Silk Sails by Calvin Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

acted for other women in leasing property to planters and handling women’s accounts with merchants and that “women managed property and accounts left to them by their husbands.”
    Cadigan builds a very strong case for the way in which “…Newfoundland households integrated women’s work into commodity production…” as contrasted with Upper Canada. From the very earliest times up to the 1950s, as long as the salt-fish trade existed (i.e., the preparation of salted, dried codfish for foreign markets), women and men worked together as co-producers in family units. Every other activity in the fisherman’s household was subordinate to the salt-fish activity. Women had to be prepared toset aside everything else they were doing when the fish arrived, for they were acknowledged to be the experts in salting and curing the fish to meet the strict demands of the market.
    Nowhere is this specific activity better described than in Hilda Chaulk Murray’s
More than Fifty Percent: Woman’s Life in a Newfoundland Outport, 1900-1950
. She writes: “In Elliston, in the period prior to 1950, the women were full participants with their menfolk in wresting a living from the sea and land, and were directly involved with all the economic, as well as social activities, in the community. The role of the fisherman’s wife was completely intertwined with that of her husband.” Women participated fully in every aspect of the fishing operation except in the catching of fish. Even the making of sails for the boats was a cooperative venture: the men cut the sails, the women sewed them, and the men roped them. When accounts were settled up in the fall, the money was brought home to the woman who “handled the cash and managed the day to day running of the household.”
    The routine that Murray described for Elliston was not entirely uniform throughout Newfoundland. For example, when the fish for the large business firms was brought into communities like Grand Bank it was transported by horse and cart to one of the beaches and placed in large piles where the curing process became the exclusive responsibility of the “beach women.” They worked in teams with a boss woman in charge of nine others. Their distinctive attire was characterized by white aprons and white sunbonnets. The fish was spread each day for a month or more until it was dry, then graded, then moved into sheds for inspection by the culler. It must have been one of the striking early examples of assembly-line production.
    The St. John’s newspaper
Free Press
of November 25, 1913, gives a wonderful example of the cooperation between husband and wife in a fishing venture: “Patrick Tobin of Gray Islands holds the record as an individual fisherman in Newfoundland for having made the biggest bill in the shortest season. A mercantile firm paid him $1,050 for his season’s work – July 7 to September 15 – helanded 160 quintals of cod, fishing ‘cross-handed.’ The fish was split and cured by Tobin’s wife and self, who also made the oil ready for market. This is the largest individual bill to be made by any fisherman in Newfoundland.” Though Tobin fished “cross-handed,” i.e., alone, his wife on shore split and cured all the fish and made the oil ready for market. These were important skills which ensured the family’s survival. There is no mention of children helping with the work, but the example serves to confirm the conclusions of other similar sources.
    There are, as well, much earlier examples of women’s involvement in the fishery in a hands-on manner. Noel H. Bowen, writing in 1855, decries the lack of women along the Labrador coast, citing an 1852 report that there were 364 men settled on the coast and only 62 women, suggesting that the situation should be remedied by emigration or some other plan, and arguing that “the more the coast is settled the better are