Discussions

Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson creates a Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The first Chairperson was Ottawa based journalist Florence Bird. The Commission held public hearings across Canada and produced a report with 167 recommendations relating to issues like birth control, family law, equal pay for equal work, and maternity leave.  
 
The People who lived in the nineteenth century have done a good job in leading their Descendants to believe that they had long and delicate courtships, large happy families with proud fathers, and devoted saintly mothers. This life of course can be found described in much literature, but in the majority of cases life was full of scandals, and wide spread vices.  
 
In Smaller communities like Brandon there was illegitimacy, alcohol addiction, homosexuality, prostitution, and the hypocrisy of the double standard, which promoted purity while allowing young men to “Sow Wild Oats” if not caught, but confining young women to their homes.  
 
In the early nineteenth century educated women were venturesome, knowledgeable, cultivated, and had personal freedom. Slowly their education became sketchy, and their homes became their Gilded Cage.  
 
Women became symbols, with greater prestige, but no longer allowed to discuss the family daily problems with their men. They were relegated to an artificial social world where Society placed them on a pedestal, like today’s ‘trophy wife’ adored, revered, but untouched.  
 
Settlers from Europe found a wife by family match making, and giving a Dowry: they found it astonishing that young farmers settled courtships themselves, and that receiving permission from the brides father a mere formality.  
 
To the young prairie pioneer the choice of a wife was important, and in 1842 Mr. N. Willis listed her required assets. “She should be skilled in the manufacturing of Maple Sugar, candle’s and soap: baking, cooking, salting meat, and fish, knitting stockings, and mittens, spinning woollen yarns, feeding poultry, dairy management, and finally, mending, and making clothes for herself, her husband, and children.  
 
These are the occupations of an emigrants wife, and if a female cannot resolve to enter upon them cheerfully, she should never think of settling in the woods of Canada or New Brunswick”.  
 
The chances of marriage for a woman were excellent, and it was said that any woman should be married within six months of arriving. Even then some of the women were considered to be too young to marry, which led to the maxim “Early Wed, early dead.”  
 
All women in the 1900’s were considered by men as ‘Chattels’, first owned by their fathers, and then by their husbands.  
 
Quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “Well behaved women seldom make history.”  
 
Women have energy that amazes men.  
 
They meet difficulties, and manage serious problems, while remaining cheerful, loving, and Joyous.  
 
They smile when they want to cry out, sing when they want to shed tears, cry when they are happy, and laugh when they are nervous.  
 
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/PowerLegacy.Com/women-3138176  
 
Source: Canadian Scenery, N. P. Willis, London, 1842.  
 
http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/rights_freedoms/topics/86/  
 
http://sen.parl.gc.ca/lpepin/index.asp?PgId=1006