ANYONE WHO HAS EVER TRIED TO WRITE knows that the time occasionally comes when you simply have to stop, push aside your self-imposed deadlines, let go of your expectations, and give time its chance to restore your mental energy. To those of you who have mentioned to me in recent weeks that you have been eagerly awaiting my next posting, I thank you for your patience and your understanding that this past month has been one of those times for me.
An important thing I have learned about myself, during the five years since I left my business career and went back to school, is that burnout is my bugbear, overwork always my undoing. You can’t dance with words when you’re exhausted, all you can do is trudge through them—not the state of mind I wanted to be in while writing the next couple of postings on this blog, as I introduce into our conversation the most important yet least acknowledged issue in all the stories people have told about Sarah Farmer: the issue of gender.
This subject was foremost on 
my mind in the autumn of 2009 because I was taking a class on Canadian Social History at Waterloo. Had you asked me about Canadian history a year earlier, I would have told you what I told everyone: I hadn’t taken a class on the subject since Grade 9, and never planned to. Why? Because Canadian history has no Boston Tea Parties; no heroic Civil War to end slavery; no Japanese pilots careening toward Battleship Row with “Toro! Toro! Toro!” ringing in their ears. Canadian history, I would have told you, is boring.
But then, forced to take a required course in Canadian history for my degree, and unable to put it off any longer, I had the good luck to draw an ace by taking that dreaded first class during the winter term in 2008, when a new professor at Waterloo, Dr. Julia Roberts, had just begun to teach it. In fact, I took two classes with her that term, and after just a few hours my misgivings about Canadian history evaporated.
Dr. Julia Roberts is a Canadian social historian, who earned her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2000 by debunking the myths that the advocates of temperance—the Late Victorian movement to ban alcohol—had used to describe Canadian colonial society. In her recent book, In Mixed Company, she argues that colonial taverns—the pre-industrial, public drinking houses that catalyzed life in Upper Canada—were not the white, exclusively male preserves of drunkenness and violence that we have been led to believe. Through incisive reading of tavern account books, newspaper editorials and diary testimony she shows how racial, class and gender identities shaped colonial public space in complicated and inconsistent ways.
Racialized identities defined public perception in colonial Canada, she says, but Natives could elude the racial barriers that normally prevented them from interacting politically, economically and socially with privileged whites, by accommodating to the Anglo-American social norms that governed tavern spaces. The way racial structures were both relaxed and enforced there made life unpredictable for black people, who visited the taverns but could never be sure if they would be welcomed in mixed company or subjected to violence. It’s true that women participated in public according to terms set down by men. But because women often ran the taverns, she explains, public life there was often indistinguishable from domestic life, it depended on women’s household work, and these places contained mixed, semi-private zones, where “virtues associated with women could be used to breach public space.”
As I listened to Dr. Roberts in my classes, and paid attention to the language she used when she spoke of history as telling stories about the past, I finally began to grasp the concrete implications of something that, in my years of studying history, I had only thought about in superficial terms. The thing we call “history” actually bears little resemblance to what did, in fact, take place in the past. In the stories historians write, they tell us far more about themselves—the possibilities they are able to imagine, the mental blocks they have inherited from their upbringing, the social and intellectual conventions of their times—than they do about the past events they are trying to describe.
The implication of this insight for the stories that have been told about Sarah Farmer came home to me with a thud. Julia was one of the first people whose advice I sought about this new writing opportunity, and I sat down to talk with her about it in the history department at the university about two weeks after that now infamous dinner at Biff’s Bistro. Her office sits on the ground floor of Hagey Hall, a mammoth of a building made from about half-a-million hard brown bricks in 1969. If you were a giant on a rampage through Kitchener-Waterloo, you wouldn’t want to stub your toe on Hagey Hall. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s not quite as ugly as the Math and Computer building, a poured concrete eyesore that sticks up in the middle of UW’s campus like an ashen thumb out of a gigantic apple pie.
She listened while I told her much of what I have told you in this blog about my conversation with Douglas that evening in Toronto. Then I began to explain who Sarah Farmer was. Founder of Green Acre. First child to grow up under electric light. Daughter of Moses Farmer, the famous electrical inventor, who had assisted him with his work and from whom she acquired her ingenuity. Another great influence in her life had been her uncle, Charles Carleton Coffin, the famous Civil War correspondent, the first northerner to set foot in Richmond, Virginia, after the Confederate surrender.
“Oh,” Julia said, glancing off to the right while she took in what I had just shared. Then she looked back at me and casually asked a question.
“Did she have a mother?”
It was the kind of “uh-oh” moment that hits you with the sickening realization of your own negligence, that makes you swear that you won’t make the same mistake again, the type of unsettling inner response that one’s most trusted mentors are particularly skilled at eliciting from one’s subconscious. By the time my mind recovered from the blow and summoned syllables to answer with, I was stammering. “Well…yes…she did…,” I began. And then I gave in: “She did, but I don’t know very much about her.”
I determined then and there that I wouldn’t go back to Julia Roberts again without first having learned as much as I could about Sarah Farmer’s mother. But I had read Douglas’s thesis by now, and I still knew only very little about Hannah Shapleigh. Only then did I realize that Sarah Farmer’s life might tell a much bigger story about gender than I had thought. In an instant, writing this biography had become central to my academic career.
Two months later Douglas and I sat facing each other across that coffee table in his living room. As I mentioned in my last post, our conversation that afternoon was not going particularly well. My earlier reasons for wanting to write the book were obviously not very persuasive, and I now understood that they didn’t even seem realistic. I thought to myself: What can I say that WILL interest him? That’s when I raised the gender issue. Here was something that he may have overlooked in his thesis work, and I had already formulated some ideas about why that might have been. I also knew how committed he was to the truth about Sarah Farmer, and felt that he would be open to looking at the familiar subject in a new light.
I was right.
Photo: Douglas Martin’s apartment, on Yonge Street in Toronto.
