The Untold Story essays

The Untold Story essays Womens Studies September 21st The Untold Story: An In-class Critique It is truly mind boggling how one could spend twenty years in a province and have no true concept of the struggle those before her went through so that she can sit in her big, spacious, nicely decorated room with my laptop and write about them. What it must have been like to be a woman at that time. To be considered the property of someone. To work endlessly next to men building a community and receive nothing while the men were paid in alcohol and drank in heated taverns while the women sat at home with no heat and freezing, starving children. Or to put in endless hours of fund raising to rebuild a community destroyed by fire only to have no say on where the money was spent. When Jessie O and Emma Peters led the first march to the House of Assembly in 1891, I wonder if they realized their fight would take thirty-four years and continue into another generation. I realize that men are often stubborn but thirty-four years seems a little extreme. I found it very ironic and interesting that while all this was going on a Queen was ruling Britain and the colonies. A women was trusted enough to rule but not to vote. Hmmm... Try as the first suffragists did the wave of the movement ended when Jessie O moved to Montreal with her husband. It would be nearly a decade before the movement caught the current again. The early 1900s brought about the second wave of the movement. I never thought of how much harder it was for Newfoundland women to rally support since, unlike Britain and America they had to get to the women in outports, of which there were many spread over vast land. In this new era women formed their own club to discuss important issues, since while they could attend the mens meeting, they could not talk. They called it the Reading Room and made use of their time by reading about other parts of the world and their st...