Silk Sails by Calvin Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

its natural resources developed.” He writes further: “The fisherman’s wants are few, and he can easily support a wife; moreover she could assist him in his calling as much as one of his own sex, and it often happens that the larger a fisherman’s family becomes, the better are his prospects…” But Ephraim Tucker, an American who had spent five months on a voyage to the Labrador in 1838, actually saw women at work in the fishery: “But they engage in the hard and laborious toils of fishing with as much zeal and activity as the males. When the salmon and trout fishing commences, the women and children employ themselves assiduously in the sport, and are often out night and day while the season of this fishery lasts. At the fish stands, while the cod fishery is in the full tide of operation, the women are seen among the most constant and dextrous in dressing the fish, thrown up by the fishermen. Some of these females will dress two or three thousand fish in a single day…” While it may have been “sport” to Tucker, who was at the Labrador for his health, it was mighty hard work for women, men and children. What is most interesting about his words, however, is the confirmation that women were the experts at handling, curing and “dressing” the fish.
    The merchants of Newfoundland who used (and preferred) the barter or credit or “truck” system found it in their interests to maintain the patriarchal nature of the fishing business. They preferred to deal directly with the male head of the household. They were at least consistent in this, for in cases where they sued the family, it was always one man or a small group of two or three men, but never a woman. Since the headquarters for the settling of accounts was not always in the same community where the fisherman lived, the merchant seldom had to deal with aggrieved women. In at least one case in which a merchant had to deal with a woman, she was victorious. Mary Reed in 1835 worked for a planter, Thomas Davis, who claimed not to have sufficient money to pay her. When Reed charged that Charles Nuttall, a merchant at Harbour Grace, had received Davis’ fish and oil from the voyage, Nuttall was ordered by the court to pay Reed both her wages and damages.
    Dona Lee Davis, who conducted a survey in 1978 of women in a south-west coast Newfoundland fishing village and published the results in the book entitled
Blood and Nerves: An Ethnographic Focus on Menopause
, writes: “Women feel particularly free to cause a spectacle or behave rudely when their family or household has been threatened or wronged.” She found in her research that men will often defer to women’s desire and ability to put things right. In the words of one of her women respondents: “A man has to be careful but a woman can say exactly what she likes.”
    In any event, the family’s struggle for survival in what was often a harsh environment, and always against formidable odds, required a strong partnership between men and women in households. Male authority was routinely challenged and compromised for a higher purpose: the family’s very survival. The result was a family solidarity that has persisted beyond what might have been expected. This is not to imply that marriages were always ideal relationships, but at least in the earlier periods personal self-fulfilment for both parties, and especially for the woman, was harshly subordinate to existing and surviving.
    The written law and unwritten rules and practices have conspired through the centuries to treat women differently from men. A woman has had to fight harder and sometimes “behave rudely” in order to ensure that her case would be considered. Women occupied a dependent status in law for a very long time and were not even defined in certain jurisdictions as “qualified persons” for certain jobs. Power and responsibility were somehow connected with