Nova Scotia (32 page)

   
Wife battering was all too common in Nova Scotian homes. To a
great degree, it was tolerated by the male-dominated society and
only rarely surfaced in the court system. If a man deserted his
wife and family, the woman was left in a very difficult and
vulnerable situation because she had no legal ownership of anything
belonging to the family. Everything technically belonged to the
husband, whether he was there or not. Later in the century a court
might allow a woman ownership of her family’s house and goods, if
her husband could be proven to be a drunk or otherwise
“worthless.”

   
When women became essential in the public workplace, some
changes in their legal status were unavoidable. In 1838, for
example, the Nova Scotia Assembly discovered there was a desperate
need for teachers in the province. Not enough men saw the
occupation as worthwhile and, besides, the pay being offered was
pitifully low. To meet this crisis, the Assembly magnanimously
decided that women could now be hired and receive personal wages,
riather than having the money paid directly to a husband or father.
This legislation also set a standard for double standards regarding
wages for men and women in the province. Despite the lower pay for
women, forty years later women would occupy two-thirds of the
teaching positions in Nova Scotia.

   
It seems that poorer counties enlisted more women than men
for the teaching ranks – to save money presumably. While there
continued to be some staunch political opposition to women working
at all, Joseph Howe didn’t see what the fuss was all about. He
argued that these women would be married soon enough anyway, so
they posed no threat to any male income earner. Once married, women
teachers were expected to give up their jobs and take care of the
husband and home. Even if there were not enough qualified male
teachers to replace them, there were always plenty more young women
to fill the jobs until they too took an early retirement into
matrimony.

   
Legislators, lawyers and judges were painfully slow to
consider the needs of women. It was not until 1866 that an
enlightened law was passed to protect a wife from debts incurred by
her husband and further along, in 188 2, women were officially
decreed to be individuals with personal rights, including the right
to collect children’s wages if they were needed to help pay
household expenses. Few married women in these days could earn an
eincome outside of the home, so, whenever possible, boys in the
family were put to work at menial jobs to bring money into the
house. It wasn’t until 1897 that the laws fully permitted a woman
to have her own possessions during marriage, including a right to
personal savings.

“A Nest of Brothels and Dance
Houses”

While women endured a decidedly hard life in rural Nova
Scotia, their counterparts in Halifax during much of the nineteenth
century may have had it even worse. In her book
The Dark Side of Life in Victorian
Halifax
, historian Judith
Fingard documents the dire straits of the so-called “underclass.”
Women of low economic means suffered from all manner of
mistreatment, often without much hope of ever improving their lot
in life. Nowhere was the situation worse than on the notorious
Barrack Street at the base of the Citadel, which was lined with
drinking dens known as grog shops, brothels and pitiful tenement
housing. Visitors to Halifax were appalled by begging children,
filth, squalor, prostitutes and, of course, drunkenness. While the
military presence cannot be blamed entirely for the problems,
Fingard points out that the economy of this district was based on
providading female companionship and cheap, plentiful booze for the
multitude of soldiers and sailors in the
city. 

   
R.H. Dana, legendary author of
Two Years Before the
Mast
, visited Halifax around
this time and described Barrack Street as a “nest of the brothels
and dance houses.” He saw prostitutes who were “broken down by
disease and strong drink,” and felt much pity for
them.

   
Halifax was a crime-ridden city and newspapers
prospered by publishing lurid stories about notorious criminals,
both men and women. In her book, Fingard resurrects the sorry tale
of one Margaret Howard and how the legal system failed to help this
down-and-out character who the
Morning Chronicle
of
the time publicized as the “Wickedest Woman in Halifax.” Margaret
Howard first went to court in 1863 when she was twenty, charged
with drunkenness, and went on to serve more than fifty-two
sentences in jail, although sometimes she was able to avoid a stay
behind bars by paying a fine of one dollar. Unlike many other
criminals from the lower class who actually committed crimes to
have the luxury of the shelter of a jail cell and regular meals,
Howard preferred to be free on the streets and avoided jail
whenever she could. She escaped from Rockhead Prison at least once,
increasing her notoriety, but little or nothing was ever undertaken
by the authorities to improve her lot in life.

   
What heinous crimes had Ms. Howard committed to earn the tide
of “wickedest woman in Halifax”? Well, she drank quite a bit on
many occasions and raised a ruckus, she got into fights and she
tried to commit suicide durin(g one of her jail terms by hanging
herself with pieces of cloth from her dress. Newspapers of the day
reveal the moral repugnance felt by the middle and upper class for
women like Howard, who was undoubtedly a product of much hardship
brought on by Halifax poverty.

   
Margaret Howard was viewed as an out-and-out criminal, but
most city prostitutes were tolerated by authorities as nothing more
than a nuisance. Fingard suggests, “In terms of income,
prostitution was an attractive alternative to the drudgery of
household service. For some women it was an occupation which led to
capital accumulation and upward mobility.” Most, but not all, of
the customers were in the military, who made up nearly twenty-five
percent of the adult male population of Halifax. For the most part,
the legal system tried to ignore prostitution altogether. Brothels
were located close to the military bases and away from the middle-
and upper-class homes, so most Haligonians preferred to ignore the
problem, if they saw it as a problem at all.

   
The army discouraged its men from marrying, preferring to
keep them unattached and ready to move out to the next campaign
when needed. Only about six percent of the soldiers in Halifax
succeeded in gaining permission from their commanding officers to
marry, mostly to women who had been domestic servants. Many Halifax
women, however, became unofficial wives, living on and off with
army men or sailors. Such an arrangement might provide some
companionship and financial support for a while, but it was also
quite unstable and an unofficial army wife might find herself at
any time left to fend for herself if her husband was ordered to a
new posting.

   
While prostitution may not have been respectable, it was one
of the few avenues for a lower-class Halifax woman of these
Victorian times to earn a steady income. By the mid 1860s there
were somewhere between 600 and 1,000 women earning a living through
prostitution, although there may have been many more
part-timers.

   
If the law, for whatever reasons, wanted to apply pressure or
control over any woman engaged as a prostitute, she could be
charged with vagrancy, lewd or disorderly behaviour, or indecency.
Most who ended up before a judge were women of the street rather
than regular employees in bawdy houses. If men and women were
caught in the act, invariably the women were charged and not the
men. Men had many privileges under the law, but women had
few.

   
Not unlike today, prostitution was a perilous trade, fraught
with dangers of venereal disease, alcohol problems, pregnancy,
unsafe abortions and physical abuse. Women who became prostitutes
did so out of desperation. Viectorian culture also forced single
women into a catch-22 situation. A woman living alone or abandoned
on the street was ·considered to be disreputable; once she was
disreputable, she could no longer hope for respectablet employment
or be considered as a good prospect for a wife. Hence, she had
nowhere to turn but to a life as a “dishonourable” woman who could
at least earn an income.

Taking Note of “Improper
Conduct”

Not everyone turned a blind eye to
the abuse of women that was so prevalent in Nova Scotia. The
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty was established in 1876, with
its initial focus on animals, but it soon recognized the dimension
of the human problem as well, particularly the plight of women and
children. As a result of the SPC lobbying, husbands could now be
dealt with in the courts for negligence or battering. Even then, a
woman only went to the law under the most desperate conditions,
because if her husband was locked up she would most likely be left
without any form of income whatsoever. Sometimes she turned to the
courts for help if her man was constantly drunk or if her
children’s lives were in danger. The SPC would become directly
involved in these cases and documented the proceedings. (The
society never kept written records of sexual abuse, however,
arguing that it was too distasteful to be written down.)

   
Nonetheless, the SPC continued to bring more and more cases
of child and wife abuse before the courts and also attempted to
improve laws to relieve the plight of victims. Matthew Richey, a
Member of Parliament who was also the president of the Nova Scotia
SPC, failed in his attempts in 1881 to pass federal legislation for
the protection of children, but the organization forged ahead in
Halifax in its efforts to ensure criminal punishment for men proven
to be cruel to or neglectful of their families. SPC
secretary-iagent John Naylor, a driving force in the organization,
recorded in 1884 and 1885 cases involving neglect or harm by a
drunken husband, husbands eloping with other women or “improperly
conducting themselves with their wife’s sister,” as well as cases
of outright murders of wives by their husbands. Similar cases
involving harm to children were also investigated. nIt’s safe to
say, however, that most instances of physical harm by men to wives
and children still went unreported, despite the best efforts of
reformers and social activists. P

   
As women entered the workforce beyond the classroom, they
found themselves in low-paying factory or fish-plant jobs. Only the
fairly destitute remained working after marriage; these ladies were
often abandoned or widowead wives. Even by the turn of the century,
a female worker in a cotton textile factory in Halifax could expect
little in the way of generosity from her employer. This young,
unmarried woman would work through an unpaid training period of
five or six weeks. When wages started, they were low, and if she
had come in from out of town, up to half of her salary might end up
going to pay for her lodging in a rooming-house. At work, fines
were imposed for lateness, poor work, breakage or even talking to
other workers. The bosses might also alter the way women were paid
to save factory costs, according to whether it was a busy or a slow
week.

   
If women and men worked at the same task, men were paid a
higher wage. Women endured long hours in noisy, unhealthy
environments. It wasn’t until 1906 that some limits were set on
time: a work week of seventy-two hours was ordained as the limit
for women under sixteen and boys under fourteen. If a woman tried
to organize even a small protest or suggest some form of union, she
was quickly released from her job.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Never Give Up the Ship

The coast of Nova Scotia is a rocky
one and there’s very little of it that has not seen some sort of
shipwreck over the years. There are countless stories along this
coast of drownings, rescues and recoveries. Whatever the fate of a
foundering vessel, shore-dwellers often harvested the goods –
anything that floated ashore. Houses and fisherman’s shacks
sometimes displayed the most curious and sometimes expensive items
that would literally wash up on the doorstep. The old law of the
Nova Scotia shore was that if it arrived by sea and you found it,
it was yours – whether it be a few good boards, a barrel of rum or
a chest of money.

   
In April of 1873, for example, the White Star
liner
Atlantic
smashed up against some unyielding
rocks on a stormy night off the coast of Prospect, not far from
where the ill-fated
La
Tribune
sank in 1797. The
steel hull of the ship was pounded into scrap and 560 people on
board died that night as they were swept overboard. The story goes
that the coast was strewn with the bodies, many of the women still
wearing expensive jewels. Not all of the jewellery lay intact when
the bodies were carried off to the morgue.

   
Sea disasters do not always end in tragedy, and
many times Nova Scotian seafarers have been pushed to their mental
and physical limits to outwit the forces of nature. Such was the
case with the
Research
, a vessel
built in Yarmouth in 1861, weighing in at 1,459 tons, the largest
ship constructed there to that time. Her price tag was a walloping
$65,000. Toward the end of November in 1866 she was sailing from
Quebec to Scotland with a heavy load of timber. Sailing out of the
dangerous Strait of Belle Isle and into the Atlantic, Captain
George Washington Churchill ran up against a monster gale and heavy
seas that were to test his abilities. The topmast sail was ripped
away and, worse yet, the rudder was broken off.