beach women of Grand Bank. These women were gainfully employed; they worked for the large business firms, not for their own family business. They worked in teams, a boss woman being in charge of nine other women. They were the experts at curing fish. When the fish was brought to the beach from the harbour, these groups of women were responsible for the finished product that was then taken back to the harbour and shipped to Europe or the Indies. The last word on the curing was never the woman’s. There was a man (a “culler”) appointed to inspect the fish and to give the final word on the product. I have never read of an instance in which the boss woman was promoted to the job of “culler.” The women, important as their role was, were in a subordinate relationship.
Other cases of women in subordinate roles may be those whose husbands registered their ships in the wife’s name in order to escape indebtedness to the merchant. It is impossible to identify these with any degree of certainty, but one case may have been Susannah Parsons of Glovertown, who from 1918 to 1922 was technically the owner of the ship George V. Parsons, named after her husband. I have it from personal testimony that Susannah was ill for much of her life and was in no way involved in the fishing venture. Susannah was originally from Carbonear and may have come to Glovertown as a teacher. If that is not so, she may still have had sufficient schooling to keep the books and handle the money. In all such cases we must remember the viability of the family as the primary economic unit; everything was subordinate to the family’s survival.
b. A woman was subordinate in a real partnership.
This pattern would have been true of Myrtle and Henry Hatcher in Rose Blanche. And from my visit with them in 1994, I don’t think Myrtle would have had it any other way. It was a good and fair partnership. It appears that Henry was ensuring his wife’s financial security, perhaps against a possible claim by one of the children from his first marriage. Myrtle was a smart, savvy woman, but it was the family’s survival that was uppermost in her mind, and I think she would have deferred to her husband on most issues.
Merchants’ wives who owned a few shares in the family firm’s ships and who played a supporting role may have belonged in this category. Emma Wheeler of Frenchman’s Cove, Bay of Islands, was a joint owner of the ship Spring Bird with her husband Symeon in 1896. Symeon was a lobster packer. This was a joint venture, with Emma almost surely playing a supporting role. Eleanor Tibbo and Mary Florence Forward of Grand Bank were real partners with their husbands in the Forward & Tibbo firm, though most of their activity was from behind the scenes.
c. A woman was in an equal partnership with her partner(s).
It may well be that Simeon and Maud Billard of Harbour Le Cou had such a partnership, where “he handled the business and she handled the money.” Each had complementary skills and they were deployed in a relationship of trust.
A clearer example would be Chesley and Mary Yarn. Chesley carried on his business with his own ships in Mose Ambrose, and Mary had a complementary business with a ship, of which Chesley had made her the managing owner, in nearby English Harbour West. My visit with Mary in 1994 confirmed this arrangement.
Annie Northover Berkshire of Spencer’s Cove, Placentia Bay, was appointed managing owner of their ship in 1959 and she sold 24 of her 40 shares to other family members. Her husband was a fisherman and perhaps he was recognizing his wife’s schooling and business ability by placing her in charge of the ship. Eli
za Pafford (Eddy) of North Harbour was married consecutively to two businessmen and was intimately involved in the operation of the business. For eleven years Laura Garland of Gaultois was manager of the Baddeck-built ship Teresa G, on which Thomas Garland Ltd. had taken a $75,000 mortgage. The mortgage was discharged after only 14 months. It is assumed that Thomas Garland was still living but only the firm is mentioned in the record. Mary Wilmot Sheaves of Channel shared an equal partnership with her husband.
Women who were traders, such as Ellen Roach of Branch, St. Mary’s Bay, Ann J. Tuck of Fortune, Anne Farrell of St. Jacques, and possibly Gertrude Newman of Boyd’s Cove, and Elizabeth Freake of Joe Batt’s Arm, were certainly equal partners in terms of putting money into the ventures, sharing the risks and the profits, and very probably working on board ship during these coastal journeys. We saw that on the south coast women sometimes handled the money on board ship.
A whimsical story in the literature gives us a good example of a real partnership between husband and wife. Justus S. Wetmore and his wife of Clifton Village on the Kingston Peninsula of New Brunswick were partners in shipbuilding, farming, a sawmill and a granite quarry. Stanley T. Spicer writes in Masters of Sail : “that such was his role in the community and that of his wife that he was well known as ‘He Boss’ and she, ‘She Boss.’”
d. A woman is in charge; she is head of the operation.
Mary Gosse of Spaniard’s Bay was an excellent example of a woman in charge of an operation. She studied her six grown sons and appointed each to a specific task, and then operated the business until she was ready to pass it over. Alice Murphy of King’s Cove, widow of Michael, operated the old MacBraire business for 30-plus years after her husband’s death. Abigail Horwood of Harbour Le Cou also operated the family business for several years after her husband Todd died.
And, of course, the premier examples of independent leadership abilities were displayed in Ada Annie Petite of Mose Ambrose and Marie Smart Penny of Burgeo, and currently in Debbie Petite of English Harbour West.