Sean Walker
October 3rd, 2016
Dr. Tracey Pennyligt
HIST 1120
Reading log #4
Noel’s “‘Nagging Wife’ Revisited” and Leduc’s “A Fille du Roi’s Passage”
Woman’s role in the world as been developing and changing for a very long time, since the advent of civilization. It is just recently that women’s rights have had such a resurgence, this meaning that there was a great change in how the modern woman expects to live, compared to how the women of 100 or 200 years ago expected to live. The two articles that were just presented to the class do a rather good job at showing us ho the women of those era’s lived, worked and what they were expected to do with their lives.
In The Nagging Wife, Noel adequately shows us that that what we think of when we imagine a 17th or 18th century women aren’t exactly right. We might think of the 17th century noble’s wife who gave the husband children and that was it, or we might think of the late 19th century industrial revolution peasant women working in a factory for 15 hours out of the day. While both of those examples probably did exist at some point, it wasn’t always like that and it wasn’t like that every where. For a long time, it wasn’t all that strange to see women in the fields harvesting, or in the barn milking the cows. Swedish traveler Peter Kalm put it excellently when he said “I confess I rubbed my eyes several times to make them clear, because I could not believe I saw aright, when I first came here . . . and saw the farmers’ houses full of young women, while the men, on the contrary, went out both morning and evening to where the cattle were, milk-pail in hand, sat down to milk. . .. In short, when one enters a house and has seen the women cooking, washing floors, plates and dishes, darning a stocking or sewing a chemise, he has, in fact, seen all their economy. . .. Nearly all the evening occupations which our women in Sweden perform are neglected by them” Kalm said this on a trip to England. On the other hand, during his first trip to Canada he remarked that the role that women played in providing for their family were much the same as preindustrial Sweden, were the wife has no less role than the husband in caring for the family or the fields.
The examples shown in the two texts show that what we thought of the role of women in history was not exactly right, while right in many places, they were wrong in many others.
Bibliography
Noel, Jan. “‘Nagging Wife’ Revisited: Women and the Fur Trade in New France.” French Colonial History, 2006., 45, JSTOR Journals, EBSCOhost (accessed October 4, 2016).
Leduc, Adrienne. “A Fille du Roi’s Passage.” Beaver 81, no. 1 (February 2001): 20. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed October 4, 2016).