It has been a few years since I have taught a course on the history of women in nineteenth-century Canada. The last time I did so was in 2016. When I contemplated how I would like to teach the course this time around, I decided to lean heavily into a comparative exploration of the work of academic historians and well-researched works of historical fiction. It’s an approach that I have sometimes used in the past, and I’ve found that it works well in a course that has students coming from a wide variety of disciplines and personal backgrounds. This year, less than 20 per cent of the students in my course are studying history as a major or a minor. Most of the students have taken no previous courses in history. At least a quarter of the students are new to Canada and have limited knowledge of Canada’s history. In this context, finding ways to get students thinking curiously and critically about representations of women’s lives in the past is a special challenge.
My approach involves teaching students about what academic historians of women do: what sorts of questions do we ask, what sorts of sources do we draw upon, and how do we use those sources to tease out information and insights? We talk about the limitations and challenges involved in writing history. We consider subjects for which primary sources are exceptionally difficult to find because they were taboo, or because they were not of interest to those who kept records. Then we look at how authors of historical fiction have tried to bring the past to life, going places where historians who are guided by the historical record alone are more reticent to go.
To demonstrate how the work of historians and works of historical fiction come together in this course, I’ll provide one example here. The works of fiction that I use include films, and I find that they work exceptionally well as ways to draw students in at the beginning of the semester. Together with sections of Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870, I start with Ikwe, and then the first 20 minutes ofMistress Madeleine, the first and second of three films in the National Film Board’s Daughters of the Country series. Van Kirk’s study (1983) was published three years before Ikwe and Mistress Madeleine (both 1986), and the films show strong evidence of Van Kirk’s influence. The films are well-researched, interesting productions that endeavour to tackle a variety of themes associated with Indigenous-European marriages à la façon du pays. Power relations, cross-cultural social dynamics, the place of agency in social history, and the challenging question of emotions are all illustrated with care in these films. They allow us to have conversations about the men as multifaceted characters in these scenarios as well as the women, who tend to be much easier subjects of empathy for students of women’s history. The films provide material for a discussion about word use and language, as we deconstruct the racism displayed by the white characters when talking about Indigenous and Métis people, and as we contemplate the significance of the fact that most of Ikwe is in Anishinaabe, with English subtitles. Talking about these works together also provides us with a starting point for a consideration of the ways in which the writing of women’s history has evolved over the past four decades. One of the conclusions that students tend to draw on this subject is that the book and the films are indications that people were thinking sensitively and insightfully about women in history a fully forty years ago, which in itself can be a useful lesson!
The final assignment in the course is a work of creative writing that is heavily supported by academic research, together with a substantial paper in which the student explains their aims, the methods used, and the research undertaken as they create their work of fiction. My grading of the assignment focuses more on the “production” paper than on the creative product, because there is not much time in the course to help students gain creative-writing skills, and because I would not be the best person to teach those skills anyway. But the assignment tends to be fun, and generally students come away from the experience pleased with their results and endowed with a far greater understanding and appreciation for how works of history are produced.
Note: Students, teachers and professors who wish to better understand how to use film as a primary (or secondary) source may find this site to be a useful resource: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/film/.
Lisa Chilton
History Department
Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture Program
University of Prince Edward Island