Chapter 4

"A good, hard-working stump of a girl"

Irish Women's Work and the Construction of Identity on the Southern Avalon

1

Irish women from the more moderate climate of southeast Ireland found themselves in somewhat altered circumstances in terms of work routines in Newfoundland. Witness the following account from the travel musings of Aaron Thomas while visiting the island in 1794-95:

Do you know that in this Country, in the Winter time, a girl can Milke a Cow into her Apron and carry the Milke home in it? If she Milkes the Cow in the open air the intensity of the weather will freeze the Milke as it falls from the Cow into the Apron and [it will] remain there, a hard, conglutinated, frozen mass, until melted by heat.1

Even allowing for Thomas's stylistic leaning towards occasional hyperbole, it is certain that Irish immigrant women would have had to modulate their skills and work rhythms to harmonize with a fishing and subsistence farming economy on the southern Avalon. Still, they also found themselves far removed from the congested farmlands of the home country, in a place where they and their families could occupy property for fishing and subsistence agriculture with minimal interference and move freely through woods and meadows, gleaning firewood and foraging for local plants and berries—a place where the game in the forests and fish in the streams were available to all comers.

As these women adapted to a new physical and socioeconomic environment, they assumed vital roles within the division of labor in early fishing settlements, and this understanding of women's place within the work cycle contributed significantly to the configuration of self-identity and the construction of Irish womanhood within the Irish plebeian community. The feminine ideal that boarded the ship in the home country and thrived within the context of immigration and early settlement was that of "a good, hard-working stump of a girl."2

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Household Production

Transient fishermen and shoremen had made up the primary work crews of the early Newfoundland fishery in both its migratory and sedentary sectors. But by the mid-1700s, the evolution of the family work unit in the planter fishery had begun, and the momentum of this transition increased through the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Household production became essential to survival in both the fishery and subsistence agriculture, and men and women followed the rhythms of complementary work routines. These rhythms were grounded primarily in efficiency and pragmatism rather than rigid perceptions of men's and women's work.3

Cod Fishery

5

One of the greatest adaptations required of Irish immigrants to the area was the shift from an agricultural base to a fishing economy. The cod fishery was the primary industry of the island, and the mainstay of the local economy on the southern Avalon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By contrast, Ireland, although also surrounded by the sea, had not developed a significant fishing industry outside a small-scale effort on the west coast.4 Most immigrants from the southeast of Ireland, then, would have had to learn a new set of skills to earn their livelihood in Newfoundland. For a number of men, the transition was gradual, coming out to Newfoundland on a migratory basis as youngsters, gaining experience as they found a niche within the ranks of shore and boat crews,5 and ultimately making the decision to remain. But women tended to be permanent immigrants, and thus they were pitched headlong into this new form of enterprise with little preparation or training. Their capacity to adjust quickly to fishing production was a critical aspect of adaptation to life in the New World and a vital contribution to the success of the settlement process.6

Some women, primarily widows, became fishing employers or household heads who operated fishing premises in their own right.7 This was signified, for example, in a notice issued by Ferryland magistrate Robert Carter in 1787 that fishing servants were not to be served liquor, "unless it be by and with the Consent of his Master or Mistress in writing";8 the implication was that women were employing servants in the industry, not just in their capacity as wives in planter households (in which case, under the principle of coverture, the consent of the "Master" would have been sufficient), but under the status of feme sole.9 Indeed, a number of these women were mentioned by name in the records. In August, 1768, for example, Governor Palliser ordered the magistrate at Ferryland to tax twenty-four persons in the district who had kept dieters the previous winter, "as the entertaining [of] Idle People, is the cause of all disorders and mischiefs in this Country." Listed among the employers was Mary Shea, who had housed three dieters over the winter (slightly more than the average of 2.75 and the median of two hired by the total group); her fine totaled £1.2.6 (7s. 6d. per servant), and in default of payment, fish and oil of equal value were to be seized.10 Five years later, the same Mary Shea was granted a fishing room on the northwest side of Ferryland harbor, which had already been in her possession for a number of years, "to quietly and peaceably possess the same so long as you shall employ it to the advantage of the Fishery."11

In 1775, Alice Thomas, a fishing employer at Renews, was sued by two fishing servants for their wages; Alice had assumed control of the premises after the death of her planter husband, Thomas.12 Similarly, Catharine Clements was the proprietor of a fishing premises and fishing employer in Renews in the 1780s and 1790s, having also taken over the management of the premises at her husband's death.13 Case File 2 In 1794, Jane Holly was one of several boatkeepers in Ferryland district entangled in a dispute between a former and current fishing supplier.14 In the 1820s, Ann Ryan rented a fishing room and premises in Caplin Bay—including stages, flakes, beaches, dwelling house, gardens, and lands—from Philip Tree for £6 per year.15 The rent of a fishing room was charged against the account of Mary Row of Renews in the Goodridge ledgers in 1839 and 1841.16

The names of several women—Sarah McCarthy, Mary Murphy, Dorothy Cantwell, Mary Morris, Widow Blanch (and Son)—appeared in the Sweetman ledgers for the 1820s and 1830s with credit entries for fish and oil, indicating that they were either fishing employers or heads of family production units.17 Catherine Kenny and Sons also produced fish and oil that they sold to the Goodridge's Fermeuse establishment in 1840 and 1841.18 Other family ventures in Renews operating under the names of "Rachel Welsh and Son"19 and "Elizabeth Beaves and Son"20 were most likely fishing production units as well. Furthermore, liquor licensees in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were required to operate at least one fishing shallop in the fishery, so by inference, any female licensees were also boatkeepers (see section on hospitality trade, below). And these are just the women's names that have survived in the written record; they likely do not constitute an exhaustive list of all women who operated fishing premises as femes sole in the period.

Certainly, however, a far greater number of women managed fishing plantations with their husbands or common-law partners, with the responsibility of boarding fishing servants and dieters added to their other household and subsistence duties. And increasingly, plebeian women participated in processing fish in family production units, replacing the hired, transient, primarily male shore crews of the traditional planter fishery. As noted in the previous chapter, this assumption of shore work occurred at a critical juncture in the fishery. Without women's presence and their capacity to adapt their routines to include this additional, labor-intensive work on flakes, the beleaguered planter fishery would have been hard pressed to survive the roller-coaster effects of the French-Revolutionary and Napoleonic War periods and, more particularly, the recession that followed.

10

Most women who worked in family units were primarily involved in making fish, curing and drying the cod on shore. After the fish was headed, gutted, and split (operations usually, but not exclusively, performed by men), men or women carried away the fish in barras for salting. Larger fish were laid in saltbulk while smaller fish were pickled in puncheon tubs. After about five days, the fish was washed, again by men or women or both, using water drawn from the ocean in large tubs. They then loaded the fish (at this stage, called waterhorse) on barras and transported it over rocky shorelines and hills, sometimes even over steep cliff faces, to a flake or a beach for drying. This required considerable strength, given the heaviness of the green salted fish, but it was not unusual for women as well as men to carry barras.21 At this point, the women's work began in earnest. Every morning (weather permitting), the fish were spread flesh-side up for drying; in the evening, the fish were gathered up in yaffles, or armfuls, and turned skin-side up in small piles called faggots. Throughout the process, women had to guard against fly-blows, waving away flies with boughs to prevent them from landing on the fish, or scrubbing away fly-spit containing eggs that would hatch into maggots and spoil the cure (see Audio Sample No. 36). As the fish became drier through respreading, the size of the faggots was increased until the fish could be placed in piles. When almost completely dried, the fish was laid in small bulks in a fish store; and after several more dryings on the flake, it was piled in larger bulks in the store, ready for shipping to market.

Women's skill and judgment were critical throughout this process, for if the fish did not contain the right amount of salt or moisture for its intended market, the quality was ruined. Also, as more and more fish was processed, various stacks would be at different stages of drying, requiring good organizational skills and a careful eye to detail. An examination of the relatively high wages paid to hired shore crew (see Table 4.1)—and, arguably, some women performed the equivalent supervisory duties of a master of the voyage—demonstrates the monetary value, and hence the importance, assigned to this work by the industry. Thus, while women did not receive wages within the family production unit, the intrinsic value of their processing work to the household was considerable. Of course, making fish had to be juggled with childcare and housework as well as other outdoor work (notably, weeding, milking, berry-picking, and haymaking). And if a rain shower threatened during the daily drying process, women had to drop anything else they were doing and run to the flakes to cover the fish with long strips of dried tree bark, kept in place by a network of boughs and rocks (see Audio Sample No. 9). Indeed, while all duties had to be balanced efficiently, none was to take priority over making the fish properly. As one elderly Cape Broyle woman observed, "If the fish wasn't spread when the men came in [from the water], there'd be some racket."22

In peak periods, when fish were plentiful, women worked at the fish through the night along with the men. At such times, it was not uncommon to find women on the stage involved in the pre-drying stages of processing. Some women helped the men prong the fish from boat to stagehead. More commonly, women pewed the cod through the open windows onto the cutting table; skill and precision were required to stab the fish in the head only, for fish that was broken, or damaged in the body, brought a lower price. Women also assisted in splitting fish—again, a stage that required care and dexterity to protect the quality of the finished product (note in Table 4.1 the high wages paid to hired splitters, signifying the value of this work). And a woman who was proficient at cutting cod tongues and sculps for local consumption was a highly regarded worker as well. But while fishing was seen solely as men's work, and women who worked at the earlier cutting and splitting stages were usually deemed to be "helping the men" (except those few women who did this work on a regular basis), making fish came to be considered within fishing families an integral part of women's work. In the eyes of the local plebeian community, women were not merely helping on the flakes and beaches; rather, "Women made fish along with the men."23 Indeed, in peak catching periods, the curing of fish became almost exclusively the preserve of women, assisted by older children.

Furthermore, although the work performed by Irish Newfoundland women in the fishery was difficult in terms of physical labor and time management, these women did not view the task as drudgery. Indeed, according to twentieth-century informants who had split and made fish themselves, women "loved to be out at it."24 Many women hired domestic servants (commonly called shipped girls) not just to help with household routines, but to "free" them from their housework so that they could join the men on the stage and flake. Others relied on older daughters or grandmothers to supervise the household and younger children in their absence, and it was not uncommon for a nursing infant to be breast-fed on the stage or flake and then settled away in a sawed-off puncheon tub while the mother worked on. Nor was the "respectability" of these women at issue. Women saw it as their right to participate in a family enterprise in which they held an equal stake, and they took pride in their capacity to contribute to the process. At the same time, the value and dignity of their work was acknowledged by the larger community. The perception of these women as essential, skilled workers in the fishery was an integral part of their own self-image and of the construction of womanhood within the plebeian community in general.25

Subsistence Agriculture

While saltfish production was a new venture for Irish immigrant women, many would have been quite comfortable with the performance of agricultural work. Still, adjustments had to be made in adapting to their new environment, even if they were not quite as dramatic as diarist Aaron Thomas implied. Most certainly, Irish immigrants encountered less fertile soil conditions and a less temperate climate, with later springs, hotter summers, and much harsher winters than in their home counties in southeastern Ireland. With poor soil and a short growing season, there was very little development of commercialized agriculture on the island, and thus the small-scale farming or agricultural laboring backgrounds of many Irish immigrants were refocused on subsistence agriculture to support fishing incomes. 15

Some adjustments also had to be made in terms of produce, although there was a good deal of continuity as well as change. The potato had been introduced to Newfoundland by the middle of the eighteenth century,26 before the major influx of Irish to the island, and grew well in local conditions. However, the potato was not as large a feature of the pre-famine Irish diet in the home country as historians once believed. Granted, the diet of cottiers and landless laborers was rather monotonous, although still nutritious, with staples of potatoes, milk, eggs, and fish until dependence on the potato increased in the decades before the famine. But outside this class, the Irish ate a varied diet, including meat (pork/bacon, mutton, some beef), milk and its by-products, cereals and grains (bread, porridge, stir-about, oatcakes), potatoes, peas, beans, cabbage, fish, fowl, and eggs.27 Most of these items were available to the Irish in Newfoundland either through their own production efforts or from their supplying merchants. The greatest shift in diet was a decreased dependence on cereals and grains, which could not be supported by the local climate (although imported flour and hard bread were available) and a greater dependence on root crops (not just potatoes, but carrots, turnips, and parsnips) that could more readily survive the peculiarities of the Newfoundland growing season.

Some efforts were made to stimulate local agriculture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but despite the increasing acreage of cleared land (much of it for meadows), the island remained dependent on outside supplies of many foodstuffs.28 Because of this, there is a tendency in the literature to be somewhat dismissive of farming efforts along the English Shore. But subsistence agriculture did help to support growing populations in local communities, complementing the predominantly salted or dried provisions purchased on credit from the merchant (usually salt pork and beef, flour, tea, butter, molasses, dried peas, and rum) by providing a reasonable variety of fresh produce, meat, eggs, butter, cream, and milk for local consumption. Furthermore, subsistence production cushioned the impact of variations in provision prices and supplies from year to year, and helped to mitigate the hardship of bad fishing seasons.29 Women on the southern Avalon contributed significantly to this effort, often in less than ideal circumstances, working to ensure the survival of families and communities.

Gardens and fields: Members of the plebeian household shared the work of preparing and maintaining vegetable gardens: some near the house, some in back meadows. Indeed, spring planting and fall harvesting were cooperative affairs, with men's and women's efforts complementing each other. In the earliest period of settlement, both men and women engaged in the heavy physical labor of clearing land, stone-picking, digging and fertilizing gardens, trenching potatoes, and harvesting vegetables. Indeed, one oral informant told of women pulling plows in the "old days,"30 although spade and hoe agriculture was likely the predominant form of ground preparation through most of the period under discussion. Still, labor-intensive farming methods were hardly strange to women who had hailed from farming areas in Ireland, where genteel observers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were horrified at the physical nature of women's agricultural labor. One shocked Englishman noted in 1812:

Females in Ireland are treated more like beast[s] of burden than rational beings, and although I never saw anyone yoked to a plough… I have seen them degraded in a manner disgraceful to the other sex and shocking to humanity. In the country, they are subjected to all the drudgery generally performed by men; setting potatoes, digging turf and the performance of the most laborious occupations.31

But women's work—often hard physical labor—was essential in family agricultural enterprises, ranging from the cottier's potato plots to the small, semi-subsistence farms that were a common feature of the pre-famine Irish countryside.32 Rural Irish families could ill afford to defer to the sensibilities of middle-class observers. Similarly, the Irish plebeian community on the southern Avalon had not yet absorbed gender ideologies that designated women as the "weaker" or "gentler" sex. Women's farm labor was part of a comprehensive package of survival skills that they brought to all family enterprises.

As families on the southern Avalon became more established and grew in size, however, men tended to assume tasks in the gardens that required greater physical strength—digging and trenching, for example—although this was certainly not a hard and fast rule, with women continuing to participate on an as-needed basis (for example, in the case of male absence or of a small family with no extended kinship networks). Otherwise, women were generally responsible for setting vegetables, transplanting cabbage, fertilizing, thinning out crops, and weeding through the growing season, as well as harvesting greens and gathering up the root vegetables that had been dug by the men in the fall. Still, this was hard physical labor, and sometimes unpleasant by current standards: spreading cods heads between the transplanted cabbages, for example, or stable manure and caplin on potatoes as the men followed behind, trenching and covering the fertilized seeds or plants with soil, were hardly tasks for those fastidious in nature. In the early days of settlement, women may also have been involved in a practice that was common in coastal areas of Ireland: carrying seaweed on their backs from the shore to gardens for fertilizing.33 Certainly, one of women's most specialized tasks on the southern Avalon was growing seeds—that is, sowing and nurturing seedling plants—and they took pride and care in doing so because strong seedlings ensured the harvest. Some women developed reputations for consistently producing good plants that were sought by others for their own gardens—a source of status in communities that lived so close to the margin.

20

Aside from larger gardens, every family also tended a kitchen garden. The kitchen garden supplied "a little bit of everything"34: some root crops, cabbage, beets, peas, rhubarb, hops, black currants, gooseberries, strawberries, flowers, and plum and apple trees. Men helped to prepare the beds in the spring of the year, digging furrows while women set their seeds. Thereafter, however, the kitchen garden became a woman's preserve in terms of both responsibility and usage.

Haymaking, by contrast, involved the entire household, although the actual curing was in the women's care. When the long grass in meadows had grown to a foot or more, the men cut it with scythes and left it in swathes overnight. The task of spreading and drying the hay was performed by women, assisted by older children, not because it was secondary in importance, but because it had to be done in daylight, when the men were fishing. The women turned out, or spread, the grass in the morning, turned it again later in the day, and then pronged it into cocks and left it overnight. As with the process of drying fish, the piles were initially small while the grass was green to deter rot, but steadily increased in size as the hay dried. The spreading and cocking process was repeated until the grass was sufficiently dry for storing in the family's stable loft. Men and women carried hay from meadows near the stable on their backs, in hay-cloths made of brin bags. Hay from back meadows was transported on hay-frames (trellis-like structures drawn by horse and cart). Men and women pronged the hay into stable lofts, where children compacted the dried grass by jumping into the piles and then stowed it as tightly as possible into every available nook and cranny to maximize storage.

Overall, work routines in the gardens were generally dictated by expedience and availability. Men and women worked together in the spring and fall at planting and harvesting, but in the summer, when men spent most of the day fishing, women assumed the greater responsibility for the gardens. Physical strength determined to some extent the division of labor after families had become more established, but women did perform hard physical work and were capable of taking over men's duties when needed.

Animal husbandry: Plebeian families on the southern Avalon kept a variety of livestock—sheep, chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and, to a lesser extent, goats—to meet household requirements for food and clothing. Of course, the number and type of animals varied with the affluence of the household, and some poorer households had none at all, but local networks of exchange (some eggs traded for butter, for example, or some cabbage seeds for wool), third-party transactions through the merchant, or even a neighbor's charity could often compensate for a lack.

Again, the rota of duties associated with men and women meshed with other work rhythms. Men were responsible for stabling and feeding animals during the winter. In the summer, horses were let out into meadows to graze, and cows, sheep, and goats ranged freely through the community. However, the family cow(s) had to be milked morning and night, and therefore had to be rounded up every evening; and as the men were usually occupied with fishing at the critical period, it was women's responsibility to locate the animals, which had sometimes roamed over a mile away, and bring them home for milking before joining their menfolk on the stages and flakes. Milking cows and goats was mostly done by women, regardless of the season, and the milk was used mainly for household purposes.

25

The family's hens, housed near the stable and within close range of the house, were also primarily the responsibility of women throughout the year. Women fed them twice a day (usually household scraps or a mash of boiled vegetables) and gathered eggs each morning. Both women and men slaughtered chickens for the family table, but the preparation for eating—the plucking and cooking—was women's work. Shearing sheep was often a joint enterprise. In some families, the men spanceled and held the sheep while the women clipped their wool and marked them with the family's distinguishing mark. In others, the roles were reversed, with women holding the sheep while men did the shearing. Some informants stated that both tasks were performed solely by women. Certainly, further processing of the wool was women's work (see below).

Irish women, then, were actively involved in animal husbandry and field work on the southern Avalon. Indeed, their valuable role in subsistence agriculture continued well into the twentieth century, unlike that of women in Ireland and Britain, who were increasingly marginalized from farm work (both paid and subsistence) with the spread of capitalist agriculture.35 As with women's work in the fishery, there were no connotations of drudgery or lack of respectability attached to women's work in gardens and fields on the southern Avalon. This contrasts with mainland colonial contexts, where there was considerable pressure to remove the wives and daughters of farming families from the fields into the home and replace their labor with that of indentured servants and slaves. In mainland colonies, white women's field work was seen as aberrant, a sign of poverty and inferiority (although often a necessary evil in newly establishing areas).36 The reverse was true within the plebeian community on the southern Avalon; there, servant girls were employed to release their mistresses from household tasks so that mistresses could contribute effectively to more important family enterprises. Indeed, a family's ability to hire servant girls and free the mistress for productive work was a sign of its increasing affluence, not its poverty, and most women did not aspire to escape outdoor work and immerse themselves in housewifery. Middle-class women on the southern Avalon did follow the pattern of withdrawing into domesticity during the period (see Chapter 9) but their aspirations to retire from productive work were not absorbed by the plebeian community.

Housewifery

A key aspect of women's contribution to household production was the performance and management of routines necessary for the efficient maintenance of the household. This involved a whole repertoire of tasks and skills, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, spinning, knitting, preserving fruits and vegetables, and household repair. Of course, housewifery was not as developed in the first years of settlement as it would become later in the study period. Houses were more rudimentary and had little furniture and few amenities.37 Women initially delegated more of their time to outdoor efforts, working with the men to clear land and establish gardens in addition to performing their vital work in the fishery. Basic equipment for maintaining the household was introduced over time; spinning wheels and butter churns were luxuries that came later, if at all (some women had to rely on others to spin their wool for them, and many were still churning butter by hand well into the twentieth century). But eventually, as families became more established, as houses expanded to meet growing family requirements, and as nonessentials (such as individual dishes and bedsteads or decorative furnishings) increased, women's household duties expanded proportionately.

Still, women had to maintain a balance between productive work and housework, and the former took priority. In the British Isles, as women increasingly retired from productive work into unpaid housework throughout the nineteenth century, household cleanliness became linked with working-class respectability, and working-class women joined battle against pollution and dirt, maintaining new standards of "decency" by whitening doorsteps and black-leading grates.38 While similar standards of cleanliness were certainly maintained by women on the southern Avalon by the twentieth century, it is unlikely that they were possible (or even aspired to) in the earlier days of settlement, although some movement in this direction may have been taking place by the mid-nineteenth century. More central to housewifery during the earlier time frame were the techniques necessary for the processing of raw materials (either produced by the family or purchased from merchants) into usable goods for the household. With this repertoire of skills and activities, women fed, clothed, and generally sustained the family work unit.

Most of the family's agricultural output was readied for household use by women. After milking the cows, for example, women prepared the milk for family consumption. The milk was strained into pans and placed in the pantry to set (let the cream rise); then it was placed on a hot stove to scald, and the cream was skimmed off the top. (A small amount of scald cream was occasionally set aside for eating as a special treat.) The skimmed milk was then cooled in the pantry and used as required for drinking or baking, while the cream was churned (often by hand) into fresh butter for the family table, a product deemed far superior to the butter imported by the merchant. Buttermilk, a by-product of the churning process, was used in baking.

30

Similarly, after sheep were shorn, women took over the processing of the wool, drawing on expertise developed in the domestic woolen industry of the home country. They washed, picked, and carded the fleece, spun the wool and wound it into hanks, then washed and dried it. Through the fall and winter, they knit the wool into a multitude of functional items of clothing for their families—an assortment of durable vests, mittens, sweaters, buskins, socks, stockings, vamps, caps, scarves, palms, and winter petticoats. Any family clothing that was not knit was sewn by women, who turned out a full complement of under- and outer-wear for family members—summer drawers and petticoats, skirts, dresses, blouses, shirts, pants, jackets and coats—sometimes using fabrics purchased from merchants, or more often, recycling older clothing or cotton sacks that had been boiled with lye soap to remove any markings and then dyed. Women also made all manner of bedding, from quilts, sheets, and pillowcases to mattresses, cushions, and pillows. In addition, they sewed items necessary for outdoor productive work, such as oilskins, oil petticoats, bonnets, and sails for the fishery as well as hay-cloths from brin bags for carrying loads of hay from the meadows. They also hooked mats in the winter, transforming piles of colored rags into patterned rugs (some basic, some quite intricate) by pulling them with a mat hook through a burlap backing stretched across an adjustable rectangular wooden frame.

While gardens provided much of the fresh produce for the family table, women also foraged through woods, meadows, and bogs for wild plants for dietary and medicinal purposes. Berry-picking sometimes became a family excursion, but it was most regularly done by women and children. Women made jams, jellies, and wines from a wide variety of local plants, including marshberries, cranberries, bakeapples (or cloudberries), blueberries, partridgeberries, and rhubarb. They made beer from spruce boughs, juniper bark, or hops from their kitchen gardens. The versatile hop was also mixed with potato and molasses to make barm for raising bread. Women also collected plants for their stock of home remedies: dogwood and cherry branches for cough medicine; wormwood to cure hoarseness; bog vein for tonic; juniper bark for tonic and tea. And while Irish women were accustomed to the role of family healer, their repertoire of cures and ointments had to be adjusted after migration to compensate for the lack of some traditional ingredients with the careful addition of unfamiliar flora from the southern Avalon.

In addition, women collected firewood—a familiar routine for Irish women, who were used to carrying heavy sacks of peat on their backs, sometimes over long distances, in the home country.39 Men did more substantial cutting of wood during the winter, bringing their loads home by horse and cart, piling the long poles into wharves of wood until they could be chopped into junks in the woodyard. But in the summer and early fall, it was women who foraged in the woods for windfall branches, returning home with brin bags full of brambles and loads of bresneys and blasty boughs on their backs so large that "you just could see their feet coming along the road."40 These branches were used to make fast, hot fires in the summer for baking or meal preparation. And throughout the summer, women went to the woodyard to gather loads of chips in their aprons to light quick fires for small cooking jobs—baking buns, for example, or frying fish.

Women were also primarily responsible for drawing water for family use, although this task was sometimes transferred to children as they got older. Water for washing floors and clothing was often taken from nearby ponds or streams, but drinking water preferably came from wells, which were usually uphill and often a quarter to a half mile away from the house. Wells were usually quite deep, and the water was drawn by lowering and raising a bucket on a string or a gaff. When water had to be transported over a long distance, women carried buckets with the assistance of a hoop from a puncheon tub. This was a miracle of engineering simplicity, for the hoop was not attached to the woman, nor were the buckets fastened to the hoop in any way. After filling two buckets, the woman laid them on the ground on either side of her, draping the handles outward; she then laid the hoop on top of the buckets, pulling the handles back in toward herself as she lifted them, so that the counter-pressure helped to keep the buckets away from her legs and balance the load. Still, this was hard physical labor, requiring several trips and involving loads of up to five or six gallons. Wash days were particularly demanding, as tubfuls of water had to be transported and boiled on the stove before soiled washing was added, together with soap that the women had made from fatpork and wood ashes from the grate.41 On fine days in the summer, however, women often took their washing directly to the sides of ponds and rivers and did their scrubbing on the rocks.

Women did most of the baking and cooking for their families, transforming provisions from the merchant's store and their home-produced fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, fish, and meat into a reasonably varied and nutritious diet for the household. In the days of early settlement, meal preparation was done on an open fireplace—a time-consuming task requiring large amounts of firewood and frequent trips to the woodpile as women stoked the fires in central hearths and did their cooking on the dog irons. There was one general exception to this assignment of cooking duties to women: when men were out fishing, they cooked a meal of stewed fish and potatoes for themselves in sawed-off puncheon tubs insulated with clay and rocks; but it was common for women to prepare the men's grub boxes, which contained all the items, other than fish, that the men would require for their mug-up on the boat, such as tea, molasses, bread, and perhaps a piece of gingerbread. All other meals and mug-ups were women's responsibility, as was the family's baking: the endless production of raisin buns, frozies, pies, gingerbreads, bottomers, and several batches of bread per week (indeed, some women with large families baked bread daily).

35

Women also had to turn their hands to home repair. While houses, outbuildings, and fences were generally constructed by men (although, again, the initial building of structures was sometimes shared by the sexes in the very first years of settlement), women were very much involved in their maintenance and were expected to be able to lime a house, replace fence pickets, or tar a roof along with the men in the family (or, more often the case, without them during the fishing season).

In terms of household production, then, women within the Irish plebeian community of the southern Avalon worked indoors and outdoors, through long days, in all seasons of the year to sustain their households. And the continuous roster of production and household duties had to be juggled around the requirements of child and elder care, which usually fell within the province of women's work as well.

Wrecking and Salvaging

One household enterprise that was more common on parts of the southern Avalon than many other areas of Newfoundland was the salvaging and recycling of items from wrecked vessels. While this type of activity is not usually found in discussions of traditional household production, it was part of the repertoire of economic coping strategies in the area and therefore deserves mention in an examination of how families survived in the years of early settlement. The greater incidence of this activity on the southern Avalon was not due to the transfer of a wrecking tradition from southeast Ireland, but to the geographical position of the shore—a long and treacherous finger of coastline abutting much-traveled shipping lanes between Europe and North America—and an unpredictable climate marked by impenetrable fogs, shifting currents, coastal ice, and sudden storms. Indeed, the southern Avalon has been the site of so many shipwrecks over the centuries that mariners have labeled the southernmost point of the shore, the area around Cape Race, the graveyard of the Atlantic.42

There is no doubt that people on the southern Avalon benefited in varying degrees from many of these shipping disasters, although it is important to differentiate between levels of participation in wrecking and salvaging activities. There were probably very few incidents of actual, deliberate wrecking of vessels. The oral tradition does ascribe this more sinister activity to certain families in particular areas (usually the more southerly portion of the shore, including Renews, Cappahayden, Trepassey, St. Shott's, and Portugal Cove South). Some people in these communities, for example, are said to have tied lanterns on the horns of cows on stormy nights to lure unsuspecting vessels onto the rocks. One particularly ruthless man from an especially notorious family of wreckers is claimed to have bitten the finger off a dead man's hand to obtain a ring that stubbornly clung to the swollen finger of the corpse. Informants asserted, however, that most local people would not have participated in deliberate wrecking activities. Certainly, none of these tales appeared in written documents of the day.

Over-zealousness in salvaging items from a wreck was the more common accusation leveled against the people of the southern Avalon. Governors' files, court records, and newspapers of the period contain various complaints against local inhabitants for mistreating shipwrecked crews and passengers and stealing items, or at least precipitously removing them, from vessels that had not been fully abandoned.43 However, while local inhabitants were usually anxious to obtain their share of salvage, they were also, on a number of occasions, commended for their bravery in rescuing crews and passengers from distressed vessels and for their generosity in housing, clothing, and feeding victims and attending to their injuries.44

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But humanitarian sensibilities aside, the wrecked property from a vessel was seen as a windfall, and boats often came from communities all around the site to reap the rewards. Of course, salvage operations after a vessel had been abandoned by its captain and crew or had otherwise become derelict were a common and legal means of obtaining property and/or extra income in maritime communities. Generally, local salvagers were awarded from one-third to one-half the value of recovered property.45 There was considerable discrepancy, however, between legal definitions of salvage and what local inhabitants perceived to be their entitlement. Indeed, the government's introduction in 1860 of a system of wreck commissioners was deeply resented by most people on the southern Avalon. The legislation called for the appointment of commissioners in every electoral district to attend at the site of wrecks and oversee the salvage and distribution of wrecked property as expeditiously as possible. The statute also established various fines and penalties for taking property from a wreck and failing to report it, and gave the wreck commissioners "full power to suppress all tumults and disturbances" at the sites of shipwrecks.46 Clearly, then, the legislators were anticipating open hostility and resistance to the measure. Certainly, within the plebeian community on the southern Avalon, the system was perceived as a scheme for taking a source of income from "the poor starving people" and hoarding all the spoils for the government. Hence, there was a tendency to race against the arrival of the wreck commissioner in a pre-emptive local salvage effort, for "what the people could steal is what they'd get."47 Audio Sample

It is difficult to assess women's involvement in salvage activities. While it was unlikely that they actually took to boats to reach foundering vessels, there are suggestions that women joined with men in stripping wrecks that had come ashore and combing the beaches for articles washed in by the tide.48 Gender-inclusive language was often used in contemporary documents about illicit activities at wreck sites. Complaints of local plundering, for example, were made against "the People at and about S^t. Maries" in 1777, the "local inhabitants" of Ferryland in 1782, the starving "inhabitants" and "riotous and tumultuous assembling of people" in Bay Bulls in 1817, and "the inhabitants" of the Point La Haye neighborhood in 1844.49 Similarly, in the court cases that followed the wreck of the Spanish barque La Plata at Trepassey, the ship's captain discussed ensuing events in gender-neutral terms, referring constantly to the "people" on the beach who, he claimed, disabled and plundered the vessel. He also specifically referred to two women among the crowd: the wife of local magistrate George Simms and another woman, who took the captain and crew to their homes for food and dry clothing. While the magistrate's wife was probably not one of the "mob," the unidentified woman may have been, for it was not unusual for residents to take items from a wrecked vessel, yet still take crew and passengers into their care.50

Until recent years, there has been a tendency among historians to interpret collective nouns such as people, crowd, mob, or inhabitants as "men," thus coloring more neutral, contemporary reports with latter-day assumptions. Especially if the ringleaders or arrestees in such incidents were male, historians have tended to gender the entire crowd male. But since the late 1980s, compelling evidence of women's central involvement in communal actions—most notably food riots, but also other forms of confrontations involving property and work—has challenged the discipline to rethink collectivities in terms of participation of not just men, but also women and older children.51

Several oral informants certainly acknowledged that women were involved in this level of salvaging activity, suggesting that it was more common in "the old days" than within their own lifetimes. One story of a specific incident in the early twentieth century, although outside the study period, illustrates by next-best approximation what was likely a long-standing tradition. In the wake of a wreck at Caplin Bay, a number of cases labeled "catsup" were washed up on the beach. This was a somewhat exotic item by local standards; indeed, inhabitants were not always sure of the purpose of the articles that came ashore after wrecks (in another instance, for example, pasta noodles were mistaken for tapers for lighting candles), but they gamely took the items home and found some use for them. So the catsup was a rare item, but a valued prize nonetheless. Two local fishermen had found a cache of the cases and were apportioning the catsup between them, when Mrs. Mary Margaret -------, "a very determined woman," came marching over the beach to fight for her share of it. One of the fishermen, a mild-mannered man named Mr. Jim -------, immediately relinquished his portion to her, saying: "I wouldn't have Mrs. Mary Margaret ------ on my back for all the 'cat soup' in the world."52 As this anecdote helps to illustrate, salvaging wrecked property from the coast was something that fell within the accepted range of women's work.

And oral informants all agreed that, whether or not they were directly involved in salvaging efforts, women had no moral dilemmas about using any items brought home from a wreck, but were instead ruled by pragmatism and a desire to give some small extra comfort to their families. Recovered foodstuffs were particularly valued as a means of stretching provisions or varying the diet.53 Furniture, shelves, deck planks, canvas, and doors provided welcome additions to household furnishings. Such items were seen as part of the bounty of the sea, a gift that it would be a "sin" to waste. One informant advised that wrecks were "better than the fall of the year [when families settled up with their merchants and obtained new supplies for the winter],"54 and virtually everything that was removed from vessels or washed ashore found a use. Audio Sample Indeed, most homes I visited for oral history research contained at least one item, and sometimes several, from wrecked vessels—some having been in the families for generations, others having arrived as recently as the 1940s. The salvaging of items from wrecks, then, was one of numerous economic activities in plebeian households, and one in which women played roles as both salvagers and recyclers as they worked to make ends meet for their families.55

Sexual Division of Labor within Households

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Along the southern Avalon, most family members (except the very young, the very old, and the sick) were expected to contribute to household production, and both men and women worked long hours, often at difficult tasks that required physical exertion, skill, and experience. But there was a gendered division of labor, although traditional dichotomies for conceptualizing work delegated by sex—such as skilled/unskilled labor, primary/secondary contributions, or indoor/outdoor work—are not useful in differentiating men's and women's tasks in this historical context. Indeed, there was a high degree of flexibility in the allocation of work routines.

Still, some duties were more clearly delegated along sex lines than others. It was very unusual for women to actually fish in the ocean, for example, although they did fish in fresh water for trout. But women's reproductive role, together with the degree of physical strength required to row out into the North Atlantic and pull handlines or seines filled with cod, steered women landward and allocated fishing activity to the men in the family unit.56 Yet even physical strength was not a clear criterion for the division of labor, for much of the landward work performed by women required a good deal of physical exertion. Furthermore, there was no traditional belief on the southern Avalon that women in boats were an "aberration" or that they caused bad luck.57 The universal explanation from oral informants for women's nonparticipation in actual fishing was that they already had "enough" or "too much" to do on the land. Certainly, women were not excluded because of a lack of capacity to cope with essential work; indeed, their involvement in shore work and in other productive efforts demonstrated quite the opposite.

Just as it was uncommon for a woman's hand to guide a fishing boat, so it was unusual for a man's hand to rock the cradle. Women generally assumed the responsibility for child care, but this was not because of notions of women as the "gentler" sex and superior maternal love—cultural facets of motherhood that were gaining prominence among the middle class but had not made inroads into plebeian culture on the southern Avalon in this time period.58 Indeed, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century observers in Ireland noted that parents of both sexes were very fond of their children, a genuine affection that was not simply rooted in the need for large family work units and security in old age.59 Rather, Irish plebeian women's greater role in child care on the southern Avalon was prompted by women's reproductive role and life cycle and reinforced by a division of labor that sent men out on the water daily in the summer. Still, women did employ alternative methods of child care when possible—a servant girl or older daughter; an elderly mother or aunt; even, on occasion, a sawed-off puncheon on the stage or flake—in order to free themselves for productive work. Thus the responsibility for child care did not relegate plebeian women to the domestic hearth.

Indeed, in many work assignments, there was much blurring of boundaries. Heading and splitting fish was generally considered men's work, for example, but some women did it on a regular basis. Some women performed heavier physical labor in fields and gardens that was normally associated with men, such as digging and trenching. And in those families in which men were involved in a fall fishery, the harvesting of crops had to be managed by women (with the assistance of hired servants, if sufficiently affluent). There were also sub-layers of involvement in work routines, such that while certain work was designated as men's or women's, the other sex also participated in some capacity. Many women were involved in the process of trenching potatoes, for example, by laying the seed potatoes and covering them over with sod that the men had dug. Then there were the variations in scheduling of the same work. While both men and women worked in gardens and fields, for example, it was logical for women to assume greater responsibility for this work during the summer months because they were not out on the water. Similarly, the care of the family cow was the men's responsibility in the winter, and women's during the summer. Cutting firewood was men's work in the winter, but in the summer, it was women who scoured the woods for dried alder branches and blasty boughs for cooking. The work rota had a certain internal logic and rhythm that delegated tasks as much on the basis of availability and expedience as on gendered notions of ability or strength.

Work roles were also quite fluid, as men and women occasionally crossed over boundaries as needs arose. Men might do household chores in the winter, for example, when their wives were busy at more specialized tasks such as spinning or knitting, while women might split and head fish at the peak of the season when there were insufficient hands on the stage. When women did men's work or men did women's work on a temporary basis, they were perceived to be helping the other. A man might help his wife scrubbing floors, for example, or a woman might help her husband splitting fish. Men might help women drying the hay if it was a poor day for fishing, while women might help men tarring a roof. Women more often assumed men's duties than the reverse, however, and in cases of men's absence (for example, at the bank fishery or, less commonly, the seal fishery), women were entirely responsible for the management of all family work at home. While women colonists in New England and Upper Canada were generally perceived by their communities as helpmeets to their husbands,60 the Irish plebeian community on the southern Avalon did not make this clear-cut distinction, but assigned the status of helper to either sex within specific work contexts, based on a sexual division of labor that designated essential tasks to both men and women.

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Indeed, there was no perception during this period or beyond of women's work in household production (whether reproductive or productive) as secondary. If anything, they were seen as contributing more than an equal share, for, as one local informant stated and many others implied, "Women did it all."61 There was certainly no stigma attached to women's productive work within the plebeian community throughout the study period; indeed, there was no perception of a gender divide between productive and reproductive work, as work routines intermeshed and were shared by both sexes. Nor was a woman who did men's tasks seen as aberrant. Quite the reverse was true: a woman who could juggle all her own routines and step in and do a man's work when necessary was highly esteemed. Marriages were seen as economic partnerships in which both sexes held equal shares and carried equal risks. Work routines were roughly delegated by sex, but they were flexible. Within this schema, women were seen as essential contributors in a collective enterprise and their efforts were highly valued. In essence, a woman's versatility and capacity for hard work were integral parts of the way womanhood was defined, both by the women themselves and by the larger community.62 Audio Sample

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Women in Paid Work, the Hospitality Trade, and Proto-Professions

While almost every adult plebeian woman (barring ill health) contributed to household production on the southern Avalon, a smaller but still significant number also performed paid work, operated businesses in the hospitality trade, or worked in proto-professional occupations such as community healing and teaching. This facet of women's work has received only passing mention in the literature on early settlement in Newfoundland (usually only a sentence or two in descriptions of women's work). But for the women involved, it was an important means of earning cash or additional credit to support themselves or contribute to family economies.

Service

Service was the most common form of paid work for women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally, young women were shipped, particularly from Ireland by the latter part of the eighteenth century, to work as servants for planters and merchants along the southern Avalon. Various court cases throughout the study period, such as Elizabeth Cullen v. James Shortall (discussed in see Chapter 3), illustrate that the contracts by which these women were hired, whether oral or written, were perceived to be binding and that negotiated terms had to be honored by both employer and employee alike.

Fishing service: While most discussions of women servants in Newfoundland during the period assume that they were in domestic service, there is evidence that women were hired by local merchants and planters as fishing servants to process fish on shore. In the fall of 1797, for example, Anstice Dwyer of Brigus South sued Cornelius Kelly for her outstanding wages. Kelly was the agent for Irish merchants George and Thomas Kough, and had taken the entire voyage of Anstice's employer, John Sloan, before her wages had been paid. Anstice produced a shipping paper that she had entered into with Sloan—a written agreement by which she had contracted to perform the duties of heading, curing, and drying fish as well as cooking for Sloan's shore crew for wages of £9 for the season. The court ordered Kelly to pay Anstice the balance of wages she was owed in the amount of £4.10.0.63 At the seduction trial of James H. Carter of Ferryland in 1827, testimony revealed that he had hired his alleged victim, Ellen Delahunty, to cut sounds with his shore crew.64 In the fall of 1848, Ellen Leary of Ferryland sued John Butler for £2.10.0 Newfoundland Currency [Cy.] in payment for curing fifty quintals of fish that summer.65

Indeed, a number of employment disputes involving female fishing servants appear in the court records of the period (see Chapter 6). And there are other types of references to women's fishing service as well. In a diary entry for 13 July 1841, for example, Robert Carter commented on the abundance of fish being taken by local boats and noted in the margin that Mary and Betsy Kehoe were among the four servants processing it at his premises late into the night.66 The oral tradition also acknowledges the hiring of women for shore work. A local folksong, "Betsy Mealey's Escape," relates the true story of the ill-fated voyage of Betsy and several other women who had been recruited as fishing servants for the fishery at St. Mary's Bay.67 Some might argue that these women were merely isolated examples of an uncommon phenomenon. But given that almost all have come to light only because of difficulties they encountered with employers, it is far more likely that they signify a somewhat larger pool of women fishing servants, most operating without sufficient inconvenience to cause them to appear in court records or ballads of the day.

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Indeed, according to local informants, Goodridge's premises at Renews hired large numbers of women to spread fish in the nineteenth century; they were supervised by a male master of the voyage and were thus regular shore crew.68 Audio Sample This observation is borne out by surviving ledgers of the Goodridge firm. The books for 1839 to 1841 are peppered with entries of payments to women for shore work in the fishery. Their rate of pay was 2s. per day—the lower end of the male shore crew's earnings, which ranged from 2s. to 2s.9d. per day.69 Some of these women were employed for only several days, but others worked on the flakes for extended periods. The following excerpt from the firm's "fishery" account for 1841, for example, demonstrates that local women worked an average of 21.4 days, within a range of 4 to 47.25 days:

					£	s	d
To	Julia McCarthy	13½	days work	@ 2s.	1	7	-
"	Esther Cahill	45½	D°.	D°.	4	11	-
"	Mary Power	4	D°.	D°.	-	8	-
"	Mary Conway	47¼	D°.	D°.	4	11	6
"	Mary Ann Fowler	45½	D°.	D°.	4	10	6
"	Fanny Devine	6	D°.	D°.	-	12	-
"	Fanny Rose	12½	D°.	D°.	1	5	-
"	Catherine Cahill	22¼	D°.	D°.	2	4	6
"	Phoebe Squires	3¾	D°.	D°.	-	7	6
"	Margaret Dunphy	29½	D°.	D°.	2	19	-
"	Nancy Gerian	22¼	D°.	D°.	2	4	6
"	Bridget Meagher	4¾	D°.	D°.	-	9	6

Given the robust participation of women in family shore crews, it is hardly surprising to find fishing concerns that still depended upon hired labor, like Goodridge's, tapping into women's expertise and experience.

Domestic service: Nonetheless, women (particularly young women) were hired in increasing numbers for domestic service during the study period. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, servant women were recruited from the British Isles, especially Ireland, and became an integral part of planter households—cooking, washing, and sewing not just for family members but also for the fishing servants who were hired each season. As the population stabilized, these shipped girls increasingly came from the ranks of local fishing families, and domestic service became a life-stage occupation by which young women earned a small income and room and board while they prepared for married life. Whether they worked for traditional planter households or the ascendant family production units, few women on the southern Avalon remained servants for life, and most went on to become mistresses of their own households.70

Indeed, the question of the social mobility of female servants (fishing and domestic) on the southern Avalon (and Newfoundland in general) is an intriguing one.71 Because of the disproportionate sex ratios in the fishing population, there is reason to believe that servant girls who emigrated from the British Isles in the period of early settlement were likely more upwardly mobile than those who remained at home,72 marrying into planter and (less frequently) mercantile families after their arrival.

Perhaps the most striking example from the area was Mary (last name unknown), an Irish servant who came out to Ferryland circa 1650 in the service of Lady Frances Hopkins. Lady Frances was a political refugee and sister-in-law of Sara Kirke, wife of David Kirke, co-proprietor and governor of the island who had headquartered himself at the colony originally established by George Calvert (Lord Baltimore) at Ferryland.73 Mary eventually married the Kirkes' son, also named David, but her husband was captured by the French in their late-seventeenth-century incursion into the English Shore, and he died at Placentia in 1697. One or two years later, Mary married James Benger, an Irish Protestant merchant in St. John's. In 1708, she petitioned the British crown to have the Kirke property on the southern Avalon restored to her, as rightful heir to her first husband. Thus, the Benger family became major landholders in the Ferryland area.74

Of course, Mary's upward mobility was exceptional, and most men of the merchant-planter group married women of their own class (often women from the home country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and women from their local social circle or from St. John's in later decades). But marriage or cohabitation between servant women and smaller-scale planters was more common. A typical example of the phenomenon was Anstice Dwyer, the above-noted fishing servant who successfully sued for her wages in 1797 by producing a shipping paper that she had entered into with John Sloan. Apparently, they entered into another concordat as well, for by the taking of the 1800 census, Anstice and John were living together in a common-law relationship.75 The oral tradition and contemporary anecdotal evidence, particularly from British authorities on the island dating back to the late seventeenth century, suggest that many servant girls like Anstice married or entered into stable cohabiting arrangements with fishermen or planters and became mistresses of their own family fishing enterprises, some of which were quite substantial operations. Many women from service or laboring backgrounds who had emigrated from Ireland to the southern Avalon had thus likely increased their opportunities for moving up in the world.76

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Still, their lives as servants were filled with long days and hard work. The term "domestic service" had different connotations in small fishing communities than in urban areas. Like servants in the rural British Isles and other rural colonial contexts, most of these women were responsible for performing a variety of tasks both in and out of doors.77 Women servants cooked meals, performed housework, and looked after young children, but they were also expected to feed livestock, milk cows, and work in the gardens and meadows as needed. Indeed, at the peak of the fishing season, servant girls on the southern Avalon were sometimes recruited for drying fish on the flakes as well. More commonly, however, their mistresses within the plebeian community left their female servants to keep house and care for young children while the mistresses themselves performed what was seen as the more crucial work of curing fish, milking, gardening, or making hay. Still, the servant girl was generally expected to "do a bit of everything"78 in peak work periods and to be on call day and night. The exceptions were those few servants working for larger mercantile households, where indoor maids responsible for child care and specialized household duties were differentiated from servants hired for more general indoor and outdoor work.79

Long hours, hard work, low wages,80 and lack of privacy were experiences that these women shared with domestic servants elsewhere. But some of the isolation and pressures that existed in situations elsewhere—for example, class tensions between mistress and servant, and even antagonism within stratified ranks of household servants—were not as pronounced on the southern Avalon, for the power dynamic in the relationship was muted. Many servants were working for plebeian families, in which mistresses bore their share of the heavy workload; there was little differentiation among the ranks of servants in most situations; and women servants could look forward to becoming mistresses of their own households in time.81 Furthermore, as Chapter 6 will demonstrate, servants on the southern Avalon had reasonable access to the courts in cases of ill-treatment or non-payment of wages, and thus were likely less vulnerable to abuse than many women who entered service in other historical contexts.

Paid Washing and Sewing

A number of women on the southern Avalon washed and sewed for community members outside their own families, catering to the large numbers of single men in the population as well as to a small clientele from the local elite. Their work contributed to the limited cash incomes of families; indeed, for some fishing families, it was likely the only source of cash in many years. Additionally, their services were an important link in the local exchange economy as many of their customers, particularly fishermen and shoremen, "paid" them through their merchant's account book. For example, supplies issued to a washer or sewer were contra'd by making a credit entry in her account in the name of the appropriate fishing servant or fisherman, with a corresponding debit entry in the latter's account. Ultimately, the merchant was paid by a deduction from the fishing servants' wages or from fish and oil collected from independent fishermen in the fall.

Of course, catering to a largely transient fishing clientele, washerwomen and seamstresses found that some of their customers attempted to abscond at the end of the season without making payment. This was most unfortunate for the women involved, but the court cases that ensued provide the historian with some means of measuring their livelihood. Twenty-six court cases during the period involved or made reference to laundresses and seamstresses (the specific profile being twenty-two washerwomen and four combined washerwomen/seamstresses). Again, most of these women appeared in the court records due to unusual circumstances and surely made up only a subsection of the total numbers actually involved in these occupations.

The court records indicate a high proportion of married or widowed women working as seamstresses and washerwomen. Of the twenty-six identified, at least fourteen of the women can be readily placed in this category because they were referred to as "Mrs." in the record and/or because their husbands were suing for payment as their legal agents. This does not exclude the possibility that some of the others were also married, widowed, or living in alternative family arrangements, for the flexibility of combining paid sewing and washing with household production and childrearing made it possible for these women to juggle their paid work with their other household responsibilities.

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Given the consistency in the amounts claimed in the court actions, it is obvious that most women negotiated a flat rate with their customers for their services (only one woman negotiated a piece rate for washing—4s. 6d. per dozen items—in 1818).82 While rates are not detailed in all the cases, definite trends can be seen. Only two amounts for washing appear in the records for the eighteenth century: £5.2.0 for washing for eleven fishing servants in the summer of 1779 (or roughly 9s. 3d. per customer); and £1.5.0 for one customer in 1785 (this seems high, and may have been payment for an entire year, as opposed to a single season, or for washing and sewing services combined). In the early 1800s, the rate for washing increased, likely due to increased demand from the high numbers of transient men in the population as well as generally inflationary conditions, and fluctuated between 15s. and 25s. per customer per season (summer or winter). It then declined after the Napoleonic War period, from 18s. in 1820 to a range of 12s. 6d.-15s. in the next two decades, likely reflecting fewer transient men in the population and hence a lowering of demand as well as an economy in recession. In the early 1840s, the going rate for washing hovered around the 15s. mark per season (with two exceptions: 10s. per season, and a very low 12s. for a year's washing). These rates were by now being charged in Newfoundland Currency rather than British Sterling, reflecting a further decrease in the remuneration for these women. By mid-century, however, the rates were beginning to creep slightly upwards again to the 16-18s. range. Of course, combined washing and sewing services garnered higher rates, with amounts of £2.17.6 (1818), £1.5.0 (1832), and £1.16.0 (1835) per customer specifically mentioned in the court records. It is difficult to draw conclusions from these few examples for the combined service, other than to note that they also seem to reflect a reduction in rates as the male population became more settled and the economy cooled down.

The evidence in the court cases is supported by accounts for laundresses and seamstresses in the Sweetman and Goodridge ledgers (see Appendix C, section 2). The Sweetman evidence is sporadic and deals mostly with the 1820s. However, it again suggests the significant involvement of married women or widows in these occupations. It also indicates that the flat rate for washing generally ranged from 15s. to 18s. per season, and the charge for combined washing and sewing ranged from £1.8.0 to £1.10.0 per season, corresponding with the amounts from the court cases for the same period. The ledgers also provide us with an approximate rate for sewing only, with what would appear to be fixed rates for a season generally ranging from 3s. 6d. to 6s., and other amounts obviously reflecting charges for piece work. The Goodridge ledgers also mirror the court cases in reflecting a gradual decline in rates (likely due to lowering demand) for women's washing and sewing services. While washing rates ranged from 10s. to 17s. per season, by far the most frequent charge was 12s. Seamstresses were charging 5s. per season or piece rates ranging from 1s. to 1s. 6d., with the mode being 1s. 3d.

Many of these women had multiple customers, a fact that is reflected in both the court cases and the business ledgers. Indeed, a Mrs. Delany in Bay Bulls washed for eleven fishing servants for the summer of 1779;83 Mrs. James Barron, a laundress and seamstress in Placentia–St. Mary's, had fourteen customers in 1823;84 and Mary Galway of Renews sewed for ten local fishermen in 1840.85 Most other laundresses and seamstresses had up to five customers per year, although there were several with over five. The records also suggest that women maintained long-term arrangements with some of their clients. For example, Margaret Yetman of St. Mary's had a working relationship with William Christopher for many years, seeking £62 from his estate in 1835 for washing and other services performed over Christopher's lifetime.86

While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wardrobes were limited, especially among fishermen customers, the demands this work placed on these women's time were considerable, given that most of them likely had families to care for as well. Washing, in particular, was strenuous work, involving the drawing and boiling of prodigious amounts of water as well as soap-making for a process that also had to be performed for the washerwoman's own family.87 Sewing, while not as physically arduous, required both long hours and substantial skill. But what value was attributed to such work by the local community in relation to other forms of employment?

The most accessible wage information for comparative purposes, at least for the early decades of the nineteenth century, is from the fishery. Still, it is difficult to compare the monies earned by washerwomen and seamstresses with the wages paid to fishing servants and seamen: there is no way of ascertaining, for example, exactly how many customers these women had per season, and it is difficult to find matching data in any given year for both fishery workers and washerwomen/seamstresses. The purchasing power of these women (based on the prices of provisions, as per Table 4.2) is also difficult to ascertain without knowing the numbers of their clientele. The following discussion is, therefore, highly impressionistic, based on the sporadic data at hand.

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Given these limitations, Table 4.3 takes women's earnings recorded in court cases and account books for years in which fishing wages are available, and projects the amounts that would have been earned based on a clientele of three, five, or ten customers per season.88 When compared with Table 4.1, it can be seen that only the earnings of those women who combined washing and sewing for ten customers per season would have approached the earnings of a youngster or less experienced fishing servant (although the combined service in 1818 would have netted the equivalent of an experienced fisherman's or shoreman's wage). Ten customers for both washing and sewing, however, would have been a rather large workload for women with other household duties, and probably untenable for many with large families. Overall, then, these women were not being remunerated as skilled workers, likely because their work was seen as an extension of their familial roles.

Nonetheless, some of these women may have had significant purchasing power. Table 4.3 also provides examples of the provisions that could have been bought with these women's earnings—again, based on a clientele of three, five, or ten—as well as a sample package of provisions for those with earnings on the high end. The table demonstrates that their earnings could make significant contributions to their family incomes, particularly those who may have had five or more customers and, most especially, those who combined washing and sewing services. The table also suggests that, even though the rates for washing and sewing declined after the Napoleonic War period, the purchasing power of laundresses and seamstresses did not slide dramatically, given the context of a generally cooling economy. Their work, then, had economic value, even though it was not as highly rated as fishing service, for it bolstered the resources of families living on the margin and also helped to drive the exchange economy in the study area.

Agriculture—Production for Market and Paid Labor

While most women's agricultural labor on the southern Avalon contributed to family subsistence, there is evidence that some women sold their agricultural labor or produce to outsiders and earned cash or credit for themselves and their families. Mary Foley of the Renews area provides a striking example, for her efforts encompassed several aspects of women's paid work. The extant records for Goodridge's (1839-41) indicate that Mary had obtained from the firm, on credit, large quantities of soap and sewing materials, suggesting that she was sewing and washing for people in the community, and/or perhaps servants in her own household, as part of the contracted terms of their employment. In addition to the usual contra entries made in her account and those of her customers, Mary paid for her supplies with various installments of agricultural produce, including potatoes, milk, cream, pigs, poultry, and eggs (see Table 4.4). Her commercial activity was well rooted in the traditional activities of rural Irish women; in particular, sales of pork/bacon, eggs, fowl, and dairy products were common means for Irish women to earn income that was essential to their families' survival.89

On the southern Avalon, women fattened pigs through the summer months, making meal from dabs (small flatfish found in coastal waters) in the earlier part of the summer, then switching to a boiled mash of potato peels and other household scraps later in the process so that the meat would not taste of fish. The fattened and slaughtered animals were sold to merchants and dealers, or in smaller amounts to community members for payment in cash or kind. Women also sold butter, cream, and milk to their merchants—as did Mary Foley and her neighbor Johanna Leary, who was credited with "37 days milk" by Goodridge's in 1840—or they exchanged these items within the community.90 Poultry also provided an important source of income for women in the early days of settlement. The Goodridge accounts indicate that several women in the Renews area raised fowl for sale, enabling them to offset their debts with the firm:91

Mary Foley	1840	23 ducks, 1 doz. eggs
	1841	20 ducks
Ann Jackman	1840	6 ducks
Margaret Jackman	1840	6 fowls, 2 geese
Mary Knox	1841	3 fowls
Margaret Dunphy	1841	9 ducks
Nancy Shannahan	1841	6 ducks

Various other sales of poultry and eggs credited to men's accounts also likely reflected the husbandry of their wives and/or daughters.92 This cash- or credit-producing activity was likely even more prominent in the earlier part of the study period, when larger proportions of the population were more transient and thus had to rely on purchasing such items. In 1794, for example, when diarist/seaman Aaron Thomas wanted to buy some poultry, a young servant directed him to a local Irish woman who had sold fowls to his master at 2s. 6d. "per Couple." Thomas passed himself off as a priest by showing the woman a pyx he was carrying, and he negotiated the price of his purchase down to 2s. a pair, the woman discounting the birds "for your Religion's sake."93 Thomas also encountered a young Irish woman in Caplin Bay, a Mrs. Poor (or Power), who was very worried that her geese, ducks, and chickens had taken to laying and sitting their eggs in the woods and would likely fall prey to wild animals. According to Thomas, she did not share the same level of concern for her children, whom she had sent in search of the strays and who had become lost in the foggy woods overnight, finally making their way to the neighboring harbor of Cape Broyle in the morning. Mrs. Poor's fowl, then, were of great importance to her, and were likely a means of earning income as well as feeding her family.94

Indeed, the significance of poultry in the family income of Irish women has been commemorated by the local folksong "Betsy Brennan's Blue Hen." Having enumerated the many fine qualities of her champion fowl, Betsy rains down curses on the "scoundrel" who has stolen her hen and her drake:

May his whiskers turn green
When he eats a crubeen
And may pork fat and beans
Nearly make him insane;
May two dogs and a crackie
Eat all his tobaccy -
The villain who stole my poor little Blue Hen.

Making no gendered assumptions about the sex of the thief, she also launches several salvoes at a possible female perpetrator:

May the ravenous baste
Burst her blouse at the waist;
May she not get a taste
Of a dumplin' or cake;
May a man from Freshwater
Go back on her daughter,
That lifted my hen and my beautiful drake.95 Audio Sample

Although this song and Thomas's earlier anecdotes are humorous, there is an underlying gravity in the concern of these women for the fate of fowl that made a significant contribution to their families' livelihoods. 75

Another important source of women's income in rural Ireland came from dairying, but there is no evidence that Irish immigrants brought large-scale commercial dairying practices with them to the southern Avalon. Still, a few isolated examples (some Irish, some English) of small-scale dairying exist in the records. A 1786 court case reveals that a family in Fermeuse named Welsh had been supplying the merchant house of Leigh and Co. with milk the two previous years and that Mrs. Welsh was a central figure in the business.96 Aaron Thomas mentions in his journal that the widow Mary Keene (also Kean and Keen) was keeping fourteen cows in the Grove at Ferryland in 1794, which in the Newfoundland context, he said, put her "on a par with Job in point of Riches."97 Indeed, two years previous, the widow had been ordered to mortgage the herd to Holdsworth and Co. as partial security for a debt of £125.98 A herd of this size was surely for purposes beyond her household consumption.

Similarly, the five cows that Elenor Tobin of Witless Bay inherited from her husband, Laurence, at his death in 1852 must have produced more than her family required; and it was evident that some effort was being made to develop the herd, for a proviso of Laurence's will stated that Elenor "keep up" the stock and "not allow [it] to diminish during her lifetime."99 The Ryan and Hartery families at Biscay Bay provide another example with their two dozen cattle and two dairies by the middle of the nineteenth century.100 Nonetheless, dairying did not develop as a more substantial industry, doubtless due to insufficient winter feed for large herds and a limited local market. Thus, the large-scale employment of women in dairying, and the subsequent devaluation of their labor that occurred in the British Isles with the "rationalization" of the industry, were not processes that played out on the southern Avalon.

Women did, however, hire themselves out for occasional agricultural work, particularly weeding, harvesting, and haymaking. Women's paid farm labor was not as common as it was in Ireland, where, particularly up to the early decades of the nineteenth century, women regularly contributed to family incomes with wages from seasonal work in the spring and fall. Still, there is some evidence from the southern Avalon that women hired themselves for work outside family gardens and meadows. Harriet Carter, the wife of a "gentleman farmer" in Ferryland, wrote to her English uncle in the late 1820s of hiring a local woman to help her with her kitchen garden.101 Her husband's cousin, Robert Carter, made references in his diary to occasional hired labor in his gardens, such as the following entry in 1836: "Biddy Hegarty's girl weeding part of a day, came after 10 A.M."102 Some women also made hay for wages or sold hay from their own or family surpluses. Carter, for example, notes in an 1841 entry: "… bought up 2 cwt Hay from Martin Culliton's Wife."103 The Goodridge ledgers provide further examples of women's sale of hay for cash or credit.104 And, as noted above, field work occasionally featured on the roster of duties for domestic servants.

Clearly, then, not all women's agricultural labor was for subsistence purposes only. For some, paid labor and the sale of farm produce were part of a variety of economic mechanisms to ensure their survival. Susan Layman of Renews, for example, combined the sale of hay with laundering for the Goodridge family and work on the Goodridge flakes to pay her way in the world. Her neighbor, Julia McCarthy, sold hay, worked on the Goodridge flakes, and sewed for the Goodridge family and other community members. Yet another neighbor, Ann Jackman, sold hay to Goodridge's and worked as shore crew for a B. McCarthy.105 Plebeian women's working careers were often much more multi-faceted than the traditional model for outport Newfoundland, which included essentially only the options of family production or service.

Hospitality Trade

The hospitality trade provided another opportunity for women to contribute to family economies through the keeping of boarders, small shops, and public houses.106 Some women in the area kept itinerant, paying boarders—casual travelers, for example, or teachers, doctors, and priests. As with sewing and washing, this type of work appealed to married women and widows, for it could be balanced with household and child care responsibilities. But the almost universal manifestation of this service was in the boarding of fishing servants by planter households, both in the earlier boatkeeper phase of the resident fishery as well as in the evolving family production stage. Of course, the traditional planter household generally accommodated more fishing servants than the household production unit, which required fewer servants to supplement family labor. Nevertheless, in both cases, servants had to be housed and fed. In the summer months, they usually stayed in separate cookrooms or bunkhouses, where they often prepared their own meals. But provisions were advanced against their wages, and often charges for sewing and washing services were deducted from their pay; these transactions involved the mistresses of fishing households, not only as service providers, but often as account managers as well (see Chapter 5).107

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Boarding services came more directly under the hand of the household mistress in the winter, when households kept dieters to perform winter work in exchange for their room and board. These winter servants were far fewer in number than the summer fishing servant population, but many resided within the household itself, and thus full board had to be provided by the mistress of the house. In exchange, the family received valuable labor such as wood-cutting and the repair of fishing premises and gear in preparation for the next fishing season.

Shopkeeping was also a source of income for a small number of women, primarily married women and widows. While merchants were the main source of provisions and supplies for local communities, shops also sold a small assortment of goods—some foodstuffs, notions, small household articles, and homemade goods. Very few of these women shopkeepers appear in the written record, although some names occasionally surface. The eight court cases that Jane Austin of Ferryland initiated against customers of her shop in Ferryland, for example, suggest that she was doing a brisk trade in the 1830s and 1840s.108 A Mrs. Leary was running a shop in Renews when she applied for a license to sell liquor on the premises in 1854,109 and the number and variety of amounts in Mary Morris's account with Sweetman's that were contra'd against fishermen's accounts suggest that she may have been a shopkeeper, a tavernkeeper, or both. The oral tradition indicates that shopkeepers were often women, and that they usually sold "a bit on the side" (illicit liquor) in addition to their lawful trade;110 thus, the tradition of female shebeen-keeping seems to have crossed the Atlantic with the Irish. This claim is substantiated by the 1786 regulations for retailing liquor, which included female shopkeepers in their scope.111

Female tavernkeepers appeared slightly more frequently in the records because of the requirement that all public houses be licensed on an annual basis. Indeed, authorities carefully monitored the retailing of liquor because of its adverse effects on fishermen and seamen, and hence on the orderly operation of the fishing industry itself. They were especially concerned about the practice of crediting migrant fishing servants and seamen with liquor "to the Amount of the whole or great Part of their Wages, "causing" all kinds of Disorders, debauchery's, Excesses and Idleness"112 and leaving many fishing servants with insufficient monies to pay their passage home at the end of the fishing season or support themselves during the winter. Not surprisingly, then, orders and regulations to stem the flow of liquor to seamen and fishing servants emanated from various governors on a regular basis, particularly up to the early nineteenth century, when the migratory and traditional planter fisheries were still in operation.113

Witness the wording of a license issued to Elizabeth Sutton of Trepassey in 1794:

I James Wallace Kn^t. Governor of the Island of Newfoundland do allow and Licence Elizabeth Sutton of Trepassey Widow to keep a Common Ale House or Victualling House and to utter and sell Victuals, Beer, Ale, Cyder and other exciseable Liquors to be drunk in any part of Trepassey where she may chuse to reside for One whole year from the Twenty Ninth day of this present Month of September and no longer so as the true assize in bread, Beer, Ale, and other Liquors hereby allowed to be sold be duly kept, and no unlawfull Game or Games, Drunkness, or any other disorder be suffered in her House, Yard Garden or Backside, but that good Order and rule be maintained and kept therein according to the Laws of the Realm of England in that behalf made, and that she does not Harbor or entertain at improper times or Seasons, Seamen, Marines, or Soldiers belonging to His Majesty's Ships of War and that she do not secret, Harbor nor entertain with undue quantities of Liquors, Seamen and employed in the Merchants Service or Servants employed in the Fishery during the Fishing Season under such Penalties as the Court of Sessions can legally inflict exclusive of being deprived of her Licence.114

Although records on the liquor trade are spotty, at least nine women on the southern Avalon received similar liquor licenses during the study period.115 And, as noted above, the brisk third-party activity in Mary Morris's account with Sweetman's suggests that she may have been another acknowledged liquor retailer in the period.116

This representation, while significant, seems to pale in comparison with the sixty-four male names that appear as license holders in the same records, and suggests that women participated only marginally in the liquor trade. Indeed, there has been a tendency in the historiography to interpret women's operation of public houses primarily as an option in widowhood, for this was certainly the life-stage in which a woman was most likely to have a liquor license issued in her own name. The sale of liquor did help some widows and their families stave off difficult times, and authorities were cognizant of the often marginal nature of widows' livelihoods when granting licenses. Governor Pole, for example, acknowledged Elizabeth Sutton's need for a means of support as "a Widow with a small helpless Family" in the preamble of her license renewal in 1800.117 But the peculiarities of the licensing regulations and the principle of coverture likely masked a much more robust level of participation by married women in the trade.

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Certainly, early regulations for the selling of liquor suggest significant female involvement, for they were as gender-inclusive as they were pervasive. Take, for example, the fairly representative instructions issued by Governor Jonathon Elliot (Web Link) to the justices of the peace in 1786 for issuing liquor licenses. In order to ensure the stability and respectability of the licensees, he required that:

…every Person who shall be allowed to keep a Public House in this Island do give full & ample security for his or her good Behaviour, and that no Person whatever be allowed to keep such Public House who does not, or shall not every Season, keep one Fishing Shallop at least; and Whereas further to encourage the Fishery and that it may be the Interest of every Individual resorting to this Island to promote the same His Majesty has been pleased to direct that every Person who shall keep on his, her or their own Account any Shop or Store for selling or retailing any Goods or Commodities whatever be obliged to keep one fishing shallop at least.118

Obviously, then, authorities anticipated the participation of women in the liquor trade. However, the requirement that the license holder have at least one fishing shallop employed in the fishery, together with the legal principle of coverture, dictated that a license would be issued in the name of a living husband, whether or not the business was a family enterprise or even being run primarily by the wife.119

Elenor Evoy (later Welsh) of Ferryland provides an example of this type of masked participation by women. Elenor was obviously involved in the trade through the 1790s and early 1800s, even though a liquor license was issued in her name only in the year 1799, after she had been widowed. Prior to that, the license for the Evoys' public house had been issued in the name of her first husband, Michael Evoy. By 1800, she had remarried, and the name of her second husband, James Welsh, appeared on various licenses for the district thereafter.120 But it is likely that the license related to the same establishment and that a vital element of continuity in the enterprise was Elenor herself, who most likely had been an integral part of the business before Michael died and continued to operate the public house, as the more experienced partner, in her new marriage with James. Certainly, court records indicate that she rose to the defense of the business, in both physical confrontations and court proceedings, during both marriages—at least once without the benefit of any spousal support (see Chapter 5).

Another illustration of the point is provided by the case of Thomas Leary of Renews and his wife. In the fall of 1854, Mrs. Leary applied for a liquor license to operate a public house in the absence of her husband, who was away at sea. The local constable advised her, however, that she would be denied a license, as "her husband was the proper person to make application." When Thomas returned from sea, he was apparently too ill to make his way to Ferryland to apply for the license, but evidently this did not postpone the sale of liquor at the Leary premises. On 2 January of the following year, a summons was issued against Thomas for illegally selling liquor, and he appeared in court two days later as the "proper person," in the eyes of the law, to answer the charge. However, the circumstances of the matter strongly suggest that it was Mrs. Leary who was primarily operating the business, and had probably been doing so at least since the previous fall. This was apparently not an obstacle to the Learys' obtaining a liquor license. Perhaps in the spirit of the season, or more likely with seasoned pragmatism, the local magistrates issued the license, and even backdated it to the day before the summons had been issued.121 Case File 3

Indeed, the ever-practical magistrates were often willing to issue liquor licenses after illicit sellers had been detected (usually either by local constables or through local informants). This happened in the case of at least two female licensees. In 1794, for example, Margret Keney (or Kenny) was fined for selling liquor without a license, but the lack was rectified the following year, when she was issued a license by magistrate Robert Carter.122 And again, Elizabeth Sutton of Trepassey serves to illustrate the point, for she let her liquor license lapse by refusing to pay the licensing fee in 1802. In September, the visiting surrogate, Micajah Malbon, issued the following instructions to the local constable:

It is my direction that you go to the house of Elizabeth Sutton of Trepassey aforesaid who lately kept a public house known by the sign of the Ship, and give her Notice to immediately take down the said sign and to desist from selling Ale Beer Spiritous liquors or other strong waters, as on the contrary her house will be pulled down and the penalty of £10 will be enforced against her.

But by November, another surrogate, Lieutenant McKillop (also McKellop), had issued her a new license for her house.123 Case File 4 Authorities could be accommodating, then, but they were equally reasonable with male applicants, and it is certain that female publicans were held to the same standards of scrutiny and security as male tavernkeepers.

These cases also suggest an additional way that the licensing system masked the involvement of women in the trade