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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Jean Barman, Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003)
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| SOJOURNING SISTERS is a vivid biographical portrait of the lives of Jessie and Annie McQueen, two Presbyterian Scots sisters from Sutherland's River, Pictou County, Nova Scotia, whose experiences as teachers played a critical role in domesticating the British Columbia frontier and in making British Columbia a part of Canada. In this regard, Jean Barman has taken up the call, articulated most recently by Gerald Friesen's Citizens and Nations, that documenting and analyzing the lives of "common Canadians" has much to teach historians about our country, its people, and its ideological perspective. Barman's central thesis is that "British Columbia's absorption into Canada in the years following the completion of the transcontinental railroad derived far more from inconspicuous women like Jessie and Annie McQueen than it did from the public pronouncements of fellow Nova Scotians like George Monro Grant." (129) Thanks to the fact that the sisters were "inveterate scribblers" who wrote numerous letters to each other, and to their siblings and parents, Barman has considerable raw material to permit us entry into their world. |
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The story that Barman deftly reconstructs from those letters is not a page-turner in the sense of conventional histories of nation-building where the tropes of great men and great deeds still reign supreme. However, in her skillful, wry, and witty style, Barman has produced an important, often extremely engrossing story, with two interesting protagonists at its core. The work opens with descriptions of the Scots Presbyterian world of Pictou County, NS, and histories of the McQueen family — a farming family that valued literacy, education, the church, and a strong moral code. Although firmly middle-class in their ideals and values, the McQueen family was never financially secure and this instability was the key determinant of their fates. Time and again, letters describe their attempts to juggle a variety of ventures to keep solvent, and the ways in which adult children, particularly single daughters, were the key to family financial stability. Of the six children, five daughters and one son, four of the daughters (one was infirm and never self-supporting) were at various times called upon to supplement the family coffers with their earnings as teachers. The son, the parent's favoured child, played his role of the prodigal well, decamping for New York and a series of fruitless attempts to make his way in the world. As the older sisters married, it fell to the younger ones, Jessie and Annie, to help support the family. When in 1887 a letter arrived from Rev. John Chisholm, a Presbyterian minister, former family friend, and then resident of British Columbia inviting Annie McQueen to journey west for a job position in Nicola Valley, BC, the die was cast. The key lure was wages. In comparison to the $45–$75 per term that Annie McQueen would earn teaching in Nova Scotia, the starting wage in British Columbia was $50–$60 per month. The family matriarch, Catherine McQueen, was loath to see her go, but in a province that viewed sojourning as an important economic strategy, and in a family where the men had failed to provide secure financial support, her departure was viewed as inevitable. Eventually, Annie's older sister Jessie also ventured west, to a nearby school. Both sisters embarked on their trips west with the clear intention that they would teach in BC for three years before returning to the familiar world of Pictou County. |
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The remainder of the book details the sisters' negotiations with the settler society of BC and the ways in which their Nova Scotia worldview informed their interactions with the people they met. Barman makes a compelling case for the importance of the Nova Scotia values that they transmitted — both to the children they taught (via imported readers from "home" and ideals of society and settlement based upon Nova Scotian norms) and to the people they lived amongst. This is true despite the fact that the youngest daughter, Annie, married within two years of arriving in the west and that she and her Ontarian husband never returned to Nova Scotia to live. Annie's experiences as a wife and mother, first in Ontario, but primarily in BC in a number of boomtowns in the interior of the province and eventually in the provincial capital were no doubt illustrative of the pattern for many newcomers to the region. No longer able to work as a teacher, Annie's economic fate was in the hands of her husband and they moved repeatedly in search of better opportunities and jobs before arriving in Victoria shortly before James' death. It is only after his death that Annie was able to return to paid work, and she threw herself into volunteer and paid work with gusto, clearly relishing the opportunity for agency that widowhood afforded. |
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Jessie's path was different. Although the older sister, Jessie never did marry or commit to life in the west. Instead she worked for approximately twelve years in BC before returning, permanently, to Nova Scotia. In part, this was due to her ill-fated choice in men, but also to the ways in which the family matriarch was loath to let Jessie McQueen, the last of the single, financially supporting daughters, slip off the family economic ties which bound her to her birth family. However, the sisters' ties to their Nova Scotia world were more than just economic and dutiful. The letters and news of home were shared and circulated among their entire family. Family members sent them newspapers from home, described community events, kept them updated on the births, deaths, and marriages in the community and thus routinely involved them in the life of the McQueens even though they were thousands of miles away. Particularly in the early years, they ordered an assortment of products and cloth from Nova Scotia because they viewed it as superior to what was available locally. Finally, though Barman emphasizes that Nova Scotians accounted for a small percentage of BC residents, Jessie and Annie were well-integrated in this expatriate community of teachers and ministers, and routinely socialized and networked within this community. It was only later in life, living in Victoria, that Annie considered herself more a resident of BC than of Nova Scotia. Jessie remained a Nova Scotian in outlook and identity to the end. |
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The story of the McQueen sisters of Pictou is, in many respects, the story of a large number of average 19th and early 20th-century Canadians. Propelled by economic circumstances, they ventured forth from comfortable, established homes and communities in the eastern and central parts of the country and headed west in search of better opportunities. That part of the story is not so astonishing, but in Barman's capable hands, we are left with a compelling micro-study that highlights some key features of the world of sojourners and settlers on the western frontier. "The lives of Annie and Jessie McQueen argue that the freedom the frontier gave was illusory. Congruent with colonialism, the frontier was highly racialized, intended to be experienced by persons of pale skin tones at the expense of the Aboriginal people, hybrids, and, in the case of British Columbia, persons from China. The frontier's freedom was also gendered. The sisters domesticated within a set of imperatives designed to control women's lives far more than they were ever encouraged to participate in events equitably with their male counterparts." (243) Thanks to the archival cache of McQueen letters, and Barman's painstaking reconstruction work, we are left with a noteworthy biography that illuminates small-scale nation-building. So-journing Sisters demonstrates both the economic and familial need that drove western re-settlement and the ways in which two "inconspicuous" women alternatively embraced, resisted, and less frequently adapted to the frontier and in so doing made British Columbia Canadian. |
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Valerie Korinek
University of Saskatchewan |
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