Two types of nagging wives?
Jan Noel’s Nagging Wife article interested me because I am very interested in women’s roles and their history. In this article the part I found most interesting was how she categorized the women as elites and not elites (small fries). This categorization is ironic because not only were women inferior, but certain women were even more inferior– mainly Indigenous women. After the large amount of research I have done on Indigenous women I find it heart wrenching that these women worked so hard and received so little. They were labelled as a non elite group, but did more than the elite group. From Noel’s article I got the feeling that the elite group were white women who were handed down businesses and wealth from deceased husbands and other family members, and the non elite group were Indigenous women who supported families by trading, baking, farming, and making a living off close to nothing. This sounds a lot like white privilege.
Now that I look back on this article I can tell that the role of females is not my concern throughout Noel’s reading, but rather the presence of inequality among the women at this time.
After seeking the notion of white privilege from Noel’s article, I have a decreased sympathy for the Fille Du Rois. These women surely did have a hard time colonizing and immigrating to Canada, but they came into the country and were more privileged than the group who founded it. Females who were not native of the land over powered the Indigenous females who had been here for centuries and I find this to be very unfair. We allowed women to come into our country for a better life and sacrificed the lives of an inferior culture who then had to adjust. The arrival of the Fille Du Rois outcasted Indigenous women even more, and I believe this influx of women had a role in the perception of Indigenous women being ideal for prostitution.
So in the end I don’t find these articles to be about nagging wives at all… rather I see them as complaining white women who thought they had it tough.
