Neptune Inn at the Foot of Mountain Street, Looking up Toward Parliament House. 1830. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1970-188-324 W.H. Coverdale Collection of Canadiana
Copyright: Expired.
Special thanks to Stephanie Pettigrew for her awesome research on the PRDH for this blog post!
If you know anything about women’s history, you’ve likely come across Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famous quote: “well-behaved women seldom make history.” My husband even gave me a bumper sticker with the quote (that hangs on my bulletin board, because we don’t have a car). Most people, including myself, believe that this is a call on women to “mis-behave” in order “make history,” to break boundaries and fight for women’s rights. But this is not actually correct. Rather, the quote calls on historians and the public to remember those women who were well-behaved, and, subsequently, did not make history: homemakers, domestic servants, factory workers, etc…
Obviously I agree with this statement. If you read the roundup, or happen to follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that following the publication of an article about public knowledge about women’s history in Canada, I went on a mini-rant about the devaluation of women’s history in Canada and the focus on elite white women. Ordinary women are often ignored, and seldom named, despite the fact that they represent the vast majority of the female population.
However, I do have one big problem with this dichotomy — it leaves out women were not “well-behaved,” but didn’t make history: Black, Indigenous, and Women of Colour, women with disabilities, LGTBQ+ women, and women living in poverty. While it is easy, and in fact more comfortable, to ignore or erase these individuals and their lived experiences from the historical record, especially if they engaged in behaviours that we find less sympathetic, like the sex trade, crime, or violence. However, their histories are just as important when it comes to understanding the history of this place we currently call Canada as any other women or person. As historians, it is our responsibility to ensure that the histories that we teach are truly representative of the diversity of our past. This includes both women who triumphed, women who endured, and women who transgressed.
So, inspired by my Twitter rant, as well as Kathryn Magee Labelle’s fantastic blog post, Forgotten Figures: Early Canadian Biographies and Course Content,” I’ve decided to start what I hope will become a new series, where I share the stories of ordinary women, well-behaved or not, that I’ve encountered over the years. As a social historian, my favourite part about doing and reading history has always been the little stories that populate the archives and our publications. I just love reading these vignettes, and I know that a lot of other people do as well. And yet these stories are, by and large, unknown to the public. My goal here is three-fold: 1) share the stories of ordinary women who are traditionally left out of historical narratives 2) provide case studies that professors or teachers can incorporate into their course content, and 3) promote the work of Canadian historians of women and gender.
For our first story, I thought that it would be fitting to share one with you that has stayed with me for many years. I can’t remember when I first read Mary Anne Poutanen’s work, but her article, “Bonds of Friendship, Kinship, and Community: Gender, Homelessness, and Mutual Aid in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal” has always been one of my favourites.[1] The fact that it is a social history of women in Montreal has nothing to do with that. 😛 I’ve always been touched and impressed by the care and compassion with which she has written about her historical subjects, and how she emphasizes their humanity even in the face of terrible circumstances. I think that this is why the story of Magdeleine McDonald has stayed with me for long. I only hope that I can do Mary Anne’s work justice in sharing her story with you:
Magdeleine McDonald (baptized Marie-Madeleine) was born in Quebec City in 1795 to soldier and labourer Augustin Poliquin (born out of wedlock right after the Seven Year’s War) and his wife, Marie-Ursule Adam (of St-Vallier). Her parents appear to have married around thirty kilometers downriver at St.-Michel-de-Bellechasse in 1788, before moving to Quebec City. Only three years after McDonald’s birth, her father died. At some point thereafter, her mother married Jean McDonald, and Magdeleine took his last name.[2]
In November 1818, pregnant and twenty-three years-old, Magdeleine McDonald married Germaine Couture, a labourer who apparently also considered himself to be a “navigator” (no clue what that means). The baby would be born in May 1818, and baptized as Madeleine Couture, though she would also be known as “Magdeleine.” According to the Programme de recherché en démographie historique (PRDH), McDonald had at least eight pregnancies. Of these, only Magdeleine Couture appears to have survived to adulthood; PRDH records the birth of two sons (who died in 1824), a daughter who survived 7 months and was never baptized, another daughter that died at eighteen-months, a son who lived until he was three and a half, and two stillbirths. Following the last stillbirth in 1831 and several encounters with the law in Quebec City, McDonald and Couture moved to Montreal.[3] They then disappeared for a time from the census and official records.
The details regarding the next few years are a bit fuzzy, but it appears that life became difficult for the McDonald-Couture family around this time and they may have begun engaging in criminal activity, which is likely why they disappeared from the records. But In 1836, McDonald came to the attention of the Montreal police for engaging in sex work.[4] In late December of that same year, McDonald was found by four watchmen “besotted with drink” and ”dans un état pitoyable et alarmant” (in an alarming and pitiable state) at an inn near Ste. Anne’s Market. Concerned for her wellbeing and safety, particularly given that they were in the middle of a snow storm, they took her back to the Watch House (then, as now, individuals who are intoxicated are at a higher risk of dying of exposure during the winter months). The police register included a recommendation that McDonald be imprisoned for the winter, for her own safety. This doesn’t appear to have happened, since she was again escorted to the Watch House in March, where a watchman recommended that she be “committed to jail as a vagrant.”[5]
And then, sometime in 1838, Germain Couture died. In this same year, Magdeleine Couture, their daughter, was arrested and sent to prison for being “loose idle, and disorderly,” the first of twenty-seven individual jail sentences, of terms between fifteen days and two months, that she served between 1838 and 1842. While Magdeleine Couture was also arrested for assault, battery, and larceny, most of her convictions appear to have been for vagrancy, which was the term most often used by the Montreal courts in this time period for sex work. Her mother appears to have been the one who initiated her, since the records show that they were arrested together on at least four occasions during raids at the brothels where they lived and worked. For her own part, McDonald was arrested twelve times in the same time period for “being a disorderly woman.” [6] And on at least one occasion, she was charged with theft. In 1839, a man named Joseph Dodds accused her of stealing his bank notes and silver watch while he was passed out drunk on a wharf.[7]However, Couture appears to have been a little more ambitious than her mother, since, in 1842, she was sentenced to seven years in Kingston Penitentiary for stealing “two gold rings, two gold earrings, a double-row red necklace, and 5 pounds, 7 shillings, and 6 pence in notes and silver.” [8]
French Canadian Habitants Playing at Cards. St. James Street (Montréal, Québec). 1848. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1989-524-2. Copyright: Expired
Unfortunately, we don’t know what happened to either McDonald or her daughter after this point. As I noted earlier, they both disappeared from official records around 1831, so what we know about them comes from parish registers. Mary Anne Poutanen’s research only went up to 1842, though she speculates that there were further arrests. And despite her amazing research skills, Stephanie Pettigrew was unable to find any information about how or when they died. Like so many other ordinary women, they were lost to history.
So what can we learn from McDonald’s experiences, and those of her daughter? First, McDonald’s experiences help us to understand one of the most fundamental aspects of society: why certain people are considered criminals and transgressors, while others are not. While we like to think of legal codes as stable and universal, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Certain actions that will mark you as a criminal one day may make you a hero in the future (just think about Nelson Mandela or Henry Morgentaler), or vice-versa. What’s more, criminality is more often about who you are rather than what you did, and is usually an attempt by one group of individuals to stay in a position of power or to gain power over others.
Learning about McDonald’s experiences can help us to restore her agency. While it is easy to read a story like this as a tragedy, and it most certainly was, it is also important to also appreciate the resourcefulness of women like Magdeleine McDonald and her daughter, Magdeleine Couture. First, it appears that following the death of the main breadwinner, Germain Couture, the two women were able to support themselves in one of the few ways available to women in this time period. While the records aren’t clear here, it is also possible that they chose to engage in the sex trade as a way to keep their small family together, as was so often the case.[9] But what’s more, many women in early nineteenth-century Montreal, like McDonald and Couture, used kinship, brothels, and prisons as survival strategies. As Poutanen demonstrates, women who lived together, whether or not they were related, benefitted from these relationships. They were able to pool their resources in times of need, share child-raising responsibilities, help protect each other in cases of violence (whether from clients or fellow sex workers), provide emotional support and comfort, and even help each other in their work (legal or not). While it is important not to romanticize these relationships, which were often characterized by competition, jealousy, antagonism, and violence, they were an important survival strategy for women living in poverty. And the same goes for prisons in this period. Many women used prison as shelters and refuges. While not ideal, since prisons in this period were almost always overcrowded, infested, and dirty, women were able to procure some assistance in this way. While blankets and bedding were scarce, women in prison were able to huddle together for warmth, while receiving food and medical treatment. [10] And in a place like Montreal, particularly in the winter, these things often made the difference between life and death.
As I noted earlier, I’m hoping to make this a regular series, so please let me know if you’d like to see more posts like this. Also, if you have a favourite story, whether from your own research or someone else’s, I’d love to include them in this series! As I’ve mentioned on previous occasions, I think that these stories are at the core of what we do as historians, and are crucial when it comes to making history relatable and relevant. Also, please let me know if you can think of a better name for this series.
I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I did! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian History Roundup. See you then!
Notes
[1] I highly recommend reading the article, and her subsequent book, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal.
[2] Mary Anne Poutanen, Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 278.
[3] Beyond Brutal Passions, 278.
[4] Beyond Brutal Passions, 277.
[5] Beyond Brutal Passions, 239.
[6] Beyond Brutal Passions, 277.
[7] Beyond Brutal Passions, 151.
[8] Beyond Brutal Passions, 277.
[9] Beyond Brutal Passions, 153.
[10] Mary Anne Poutanen, “Bonds of Friendship, Kinship, and Community: Gender, Homelessness, and Mutual Aid in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” in Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, sixth edition, eds. Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Adele Perry (Don Mills: Oxford University Press), 82-98.
A great article and very interesting. Thank You.
you say “Magdeleine McDonald married Germaine Couture, a labourer who apparently also considered himself to be a “navigator” (no clue what that means)”
From my own genealogy, I know that – in the UK – a Navigator (or ‘Navvy’) was a labourer who dug canals (or worked on Roads/ railways). They were often Irish immigrants and, despite the important sounding name, the work was meanial hard labour
it makes no difference to your excellent account, but I hope it fills a small gap in your knowledge
Hi Pete! Glad you liked the piece. Thanks for the additional info on the occupation of navigator! I’m still unsure why Couture’s occupation was listed in this way (he considered himself to be). But I guess the answer will remain lost to history!