Reading Log Week 4: Much More Than a Nagging Wife
Adrienne Leduc, “A Fille Du Roi’s Passage,” Beaver, Vol. 81, Issue 1 (Feb/March 2001).
Jan Noel, “ ‘Nagging Wife’ Revisited: Women and the Fur Trade in New France,” French Colonial History, Vol.7 (2006), p. 45-60.
In the two readings “Nagging Wife”[1] and “Fille Du Rois Passage”[2] there is a recognizable tie between romance and privilege, as well as a contrasting assumption of the Canadian lifestyle.
In Jan Noel’s article she writes on the importance of female involvement in the fur trade and how they had a much larger role than what some; including William J. Eccles, had previously alluded; “(women were a) pull factor that put male habitants into the fur trade region.” [3] She recognizes the many roles females took on during the fur trade; but, distinguishes the women as elite and ‘small fry.’ Elite women were women of power, who coincidentally, were married to elite men, and ‘small fry’s’ were primarily Métis women. Adrienne Ledur, on the other hand, writes that male privileges came from men having a romantic relationship with a Fille Du Rois (King’s daughter), contrasting the assumption that females needed men in order to have privileges. If men did not romantically attach themselves to a Fille Du Rois, they would be deprived of the activities that define a man: hunting, trading, and fishing rights.
In Ledur’s article, it is stated that the Fille Du Rois were coming to New France in order to escape the hardship and poverty of France. In contrast, he also points out that New France was called things such as “lieu d’horieu” (place of horrors) and “aux faubourg de l’enfer” (outskirts of hell) in the French colony. This contradiction makes the reasoning behind sending these young girls to Canada questionable. Noel also points out negative aspects to women’s work in Canada through Peter Kalm’s experiences: “Almost everywhere in the Atlantic world women’s work did eventually change, in the direction of less outdoor work, fewer home manufactures, less economic production and exchange, generally less visibility in public. In eighteenth-century Canada, it had not changed yet.”[4] So if this was the case, why were the King’s in France sending their beloved daughters to a place which suffered from the same economic and labor hardships as them? Were they giving them false assumptions of where they were going so they would be more willing to travel away? These are some of the questions that sparked me after reading these two articles.
From the two articles we can identify that each gender had power to privileges, and that women were not simply ‘naggers.’ Women stepped up because their colony demanded them to, “a poor colony, with even its noble families dependant on fur trading and Crown subsidies. Work was required of both sexes…” [5] Canada’s gender roles had not changed in the ways European’s had, and this concept was misconceived by the French and sparked the use of opposing genders for a favorable lifestyle.
[1] Jan Noel, “ ‘Nagging Wife’ Revisited: Women and the Fur Trade in New France,” French Colonial History, Vol.7 (2006), p. 45-60.
[2] Adrienne Leduc, “A Fille Du Roi’s Passage,” Beaver, Vol. 81, Issue 1 (Feb/March 2001), p. 20.
[3] Noel, “Nagging Wife,” p. 45.
[4] Noel, “Nagging Wife,” p. 55.
[5] Noel, “Nagging Wife,” p.53.
