100 More Canadian Heroines

by Merna Forster

  When the Watts arrived at Sept-Îles months later, they found the Quebec-bound steamer already full. A gentleman kindly offered them his stateroom. The chance meeting would prove helpful, as Maud’s admirer was the Honourable L.A. Taschereau, future premier of Quebec.

  In 1919, James was reassigned to Rupert House on James Bay. It had been one of the most productive beaver-trapping areas in the world, but was receiving only a few thousand beaver skins the year the Watts arrived. The numbers plummeted each year, and Rupert House was operating at a loss. With few beaver available, the Cree were suffering. It was one of their major food sources and they needed to trade the furs to survive.

  In 1928–29, Rupert House received only four beaver skins. Many Cree were starving. James Watt suggested the creation of a beaver farm to provide steady production of beavers, but the HBC ignored his desperate pleas. When two men told James they’d found an occupied beaver lodge, he used his own money to buy the live beaver so they could live in the wilderness. He also convinced the local Cree that leaving the beaver to reproduce would eventually result in a sustainable resource. James continued paying Natives to guard the beavers, but his credit was running out and threat of poaching grew. By the third year, there were more than 200 beaver.

  Though it was mid-winter, the Watts decided they had to act immediately. They decided to ask the Quebec government to set aside some of its territory as a beaver preserve. The government wasn’t likely to be receptive, and James would probably be fired for abandoning his post. Plus, he couldn’t speak French. Maud decided to travel to Quebec City immediately to plead on behalf of the Natives of northern Quebec.

  It was sixty below zero when Maud set out on dogsled, with two skilled men and her children (aged three to six) bundled up in bearskins. After an arduous journey by sled, foot, and finally train, the group arrived in Quebec about a month after departing. Maud met with the deputy minister of the provincial fisheries department, Louis A. Richard; she calmly asked for a large reserve, offering a token payment of $10. After subsequent meetings and considerable negotiation, Premier Taschereau and his cabinet approved her audacious request.

  Maud returned with a lease from the Province of Quebec for 7,200 square miles of territory to be used as a beaver reserve. She served as proprietor of the Rupert House Preserve, but the Watts couldn’t finance the venture indefinitely. Eventually, the Hudson’s Bay Company took over the lease. By 1940 there were over 4,000 beavers, and licensed hunters could trap within the preserve, according to a quota system. The Rupert House Preserve became a model for other beaver preserves across Canada.

  When James died of pneumonia in 1944, Maud lost both the love of her life and her home. A few days after his death she climbed into a float plane to fly south, but Maud’s heart stayed in Rupert House. She later returned to set up a bakery. She also built the J.S.C. Watt Memorial Community Hall and adopted several Cree children.

  During Maud’s lifetime, she received a number of honours in recognition of her devotion to improving the lives of the First Nations of northern Quebec. In 1952, the Province of Quebec appointed her official warden of Rupert House, providing her with authority, a badge, and a modern two-storey house. She was the first female game warden in the province.[4] The Beaver Club in Montreal, the historic association of wealthy fur traders, presented her with a golden trophy. The well-dressed and elegant Maud, speaking in classic French, charmed the members with her gracious acceptance speech.

  Maud was awarded the Order of Canada in 1971. She died in Ottawa in 1987 but was buried in Rupert House near her beloved James, in the land that she called home. In March 2009, Radio-Canada broadcast a program about Maud Watt in a series about remarkable people who have been forgotten.

  Maud Watt with sleigh.

  The Beaver, March 1943.

  Quote:

  “… here I am standing on a hilltop with a jewelled world at my feet — and healthy and happy — with an appetite no millionaire could buy — and not a worry in the world.”[5]

  — Maud Watt describing her view near Ungava Bay.

  Mother Esther Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant-Jésus, circa 1763.

  From Captive to Mother Superior

  Esther Wheelwright

  1696–1780

  She was once a devout Puritan girl. But her dedication to Catholicism helped save the Ursulines after the fall of New France.

  In the summer of 1703, Esther Wheelwright was seven years old, a happy child on the American frontier. The daughter of prominent pioneers Colonel John Wheelwright and Mary Snell, she was born and raised in Wells, Massachusetts. The Wheelwrights were influential Puritans; Colonel Wheelwright served as a judge, town clerk, and councillor.

  On August 21, 1703, hundreds of Abenaki warriors and French forces raided the community of Wells, torching buildings, killing twenty-two, and kidnapping seven, including Esther. The terrified child joined sixty-eight captives from other nearby communities. The raiding party forced the prisoners to march north on an incredible 200-mile journey through forests and swamps. After about a week, Esther and the other surviving captives arrived in the Abenaki village of Norridgewock, near the Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers, in New France.

  An Abenaki family adopted Esther, who was in “an impenetrable gloom.”[1] She laboured in the fields with her adoptive family and was trained in Catholicism by a Jesuit priest. She attended Sunday Mass and catechism class before being baptized a Catholic as Marie-Joseph. Esther soon lost her English vocabulary and became fluent in Abenaki. When her new family moved to a St. François mission (south of Trois-Rivières) in 1705, young Esther paddled canoes and portaged on snowshoes like everyone else.

  Once the Wheelwrights learned that their daughter had survived, they appealed to the governor of Massachusetts for her release. The powerful and persuasive Father Vincent Bigot in Quebec eventually managed to convince Esther’s Abenaki parents to release her in a prisoner exchange. She was sent to Quebec after five years of captivity. Esther was welcomed into the splendid home of New France’s Governor Vaudreuil.

  Despite the Wheelwrights’ continued efforts to have their daughter released, they never saw her again. She had made a strong impression on Father Bigot, who was confident that the young captive had great potential as a convert. Father Bigot devoted himself to Esther’s education and advancement.

  He enrolled Esther in the boarding school run by the Ursulines in Quebec and she decided to join the order. She took her vows on April 12, 1714, as Esther Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant-Jésus and began an extraordinary career with the Ursulines. Esther became principal of the boarding school, then mistress of the novices, before being elected as the first English-born Mother Superior of the Ursulines in Quebec on December 15, 1760. After 1772, she served as assistant superior until 1778, then zelatrice until her death in 1780.

  Esther accepted the keys to the convent at one of the most challenging times in the Ursulines’ history. The British conquest of French forces in North America had left the monastery in shambles. Refugees and British soldiers sought shelter there. The Ursulines were in debt and had no income. The boarding school was closed and their traditional patrons had fled or lost their fortunes. Ties with the Mother House in France were broken, and Esther and the sisters feared for the order’s survival.

  Esther became Mother Superior in the midst of hostilities between the British military and the conquered population. She used her excellent diplomatic skills to demonstrate that the Ursuline order was beneficial to the new colony. Among her many influential English patrons was the writer Frances Moore Brooke, who incorporated Esther in her book The History of Emily Montague, the first Canadian novel.

  Esther maintained contact with her relatives over the years, and her English background and family connections helped her build important relationships with the English colonists. She was able to place English students in the boarding school, rent out rooms to ladies, and establish a lucrative business selling holy objects, convent art, fresh produce, and jams. The
unlikely Mother Superior from Wells saved the Ursulines from extinction while serving in the most powerful religious position that a woman of her day could hold.

  Esther’s story has long been familiar to historians of New France, and the Wheelwright family has cherished the memory of the lost child who became a famous Ursuline. For eight generations the only existing portrait of her was handed down in the Wheelwright family through members named Esther. In more recent times, her creative relatives have honoured her memory. Director and producer Penny Wheelwright released the documentary Captive — The Story of Esther in 2004, and author Julie Wheelwright spent several decades researching her 2011 book Esther.

  Quote:

  “Thus you see, my lovely Mother, the impossibility there is of complying with the desire you have of my return to you. It hath been always an infinite trouble to me to resist the desire that you and my Dear Father have so often repeated in times past.”[2]

  Charlotte Whitton, 1935.

  The Unforgettable Madam Mayor

  Charlotte Whitton

  1896–1975

  The first female mayor in a major Canadian city, she was a flamboyant trailblazer for women in public life.

  Charlotte Elizabeth Hazeltyne Whitton was born in 1896 to a family of modest means in Renfrew, Ontario. She excelled in school, motivated by her mother’s advice: “Charlotte Elizabeth, you’ll have to make the best use of the brains you’ve got for you’ve neither a face nor a figure.”[1]

  Sixteen-year-old Charlotte was inspired by the mock election in history class at school, and raced home to share her dream of becoming a federal cabinet minister. Her usually placid father fumed at the preposterous idea, because “like rugby, politics was for the boys and men.”[2] He did, however, believe in the value of education. During the First World War, the ambitious young woman attended Queen’s University on scholarships, excelling at both academics and hockey. Her hopes for a career in public service grew when women won the right to vote in federal elections in 1918, the year she graduated with an M.A.

  Charlotte became a social worker, working tirelessly for two decades on child protection and family welfare in Ottawa. From 1920 to 1941, she was a driving force behind the Canadian Council on Child Welfare (CCCW), which became a strong national organization. Charlotte led the way to making social work a profession rather than a volunteer activity. Under her leadership, the CCCW worked to protect handicapped, illegitimate, and immigrant children, and improve child welfare legislation and the juvenile justice system. The CCCW also conducted valuable research, published reports, held conferences, compiled a directory of child welfare agencies, and worked with federal and provincial authorities across Canada.

  A tireless activist, Charlotte lectured across North America. She served on the League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee for more than a decade. During the Great Depression, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett hired her to investigate the distribution of unemployment relief. She also wrote countless articles for newspapers, magazines, and journals, and hosted a popular television show called Dear Charlotte.

  During the 1940s, Charlotte continued fighting for the public good. After alleging that babies were being smuggled out of Alberta for sale in Ontario and the United States, she was charged with conspiracy to commit criminal libel. When the charges were dismissed, and a Royal Commission in 1949 confirmed her report, one writer congratulated Charlotte and compared her to Joan of Arc.

  Charlotte was in her fifties when she became the mayor of Ottawa. In 1950, she was elected to city council as controller, thanks to strong support from many women’s groups. She stepped into the position of mayor the following year. “While men groaned and women gloated, Charlotte Whitton took up the municipal reins.”[3] When one alderman suggested that a particular topic might be offensive to a woman, she quickly reassured him, “Whatever my sex, I’m no lady.”[4]

  She served for nine years, 1951–1956 and 1960–1964. Colourful and controversial, she was an outspoken mayor known for many stormy confrontations with her opponents. She once threatened to hit a man who made a sexist remark. After leaving the mayor’s chair, she became an alderman until retiring in 1972, at seventy-six. Charlotte encouraged other women to become active in politics and championed women’s equality standing firm on her conservative notion that married women shouldn’t work outside the home. Her bold personality, controversial views, and wit frequently made her the focus of attention, putting Charlotte in the headlines for more than half a century.

  Charlotte Whitton at age five, in a teaser for an article about her in Maclean’s, 1956.

  Charlotte was named a Commander of the British Empire (1934), and awarded the Jubilee Medal (1936) and the Coronation Medal (1937). She also received several honorary degrees. She died in 1975, but people still speculated on her legacy and sexual orientation.

  Charlotte’s racism raised concerns about how she is remembered. She frequently expressed her anti-Semitic views in important discussions of immigration, which influenced government decisions to restrict the entry of Jewish refugees. Determined to preserve the Anglo-Canadian character of the country, she voiced her racist objections to the immigration of Ukrainians, Asians, and other ethnicities.[5]

  Though anti-Semitism was common at the time, Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress pointed out that “[the] difference with Charlotte Whitton is she acted on her anti-Semitic views … she damned Jewish children.”[6] Ruth Klein of B’nai Brith Canada commented that “[the] Charlotte Whitton controversy forces us to re-evaluate the standards we use to choose our national heroes and heroines…. People’s prejudices and the actions they take should be taken into account when we assess their enduring legacy. The negatives cannot just be overlooked.”[7]

  Charlotte donated her personal papers to Library and Archives Canada, stipulating that the box of letters written by longtime companion Margaret Grier be sealed for fifteen years longer than the rest. The couple, who had a very close and affectionate relationship for about thirty years, lived together until Margaret died of cancer. The opening of the box in January 1999 caused a sensation.

  After her partner’s death, Charlotte had written, “Oh! Mardie, Mardie, Mardie, how can I go on? Ours wasn’t love; it was a knitting together of mind and spirit; it was something given to few of God.”[8] While some historians doubt a lesbian relationship,[9] others believed that they “obviously had a wonderfully physical relationship.”[10]

  Charlotte Whitton continues to be remembered as an influential feminist, journalist, social worker, and politician.

  Quote:

  “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily it’s not difficult.”[11]

  Mona Wilson.

  A Great Human Dynamo[1]

  Mona Wilson

  1894–1981

  A heroic nurse for a new century, she made a difference.

  “Come wind, snow, rain or sleet, and any hour of the day or night, often standing for hours in the freezing cold waiting for the port and starboard lights of the rescue ships to loom out of the blackness of the harbour, I was always on the pier to meet the survivors.”[2]

  The woman on the dock at St. John’s was nurse Mona Wilson, ready to care for shipwrecked sailors and soldiers. During the Second World War, the port was home to the Newfoundland Escort Service, which guided convoys of supply ships across the Atlantic. Mona and her volunteers looked after 500 survivors of vessels attacked by German submarines, and 5,000 more men who landed after disasters.

  Nicknamed the “Florence Nightingale of Newfoundland,”[3] Mona served as Red Cross Assistant Commissioner for Newfoundland from 1940 to 1945. The resourceful and dedicated nurse organized a system to effectively meet the survivors’ needs, as well as those of men stationed in Newfoundland and Labrador. Backed by an army of volunteers, she served three hospitals in St. John’s as well as others in Gander and Botswood. She established the Caribou Hut hostel in St. John’s and ensured emergency supplies reached thos
e in need, even sending warm clothing by dogsled to an isolated base and dropping food by parachute to a snowed-in troop train. Mona earned the Office of the Order of the British Empire for her wartime service.

  Mona was born in Toronto, the daughter of upper-middle-class parents who believed in public service and gave their children the best education. She graduated as a nurse from the prestigious John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1918. Mona was anxious to work overseas, but the Canadian Army Medical Corps turned her down because she hadn’t trained in Canada. The newly minted nurse was soon accepted by the United States Army Nursing Corps, administered by the American Red Cross.

  Mona and some of her nursing friends were sent to Siberia in 1919. She worked in Vladivostok before being posted to Albania and then Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), where she helped some of the 30,000 refugees. Reassigned to Montenegro, she cared for children in an orphanage, participated in mobile clinics, and trained women in public-health nursing. Mona received a number of awards for her work overseas, including the Foreign Service Certificate (Siberia), Red Cross Certificate (Balkans), a gold medallion (Italian Red Cross), and the Order of the Day (White Russians).

  After returning to Canada in 1922, Mona enrolled in the new public-health nursing program at the University of Toronto. Following her graduation, she became the chief Red Cross nurse in Prince Edward Island, which was still relatively isolated. It wasn’t until 1931 that a department of health was established in the province, with Mona named as director of Public Health Nursing. She ably developed nursing services in Prince Edward Island from 1923 until she retired in 1961.