Elizabeth Gillan Muir - An Unrecognized Contribution: Women and Their Work in 19th-Century Toronto

Black and white photo: five women in long dresses and hats in front of a building entrance with a sign, Church of England Deaconess & Missionary Training House.

The Metropolitan Methodist Church Bicycle Club. Even some doctors believed that women would be sexually aroused on bicycle seats and urged women to eschew modern dangers. There was also concern about the apparel that women wore to ride bicycles: balloon pants or long pants.

AN UNRECOGNIZED CONTRIBUTION

Women and Their Work in 19th-Century Toronto

Elizabeth Gillan Muir

Copyright Elizabeth Gillan Muir, 2022g

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Publisher: Kwame Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Kathryn Lane | Editor: Susan Fitzgerald Cover and interior designer: Karen Alexiou

Cover image: Anglican Womens Training College Toronto, Church of England Deaconess House, before 1903. From left to right: Mrs. Hillyer Boyd; Fanny Cross, head deaconess; Frances Victoria (Fannie) Clute; and Miss Connell. With permission of Anglican Archives, P7902; background: rawpixel/Freepik.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: An unrecognized contribution: women and their work in 19th-century Toronto / Elizabeth Gillan Muir.

Names: Muir, Elizabeth Gillan, 1934-author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220250790 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220250839 | ISBN 9781459750029 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459750036 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459750043 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: WomenEmploymentOntarioTorontoHistory19th century. |

LCSH: Women employeesOntarioTorontoHistory19th century. | LCSH: Women OntarioTorontoBiography. | LCSH: Women employeesOntarioTorontoBiography. | LCSH: WomenOntarioTorontoHistory19th century. | LCSH: WomenOntario TorontoSocial conditions19th century. | LCSH: WomenOntarioTorontoEconomic conditions19th century. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC HD6100.T6 M85 2022 | DDC 331.4/09713541dc23

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Dundurn Press 1382 Queen Street East

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9

dundurn.com, @dundurnpress

To all women: May you dream big and achieve your dreams.

P arthenogenesis: an uncommon word not likely to be found in pocket-sized or abbreviated dictionaries. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1949) defines it simply as reproduction without sexual union, from the Greek word for virgin parthenos. Websters New Collegiate Dictionary (1949) is somewhat more detailed: Reproduction by the development of an unfertilized egg. Natural parthenogenesis typically involves the development of eggs from virgin females without fertilization by spermatozoa. It occurs chiefly in certain insects, crustaceans, and worms.

While parthenogenesis is connected to females, on reading histories, especially early histories of Toronto, one could be forgiven for wondering if males were suddenly reproducing themselves. Perhaps one should think in terms of virogenesis, a newly invented word from the Latin word for man vir for few histories mention women at all. It takes time, extensive reading, and research to find any women, and then to collect all the references, in order to end up with a reasonably full story.

The following chapters, then, have evolved over time, through searching out nineteenth-century women in Toronto from various early historical works. Not only are women, half the adult population, generally missing, but their writings diaries, poems, novels, and so on have not been considered important enough to be saved to any large degree. One is hard pressed to find many early Canadian womens diaries, although we know they existed, as women traditionally kept diaries.

The commonly accepted thesis is that women [in the 1800s] usually stayed at home. They cleaned the house and cooked and sewed. They didnt often go out to work and many girls didnt go to school. Women worked as servants [or] as governesses. While this brief description of women in the 1800s may be true in a few cases, it tells only a small part of womens story. Research indicates that life for many women in Toronto in the nineteenth century was much more interesting and varied. Some women had incredible careers.

In the following chapters, there is a glimpse of womens lives in the nineteenth century in Toronto.

T here had been cities flourishing in the New World for decades such as Mexico City, New York City, and Quebec City by the time Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim Simcoe (17621850) and her husband, John Graves Simcoe (17521806), the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, arrived at the north shore of Lake Ontario. This was the future site of Toronto, the proposed capital of the province of Upper Canada, but in 1793, the Simcoes saw nothing but trees. True, there were the ruins of a very small French trading post, Fort Rouill, which had been built in 1751 and burned down in 1759. But as the saying went, the trees were so dense that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree from Windsor in the west of the province to Cornwall in the east without once touching the ground.