The INITIATIVE

Understanding Rose

By Richard L. Belair, Auburn, MA

Presentation made at Assumption College, Colloque - Institut Français, June 6, 1998

This is the second time Claire Quintal has invited me to address this colloquium on a novel that has not yet been published. About ten years ago, she asked me to talk about The Fathers. That talk preceded publication by almost two years. I think she invited me to that colloquium because wanted a novelist's approach to an episode of Franco-American history called La Sentinelle.

Here I am again with another yet to be published novel. This one also touches on La Sentinelle. And, once again, my approach is one of a novelist, not one of a historian.

The novel is called Understanding Rose. I came up with this title only after I had finished writing the book. In the next fifteen minutes or so, I would like to explain how the evolution of that novel was really a process of understanding several things about La Sentinelle, about mysticism, about a shining example of spirituality, and, as is often the case with novelists, an understanding of a few of my personal, unresolved hangups.

First of all, the novel certainly involves an understanding person. Mary-Rose Ferron, also called Little Rose, was extraordinarily understanding of all she suffered. She was understanding of those persons who made her suffer a great deal in the last years of her life. And she is probably, right now, the most understanding of what has happened to her good name since she died. She died in 1936, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, at the age of 33.

She was a stigmatic. Her stigmata were extraordinary in that she had all the marks of the crucifixion. At certain times she bore the marks of flagellation, the crown of thorns, the nail marks in her hands and feet, the pierced side, and even the disfigurement of the Holy Face. At one point in her life, she bore all these marks at one time.

She made every effort to conceal these marks. In fact, one of the few personal gifts she requested for herself with the grace of a beautiful smile that would conceal her great suffering. Theologians found other signs of her mystical characteristics. They detected the phenomenon weight that prevented anyone from moving her while she was in ecstasy. She had the gift of being able to speak different languages. She had the gift of bilocation, and she had the strange ability to give people detailed directions, complete with landmarks, over routes she had never traveled.

As a point of fact, her travels were severely limited because she was bedridden most of her life. She had moved with her family from St. Germain-de-Grantham in Quebec, Canada, to Fall River, Massachusetts. But she was only 3 years old when that happened, and not likely to remember traveling details if she noticed any at all. The family was poor so they traveled little. When she was about 23, the family moved to Woonsocket, Rhode Island. By then, Rose was totally bedridden and extremely sensitive to noise and any jostling. A friend loaned the family a hearse because they couldn't afford an ambulance necessary to move her from one city to the other. In Woonsocket, the family moved four times, but only from street to street in one neighborhood. In each case, her father literally carried Rose from house to house. So she was never able to see much of the world she still seemed to know in great detail.

Her extraordinary suffering became the charismata that attracted people to her. But what most attracted people was her joyous personality despite all her suffering. They were also drawn by her promise to pray with them. Praying with people rather than for people was something she repeatedly insisted on. She claimed no special powers. In fact her greatest dread was to be regarded as someone special or as a saint. The fear of this caused her a great deal of suffering.

Two published books give the details of Little Rose's life. The first one, entitled She Wears a Crown of Thorns, appeared in 1941. It was written by Father Onesime A. Boyer, who specialized in mystical theology and was one of Rose's spiritual directors. In 1988, Jeanne Savard Bonin published A Stigmatist. Both of these books are available in English and French. The French translation of She Wears a Crown of Thorns, called Coronnée d'Epines, by Father Leonard Puech, has recently been released to Jeanne Bonin for reprinting and distribution.

In addition, there are two volumes compiled by Father Jean-Baptiste Palm, S.J.. One is referred to as "the big red book". It contains about 2,600 pages of testimony from people who knew Little Rose personally or have since experienced favors by asking Rose to intercede for them. There are only a few copies of "the big red book", and they are guarded carefully by people who have been working on Little Rose's cause for sainthood.

Another volume by Father Palm focuses mainly on Rose's mother, Delima Mathieu Ferron.

I was also able to get a look at notes taken by Father Emile Leonard, a theologian from Canada who made several trips to study Rose while she was living.

I wrote Understanding Rose to understand why I would write such a book.

Let me explain. When I wrote The Fathers I did quite a bit of research. I read books by Alphege Daigneault and J. Albert Foisy on the Sentinelle. Read Robert Rumily's history of Franco-Americans. I listened to a drawer full of cassettes tapes on Franco-American life in Rhode Island. And I had heard many odds and ends about the Sentinelle affair as I grew up.

Never, in all that research did I come across any reference to Little Rose Ferron.

In 1993, a good three years after The Fathers was published, I read a talk about Rose, given by Jeanne Savard Bonin at one of these colloquiums. I had missed the talk, but it was published by the French Institute in the book on Franco-Americans and Religion: Impact and Influence. Among the many details about Rose's life, Jeanne Bonin tells of a visit by Bishop Hickey to ask Little Rose to pray for him and for the Sentinelists he had excommunicated. The Bishop was so moved by Rose's readiness to do his wishes that he had to ask her to think it over before she made that commitment.

But she consented and she paid the price. She paid in physical suffering because her stigmata became more pronounced and more frequent. She paid in political suffering because she was ­ and still is ­ regarded as a traitor by some for having done anything for that hated bishop.

I didn't know anything about this connection that Rose had to the Sentinelle. The Fathers does not cover what happened to the excommunicated Sentinelists. I ended that novel where I did for dramatic and thematic reasons. I had read that all the excommunicated Sentinelists asked forgiveness and were readmitted to the church. I am told that one of them did not recant. But even if there is one exception, I am still amazed.

I am a Franco-American. I know about that deeply ingrained pride and intractability that often prevents me from admitted I am wrong. To have all those men come and pay the very humiliating price that the Bishop of Providence required of each of them is to me nothing less than a miracle. So when I learned about this Little Rose and her prayers for the bishop and for the excommunicated Franco-Americans, I immediately felt I had come full circle to that miracle. I just had to learn more about this young woman.

Rose presented a problem to me, however. I had avoided this young woman most of my life. And avoiding her wasn't easy to do. She had lived only about fifteen miles north of Central Falls, where I grew up. This Little Rose's name was mentioned at times when I didn't want to hear of saints because they cramped my lifestyle or made me look terrible by comparison.

Once, however, it was I who had mentioned her name, in a class at Assumption Preparatory School. The priest who was my teacher, a formidable man, responded negatively to my reference to her. I don't recall his exact words. But to this impressionable teenager, his response indicated that I should avoid Little Rose Ferron, the little saint from Woonsocket. Which was fine with me.

Perhaps it is due to that priest's reaction that I have difficulty dealing with what I regard as pietistic practices some people develop. I do believe in the intercession of saints. I do believe that to honor them, God grants them special favors to benefit people in this life.

But I have trouble with things like oils dripping from statues or relics of saints, such as their bones or hair or even pieces of their clothing. Sometimes these objects are not things the saints themselves possessed but things that touched the things the saint possessed. To me this echoes Elvis Presley memorabilia. Because some people place much emphasis on carrying or handling these objects, the practice approaches the superstition of carrying a rabbit's foot.

My problem is not with the saint; it's with what people attach to the saint. Sometimes it approaches cult status, very much like a fan club. Some of this sort of thing developed around Rose.

The mindset I had developed as a teenager caused problems about ten years later.

When visiting Marie Coderre, one of my wife's relatives, I saw a small photo of Little Rose hanging on the wall. Marie Coderre caught me looking. She said, "Oh, have you heard of Little Rose?" I responded that I had but with a curtness and rudeness that cut off any further discussion. And Marie Coderre, a very charitable and thoughtful woman, didn't push the subject.

I have since deeply regretted my rudeness to Marie Coderre because she was one of those who helped the Ferrons care for Little Rose, especially in the most dramatic final years of her life. Marie Coderre had passed away by the time, in 1993, that I hungered for more information to write my novel.

My reading about her eventually brought me to one final obstacle that I new absolutely nothing about.

In 1964, almost 30 years after Little Rose had died, the then Bishop of Providence, Bishop Russell J. McVinney, had proclaimed a decree that people should end any efforts to promote Little Rose's cause for sainthood.

Let me explain, as best I can, the background to that decree from Bishop McVinney. After Rose died in 1936, the book, She Wears a Crown of Thorns, by Father Boyer, gave strength to what had already become a cult-like devotion to Rose. People were coming in busloads to a little shrine near where she died. Many people sought her intercession and many gave testimony that their prayers were answered.

Very often when extraordinary phenomena occur and people begin flocking to the site, it is the bishop of that area who is the first to rise in warning and even opposition to what is supposed to be happening. Bishop McVinney's decree explains that investigations were undertaken under his direction. The findings of both investigations (apparently there were two) were predominantly negative. His decree states:

WHEREFORE: with deep regret we conclude that any

further action to promote the cause of Rose Ferron is

not warranted. We urge all who have manifested an

interest in this cause to discontinue their activity and

to pray with us that this pious soul may be permitted

to find her place among the myriad unheralded saints

who enjoy the Beatific Vision in heaven.

I was toying with the idea for a novel.

I had no intention of getting involved in a cause for anyone's sainthood, so I wasn't going to be violating that old decree.

Nevertheless, the bishop's wishes posed an obstacle to me, and I didn't want to add fuel to that fire.

Still, despite the problems I had with the subject, I wanted to find out more about her. I was especially attracted by Rose's relationship with Jesus. It seems to have been sweet, easy, open. Personally, I was particularly touched by the intimate tone of conversations between Rose and what she called "her Jesus".

Father Emile Leonard, a theologian from Montreal, frequently took notes of these conversations while Rose was apparently in ecstasy. He got only one side of the dialogue, but he could fill in what Rose might be referring to. I'd like to read a sampling of these notes, taken from Jeanne Savard Bonin's book (because I had to return the copy that I saw of Father Leonard's actual notes.)

So, Rose the person captivated me very much. Despite all her suffering, she was a very upbeat person. I enjoyed her sense of humor. She loved to tease her younger brother about his dates. And she wanted to know all the details of what he had done while on dates. She could be a matchmaker too. It was she who got Marie Coderre to marry a widower who had come to Rose for help.

As the son of a mill worker and a person very familiar with Franco-American life in the three decker neighborhoods, I felt right at home in her environment.

But I was also drawn by what I considered dramatic moments in her life. As I writer, I need to feel the contact with the character. But I also need to find dramatic moments to make something come alive.

I liked an early dramatic moment when Rose was very young. Her devotion to St. Anthony was apparently excessive, at least of some members of her family. Whenever anyone lost something, Rose would immediately take to praying. One evening, her father complained that he couldn't find his overshoes. Rose immediately prayed to St. Anthony. She left the supper table and went out of the house, across the street and even across some railroad tracks. She returned with the overshoes. Her father had set this up as an attempt to cure her of her St. Anthony routine.

There are many other moments which I considered dramatic. For instance, I could well imagine the high drama of having the bishop of the diocese suddenly come to their humble tenement. This was the family of a poor textile worker at the time. He had been a blacksmith in Canada and Fall River.

There were dramatic conflicts between personalities. Theologians from all over the world descended on this family whenever they came into the vicinity. In their specific area of interest, theologians saw Rose as an interesting case, rather than as a human being. Spiritual directors became attached to her. In human weakness, sometimes they tended to become possessive of this very extraordinary young person.

Throughout all of this, there was Rose's father, Jean-Baptiste Ferron. He never objected to having people wander in and out of his house. I think he was amazingly patient with everyone. But he had his limits. The theologians and spiritual directors especially, tried the goodness of this otherwise very affable man.

A few of them would try to test her authenticity by trying to trick her into vain or prideful comments, for instance. These trials would upset her terribly.

Toward the end of Rose's life, one assistant to the pastor in her parish had been given the responsibility of taking Holy Communion to her daily. This priest, Father Joseph Baril, had his doubts that Rose deserved such special treatment. He seems to have doubted nearly everything about Rose, in fact. He objected to all the visitors Rose was having and tried to get her father to keep the bedroom door closed. Jean-Baptiste Ferron took a issue with that. Father Baril urged Rose to get rid of all the statues she had in her room. Always obedient, she immediately complied and asked her father to move them. He did, until he came to one particularly beloved statue of the Sacred Heart. Then he thundered that he wouldn't move that one.

Father Baril's predecessor, Father Henri Vincent, had on several occasions, attempted to persuade Fr. Baril that Rose was authentic. In a final attempt, Father Vincent set up a series to tests to be done at a hospital in Providence. It is not clear exactly what the tests would cover, but they would probably be psychological and physiological tests to determine whether Rose's ecstasies were simply a case of hysteria or other psychosomatic phenomena. Father Vincent went through considerable trouble to set all this up. One problem, however, was that he never let Rose's father in on all the plans. When Jean-Baptiste Ferron learned of all this, he reacted furiously. He remembered how Rose had been made to suffer years earlier when doctors probed and experimented to determine what she was suffering from at that time. By this time, mystical theologians had cautioned the family against extraordinary medical treatments that might kill Rose.

I found Jean-Baptiste's reaction very understandable.

In fact, the more I read to understand Rose, the more I came like her father, who was also struggling to understand her and what she was about.

He was a man of deep faith. But he was uneducated, and he certainly knew nothing about stigmata, mysticism, or anything else about what seemed to be happening to his daughter.

From the very beginning when Rose began showing mysterious behavior, Jean-Baptiste Ferron quickly found himself caught between the conflicting opinions of experts in their field whom he respected and had to rely on. The doctors naturally thought her illness was physical. But not all doctors agreed on that. Priests thought it might be spiritual. But not all priests agreed on that either.

On the other hand, he was the head of his family, in the good old-fashioned sense. He loved all his children. But, like all parents, he had a particularly tender love for this little one who suffered so much yet never complained.

And he had other parental concerns. For instance, back in the Fall River days, when Rose first began showing signs of a mysterious illness that doctors couldn't quite diagnose, a parish priest, Father Adrien Gauthier cautioned Rose's father to keep this secret. Otherwise he might have trouble marrying off the rest of his daughters.

The more I read about Jean-Baptiste Ferron, the more I could get into the struggle that might have been going on within the man.

Very much like me in all of this, he wasn't rushing to judgment that he had a little saint here, as so many seemed convinced was the case.

On the other hand, he couldn't ignore what he was witnessing, just as I couldn't ignore the more than 2,000 pages of testimony in Father Palm's big red book.

People were coming back to Rose to say they had been cured of illnesses after she had prayed with them. They had found a job. The birth of a child had gone well despite medical concern that things would go badly. He saw these and many other things.

I wrote this novel with Jean-Baptiste Ferron as the main character because I could identify with him. I could connect with him as a man of faith but also a man of a certain skepticism, as a man who respected the clergy but could sometimes have difficulty with their attitude, and as a father who would certainly love his children to be saints but might have problems if they manifested extraordinary or mysterious behavior.

I also suspect‹and hope‹that others might be intrigued enough to want to read Understanding Rose, a story inspired by the life of a person who really existed.

All Contents are Copyright© Richard Belair, 1998

"MY HOMETOWN"

By Ginny Sands, Bangor

I recently moved back to Bangor from my hometown of Waterville, and found myself missing my Franco-American connections, I especially miss the almost daily conversations with my mother (maiden name Albert). Even though my father is of German descent (Pimperal/Sand), I was raised in the heart of my Franco-American mother's family and culture. Though I myself do not speak (Canadian French, it is always a comfort for me to hear my mother's voice in English, with her Canadian French accent and inflections.

Recently I picked up a listing of "News & Events" at Borders' Books & Cafe', and saw that a Franco-American Women's Group meets there bimonthly. I therefore showed up at the June 25th meeting. Upon arrival, I was amazed on how quickly I connected with the group. I knew one of the FAWI members from graduate school. I was additionally surprised to discover that another member was born and raised in Waterville like myself and, in fact, wrote a book about the Franco-American culture of Waterville, To say the least, I quickly asked for membership to the Franco-American Women's Institute, It seemed to be filling a void for me; helping to ease my transition from Waterville to Bangor, I also looked forward to networking via les Voix.

I consider Bangor my second home, as I spent eight years here during gradate school and while teaching at Ellsworth High School. I cultivated a supportive family of friends here. Three years ago I was at a cross-roads in my life and felt a need to reconnect with my hometown - Waterville, I had spent plenty of time investigating my German roots but I guess now it was time to explore my Canadian French roots. Going back, I found,wasn't easy. I had changed, after being exposed to and studying about different cultures, religions, countries, and peoples. I found it a challenge to find a niche for myself in my Franco-American hometown. While there, I was inspired to finish and self-publish a children's book, which helps teach children (and adults) about embracing diversity. I also completed and self-published a vegetarian cookbook (The Embrace Life Cookbook) which contains some awesome whole grain pancake receipes and a vegetarian "tourtiere pie" receipe. With a Franco-American mother as a full time homemaker, creative cook, and immaculate housekeeper, it's no wonder that I majored in Home Economics Education (now called Family & Consumer Science) when I decided to be a teacher, However, with all the nutrition education and research I was exposed to, I just had to transform my mother's Wednesday night pancakes to something with more fiber, and her traditional Christmas tourtiere pie to something more "heart-healthy." By now you're probably thinking, "no wonder she couldn't find a niche in Franco-American Waterville," In any case, I dedicated the cookbook to both of my parents.

My father was equally instrumental in my life path with food. Dad became malnourished as a prisoner of World War II for over three years. He survived mostly on fish heads and white rice in a Japanese prison camp, in the Philippine islands. Because of this, Dad taught me to appreciate food with his never-ending mealtime lectures and blessings. He taught me the value of food, both nutritionally and monetarily. Dad also supported mom's efforts to put three hot meals on the table each day.

In spite of everything, I felt serf-defeated and disappointed when I left Waterville this past May; three years to the month of when I returned to my hometown. It never really came to feel comfortable to me, and I never felt that I found a "niche" for myself, It's hard to put into words, I simply felt different, I've come away feeling that I had nothing to contribute, and that there was no way I could ever fit into the fabric of my hometown Franco-American culture, This is disheartening to me, because there are still people I love very much in Waterville, and there are places in the greater Waterville area that hold special meaning and magic for me,

Still, the Canadian French culture is in me and I take it with me wherever I go, For example, my Family & Consumer Science students at Dexter High School often remind me of how expressive I am with my hands and my voice, We Franco-Americans have a tendency to speak with our hands along with our voice, as well as adding all kinds of inflections to our words and sentence structures, I am often reminded daily of my Canadian French upbringing in so many ways,

Perhaps I am coming back to Bangor knowing more of who I am, Nevertheless, it is a comfort to know that there are other Franco-Americans with whom I can connect, along with my family of long-time friends in the Bangor area. THANK YOU, FAWI! In gratitude, I have included a pancake recipe from my Embrace Life Cookbook.

All Contents are Copyright© Ginny Sands, 1998

Buck Wheat Pancakes w/kefir

By Ginny Sands, Bangor

1 "free range' egg

1 cup soy milk

2 Tablespoons canola or safflower oil

1/2 cup whole wheat flour or whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 cup buckwheat flour

1 Tablespoon maple syrup

1 teaspoon non-aluminum baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Topping

Strawberry kifer cultured dairy beverage or strawberry yogurt

Fresh strawberries sliced

Beat egg; then add remaining ingredients, except the kifer and strawberries, and thoroughly blend with a wire whisk until smooth.

Add a bit of canola or safflower oil to a heated griddle or frying pan, and allow to heat.

Pour batter from a ladle or from a small measuring cup, tilting the pan to help make a round, even pancake. Flip pancake over once the top is covered with bubbles, but before the bubbles break. Cook until underside is also golden brown.

Serve pancakes hot, topped with the kefir and strawberry slices. YUM!

All Contents are Copyright© Ginny Sands, 1998

VOICING IDENTITY: THE CASE OF FRANCO-AMERICAN WOMEN IN MAINE

By Kristin M. Langellier, Ph.D., and Eric E. Peterson, Ph.D., Orono

Presented at the International Communication Colloquium, July 30, 1998, Budapest, Hungary (forthcoming).

Maman Langellier once pointed out that the expression ferme ta bouche is the last remnant of the French language surviving in our Franco-American family. According to family rules about permissible speech, "shut your mouth" in French is less punishable than the English "shut up." Such linguistic minutia is mere family trivia, except that it links two seemingly contradictory details about Franco-American women: that they are voiceless when situated in United States, Maine, ethnic, and even Franco-American histories (Brault 1986, Chodos & Hamovitch 1991); and that they are voiced and vociferous in situations such as the panel arranged for Women's History Month at the University of Maine. There members of the Franco-American Women's Institute (FAWI), a community-based organization in Maine, enacted a discussion à cupbette-the pantry talk of Franco-American women-conducted in English with French "body language," advocating their contributions to culture.

Franco-American women in Maine provide an opportunity to explore the relation of voice and identity, of how cultural groups find their voices and get a hearing in conditions not of their own making. We advance three arguments: that Franco Americans are silenced, but that silence functions simultaneously as a strategy of resistance to assimilation; that Franco-American women have significantly contributed to ethnic survival, including ways that resist male dominance; and finally, that white ethnicity cannot be understood apart from issues around religion, sexism, racism, and classism. The case of Franco-American women in Maine complicates questions of voice and ethnic identity in the U.S. and participates in current dialogues on diversity, assimilation, and whiteness studies.

Ferme ta bouche symbolizes the untold and unheard story of Franco-Americans: an ethnic group distinguished by the longest tenure of any European minority in the New World and by minority status in two countries, Canada and the U.S. The French who colonized New France in eastern Canada beginning in 1604 came under British control in the eighteenth century. La Conquête of the French in 1760 was accompanied by le Grand Dérangementin 1763 which expelled Acadian French from Nova Scotia. For economic reasons-depressions, indebtedness, and the decline of farming, lumbering, and trapping -- French Canadians from Quebec migrated to New England, lured especially by rapid growth in the textile industry. Between 1820 and 1920, one million Quebecois-one half of Quebec's population and 10% of Canada's -- crossed the land bridge into the U.S. The first major non-English-speaking immigrant group to the Northeast and the largest continental migration, today their descendants number seven million and account for one quarter to one third of Maine's population.

Franco Americans are unique among white ethnics in retaining minority status for nearly 400 years -- significantly without the mark of racial stigma. Internally cohesive, they have lacked social mobility, in one study ranking lowest of white ethnics with only blacks below them (Secord & Backman 1964, 570). Although they maintain their own businesses and professions, the majority remain working class. For example, with few exceptions, Franco Americans at the University of Maine are classified employees and students rather than administrators or faculty (Langellier 1996). Their status as unmeltable but invisible ethnics is attributable both to internal resistance to assimilation, and to external hostilities.

French ethnic culture was promoted as la survivance, the valiant effort to maintain French Canadian identity even while becoming Franco American, especially through language retention, ethnic organizations, and strict allegiance to the Catholic Church. When French Canada yielded to British control and the French elite fled to France, the Church inflated to fill the vacuum, wielding secular and sacred power. The Church also migrated to the Northeast to guarantee French identity through its hold on education, the system of 200 parochial schools unifying language, faith, and customs. Bilingual parochial schools and churches anchored les petits Canadas, the neighborhoods with French language newspapers and social clubs-structural bases that successfully resisted assimilation. Proximity to French Canada also advanced and maintained ethnic identity, distinguishing French from other white ethnics more distant from their mother countries. In 1980, Hendrickson described the enduring and "quiet presence" of the French in New England.

This quiet presence was noted by others, however, as external hostilities reinforced the internal cohesion of the French. Early conflict in Canada emerged from contrasting cultural norms: French Canadians spoke French, were Catholics, and belonged to an agrarian economic system; the British spoke English, were Protestants, and developed a progressive industrialized society. This conflict persists today in the political movement for a separate French Quebec, particularly after the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s transferred power from the Church to democratic institutions. Ethnic frictions crossed the border into the Northeast. Franco Americans sustained one hundred years of discrimination, including hostility to spoken French, ethic slurs (Frog, Canuck) and dumb Frenchman jokes-class conflict played out in the form of language and religion (Doty 1995). French Americans were pitted against Irish Americans for jobs, and they also fought bitter battles over control of the Catholic Church, with Irish bishops dominating national parishes. Perhaps most tellingly, French Catholics were the target of cross-burnings and rallies by a flourishing Ku Klux Klan in Maine, numbering 150,141 members in 1925. Franco Americans likewise document a persistent lack of political voice. In Maine, for example, there has never been a Franco-American governor, U.S. Senator, or member of Congress. Only in 1995 did the Maine diocese get its first Franco-American bishop. Contemporary academic scholarship continues to ignore and marginalize French Americans. A quick review of the Maine section of any local bookstore yields a plethora of Yankee texts but not a single title about Franco-American culture.

Thus, the silence of Franco Americans should not be taken as simple absence or voicelessness. Rather, silence marks out the conditions and constraints within which speech can occur. Within a culture which emphasizes individuals apart from any group affiliation, as in New England, those aspects which indicate an ethnicity different from the assumed universality of the dominant culture will be dismissed, ignored, ridiculed, or silenced. At the same time, a likely response for dealing with such discrimination is to adopt a strategic silence as a form of cultural preservation instead of other possibilities such as assimilation (self-eradication of difference) or confrontation (imposition of difference regardless of context). Silence, rather than being uniform, suggests differences that are relational and conditional (Peterson 1994).

If the Franco-American voice is muted, Franco-American women's silence is even more layered and profound. Franco-Americans are invisible within "white" culture because they can pass; Franco-American women are muted within the male dominance of Franco-American culture; and Franco-American women also disappear within the umbrella "women of color." Recently Eloise Brière (1998) suggestively applied the term "pedagogy of silence" to Franco American experience. In the next paragraphs we trace the gendered specificity of ferme ta bouche in three historical moments.

The first moment occurred in Canada after La Conquête when the French responded to the dominance of British rule and demographic numbers with la survivance. The burden of ethnic survival was placed squarely on women: "the guardians of all that made for French Canadian cultural superiority in North American, they held the key to the survival of religion, morality, education, and the family. If they stopped behaving in the prescribed manner, if they ceased to embody all the ideal characteristics not only of French Canadians but of humanity itself, they would bring down the social order in ruins around their heads" (qtd. in Bouliane 1995, 10). As policy, la survivance prescribed two roles for women: nuns, perceived to be asexual, to teach in schools; and fecund mothers to people the province. As the primordial role for women, motherhood and large families-more than ten children was not unusual-were exalted and eulogized. The myth of motherhood was enforced through Catholic Church hegemony and a variety of pronatal policies. A spectacularly successful enterprise, the population doubled every two decades from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century (Chodos & Hamovitch 1991, 14), becoming known after the Conquest as "the revenge of the cradles." At the same time that women were empowered with cultural survival, their role demanded intellectual docility, physical passivity, and self-sacrifice. Many Franco-American women stoically embraced their "heroic fecundity."

This historical moment crystalizes the Franco-American family as patriarchal. The family is the basic socializing unit situated within the parish as religious and civic community. The hierarchy of control and dominance within the parish community ranked the priest highest, the extended family patriarch second, followed by his married sons, and women and children last. Family hierarchy was modeled on the "earthly trinity," "whereby the father, like God, dominates, controls, and protects the family interests, while the mother's role like that of the Virgin Mary, is to be compassionate to the family while remaining subordinate and submissive to the father. Her specific role is to provide moral support for the family. The religious aura encompassing and binding the family together through the use of daily ritual is analogous to the binding effect of the 'Holy Spirit'" (French 1981, 336).

For Franco Americans, family, kinship, and religious community supercede individual interests, especially for women. Family and religion are also more important than civic government, providing a further clue to the voicelessness of Franco Americans in general and Franco-American women in particular. In their study of voice and equality in American democracy, Verba et al. (1995) find that religion has a strong institutional effect on political participation. Catholics are less active and less likely to practice civic skills in their churches than are Protestants. The greater opportunities for skill development among Protestants emerge because their congregations are smaller than Catholic parishes, they allow for greater lay participation in the liturgy, and they are organized with authority invested in the congregation itself rather than in church hierarchy. Given the much more restricted roles of women in the Church, they had even less opportunity and access to developing a political voice.

The second moment of Franco-American women's silence focuses on the important economic role they played after migration to the U.S. Recruiters for mill workers often enlisted the whole French Canadian family. As the basic economic unit, the family migrated with the intent to accumulate money quickly, pay off debts, and return to Canada (Roby 1996). French Canadians were considered ideal workers. "The mill workers desired a readily available, docile, easily controlled, low-salaried work force. . . . The French Canadians met all the ideal prerequisites, while remaining racially invisible." (French 1981, 329). They were skillful, conscientious, and little inclined to strike, the latter because they saw their tenure in U.S. as temporary. Church hegemony also preached obedience to hierarchy, including to employers. Because the family did not hesitate to break the law in their haste to accumulate savings, children twelve years old or younger worked. Due to their large numbers, which in the cotton industry surpassed all other ethnic groups, and to their anti-union sentiments, Franco Americans were characterized as "the Chinese of the Eastern States" (Doty 1995).

A remarkable seventy-eight per cent of Franco-American women worked in the textile mills, including almost all girls over fifteen and many married women, performing the most menial and lower-paying jobs in the textile mills (Roby 1996). Women and girls worked twelve hour days, gave 95% of their earnings to their family, and suffered sexual harassment on the job. But some also found some pleasures in their independence, friendships and solidarity with other women. As Franco Americans increased their tenure in the U.S., they became more militant and participated in union activities. Married workers transgressed the prescriptions of la survivance and defied the clergy's admonitions not to work, not to break their solemn contract as wife, mother, and housekeeper, not to violate the "natural law" of motherhood, except in most extreme need, because "violation of this law would ruin domestic life and ultimately undermine the foundations of society" (quoted in Roby 1996, 562). Women were again held responsible for ethnic survival and the tensions which shook the Franco-American family at the beginning of the century.

Becoming Franco American threatened the French Canadian soul; and la survivance was far from a seamless success. DeRoche (1996, 45) argues that as Franco-American historiographers concentrated on the formal institutions and organizations of la survivance, they missed working-class French Canadians and most especially women. Franco-American women subscribed intellectually to la survivance, but their lives etched a more complex and ambiguous rendering of ethnicity, marked by their gendered experiences and modified by practical demands. DeRoche's oral history of second-generation working class women in Maine suggests the many ways they challenged images of passivity and silence: by working outside the home through most of their adult life, by participating in informal political practices, and by challenging religious rigidity. In contrast to the formal organizations girding la survivance, Franco-American women engaged in informal female social networks based upon relationship rather than memberships. They maintained their ethnic identity as their lifestyles changed.

The third moment of Franco-American women's voice takes us into contemporary lived culture. In his sociological study of ethnic identity in Lewiston, Maine, Parker (1983) suggestively distinguishes two Franco-American cultures. The "ideal" culture was born of their long-suffering history in Canada and strongly influenced by the Catholic Church, emphasizing stoicism, hard work, religion, and the other world. This ideal was compatible with the goals of la survivance in terms of allegiance to the Church, French language preservation, hierarchical structures of authority, and, as we have seen, the prescription of maternal roles and appropriate behavior for women. The "real" Franco-American culture, however, is performed in the rituals and relationships of les petits Canadas and characterized by expressivity and sociality: talking and laughing and gesturing, singing and dancing and card-playing, eating and drinking. This "real" culture captures the French joie de vivre, features oral activities, and suggests the Franco American kinship more closely resembles folk cultures than western societies. The defining ritual of "real" Franco-American culture is the extended family's Sunday-after-Mass visit to mémère, with its storytelling, music, and meal (Dufresne 1996, Robbins et al. 1995).

Parker stresses the convivial, intimate, and egalitarian aspects of "real" Franco-American culture, arguing that the hierarchical element of the cultural "ideal" was largely confined to church organization. His examples of egalitarian participation include age and class divisions but notably not gender. We cannot dismiss the male dominance of the "real" culture. However, the notion of a "real" Franco-American culture invests ethnic identity in everyday cultural texts and performances rather than any single differentiating institution such as French language. Then we can listen for women's voices. For example, in the first anthology of Franco American women's writing, I am Franco-American and proud of it/je suis franco-américaine et fière de l'être (Robbins, et al, 1995), Franco-American women speak for themselves, becoming subjects of their own discourse after long silence. Their voices are embedded in the contexts of their daily lives; embodied in multiple forms such as poems, stories, letters, recipes, personal essays and scholarly articles; and emboldened to write in a public forum. This first anthology stitches them to their history, voices their present tensions and contradictions, and generates new possibilities for their futures (Langellier 1996, forthcoming). Rhea Côté Robbins's memoir Wednesday's Child (1997) vividly depicts the particular intricacies of growing up Franco American and female in Maine, for example:

Where I come from is where I want to be. I used to want to come from somewhere else. I pretend myself in some other context. More white. I am a Franco American girl growing up in a French-Canadian neighborhood. Un p'tit Canada. Rumor has it that we give out sex for free. Like candy. We have a reputation of being uninhibited. We have body language, but what we Franco-American girls are saying isn't what the Colby [College] boys and "les Anglais" are hearing. Things get confused (60).

The case of Franco-American women in Maine sketches the complex interactions among ethnicity, religion, gender, and class that contribute to understanding the dimensions of voice and identity. But why has a Franco-American woman's voice emerged here and now? Rather than answer this question in the remaining space, we elaborate its concerns within the context of the "new ethnicities" of the 1970s by turning to Waters's (1995) study of white, middle class, suburban Roman Catholic ethnics-especially Italians, Poles, and Irish. (Notably, in this book-length study, the French receive only three textual mentions, none of them substantive.) The new ethnicity is a symbolic identification with ancestry, a more or less leisure time activity enacted situationally, for example, on St. Patrick's Day or in family celebrations. Invoked at the will of the individual, the new ethnicity is not something that influences one's life unless s/he wants it to. Waters concludes that such ethnicity is an option exercised voluntarily for its pleasures. Significantly, the ethnic option carries no social costs, constrains no individual choices. The ethnic option fulfills the specifically American quest for community and desire for individuality. It is family writ large.

The ethnic option is problematic, however. First, it conceptualizes ethnicity individually rather than in group terms, a personal choice in isolation from a social group, its meanings self- rather than other-defined. This individualism assumes a social context in which all ethnicities-and race and ethnicity-are equal and positive. Second, the new ethnicity is flexible and optional for white Americans but not people of color, whether indigenous Native Americans, Africans imported under slavery, or recent Asian and Latino immigrants, where differences are still marked and material. As Waters explains, "if your own ethnicity is a voluntaristic personal matter, it is sometimes difficult to understand that race or ethnicity for others is influenced by social and political components" (164). The new ethnics are sure they were discriminated against, but that was in the past and they survived: we came, we suffered, we conquered (Rubin 1994). Thus, a focus on white ethnicity may both enact racism and prohibit the understanding of race as different from ethnicity. Considering these racist tendencies is of crucial significance in the current debates on diversity in Europe, Australia, and the U.S.

For these reasons we urge caution in making the case for Franco-American women in Maine. The new ethnicity is attractive to the extent that it offers Franco-American women the option to discard the sexism of their traditional ethnic culture that prescribed that they ferme la bouchee. But being a white does not assure dominance, and it is equally important not to conclude that the Franco-American story is the same ethnic story as other white European Americans. That story assumes that all ethnicities are similar and will assimilate and eventually end up successful, that is, socially mobile and middle class. This Franco-American story challenges the new ethnic story in that Franco Americans are strategically unmeltable ethnics embedded in geographically specific, linguistically distinct, historically religious, racially labeled, and highly gendered social relations. Their story especially returns us to class relations-which inflect both race and ethnicity-and which take a variety of forms, including language hostility, religious conflict, ethnic slurs, racial discourse, and sexist practices. If the Franco-American story is not the new ethnic story, or if the new ethnic story is not an accurate model for understanding assimilation, then we are challenged to examine the complexities and complicities of "white" identity in America.

Notes

Bibliography

Bouliane, G. R., 1995, Variations on a theme: The image of the mother in traditional French-Canadian history. In: Robbins, et al., pp. 10-12.

Brault, G. J., 1986, The French-Canadian heritage in New England, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Brière, E., 1998, June, An identity of my own: In search of the elusive Franco American. Lecture at the University of Maine, Orono, ME.

Chodos, R., & Hamovitch, E., 1991, Quebec and the American dream. Between the Lines.

DeRoche, C., 1996, "I learned things today that I never knew before:" Oral history at the kitchen table. Oral History Review, 23/2, pp. 45-61.

Doty, S., 1995, How many Frenchmen does it take to . . .? Thought & Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal, 11/2, pp. 85-104.

Dufresne, J., 1996, Telling stories in mémère's kitchen. In Quintal, C. (ed.), Steeples and Smokestacks: A collection of essays on the Franco-American experience in New England. Worchester, MA: Éditions de l'Institut français, pp. 660-669.

Franco-American Women's Institute (http://members.aol.com/FAWI2000/index.html)

French, L., 1981, The French Canadian American family. In Mindel & Habenstein, pp. 326-349.

Hendrickson, D., 1980, Quiet presence: Dramatic, first-person accounts: The true stories of Franco Americans in New England. Portland, ME: Gannett.

Langellier, K. M., 1996, Responding to ethnicity: Franco-American studies in Maine. In Barthel, H. (ed.), Logon didonai: Gespräch und Verantwortung, Ernst Reinhardt, pp. 93-100.

Langellier, K. M., forthcoming, Franco-American women's voices: Embedded, embodied, and emboldened to write.

Mindel, C. H., & Habenstein, R. W. (eds.), 1981, Ethnic families in America: Patterns and variations, 2nd ed. NY: Elsevier.

Parker, J. H., 1983, Ethnic identity: The case of the French Americans. Univ. Press of America.

Peterson, E. E., 1994, Diversity and Franco-American identity politics. Maine Historical Society Quarterly, 34, pp. 58-67.

Robbins, R. C., 1997, Wednesday's Child. Brunswick: Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Robbins, R. C., Petrie, L. L., Langellier, K. M., and Slott, K. (eds.), 1995, I am Franco-American and proud of it/Je suis franco-américaine et fière de l'être, unpublished manuscript.

Roby, Y., 1996, A portrait of the female Franco-American worker (1865-1930). In Quintal, C. (ed.), Steeples and Smokestacks. Worchester, MA: Éditions de l'Institut français, pp. 544-563.

Rubin, L. B., 1994, Families on the faultline: America's working class speaks about the family, the economy, race, and ethnicity. New York: HarperCollins.

Secord, P., & Blackman, C., 1964, Social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (eds.), 1995, Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Cambridge: Harvard University.

Waters, M. C., 1990, Ethnic options: Choosing identities in America. Berkeley: University of California.

All Contents are Copyright©Kristin M. Langellier and Eric E. Peterson, 1998

Working Hands

By Deborah Ouellette Small, Old Town

As long as I can remember, I thought my mama old. She didn't smell bad like the pepe who sat in the last pew at church. It was her face that gave it away. Around her blueberry eyes she wore tiny worry lines. Every time mama would come close to me, I would play in her face. It became my secret adventure. Soon she turned into an object, like a worn out road map, both tired and frayed around the edges.

As long as I can remember, my mama's hands would always bleed and crack. Especially when hanging wash effortlessly outside in the dead of winter. For sure, mama's working hands were not like the ones attached to the ladies I used to cut out from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Theirs were soft, delicate, and shapely formed.

As long as I can remember, my mama had no silver boxes with red satin ribbons. Instead, she possed an old rusty ironing board. Behind the bathroom door and under a naked light bulb, she would stand for hours in nonsupportive shoes pressing clothes to perfection. Her playful spirit dampened, like the wet cotton cloth she used to press creases in my brother's church pants.

As long as I can remember, my mama had no time for foolishness. She never wore the exquisite Christmas bathrobe that still hangs in her closet today. It was a gift from papa many decades ago. "My kitchen is a functional kitchen and not a showcase for pretty things." She lamented.

As long as I can remember, mama mastered in the art of family devotion. Like all the saints, she was a true sacrificial giver. As long as I can remember, she gave and gave and gave. As long as I can remember . . . as long as I can remember.

All Contents are Copyright©Deborah Ouellette Small, 1998

The 'History and Mystery' of a Remarkable Frenchwoman

By PETER MONAGHAN

Taken from The Chronicle of Higher Education,June 26, 1998
http://chronicle.com

A biographer reveals much about an 18th-century midwife, but also acknowledges what isn't known

In the three decades before the French Revolution, Angelique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray crisscrossed France teaching the art of midwifery to some 10,000 rural women.

Her mission was to fight the scourge of infant mortality. Every citizen was needed, if only to die for the glory of the nation in what seemed like never-ending wars. Armed with a commission from King Louis XV, she charged onto the turf of village matrons, who despised her for discouraging such age-old birthing practices as having expectant mothers jump up and down to speed delivery. Even so, she revolutionized the teaching of midwives by having them practice on mechanical midriff-to-thigh mannequins, complete with extractable babies.

She was so confident of the value of her work that she presumed to address the king's 30 regional chiefs -- his "intendants" -- as equals. And she pressed for a monetary sign of royal appreciation, so she could carry on her patriotic work and provide for her old age. Eventually, the king granted her a pension comparable to those of battlefield generals.

Among her students were resentful surgeons, who considered being taught by a woman an affront, even an indecency. But the king had directed them to enroll.

All that, at a time when an autonomous woman, let alone a blustering female traveler who began her moving and shaking at the age of 40, was rare indeed.

When Nina Rattner Gelbart, a professor of history and the history of science at Occidental College, learned about all this, she assumed that du Coudray was the subject of extensive study. Not so. Now, after 10 years of research, Ms. Gelbart's The King's Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray (University of California Press) is the first biography, and the first book-length study, of the remarkable Frenchwoman.

The story behind the book begins during Ms. Gelbart's research for Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: "Le Journal des Dames" (California, 1987). She kept coming upon the heroine midwife, who figured in 18th-century collections of "femmes celebres."

Intrigued, she decided to read more about this woman who, already an experienced midwife, began to travel in pursuit of her ambitious goals. But Ms. Gelbart found little, apart from a few passages here and there, on du Coudray. "I wondered if it hadn't been done because it wasn't doable," she says.

That almost turned out to be so. Du Coudray never revealed details of her origins, childhood, or many other facets of her life. "Clearly this biography could not follow the conventional cradle-to-grave pattern," says Ms. Gelbart. But it was important to try to understand the internal du Coudray, she explains, because gender "is quite simply central to an understanding of any woman, even a woman who does not make an issue of it."

The result of Ms. Gelbart's work, writes Londa Schiebinger in The Women's Review of Books, is "a vivid portrait of how one woman maneuvered her way through the world of extreme privilege, poverty, stench, filth and opulence" that was 18th-century France.

To compile the biography, Ms. Gelbart pored over records at dozens of provincial archives in France and at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Helpful archivists directed her to more holdings at academies, agricultural societies, medical schools, local parishes, and philanthropic organizations. In all, she found hundreds of du Coudray letters to and from local officials, intendants, country matrons, and parish priests who recruited girls for her classes.

Still, the professor faced two obstacles. First, while she could piece together a map of du Coudray's travels, it had many gaps. Second, she could turn up nothing at all about du Coudray's inner life. A reference to a cache of personal papers was tantalizing, but Ms. Gelbart's efforts to locate such a find came to naught.

To capture fully this vibrant life would require the skills of a novelist, one scholar suggested. "Well, I thought, Mme du Coudray needs no novelist," Ms. Gelbart writes. "She needs a historian."

Theorists including Roland Barthes and Hayden White, she notes, have asserted the inseparability of fact and fiction. But Ms. Gelbart was not going to make that accommodation so easily. Rather, she settled on the notion of a biography as "history and mystery." She would present her findings as episodic glimpses into the life and career of du Coudray. She decided -- or consoled herself -- that such an approach would illustrate a central conundrum of history: "What happened in between, the connective tissue of reasons and motives, is often unknowable."

To flesh out the facts, Ms. Gelbart summons up the ancien regime. She made several forays into the French countryside, to experience more than the aromas of foliage and fresh bread. She imagines, and recreates from 18th-century reports, what du Coudray must have endured in her travels: dusty roads, crowded with people in wagons or on foot, beset by brigands, wolves, and pestilence.

In one section, Ms. Gelbart peers through the prose of du Coudray's 1769 textbook, Abrege de l'art des accouchements (Summary of the Art of Delivery), to bring to life the work of a midwife. The scholar describes ointments made from melted pork fat, rose water, calves'-foot marrow, or the caul of a newborn goat. She explains bran enemas, monthly bloodlettings, and purgings with manna, rhubarb, cassia, and senna.

All that before getting to the birth itself.

Ms. Gelbart also examines midwives' difficulties in dealing with male practitioners who did nothing to abate rumors that midwives were infanticidal sorcerers. And she recounts village beliefs surrounding childbirth -- the "rituals and rhythms" going back countless generations. These included such methods of detecting pregnancy as slipping a clove of garlic into the vagina at night -- sweet breath in the morning indicated that a fetus was obstructing diffusion of the odor. During pregnancy, if the right breast was firmer than the left, a boy was the forecast.

And during labor, Ms. Gelbart writes, "a dried Rose of Jericho placed in water near her swells and unfolds as it gets wet -- a sort of vegetable vagina. This will, it is hoped, cause the cervix to dilate."

"Blood, gore, and butchery" left many women, especially in rural areas, impaired by "disabling pain, uterine prolapse, private parts hideously mangled," Ms. Gelbart notes. Babies that presented abnormally often died as they were yanked out; they certainly died if extracted by dismembering tools in an attempt to save the mother. Some babies sustained misshapen heads and survived to become that rural commonplace, the village idiot.

That du Coudray confronted those accepted realities made the scholar all the more intent on figuring out just who this woman had been.

"Her journey violated the conventional domestic enclosure of women [and] created for her a special kind of freedom and excitement," Ms. Gelbart writes. "Her road show had all of France for its stage, and she as a ham, a stunning performer, giving a more sustained and spectacular solo display than almost any other female, save royalty, in early modern Europe."

Du Coudray herself complicated the historian's task by mingling fact and fiction to advance her cause. "She was careful to have posterity know her a certain way," Ms. Gelbart says. For example, she fashioned an identity as "Madame" though she never married.

The great protector of infants remained childless, adopting a "niece," Marguerite Coutanceau, to carry on her work. Ms. Gelbart even contacted 300 modern-day Coutanceaus, "in the wild hope," she writes, "that, eight or nine generations later, some distant descendant might still be a keeper of this family flame."

"I eked out everything I possibly could," she says. "I was sorely tempted to reconstruct conversations I knew must have happened, but I kept reining myself in. I was acutely aware of the boundary between genres."

At Occidental, Ms. Gelbart draws on du Coudray in her courses on the history of science to suggest how medical practices are shaped -- by competing interests, for example, such as those met by du Coudray when male "accoucheurs" tried to corner the birthing business.

The famous midwife even offered valuable lessons in pedagogy.

She understood, for example, the challenge of weaning "rustics" from the lore of their mothers and the village matrons. Her obstetrical mannequins proved to be key. Earlier versions, used by medical theoreticians, were miniature affairs, made of glass, wood, or wax. But du Coudray's were life-size and malleable. She upholstered them with flesh-colored linen and leather to mimic human skin and soft organs. The pelvis was made from real bones or from wicker frames. In deluxe models, sponges exuded colored liquids to imitate blood and amniotic fluid.

To remind students of the life-and-death seriousness of their trade, du Coudray even modeled such things as the flattened umbilical cord of a stillborn baby, and the detached head of a late-aborted fetus.

The mannequins allowed her students to engage in relatively realistic hands-on practice. Such "maneuvers," du Coudray wrote, had to be "vividly impressed on their senses."

Her "machine," as she called it, won plaudits in an age that revered marvels of engineering. Her introduction of the "palpable body" constituted "nothing less than a revolution in pedagogy," Ms. Gelbart writes, because it permitted instructors to demonstrate birthing procedures to large groups of students, and favored repetitive practice over theoretical lectures.

The 1769 textbook itself was a pioneering how-to manual, Ms. Gelbart notes. It included 26 costly anatomical engravings that drew attention not just to mothers, but also to babies and deliverers. Visually compelling, Ms. Gelbart writes, were their "fresh, gentle, watercolor-like tones, almost cartoonlike in their simplicity and accessibility." Book and mannequin together worked by speaking both to the champions of enlightenment and to aspiring practitioners who knew nothing of the intellectual and cultural revolution afoot.

Ms. Gelbart's next book will be a study of Charlotte Corday, another extraordinary 18th-century woman. She murdered Jean Paul Marat, the French revolutionary, as he lay in his bathtub. Again, the biographical record is thin, since Corday was, until her crime -- and her beheading, four days later -- an obscure, 24-year-old provincial from Normandy. This time, Ms. Gelbart plans to borrow from art history, studying the many depictions of her subject as well as what Corday considered her patriotic act to save thousands from Marat, a physician who became a revolutionary fanatic.

Ms. Gelbart promises that her next book will arrive more quickly than The King's Midwife did. Of the time it took her to track down du Coudray, she says, "my friends teased me that I was having a very long gestation."

Copyright (c) 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education and PETER MONAGHAN, http://chronicle.com
Date: 06/26/98, Section: Research & Publishing, Page: A16

Edith Starrett Masse's Work Roles: On the Farm and at Home
A Narrative Study of Her Diaries 1942-1945

By Suzette Lalime Davidson, El Cerrito, CA

Introduction

Vassalboro, Maine, at the time of World War II, was a rural farming community located between two larger towns which supported small businesses, paper mills and two small colleges. The area has many bogs and lakes, as well as forested lots and steep hills. Route 32, the road which runs through East Vassalboro, parallel to the mill stream, connects the village to neighboring towns of Windsor to the south, and, by way of the China Lakes region and Route 202, to the state capital of Augusta. To the north is the town of Winslow and then the larger mill and college town of Waterville.

My great-grandmother, Edith Starrett Masse, who lived in Kennebec County, Maine, all of her life, was a teacher in her youth, but, following tradition, she became a full-time housewife after her marriage to mill-owner and carpenter, Louis Z. Masse. Edith kept a diary for many years. The section from January 1942, to December 1945, is a daily record of her activities. In 1942, she was 61 years old and Louis Z. was in semi-retirement. She kept the diary until the death of her husband in 1959. The diary is a chronicle of her tasks and of the variations of her work. It reflects the changes that she, and many other rural New England women, experienced during World War II, most notably, the transformation of the social and economic conditions within her small community.

Edith's position as "housewife" did not prevent her from accomplishing a wide variety of work, which she noted daily. In fact, the main subject of her diary is work: the basis for the home-economy. Although she did not receive wages for her efforts, she made an economic contribution to the family in the same way her female ancestors did; she contributed to the household economy. Edith's role of housewife was far greater than the title would suggest to the contemporary reader. Unlike the woman represented in many portraits of the twentieth-century housewife who remains isolated in her own home, Edith contributed her labor to many households within her family network. She often traveled to her daughters' houses to assist them with their work.

Edith and Louis did not run their own "farm," although they owned a cows and chickens and tended a garden; Louis Z. supported their family as the owner of the town lumber mill and water district. But Edith and Louis Z. assisted their eldest daughter, Malvena Robbins, and her family with their farm and their second daughter, Agnes Plummer, with the renovation of her home.

Edith and Louis Z. usually worked within their traditional set of duties, but often they worked together on specific projects. The family's livelihood depended upon cooperation of all the available relatives, especially during the war years when many of the young men in the family were being drafted or voluntarily leaving the community for duty in the armed services. Running a farm and maintaining a home in rural Maine required sturdiness, thrift and tenacity as well as inventiveness and creativity. Edith retained these characteristics which, combined with her experiences from the Great Depression, prepared her for the many shortages of goods and labor that would come with World War II. She contributed her own labor to the efforts of her daughters in maintaining their farm and homes.

Edith's work-load increased during the war; in addition to assisting her family, she contributed goods and services to voluntary associations. She made clothing for the Red Cross. She donated homemade sewing projects and baked goods to the Friend's Church, to which her daughter Mena belonged. In addition to caring for, and sewing clothes for, Mena's children, Edith's contribution of work and goods to the households of her daughters, Mena and Agnes, allowed them, at times, to embrace less "traditional" roles. When Edith's eldest daughter, Mena Robbins, became more active in the management of the Robbins' farm, Edith stepped in to assist her. Edith assisted with child care and household matters when Mena's husband Maurice worked as a salesman for the Sunshine Biscuit Company, and was away from the farm on a regular basis. Edith also assisted her daughter when Mena's commitments to social organizations took her into the community.

Edith assisted her husband Louis Z. in the renovation their daughter Agnes' home when her husband, John, was drafted. Louis Z. was a carpenter and he supervised the work on the house and did a lot of the work himself, sometimes with Edith's assistance. Agnes traveled throughout the state teaching classes in Home Economics and Nutrition, and Edith's assistance made it possible for Agnes to clean, start a garden, gather and re-finish furniture, and "settle in" to the new home. Edith and Louis Z. were family for Agnes, providing emotional and moral support, as well as practical support, during her husband's absence.

Edith's purpose in keeping the diary was manifold. Often, the entries kept track of her productivity, which fluctuated between the times when she was ill and when she was healthy. She also noted her husband's work as well as any activity in which she was assisted by her relatives. She kept track of the many visits and letters she had from family members and friends, overseas or out of state. Her entries reflected the seasonal changes that occurred, both in her work and in the natural world around her. She recorded relatives' birthdays and anniversaries, and reflected upon the passing years. She noted how old her parents would have been, if they had still been alive at the time of her writing.

It is my intention to explore the variety of Edith's work, the changes which occurred in her work, due to the war, and to examine what she chose to record. My purpose is to reveal the ways in which she actively participated in the creation of her family's home economy, as well as supported her relatives during the transitional years of World War II. Because work was so central in her written account, I would also like to explore what the work meant to her.

All Contents are Copyright©Suzette Lalime Davidson, 1998

Regardless of how it seems sometimes, we are white...

By Christine Theberge Rafal, Ph.D., MA

When I first met many of the FAWI femmes in person, at the "Did She or Didn't She" panel on March 25, 1997, I spoke briefly about growing up ambivalent about my ethnic heritage. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that the ambivalence is about how others construct the meaning of my ethnic heritage, and even their own if it happens to be similar to mine. Right now I want to challenge those Francos who like to compare Francos to Latino/as and to African Americans. I am afraid most of my time working up to that challenge will be spent trying to explain how I have come to believe certain things.

First of all, I, like many New England Francos of Canadian ancestry, grew up in a town where I did not even see a black person until I was twelve. I am not sure at what age I realized I was white, and it certainly didn't mean then what it meant once I left home and went to college.

There were some Anglo Protestants in my hometown, many Irish Catholics, a few Greeks and many of us who called ourselves Franco-American, completely skipping over the Canadian part, where we had been colonized by the English.

My mother somehow communicated that some people might not like us for being French and Catholic, and she worked hard to make sure we could say "th" instead of just "t". In fact, in many ways I learned to feel that being French and Catholic meant being at the bottom of the heap. A typical stereotype was that we were stupid. Sadly enough my father told his share of "How many Frenchmen does it take to screw a lightbulb in..." I vividly remember a cartoon he brought home from his workplace where a man was leaning his head against the canoe he had just built. One tip of the canoe was pointing up, one was turned down. The thought-bubble over the man's head said, "Moudsie!" Who brought this to my father's workplace? How did it make the other French people there feel?

Eventually it was time to go to college. On the recommendation of my father's boss, I applied to Stanford and that's where I went. Early in my freshman year, my new friends were so excited that _US News & World Report_ had ranked Stanford as number 1 in the country. What was I doing there, I wondered. How had I gotten in? Didn't they know?

But Stanford didn't know about "stupid" Francos, and that was both a good thing and a bewildering thing. It was a good thing, because as it turns out I am not stupid, and neither in fact are most of "us".

It was bewildering though to have grown up with something of an inferiority complex, a feeling of being a linguistic minority, and to join a new culture where I was just white. It is probably no coincidence that I made several friends from recognized racial minority groups. But they saw me as white and therefore privileged and complicit in many injustices.

At the time I did not even have a clear grasp of the notion that race and hierarchy are socially constructed. This is not surprising now that I know about the neo-feudalist structure of 18th and 19th century Quebec society and the theocracy of the Catholic Church. But I couldn't figure out that differing assumptions about the way the world worked were contributing to my misunderstandings; I did feel stupid. I also could not always understand the complaints of institutional racism raised by my Asian or African American friends or how I was implicated.

The assumptions made about one because one is white can be astonishing. A beloved and sophisticated African American professor once insisted that of course my parents had read me bedtime stories, after all, he said, I was white, middle class and had made it to Stanford. Feeling crazy for not remembering this, I asked my parents if they had. No, they hadn't.

Similarly, dorm resident fellows once had suggested reading a book which asserted that all Greek philosophy was stolen from the Egyptians. The woman of the couple made me feel stupid with her rhetorical question about didn't I see what difference it would have made for centuries if people had known this. She indicated that since people believed it was Greek philosophy I, being white, could think it belonged to me. I had only recently learned I was white, but I had known all my life I wasn't Greek. She was right; I didn't get the connection. Not only that, I didn't particularly value Greek philosophy. I thought maybe it was interesting because it preserved good chunks of the ancient Greek language, better than say old shopping lists would. But unlike Aristotle or Plato, I didn't think that certain people were "natural" slaves and would be happiest in that capacity. Could she, an African American believe that? In what she saw as my obtuseness, I became in her eyes "part of the problem."

And the truth was, and to a lesser extent probably remains, that I was ignorant of all kinds of racism, institutional and otherwise, because target people of color had been absent in my life experience until then. And because I was not a member of a white group benefiting particularly much from racism.

HOWEVER, there are two important things I have learned, partly through mainly painful college experiences and partly in trying to make better sense of them and of racism in the time since then.

One is that comparative suffering is futile, disrespectful and trivializes each person's or group's suffering. Friends of color have taught me that this is what one is doing when one uses a white ethnic experience as a means to try to understand the experiences of groups of people of color. Think about new "white" immigrant groups throughout history, the different opportunities they have had because of the color of their skin. For a long time slaves were not allowed to learn to read. If we wanted to learn to read, we could go to oppressive Protestant public schools or we could set up our own parochial schools and learn to read at our parents' and our churches' expense. It's not the same.

If immigrants from certain selected countries were willing to pay the price of losing their languages and forgetting many of their cultural preferences, markers, and rituals, they could have all the benefits of being "white." But those are a heavy price and an empty promise. Those of us who paid the price regret it; why should we allow Rush Limbaugh dittoheads to encourage others that they could just integrate if they wanted to?

From what I know of the circular migration of the Quebecois into New England, it started after the Civil War. French Canadians were desperate and would work cheaply and break the Irish mill workers' strike. Isn't it strange the mill owners looked to foreigners and not to newly freed slaves, who had produced much of the cotton that was being woven? Certain groups of white people were exploited in order to avoid hiring people of color, and hey, they might have told our ancestors they had it pretty good compared to the African Americans, so they would accept their place in paternalistic yet dangerous mill conditions.

But the so-called "benefits" of being white are not good for the vast majority of us, probably not even for the very rich. To have more opportunities than those of other ethnic origins is unjust and without justice there cannot long be peace.

It is good to fight for justice. But we can't do it by comparing ourselves and our ethnic group's situation to people of color and their circumstances. We are used as a buffer between those who benefit the most and those who are hurt the worst. We cannot let this continue, and one step towards ending it is to stop co-opting the issues of other minority groups, be they Puerto Ricans, other Latino/as, or African Americans. Instead we must start working to understand their unique circumstances and how we as white people at or near the bottom of this whiteness ladder can stop stepping on people of color and work with them to lay the ladder down.

I am hoping that this will start a discussion beyond what we have in common with other groups under the status quo and lead to ideas for what we can do to eradicate the racism in which we may be unwitting colluders. Two books that have helped me in thinking about this are Fruits of Sorrow by Elizabeth V. Spelman, which was brought to my attention through the Franco Femme discussion, and Uprooting Racism by Paul Kivel. Two other books of interest are Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism by Derman-Sparks and Phillips and Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, edited by Adams, Bell and Griffin.

All Contents are Copyright© Christine Theberge Rafal, Ph.D., 1998

To Be Or Not To Be -- Catholic

By Trudy Chambers Price, Brunswick

I've just met a cousin I didn't know I had. She's the link to my French-Catholic blood that's simmered on the back of the stove all my life. Now, that blood has begun to boil up with memories of memere Sophia St. Germain, born in northern Wallagrass.

As the story goes, memere left the Catholic church because as a small girl she remembers the priest coming to their house of many children asking for money when there wasn't enough to eat! At around 14 and 15 years of age, "Sophie" and one of her sisters, Eupheme "Phoebe," left their home, family, community and church to work as domestics in the small village of Smyrna Mills in southern Aroostook County. They were known as the "Squirrel Sisters" and received mail addressed as such. In geneological research done by my father, he discovered that since the late 1700s, on more than one occasion, following the name St. Germain, there appeared in parenthesis the word "Cureux," which means squirrel in English. The nickname given, probably because of quickness and agility for over 100 years, followed Sophie and Phoebe to their new jobs. The sisters met and married brothers of English descent, leaving behind even their French name, but not their accent or their silent heritage.

Except when Sophie and Phoebe were together, French wasn't spoken in the home where my father and his four siblings grew up. I was always aware that if memere had stayed in her church and followed the rules, my father would have been brought up Catholic, as would I.

My father's railroad work took us to Caribou where we lived in a mixed, but mostly French-Catholic neighborhood. My friends attended the convent school, taught by nuns. I attended the Catholic church as well as my parents' chosen Methodist church. I was enchanted by the mystique and vastness of the Catholic church­­the beautiful statues and stained glass windows, the gestures, music, Latin, the rules. It would be easy to be good if I had to confess my sins to the priest every week, but I couldn't. I envied my friends' catechism classes, their first communions and confirmations (their white, bride-like dresses and veils); their "I HAVE to go to church every week, I CAN'T eat meat on Friday, girls HAVE to wear a hat in church. If I don't, it will be 'such-and-such' a sin." I could never keep them straight the sins­­mortal, cardinal...I abided by the rules in ritual but not in legality. Whenever the subject of religion came up, I said, "I should have been raised Catholic."

My parents were open to my attending the Catholic church and didn't encourage me to join with my Prostestant friends when they as fifth-graders became members of the Methodist church. "Wait," my mother had said, "You may want to join a church with the man you marry." And that's what I did. It was Methodist, not Catholic, even though I had dated Catholic boys, sexy with their chain and medal hanging on their chests, even in bed. Then my best friend married a Catholic and converted. When she became devout the Catholic church tugged at me again. Whenever we were together, we attended mass.

I didn't like the changes in the Catholic ritual over the years, and I started to question the rigid doctrine. I missed the Latin, the smoking incense and clanging of chimes. The huge Holy Rosary Church in Caribou burned and the new one lacked the old mistique. I missed the nuns singing from the back balcony.

Then I decided I would "make" my own first communion at the age of fifty instead of six. That was the beginning of the end. I was with my best friend but I didn't tell her of my plan. After I received my first communion that day in the Catholic church it satisfied a deep need. My friend didn't say anything. I sensed her uneasiness.

The next time we went to mass, we stood for communion. The priest said to the parish, "If you are a member of the Catholic church, you are welcome to communion." I was shocked. I abstained, not wanting to break the rules. When I discussed it with my friend, she supported the priest and took the opportunity to expound upon the importance of the Eucharist within the Catholic church and how one must learn that before one participates (children grasp this at age six?). She said I did the right thing by abstaining. It brought my French-Catholic blood to the boiling point. "Think about what the word communion means!" I said. We parted on a sour note. Three weeks later I received an apologetic phone call.

Now that I had been rejected, I began questioning my need to be "Catholic." My friend was so dedicated to the rules of her religion that she put her body through four C-section births when the doctor advised her to stop at two. And didn't she have to get her first Catholic marriage annulled to marry a Prostestant? My Italian-Catholic sister-in-law was excommunicated after her first divorce. When she married my brother and had a baby, she was frantic to have the child christened (in any church, since the Catholic church wouldn't do it) lest the child die and go to purgatory forever. The Methodist church did it willingly.

Recently I attended a women's retreat Vermont. The retreat center is run by the Sisters of Mercy who are the freest of the unfree within the Catholic church. One last time I attended mass with the other women (not all Catholic). There it was in black and white on the back of the Epistle. The black said that no one shall receive Holy Communion unless one is a member of the Catholic church or has special permission (law #..., code #..., canon #...). Once again I abstained, but the Catholic woman beside me broke her wafer and put a piece in my hand. I put it on my tongue and it was coated with guilt.

After church I had a private session with one of the Sisters of Mercy. She asked, "Do you think God asks for your ID when you take communion? Remember that God did not create the church. Man, and I mean, MAN, made the church. Use your conscience and your heart. It is between you and God."

I now believe memere did me a big favor. As my cousin put it, "That Sophie, she DARED to leave!" TRÈS BRAVE! memere Sophie, TRÈS BRAVE!

All Contents are Copyright© Trudy Chambers Price, 1998

What Effect Does Culture Have On Aging?

By Lanette Landry Petrie, Bradley

Culture is a set of values a group of people hold and the behaviors that stem from those values. Each of us is a composite of a number of cultural factors such as gender, economic situation, religion, rural vs urban, physical capacity, as well as ethnic origin. All of these factors help to shape our image of many things in our lives, including aging. Cultural perceptions of becoming old and being old have much to do with how we think about aging. Sokolonsky tells us in "Images of Aging," that variables such as degree of Family support, gender, or class position might alter the images associated with aging. I want to develop this idea further by focusing on women in general and, in particular, a group of elderly Franco-American nuns I interviewed.

Mythic images of the elderly were used in preindustrial societies to teach about the life cycle of a people. Folktales often included stories of glorified elders with powers for guiding, healing and protection. Old women were sometimes viewed as nurturing matriarchs or feared as evil witches. In many of these societies the role of women changed after their reproductive years and they became the holders of the family stories, held control over daughters-in-law, became peace makers, and were seen assuming greater authority.

In today's societies, "elderly women tend to have life circumstances quite differently from elderly men." (Taeuber, 56) The nation's oldest and fastest growing population today is unmarried women with increased impairment, living alone with economics problems. (Barer, 59) Barer continues to tells us that men have an advantage physically and economically while women have more extensive social networks.

In Cambodia old people are considered very important to their culture. The elderly continue to learn the practice of Buddhism and young people depend on the elders to teach the philosophies to them. (Lao, 52) In Nigeria aged people are not only respected, but well cared for either by their families or by the community as a whole. The elderly are seen as a blessing both to the family and the village and the young make a yearly contribution to their care. (Ugbaja, 63)

Family is the center of life for the Vietnamese. They believe that the old deserve the highest place in the family. Mary Meigs tells us her experience of aging as a lesbian has shown her that old age can free women to live new lives detached from patriarchy. These are only a few of the stories which tell us about the effect of family, gender and class position on the cultural image of aging.

Because of the importance of the Catholic Church in the lives of Franco-Americans, young women were given two choices for their lives - wife/mother or religious nun. Through my interviews with ten Franco-American elderly nuns, I came to believe that choosing the life of a religious provided women with opportunities which were not possible for wives/mothers and may have affected their aging.

Coming from families with as many as fifteen children with six being the fewest, these ten women chose the life of the convent as an alternative, in some cases, to the raising of more babies - their own. For some it was the only chance for an education. Most Franco-American families were not pro-education, particularly for girls. As farmers and mill workers there was little money for anything but the essentials. With their strong faith in God and the Catholic Church, life in the convent offered girls a respected way out. Nine of the sisters I interviewed were over eighty with one in her seventies. Included among them were six teachers, one pharmacist, one librarian, one in social work and one in business affairs. All are presently living in their Motherhouse where they are provided with nursing care, if and when they need it, and productive activities such as helping in the gift shop, playing the organ for Mass, helping in the mailroom, visiting the sick, making crafts to sell in the gift shop, and praying.

One of the general aspects of aging is the loss of meaning in life. These women have aged well in that regard. Some of the reasons may be their philosophy of life which includes the belief in the sanctity of all life. They have always had a purpose for their life. Even the value of prayer and suffering contribute to their acceptance of their position in the life cycle. Their lives have included planned vacations and time for reflection.

Another aspect of aging is the change in socio/economic position. The nuns financial needs have never been a worry. Although they often had little, it was not their worry as for a place to sleep or food to eat. The socio/economic condition for these nuns has never changed.

Loss of physical and mental ability is also seen as an aspect of aging. The sisters loss of physical ability has only changed their duties to incorporate what they were capable of. Health care and dental care have always been available to them. There is a sense of worldly innocence which has provided a level of stresslessness which may contribute to their good mental health.

In looking at the Franco-American culture of aging, four significant aspects arise. For the nuns they are as follows: 1) the loss of home language, French, 2) lack of decision making in the convent contrasted with major decision making in their professions, 3) frequent moving, and 4) loss of family.

1) Entering English language only religious communities meant losing their language for these French speaking women. Some were told not to speak French in their convents because it was perceived that they might be talking about someone behind their backs. In spite of that, several of these sisters still speak French today. Some were missioned to French speaking communities and so continued to speak French with parishioners. For some, their families continued to speak French with them when they visited.

2) As nuns, they took vows of obedience which meant that they would accept whatever they were told to do. Some of these sisters held positions with a lot of authority and made important decisions, but as private women were expected to be submissive, which they were. There are pros and cons to this behavior. Along with decision making often comes responsibility for other peoples lives which can create a lot of stress. One sister was Assistant Director of Mercy Hospital when mandatory retirement at sixty-five went into practice. So at sixty-five she felt compelled to comply with that rule and retired. This meant for her, opening a pharmacy in northern Maine and operating it for another eleven or twelve years. She retired again to parish work for another eight or nine years when it then became necessary for her to have a mastectomy, then by-pass surgery and is now helping in the Motherhouse gift shop and mailroom. Stress as we know can cause many physical illnesses.

3) Sisters were often transferred from one place to another to fill vacant positions in schools and to keep them from becoming too rooted in one place. They were asked to leave their family and friends over and over again. It was necessary for them to continue to make new friends and acquaintances. Some living arrangements were less than friendly. Sometime the local priest gave the sisters a hard time or there were personality clashes within the house. Each sister had little control over her living arrangements.

4) When these sisters left home to enter the convent they literally left home. The convent became their family. The rules were very strict about family involvement, or the lack of , in their lives. Many sisters were not allowed to attend family weddings or funerals or even be alone at home with their parents or siblings. For Franco-Americans this is a major loss. The family is central to the life of the Franco-American people. Not to be able to celebrate and grieve together was extremely difficult. Although they need not worry for their own financial needs, they were often torn by not being able to help their families financially as they saw them struggling. For one sister the decision became critical when her mother died leaving small children to be raised by a sister who was younger than she. Her father operated a bakery and she felt she was needed at home. Through prayer and discernment she remained in the convent but not without a great deal of soul searching.

In looking at the four cultural characteristics for Franco-American women who became wives and mothers, life was hard in its own way. Education was out of the question for them. They went to school until they were probably fourteen then helped at home or got married. Women married early, often to ease the burden at home, to men who needed someone to have their children and to take care of them. There was the need to have large families in order for the children to help work and support the family along with the Catholic Church's strong stand against birth control. There were few convenience and little money. The only medical help was from a town doctor and mid-wives. Many women lost babies at birth or through miscarriages. There were twenty-four losses of children in the families of the ten nuns I interviewed. Medical care was very rare and dental care practically non-existent for most. The economic conditions varied but for the most part, Franco-Americans in Maine were the working poor. They were farmers and mill workers with little education and large families to care for. There was seldom enough to meet present needs let alone plan for retirement. Old age was left to God, along with the whole of life. Life offered many hardships such as accidents and complications from childbirth.. The stress of life took its toll on their health. High blood pressure, diabetes, and heart ailments were typical.

1) French was spoken in early Franco-American homes and continues to this day in some. It provided a real sense of belonging. Most Maine communities had a French church were people could worship in French.

2) Franco-American women had little authority in their lives and had decision making ability only in as far as it concerned the children. In most families the father was the firm head of the household and controlled everything in it making all the "important" decisions. In the area of finance, women had little say over what little money there was. The men earned the living and the women took care of the house and children. Franco-American women were excellent managers with very little material goods. They found ways to feed multitudes of people with nothing and still provided harmony in the home.

3) Franco-American families often moved to find work. The usual pattern was for the man to go ahead and set up housekeeping, often with relatives, and then sent for the family. For

the most part, they stayed in place with their extended families.

4) Franco-American women were surrounded by their extended families which proved to be their greatest help. For these women life revolved around the Church. Most celebrations, deaths, social occasions, even dating took place at the local church.

As Franco-American women aged, they became respected for their ability to survive and were looked up to for their wisdom and faith. Their children, for the most part, took care of them in their old age. Today many live in elderly housing made available by state assistance. They worry about what will happen to them when they are no longer able to care for themselves. Nursing home care is very expensive and becoming more restrictive. Their children work outside the home and aren't able to care for them at home. They have very limited funds to provide for emergency situations. Their lives still depend on their faith in God. For many, they feel their life of usefulness is over and they wait to die. For others who have been able to benefit from a higher standard of living, they have found a freedom from hard work and are enjoying their last years watching their grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up.

In looking at the data, we can see similarities in these two groups of Franco-American women. The French language was very important to both groups of Franco-American women. Neither group of women had decision making abilities where their lives were concerned. Both have a history of moving with a sense of rootedness - the Motherhouse for the sisters and family of origin for the wives/mothers. Both groups of women had a loss of identity as the nuns took saints names and the women who married took their husbands name. Their philosophy of life was and remains the same, "God will provide."

The differences show up mainly in the socio/economic structure. The nuns were held in high esteem, educated, with work positions of prestige. Financially the nuns were provided for with complete access to medical and dental care, all of which was beyond the reach for the wives/mothers.

Each group can learn something from the other. For religious communities to survive with fewer women entering convents, outreach to families will be critical. More involvement and communication with the outside world would bring in needed financial resources. The sisters physical and spiritual needs are met very well but psychological needs remain behind closed doors. More meaningful stimulation could be looked at as this group of aging women have lives of experience to share.

For the community women, "Women's ability to sustain community living in advanced old age would be enhanced by the greater availability of quality home care help." (Barer, 64) A return to the old family values of respect and care of the elderly by young parents would do a lot to assure their own care in old age. Promoting images of productive, useful elderly people would help to bring the generations closer together, to work, play, and pray. Including older people on church boards and civic committees; inviting them into the classroom to share life experiences; as volunteers in hospitals and ecology projects; as coaches for young mothers; etc.

For the most part, many of the needs of the elderly are more social than medical. The elderly generally experience lingering disability rather than disease but the system still treats care of the elderly through traditional means - doctors and hospitals. The three major sectors of social protection are Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and private insurance. There are possible problems facing each system of reimbursement which could be helped by working together.

In conclusion, I believe that culture plays a major role in aging. The lives we were given have much to do with the choices we have. To be born a Franco-American, Catholic, working class, straight woman offered me the same two options as most Franco-American girls - marriage or convent. I considered a life in the convent very seriously, but could not leave my family to do so. I know today that I made the right decision to marry but accepted many of the same limitations as my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother before me. The major change has come in my aging. As a middle-aged woman I have found the freedom to be me. My husband and I have been fortunate enough to have work situations where we moved up in the economic scale and are better able to provide for our retirement, but as with the other women, I lost my language, took my husband's name, and still place my faith in God for the future.

Sources:

Ten Franco-American elderly nuns (Community asked for anonymity)

Barer, Barbara M., Men and Women Aging Differently. . Annual Editions, Aging, Eleventh Edition, Harold Cox. Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, Guilford, CT. 1997

Lao, Ponloeu, Aging in My Culture. Fierce with Reality, Margaret Cruikshank. North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., St. Cloud, MN. 1995

Leonard, Fran, and Loeb, Laura. The Future of Older Women in America. Annual Editions, Aging, Eleventh Edition, Harold Cox. Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, Guilford, CT. 1997

Meigs, Mary. Memory Is As Uncertain as Grace. North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., St. Cloud, MN. 1995

Meyer, Jack. Can We Afford Old Age. . . Annual Editions, Aging, Eleventh Edition, Harold Cox. Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, Guilford, CT. 1997

Sokolovsky, Jay. Images of Aging: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Generations Spring/Summer 1993

Taeuber, Cynthia M. Women in Our Aging Society. . . Annual Editions, Aging, Eleventh Edition, Harold Cox. Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, Guilford, CT. 1997

Ugbaja, Franklin. Aging in Two Cultures. Fierce with Reality. Margaret Cruikshank. North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc., St. Cloud, MN. 1995

All Contents are Copyright©Lanette Landry Petrie, 1998

Daring Feat Is Recalled

By Dick Shaw, Bangor Daily News Staff

Brewer Girl's Daring Feat Is Recalled

Bangor Daily News, Bangor, Maine--circa 1970s

She was Annie Polyot [Pouliotte], a French girl from Pennsylvania, and she surprised just about everyone in August 1900 by taking a dare. A five-dollar bill was offered to anyone who could muster up the bravoure to scale a 126-foot-high iron smokestack at Eastern's plant in South Brewer. Only on man, and no woman or girl, had ever done that.

"On Friday afternoon," the NEWS reported, "in company with some girl friends, she went to the mill and practiced a little at climbing the ladder. It seemed easy to her, and she declared that in the evening, when there would be fewer men around, she would to the top."

News go around, however, and when Annie later came tripping down between the wood piles, dressed in a short bicycle skirt, she was surprised to see a crowd of 100 men and a few women and girls clustered around the chimney.

"Without any ceremony or timidity," the NEWS stated, "she grasped the slander ladder and started for the top of the lofty stack, while the crowd stared in wonder and admiration."

"Without looking back she gained the top, seated herself on the cap of the chimney and swung her legs to and from as tough she were sitting in a hammock. The crowd gaped and wondered if she would fall, and the men cheered loudly.

"As she landed lightly on terra firma, she smiled saucily and held out her hand for the five dollars." Edward Blackman Jr. of Bangor, a son of Annie Polyot, recalled that his mother married shortly after the incident. "She used to go around as a midwife with doctors," Blackman said. He also remembered that Annie could play 20 to 25 bingo cards at a time, while he had his hands full with only five. Annie [Polyot] Blackman died in 1945 and the iron smokestack in South Brewer was demolished many years ago. All Contents are Copyright©Dick Shaw, 1998

¡Bienvendios!

By Bridget T. Robbins, Guilford

¡Bienvendios! Al instituto de mujeres franco-americanas. ¿Porqué el español? Porque el intercambio de las culturas se hace el movimiento contemporaneo del feminismo más fuerte. Necesitamos establicir un entendimiento entre las culturas; la religion, el idioma extranjero y la tradición de los franco-americanos tiene muchas semejanzas a la cultura hispánica. Lo que nos reunimos, el catolicismo, quizá pueda servir como un puente entre las mujeres latinas y franco-americanas. ¿Hay otra manera mejor para celebrar tu propia cultura que explorar y descubrir otra?

All Contents are Copyright©Bridget T. Robbins, 1998

A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER'S FIRST SCHOOL DAY OF SNOW

By Amy Bouchard Morin, Old Town

It's not just the teaching that wears a person out when you teach kindergarten .... especially on the day of the first snowstorm of the year! Maman always dreaded that first snow of the year because she knew what to expect. First thing in the morning in come 25 little boys and girl with 25 pairs of boots all the same size and all one of two colors. (back in the days when maman taught the boys wore black boots and the girls wore red). And, most of them did not have a name marked inside. Then came the hats and mittens, which were also more often than not sans identification. If the children went out for recess, there was the process of bundling them up .. find the boots, hats and mittens that belonged to each child and help them into them. Maman says that no matter how carefully she had them hang their coats and line up the boots, etc under them that there were always several mixups. The children may not be sure which "red" boots were theirs, but they certainly knew which ones were not theirs. Then in from recess they came and the "unbundling" proceeded. Maman would follow her lesson plans until it was time to go home. Then came "bundling up" time again. The morning group went home, Maman tried to choke down her lunch and get a couple minutes rest and at the same time prepare her room for the afternoon group. "Here we go again," she would say as the bell rang and her second group of 25 little ones lined up outside her door. The morning process repeated itself, with Maman telling the children how to hang up their coats and line up their boots (checking as she went to see if the boots had names inside), etc. Again came the recess rush and then the final bundling up to go home.

One year, Maman had her physical scheduled, and that particular day ended up being the first snow day of the year. Maman went in for her appointment and collapsed in the chair in the examining room. Her doctor came in, took one look at her and said, "Agatha, what the h... is the matter with you? You only taught school today, what could possibly have worn you out so?" Let me tell you, my Maman found the energy to tell him exactly what her day of "teaching school" had been like. The good doctor apologized and said that he had never given a thought about what the first day of snow could bring to a kindergarten teacher. All Contents are Copyright© Amy Bouchard Morin, 1998

Some Jewels of Maine: Jewish Maine Pioneers

A Review By Rhea J. Côté Robbins, Brewer

Some Jewels of Maine: Jewish Maine Pioneers, by Celia C. Risen, Dorrance Publishing Co., Inc., 643 Smithfield St., Pittsburgh, PA., 15222, Telephone: 800-788-7654, ISBN#0-8059-4206-8, 178 pp., $14.00/$3.50 S/H.

Some Jewels of Maine: Jewish Maine Pioneers is Celia Risen's second book. Her first book, published in 1988, is entitled Yankee Fiddler: A Man Called Suss. Both books are about the Jewish families who came to settle in Maine. With her recent book, Some Jewels of Maine, Risen focuses in depth on the entire state of Maine and several of the immigrants and their families who came to settle here during the late 1800s, early 1900s and carries the story to modern times. The immigrants came from Russia and Eastern Europe to escape the pogroms, persecution and conscription into the Czar's army.
Risen, now retired from teaching, began her inquiry into the Jewish pioneers who came to Maine after conducting interviews with them and their descendants for the English as a Second Language (ESL) courses she was teaching. The stories sparked her interest so she decided to pursue the families' histories.
Some Jewels of Maine captures the lives of the Jewish pioneers and their struggles of living through the hardship of language, culture, religious barriers in a new, foreign land. What they left behind in the old country were even greater hardships. What they became in the new land was a distinct and unique people who prospered, for the most part, despite the barriers, and because of the barriers. The push to succeed and the hard working diligence of the Jewish people who came to settle in the state are a part of many Maine communities local legend and lore. From the beginning of their arrival, even without knowledge of English or without much capital, these Russian and Eastern European immigrants touched the lives of the people in the state.
"I wanted to show the ESL students what others were able to accomplish even though they came with no money, no skills and no knowledge of English," Risen states. What began as a way to illustrate to her ESL students the influence that these immigrants played, despite the barriers of language, etc., in the formation of the communities they settled in, Risen's book speaks to many of us about the valuable contribution these immigrants made to their culture and the economy of the state.
Interestingly, for me, the interweaving of other cultures with the Jewish immigrants is adeptly illustrated. I can add my own personal testimony, coming from the French Canadian [Franco-American] culture, about the interactions with many of these Jewish immigrants, or their descendants, which was a part of my upbringing. I was told, and it was held up as an example, of the way in which the Jewish people often aided their own to succeed in the world of commerce. The local paper would advertise the "Founder's Day Sale" of the local Jewish clothier. A peddler's wagon was featured in the ad because that was how the business had started. My mother worked for two such clothiers, hired because of her bilingual skills, as many others were also hired to work in the stores because of their bilingual abilities, which represents a prominent feature of the way these Jewish pioneers would learn to do business-in the language of their customers. Later on, as a family, we raised chickens for another Jewish business enterprise. My aunt would tell me stories of the Jewish peddler in No. Maine and what his interaction with the French community there was like. In reading Risen's book, my own life's history was revealed to me through the stories of the many Jewish families that effected the communities to which they came to work and live.
The Jewish pioneers came to Maine because the climate and landscape resembled the ones they had left behind. Immigrant followed immigrant as well. The economy in Maine was one which allowed for immigrants to learn a trade, peddle, apprentice, or become an independent worker. Many who started out as peddlers, prospered to become merchants, factory owners, chicken plant processors, distributors of goods and services as well as community leaders. Risen writes a catalog of accomplishments and achievements for the women and men whose families immigrated to Maine. Because education was a goal for all, both women and men, through the hard working efforts of others before them, were able to attain college education in the second and third generations to become doctors, lawyers, professors and entered other professions as well.
Religion played an important role in their lives. Maintaining kosher homes and Jewish religious observances were a part of their integration in the community. Synagogues were begun when there were enough Jewish families in that town to support it. When faced with anti-Semitism, they responded by creating fraternities, support networks, lending agencies and other organizations to counteract the prejudice they faced. Some communities were more accepting than others. Risen often points out that the Jews and the French often faced the same core of prejudice-that which was directed toward cultures other than "Yankee."
Risen writes in a style of "the pot of living" which is open ended and stirs in details through a cultural language that reflects Jewishness. She expounds on proverb, humor, philosophies of Jewish tradition, candidness of intercultural animosities, shochets, schonorrers, economics defined by histories, poverty, struggles in upward mobility, successes and failures of the families which read as a who's who of many Maine communities. Many will recognize family names such as Sterns, Bernstein, Povich, Berliawsky, Lown, Wolman, Lipman, Goldsmith, Cohen, Cutler, Etscovitz, Levine and many more whose enterprise touched the lives of thousands through the years. Each chapter interviews one family which leads to the next chapter like a string of pearls of influence. Each chapter also focuses on an issue or cause or concern close to the individuals featured. The language and ritual of Jewish living is explained historically for the dislocated immigrants who took up the hard work of recreating the support networks necessary to define a distinct people. In modern terms, taking into consideration the renewed interest in global economics, this book reveals the multicultural and international landscape which has is a legacy of the state. The historic proof of the tradition and ability to do business in the language of one's customers as well as a multicultural focus informing the communities in which these immigrants settled, is a strength to be drawn from in today's market place.
Risen began her connection to Maine in 1955 when she and her husband sent their children to the camps developed in the state for Jewish children, and later they began summering here on a tree farm in central Maine every year from June till September. Her intimate knowledge of the Jewish communities captures the flavors of each and reflects it back to the reader in detail and accuracy. Her book, Some Jewels of Maine: Jewish Maine Pioneers is an important book to add to the libraries, classrooms, curriculums and pleasure reading lists because of the inevitability of how these pioneers have touched our lives. As a reading public, we need to know their stories. As a multicultural, international historic community, we are enriched by our collective history told in this book.

Rhea J. Côté lives in Brewer with her family and is the author of Wednesday's Child, which won the 1997 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Award.

All Contents are Copyright©Rhea J. Côté, 1998

MOTHER LOVE

By Trudy Chambers Price, Brunswick


The new bride's first child,
a boy, is stillborn.

Another comes soon - small, quiet and blue-eyed, 
Be careful, watch out, the mother warns, 
you might get hurt. No bicycle, no scooter, 
you might get run over.
He buries himself in comic books.

Later comes a cheerful, brown-eyed girl. 
Her dark hair reveals her father's French family. 
Don't play with "him," the mother warns, 
he's from down on the French flat. 
Don't play with "her," she's loud, 
No bicycle, no horse 
(but she rides one every chance she gets). 
She cleans the house to please her father, 
then moves away and becomes a Catholic.

Years later in mid-life, a blonde, 
artist child is born.
Stay in the yard, the mother warns, 
so I can see where you are.
Don't mow the lawn, it's too hard work. 
Picking potatoes is too dusty, 
No bicycle, no lipstick, 
She paints silently and cleans the vomit 
and bottles from her brother's car, 
so the mother won't know,

Near the end of her life, 
a nurse asks the mother 
how many children she has had. 
One, she says, but I lost him,
11-26-94

All Contents are Copyright©Trudy Chambers Price, 1998

By Yvonne Mazerolle, Old Town

Untitled

I am pieces dissected 
By the gazer...
I am breasts-
Too Small
Too large 
Too perky 
Too Saggy
Just right.
Who says?

I am legs-
Too short
Too long
Too skinny
Too chunky
Just right.
Who says?

I am ass-
Too wide 
Too flat
Too jiggly
Too bony
Just right.
Who says?

I am round
I am thin
I am short
I am tall
I am buff 
I am soft
I am thought 
I am emotion
I am soul
I am all
I am mine!

All Contents are Copyright© Yvonne Mazerolle, 1998

Poems By Joyce Fairbrother

Pieta

The schizophrenic man at the bus stop 
wipes his nose on his red bandanna,
then ties it around his head,
greasy hair framing his face like a halo.
He will not take my silence for no answer.
He sidles slightly closer
and I withdraw as much as I can
without moving.
I am trying to finish the tress poem
but my eyes are pulled away
from my notebook,
pen stilled, loss immanent.
He chants a relentless litany
of mumbled interrogatives and jibes:

Hail Mary full of grace?

He makes it a question.
For a second, I wonder
how he knew my name was Mary.
When I look up
 to meet his jumbled gaze,
he blows cigarette smoke
into my already aching eyes.
Smiling his beatitude,
he calls me "Mother Mary,"
signing the cross 
with self-mortifying jabs.

There's no sanctuary on the bus.
My cross to bear,
the schizophrenic man sits behind me,
leaning forward to whisper
Hail Marys into my averted ear.
He smells of sweat and Old Spice aftershave.
At the corner of Third and Union,
he tells me he is an archangel
sent by God and traveling incognito
to call me to sit in sorrow
at my crucified son's feet.

Pulling the cord, I rise
to meet him genuflecting.
As I get off the bus,
he begins to tell the bus driver's head
today's installment
of the madonna visions.

July 15, 1998



Seraphim


Cantor enchants,
        sings

   old angel midnight cherry
blossomed wings 
ricochet off 
    tangent walls to slats, 
off the slant shift silk of wings
that whisper down vaulted hallways, 
        down blind alleys underneath;
    find salvation in a lisp,           a slip  
of comfort into transubstantiated things,
penny taken nearer their gospel than thee.   
    Altar visions alter vistas spun
        beyond the stark woven thread, 
brush arcade mysteries,     arcane touch 
        nave to navel and bending, 
rediscover 
sacraments, 
        her covenanted scent,
         wings folded serenely 
                            over his feet.

All Contents are Copyright©Joyce Fairbrother, 1998

As a teenager, I strongly admired my great-grandmother, Elise Landry Bosse, for the true pioneer she was. 'Grandmaman' was born at St. Andre de Kamouraska, Que., on April 30, 1867. On September 19, 1886, she married Louis Bosse from St. Arsene de Temiscouata, Que. They arrived in Lewiston, Me. about two years later and were the first to develop 'le petit Canada'. Louis built several large apartment buildings on River and Oxford streets in order to generate income and eventually help lodge his large family; as they married and established families of their own. There were 14 children, 11 that survived infancy. Six sons and five daughters, most of whom married and had large families also. The exception was my own 'Memere' Amanda, who was widowed very young and was left with three children, which included my Mother. But, that's another story.

It was so intriguing to watch 'Grandmaman's' routine. Sometime, I would visit after school, and find her on her hands and knees, with a big brush and pail of water, scrubbing her kitchen floor. She made the lye soap with grease