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Graduate Studies Legacy Theses

2001 "Times are hard": a Saskatchewan farm woman's experience of the Great Depression

Bye, Christine Georgina

Bye, C. G. (2001). "Times are hard": a Saskatchewan farm woman's experience of the Great Depression (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/17025 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/41063 master thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca 'Times are Hard": A Saskatchewan Farm Woman's Fscpenence of the Great -on

Cristine Georgi~Bye

ATHESIS SUBMITIED TO THE FACUZ,TY OF GRADUATE SITJDIES IN PAR" FULRLMENT OF THE REQ- FOR THE DEGREE OF MASER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA SEFIEMBER, 2001

S Cristine Gee* Bye 2001 National Library Bbliitheque nationale 1+1 d,, du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliiraphiques 395 w.ling(on Street 395. rw wewinglor, OlrPwaON KIA ON1 OttawaCM KlAW Canada Canada

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Biblioth-e nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distriibe or sell reprodwe, pr8ter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/fh, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format eIectronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherurise de celle-ci ne doivent Stre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT

This thesis focuses on the key strategies an elderly Saskatchewan farm woman used to sustain herself and her family during the Great Depression. Based on an extensive collection of letters Kate Graves wrote a daughter between 1930 and

1941, the thesis argues that Kate's experience of the Depression revolved mainly around work and the family. Rather than challenge prevalent ideas about men's and women's work and familial roles, she embraced and drew strength from them. Ultimately, this determined matriarch used gendered expectations to construct and reaffirm her identity as a "good" fmn woman. In doing so, she helped to sustain the status quo and to bring a measure of stability to rural Saskatchewan sodety during a time of upheaval.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people helped to make this thesis a reality. First, I would like to thank my supemisor, Dr. David B. Marshall, for believing in me and this -ect from the moment I walked into his office more than three years ago. His scholarly insights, sense of humour and intuitiveness have been a source of strength throughout this process. I am also giateful to the members of my examining committee, h.R Douglas Francis, Dr. Elizabeth Jamesonand Dr. Tamara P. Seiler, for reviewing my thesis and offering helpful suggestions and encouragement. I feel fortunate, in addition, to have received generous financial assistance from the University of Calgary's Department of History, and to have enjoyed abundant intellectual, practical and social support from faculty, staff and my fellow graduate students. For helping me with the research portion of this -ect I thank Saskatchewan kchives Board employees in Saskatoon and Regina, and many people in the communities of McCord, Madcota, Glentworth and Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan. It was a joy to engage with individuals who cared so passionately about history. Audrey Wilson with the McCord and District Museum, Maggie Brown with the Rural Municipality of Mankota, and Deidre Downie with the Rural Municipality of Waverley were particularly generous with their time and advice. Hazel Major, Nellie Spier, Mildred Thomson, Les Win,Paul Bonneau, Tony Kress and many others proved equally helpful and enthusiastic. This would not have been possible without the support of Kate Graves' descendants. Many of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren have helped in countless ways. First and foremast I wish to thank Jean (Griffiths) Checkel, Anne (Griffiths) Rodvan%, and Muriel (Griffiths) Bye for preserving Kate's letters and entrusting them to me. The letters that Kate wrote to their mother, Georgina Edith (Graves)Griffiths, during the Great Depression form the basis of this thesis. I am profoundly grateful for the opportunity to study the life of the woman who was their grandmother and my great-grandmother.I must add that I am deeply indebted to Jean for hnscribing Kate's letters. Her careful and arduous work made my job that much easier. I also appreciate the many hours Enid (Wallace) Kolskog spent recounting her memories of Kate for me, and the hospitality Allen and Murray McGea, and their wives Audrey and Norma, showed me when I conducted research in Saskatchewan, Other family members who have expressed a warm interest in this project and, in some cases have shared their recollections, photographs, diaries and family memorabilia with me, include Gordon Graves, Wes Hatlelid, Sherry (McCrea) Gettle, Stan and Leah McCrea, Jim and Sherry McCrea, Bill Graves, Velma (Anthony) McCrea, and Marilyn McCrea. My good friends have been a tremendous support to me. Thank you to Tania Therien for sending me cheering e-mails, to Dot Foster and Susan Gagliardi for keeping me in their thoughts, and to Kate Logan and DanieUe Kinsey for graciously editing my work and acting as sounding boards at all hours of the day and night. I would also like to thank Jeri Lynne Lorentzon for encouraging me to let my light shine. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my parents, Muriel and Arnold Bye, my sister JoAnne (Bye) Meents, and my children, Gee- and Lawson Beaty. Thank you, all, for supporting my academic goals and for engaging me in stimulating conversations that have helped to clarify my views. Above all, 1 thank Georgjna and Lawson for their unqualified love. DEDICATION

For my children, Georgina Linden Louise Beaty and Lawson Gale Beaty, who have been with me through this and much more TABLE OF CONTENTS .. Approval page ...... -...... JI Abstract ...... m0.. Adcnow1edgements ...... Dedication ...... -vi .. Table of Contents ...... INTRODUCTION The Great Depression Through Kate Graves' Eyes ...... 1 Kate Graves and the Ritual of Letter-wxiting ...... lO CHAFER ONE 'Those Were Great Days": The History of Kate Graves, 1866-1929 ...... -...25 CHAPIERTWO 'Times are Hard": Saskatchewan, the Graves Farm and the Depression, 1929-1941 ...... 49 cxLumRTICREE "I Like to Hoe MyOwn Row": Gendered Work Strategies ...... 71 CHAmElx FOUR "Your Father Says I Cannot Leave,. They Need MeVery Much": Women's Response to Margmbation ...... ,...... 95 CHAFrERFIVE "I Think So Much of Edward" ...... -114 CONCLUSION "A Very Remarkable W~man"...... 141 REFERENCES ...... 150 INTRODUCTION The Great Depression Through Kate Graves8Eyes

She sits at the kitchen table on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1932. A tall, angular wornwith upswept grey hair and a thinly drawn mouth, she is writing a letter to a far-away daughter. She gazes out the window at the maples that border the farm. Most are dying from the drought that has gripped the prairies for three years in a row. Beyond the trees lie the dry bed of the Wood River, a stretch of bleached cropland and the weathered Mousewhere one of her daughters lives. A grasshopper becomes entangled in the sleeve of her house dress. She disengages it and retums to the task at hand.' Between 1930 and 1941, Kate Graves dspatched more than 158 letters from her farm in southwestern Saskatchewan to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths in east-central Alberta.2 Her letters detail her domestic8farm and community labour, her ministrations to sick family members and neighbowsf and her gifts of time' money, food, clothing and energy to relatives and others. They provide us with a rare opportunity to view the Great Depression through the eyes of an elderly farm woman who lived it This thesis focuses on the work and family-related strategies Kate used to endure, arguing that she coped with the Depression in ways that were consistent with her perceptions about work, fdyand gender. Her strategies both constructed and reinforced her identity as the "good" farm woman. The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter one examines the factors that shaped Kate Graves' life and located her in southem Saskatchewan at the start of the 1930s. Chapter two explores the impact of the Depression on Saskatchewan and the Graves' farm Chapter three desaibes the work strategies Kate employed to sustain her family and the farm enterprise. It argues that her essential labour in the house and yard did not translate into inmeased recognition and power because of entrenched ideas about men's and women's pperspheres. Chapter four discusses Kate's and her family's responses to the margidhtion of women's work The fifth chapter describes Kate's efforts to sustain her son's family during the Depression, and what her actions say about the value accorded male and female family members. The thesis concludes with a brief description of Kate Grave's death in 1941, at age seventy-five, when Saskatchewan was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression. It is fitting that we, like the people who attended Kate's funeral, decton the key role she played in her family's life, and the values that sustained her. To date, very little is known about prairie farm women's experiences of the 1930s.J A handful of published nminiscences highlight rural girls and women, and a destitute-but-cheerfd "farm wife" appears in the best-known memoir of the era, JamesGray's DeW&gr Y-4 But, by and large, women like Kate Graves are missing from the story of the Great Depression. Most Depression histories focus on politics, economics, and public policy - not on how individual farm women and their farnilies coped at a grassmots level? Even published photographs of farm women are scarce, outnumbered by images of spee&i@hg political leaders and unempIoyed male migranis and ptesters.6 The few sdtolars who train their gaze on Western Canadian farm women of the 1930s tend to provide general, wideranging analysis that tells us little about rural women's everyday lives.' Wendy Wallace, for instance, generalizes about urban and rural Saskatchewan women's experiences concaning everything from poverty, pydrol@d depression and infant mortality to relief, medical care and government employment policies.8 She paints a grim pidure of women's overall situation, arguing that married and single women were victims of economic circumstances who retreated to the home and abandoned pre-1930s feminist aspirations. A thorough, nuanced examhation of farm women's roles, values' and contributions to families and communities is missing. Other scholars get doser to rural women's lives, but focus on only one aspect' such as feminism or work Often, they cover broad time periods, rather than looking only at the decade of the Depression. In this way, prairie women's specific responses to the exigencies of the 19309 are lost or downplayed. Examples include Veronica Strong-Boags article on feminism on the prairies in the inter-war years, Carolina Van de Vorsfs M.A. thesis on the history of fann women's work in Manitoba from the mid-1800s to the 198Os, and Julie Dorscht's article on the work lives and marital and social relationships of four Saskatchewah farm women from the 1930s on.9 Only Christa Scowby, who analyses the letters htappeared in the "Mainly for Women" pages of the bebetween 1930 and 1939, begins to provide a detailed portrait of ordinary Western Canadian farm women's roles, concerns, and sense of themselves during the Great Depression. Scowby argues that women's identity revolved around their reproductive, productive and community work. Although they focussed mainly on their roles as mothers and wives, rural women redefined the meaning of those roles over the course of the Depression - using the "Mainly for Women'' pages to legitimize and seek greater recognition and appreciation for their work. Where Wallace sees women as victims and their focus on the domestic sphere as evidence of failure, Scowby sees rural women as active agents who both asserted and challenged their traditional roles. To Scowby, these women faced the Depression with a sense of what one "Mainly for Women" contributor called "Divine Discontent"; they made the best of their situation, while refusing to accept it.10 Scows MA. thesis provides an excellent foundation for a deeper, more holistic exploration of nual women's lives. For as Kate Graves' letters indicate, 4 life during the Depression wasn't just about work. It was also about emotionsf relationships and rituals. It was about dealing with circumstances that stretched women and families to the limits of their endurance. It was about finding the physicalf social and emotional resources to carry on Focussing on an individual fa.woman like Graves can contrite to a fuller, more intimate understanding of women' s lives' the Great Depression, and Western Canadian history as a whole. This thesis is grounded in several key assumptions about the value of using ordinary women's narratives to help create rounded pictures of women's lives in the past. I assume, fust of all, that women's experiences are central to the history of the Canadian and American Wests, that their work has helped to sustain their familes and communities, and that their decisions, values and actions have helped shape historical events. Although conventional historians have assigned them minor roles or overlooked them altogether, women's experiences and perspectives are as significant as men's.11 Historians who neglect the majority of the population tell an incomplete and misleading story.12 Simply inserting women into historical accounts is not enough, however. Historians must think about what women did in history and how they perceived their actions. This is my second assumption=That women were active agents in the drama of history. Neither victims nor passive bystanders, they acted in ways that helped shape events." Elizabeth Jamesonsays historians' main task is "to explain history through the eyes of the people who made it, to try to understand why they acted as they did, and how their ads either preserved or changed the way things were."l* Evaluating women's lives from the viewpoint of the players themselves often leads historians to a more positive interpretation of women's past experiences.15 At the same time' I assume that there are knits to women's agency, that events, relationships, and cultural and personal beliefs acted as restraints on their lives. Kate Graves and her family were actors in the drama of the Depression, but they encountered strains from within and without. The weather8agricultural prices, government policies, health problems, persodity conflicts, family and community expectations, her own ideas about the options open to her - all these things impinged on Kate's life. The real question is, given what Kate Graves had to contend with during the Depression, how did she iespond?l6 My fourth basic assumption is that private writings are often the best way to get at women's experiences. Public documents such as newspapers tend to obscure women's stories or to tell them from men's pempedives; censuses and other demographic data tell us the quantities but not the qualities of women's lives; prescriptive literature depicts ideology: how some people thought women ought to behave, rather than how they actually behaved. Women's lettem, diaries and memoirs take us as close as we are likely to get to women's lived experiences. More than that, they offer us a glimpse of the way women thought, felt and perceived their own lives. Rivate writings such as Kate Graves' letters provide us with what Jameson calls a "subjective entry into women's lives."l7 They offer us a sense of the variety and complexity of those lives, and their meaning for those who lived them. The fact that women's lives and writings often centre on the domestic and the "ordylary,," rather than the public and the momentous, is no reason to discount than. History is shaped by private actions and beliefs as much as pubIic developments. As feminist scholars are fond of sayink "The personal is politid"l8 Ordinary women's private writings can educate us in the "richness of daily &."I9 They can help us to follow Western American historian John Mack Faragher's advice to write "history fkom the hide out"20 They also remind us that the rhythms of women's lives may difkr substantially from those of men's lives-21 They may alert us to female cultures - complex webs of social relationships and rituals that parallel and intewith male culw- that other sources hide from view.= I assume, lastly, that women in the past were complex, multidimensional, imperfect beings: "Real people who led real lives."23 Women were defined by a range of factors operating at the same time. It is a mistake to think that their lives and identities can be neatly compartmen~ed.Nor were women stereotypical figures to be pitied or revered. Viewing them as heroines, as some historians would have us do, does not serve them, or anyone, very well. It obscures the fact that people's lives are largely coloured by human emotions, unconscious rituals and thoughts, and a litany of small, daily trials and triumphs. Women themselves did not see their lives as heroic They "just did what had to be done."24 Historians who mythologize women or gloss over their perceived flaws and inconsistencies deprive us of a valuable opportunity to connect with full human beings from the past. It is predsely their humanness Ulat makes historical figures like Kate Graves so compeUing.2s Reading her letters, one cannot help but recognize that Kate was indeed an actor in the story of her life. She Iived in difficult times, she suffered from deprivation, illness and anxiety, and she carried an enormous worlcload. But she responded to these challenges with strength, awareness and stoidsm. This woman did not perceive herself as a victim. Her solid presence shines through in her writing. The overall portrait that emerges is of endurance' familial devotion and emotional conflict. Although generally cheerful' empathetic and capable, Kate occasidy comes a

Kate Graves and the Ritual of Letter-writing

The act of putting fountain pen to paper was extremely important to Kate Graves during the Great Depression. Even though the family had little money for essentials, and stamps were a luxury in many Saskatchewan farm homes, Kate procured enough stationary, pens and postage to keep up a steady correspondence with her daughter GeorgiM at Fleet, Alberta, and other relatives in Quebec, British Columbia, California and the eastern United States. She followed a strict writing regimen, and felt guilty when she strayed from it. On April 19,1933, she wrote: Dear Georgina Edith: I have just discovered I have not written you for over two weeks, as April 3rd is the last I have entered on my list of letters I wrote. I find it is well to jot them down when I write. Then I sort of keep track of the numerous letters 1send. It is not my custom to go over two weeks when writing to any of my family. I hope you forgive me and always remember you are very dear to your Mother. I will always love you.38 For Graves, who was writing a daughter she had not seen for nine years, a letter was an essential sign of caring. If she did not write regularly, she believed Georgina would fed unloved. Perhaps this was because she, hemelf, relied emotionally on her daughter's letters. She expected Georgina to write her often, and when the letters were brief or tardy, Kate was aggrieved. She was proud of her own ability to write long, frequent letters. Commenting on the shortness of Georgids "epistles," she said: 1write such long ones - bet you wonder how I can." Another time she asked, 'Who writes oftener than me?"39 Sometimes, Kate reminded Gee* that she owed her aunt and sisters letters. The unspoken message was that good mothers and daughters were prolific, reliable letter writers. Kate was the communication hub for her family, using letters to maintain family relationships, and she expected her daughters to be the same. We begin to see how the very act of letter-writing was key to Kate's sense of identity. Given her domestic responsibilities and the pressures the Depression created, one wonders how Kate found the time and indination to pen several letters a day. Nothing prevented her from writing. She wrote amid dust storms, family strife, visitors, illness, and preparations for family and community events. She wrote within hours of her daughter Mary's burial, while tending her critically ill husband, and immediately upon learning that her last remaining sibling was dead. Not only did Kate produce numerous letters of several pages each, but she made entries in a diary each night. Clearly, she was driven to write. Several scholarshave argued that women on the American frontier in the latter part of the nineteenth century used letters and diaries to gain a sense of control over Wcult circumstances.40 Perhaps letter-writing was a survival strategy for Kate, helping to order her thoughts and reassert her sense of herself in times of stress. The daily ritual of sitting with pen and paper may have helped make the Great Depression bearable. Kate would not have been the only Saskatchewan farm woman to use letter-writing as a coping medranism in the 1930s. Several women told the in 1937 that writing letters helped cure them of '"a case of the dumps."*l One woman said writing to the West= -Violet McNaughton was "a real safety valve" that helped keep Depression-hit people out of mental hospitals, and another told McNaughton, "I had to write or 'bust."'* Kate's letters are a potpourri of names, news, observationsJopinion, aphorisms and sentiment. The vast majority are filled with everyday details about her domestic work, the men's farm work, the weather, the farnily's health, pricesJmeals, trips to town, church and women's club activities, visits with women friends and close relatives, and news of neighbouft and distant kirt. Kate's Wfiting style is plain and straightforward. and her sentences jump from one subject to another without transition. Her thoughts appear on the page in the order they occur to her. All flow together in one long, multi-page paragraph. Hence, we see passages like this one, from January 1936: We are all invited to Ethel's for dinner an Gordon's 6th birthday, and expect to get to J.D. Hamilton's on the 5th for our W.M.S.social tea. Dorothy has washed and hung some clothes out It is 7 above zero now. Our hens are laying all winter. From 4 to 8 (eggs) a day. The Oxford gmup seem to be getting lots of followers and I think may do some good. One queer thing is they seem to be all of the well-off fok.43 From a family dinner, to a Women's Missionary Service tea, to the laundry, to the weather, to hens, to an international religious movement - Kate writes as if all details and thoughts are of equal importance. Often she speaks as if Georgina is in the same room and she is answering a question or comment put to her, as when she says: "Yes, it is a lot to think sugar is taxed 2 cts. a lb."u English literature professor Elizabeth Hampsten says Wting such as this may appear disjointed to the eye, but it sounds perkctly natural to the ear. It is a "talking voice" that awaits a listener. "A reading voice is able to supply transitions that appear less evident to a silent eye," says Hampsten.45 Kate's letters to Georgina, then, are actual conversations. Interestingly, there is much that Kate omits from these conversations. Reflectiveness, direct emotion and abstract thinking are missing by and large. She writes concretely and at short range, rarely stepping back to consider the general significance of her experiences or her own response to them. She seldom considers events beyond her immediate neighbourhood, and when she does, she relates them to people and activities in her own world. She writes of surface things, rather than content. She says the minister gave a serxxton, but not what the sermon was about or what spiritual chords it struck with her. She says family members visited, but not what they talked about. She says her daughter-in-law picked an argument with her, but not what her daughter-in-law actually said. Rarely does she express intense emotion. She may say she feels "so sorry" someone has died, or that she is "so alone" because her son and husband are away, but she goes no deeper. Neither does she permit herself to express emotions she considers to be negative or unfeminine, such as anger, frustration or disappointment. And she almost never complains, either about her circumstances or other people. "I should be ashamed to say what I have said," she admonishes herself, after mentioning that two neighbow bachelors seldom offer to drive her and her husband Tom to church* Kate adheres to an unspoken "code of loyalty" concemhg her spouse and children, rarely criticizing them overtlyP7 In life she was fond of telling family members to "nwer dirty your own nest," and she attempts to follow the same precept in her letter- writing.48 However, as we will see in subsequent chapters, she sometimes subtly (and not so subtly) derides those who do not live up to her expectations of good women and men In her study of the diaries of Midwestern American pioneer women, Gayle R Davis found that some diarists disclosed their emotions in order to maintain their "mental eqdiium," while most s~upulouslyavoided expressions of feeling for the same reason. The women who Myexpressed their emotions tended to be educated members of the middle class.49 Elizabeth Hampsten, who studied the private writings of sirnilat women at the turn of the century, found that middle class women tended to write more abstractly than working women, and to use more formal, sentimental language. Neither dass described the physical landscape in which the women found themselves.sO Although Kate Graves was educated and literate, her writing generally resembles that of the working women Davis and Hampsten describe. Only when she discusses subjects like motherhood and death does her language shift into sentimental gear. Kate rarely desccih her overall situation during the Great Depression She mentions wind, drortght and insectsf but not their impact on the general landscape. She mentions her family's food and money shortages, but seldom descrii the social, economic and political dimate in her community and beyond. Her focus is inward, on people and activities in the house and yard. She interprets the Depresion in tenns of its impact on her life and that of her family; even when she does mention the big picture, she recasts it to fit her immediate setting. Thus, the environmental impact of the Depmssion is desaibed in terms of dust in the house and the extra cleaning it entails. The global economic depression is seen through the lense of the fdy's farm: 'There is a big scarcity of work all over North America, but chores enough"S1 The social impact of the Depression is discussed in tenns of her son's reduced economic and marital 15 prospects: "I am sorry for Edward. He is young and he works hard and he feels he gets nothing, and he will want to get married."" And discusions of politics take place in the context of her personal economic and family situation. Her musings about the possiity of political revolution are sparked by the realization that she may not see Georgina's children before she dies; comments about the Sodal Credit party (which Georgina evidently favours and Kate does not) revolve around the fact that some people in the community wear shabby coats and Kate has not had a new coat in eight years. Kate does not generalize about her experiences and those of the people around her during the Depression. She observes that some people are physically or mentally ill, and some are alcoholics, but she does not link these problems to the Depression. She acknowledges that her family is on relief, but does not comment on or question the relief situation in general. Rarely does she complain about the Depression. When she does, she does not gripe on her ownbehalf* She speaks collectively, as in, 'We are fed up with bad dust and wind sturms." Or, she uses others as her mouthpiece*"Edward is discouraged out and out," she says of her son. "He would like to move right off."53 She says her niece Maude Flick would like to move, too. "Sick of this having nothing so long.54" Overall, Kate's attitude towards the -on is one of stoicism and guarded hopefulness. "Never get discouraged," she tells Georgina. "Good times will return. I often say I wiJl not live to see them, but others will."55 In many ways her attitude resembles that of the extremely poor but proud, determined and individualistic people who wrote to Prime Minister RB. Bennett seeking help in the early 1930s. It is a spirit of what L.M. Grayson and Michael Bliss have ded "nineteenth century grit."56 Kate's take on the Great Depression contrasts sharply with views expressed by some prairie women at the time. Mrs. Ted East, Alice Butala and Mrs. L.C. Shoebridge all wrote letters to women's editor Violent McNaughton railing against the social and economic plight of people in their area, condemning relief officials and the inadequacy of the relief system. and suggesting political and other remedies.57 "I do hope before the next election the people will ask themselves a few more questions. Where does all the relief money go to?" wrote East in 1938.5s The women made dear connections between the problems people were experiencing and the larger phenomenon of the Depression. Butala said pregnant women were aborting their babies because they were too poor to care for them. And Shoebridge criticized local politidans in her municipality for paying more for medical than other forms of relief. "People are being starved and worried into sickness and nervous mental breakdowns and they pay $1 to feed them and $3 to cure them of the mdts of their feeding (or lack of it)."59 These women wrote far more graphically and emotionally about the Depression than Kate did. Shoebridge said cattle in her area were "walking skeletons,'' and a local famiys situation "twisted my heart more than wer I felt before."sO East talked openly of the negative effect failed crops were having on her husband's disposition and her mamiage. "I do so pray we get a crop this year. I'm sure it will mean the end for us if we don't. The eternal rages are simply sapping my health away."61 And, Buhla said people in her part of southwestern Saskatchewan lived under "the most shocking conditions." 'The stories I could tell! The very stones on this desert would weep for us."62 Why did Kate write diffemntly about the Depression than these women? One explanation is that she was a mother, writing to her daughter and not to a public figure who might put what she said in the newspaper. The women who wrote McNaughton wrote for the express purpose of venting their problems and their views on the Depmssion. Kate wrote to maintain emotional ties with her child. The stoical tone of Kate's letters may also reflect the value that was placed on emotional restraint in the 19305 in ma1Saskatchewan. Newspaper, government and church reports emphasized drought-stricken farmers8bravery and optimism, often praising them for demonstrating the "spirit of the old pioneers." "The farmer, his wife and children are matching their courage and powers of endurance against difficult conditions but they will win out and they deserve to win,"said the author of a 1939 federal government report.63 "The spirit of the Fpleis truly magni£icent,"said a United Church official in 1931. "They say very little - even by way of c0rnplakring."~4 Rural women who spoke openly about problems sometimes met with hostility. Butala was pilloried in her community for a letter she wrote the -descriig the dire poverty in her area, and a "prairie wife" who described farm women's stark lives in a Chatelaine article sparked hundreds of protests from fann women who said they were coping admirably.65 Evidently the "good" prairie wife was ever positive, uncomplaining, and blind to unpleasant reality. The Graves family as a whole placed a premium on stoicism. In times of emotional stress, such as illness or the death of loved ones, family members were expected to "bear up."66 Manbas who faddifficulties without complaint were praised for their courage. For instance, when Kate's son Edward and his wife Dorothy moved to Quebec in 1937, Kate wrote that Dorothy "was brave and went willingy."67 Given all these considerations, it is not surprising that Kate downplayed her emotional reaction to the Depression. The fact that she kept a tight rein on her emotions and focussed so closely on people and activities in her immediate Medoes not diminish the validity of her letters as sources, however. Her writing contains a wealth of information about her values, experiences and feelings. She may not use passionate language to express herself, but the detail and space she devotes to topics like family separation and conflict reveal strong em~tionnonetheless.68 And, her detailed, often repetitive accounts of domestic work and family activities dearly reveal the themes she found significant and wished to stress. Kate Graves could not control what was going on around her during the Depression, but she did have control over what she put in her letters, over how she chose to present her life and herself as a person. It must have been comforting week after week, to reconstruct and redhnheftelf on the page. Her chosen identity was that of the "good woman. Everything she wrote said: "I am a devoted mother and wife. I am caring, selfless, pipious and hardworking. I find meaning in my relationships with others. I do what is expected of women I follow the rules. I do not complain and I do not engage m emotional displays. I bear up." NOTES: INTRODUCIION

1. Kate Graves letter to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, MdZord, Saskatchewan, 16 August 1932 Kate Graves Family Papers. Personal collection of Cristine Bye. Allen McCrea, personal interview, McCord, Saskatchewan, 14 July 2000. AU letters by Kate and other Graves family members originate from McCord, Saskatchewan, unless othhnoted.

2. Kate Graves' family farmed near McCord, Saskatchewan, approximately two hundred kilometres southwest of Regina and forty-five kilometres north of the Canada-United States border. Her fourth eldest daughter, Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, lived on a farm about 450 kilometres away, near Fleet, Alberta.

3. Until recently, historians have paid scant attention to Western Canadian farm women in general. Historian John Herd Thompson has deemed them "truly the last 'neglected majority' in prairie historiography." Most literature that does exist on rural prairie women focuses on the period prior to 1930 and highlights the dfhgemovement and women's organizations. See Thompson's review of Mary Kinneafs -view 70 (March 1989 Agriculture," in hk4. John Schultz (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1990), 107. Also see Royden Loewen, "On the Margin or in the Lead: Canadian Prairie Historiography," -731 (Winter 1999), 27-8,344; Gail Cuthbert Brandt and Naomi Black, "'11 en faut un peu': Farm Women. . and Feminism in Qukand F%anceSince 1545," / Ass- 1 (1990), 74; Patricia Roome, "RememberingTogether. Reclaiming Alberta Women's Past," in ed. Catherine A. Cava~ughand Randi R Wme (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993), 187-8.

4. Myrtle G. Moorhouse, Buffalo VVeG. -(Regina: Banting Publishers, 1973); Gwyneth J. Whilsmith, (Zurich, Ontario: Gwyneth J. Whilsmith, 1987); Lulu Beatrice Wilken, The Wav It Was(Regina: . . Banting Publishers, 1979). JawsH. Gny, a WmrYy (Toronto: Maanillan of Canada, I%), 172-8.

5. Academic and popular histories of the Great Depression tend to be national in scope. See Pierre Betton, G-1939 (Toronto: McC1eHand and Stewart, 1990); Barry Broadfoot, -9-1939-$,- . . (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1973); Michiel Horn, ed., TheDirtY- -(Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing Company, 1972); A.E. Safarian, 311p m thefloronto:McClelland and Stewart, 1970); John Herd Thompson and Allen Sager, -9-1939 of J2&& (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985). The fewworks which focus on the prairies include G.E. Britnell, The -(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939); and Janice Patton, pow aeDem (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).

6. See photographs in Broadfoot, TenGray, pie Ye- - Byfield, (Edmonton: United Western Herd Thompson, -. (ToronW Oxford- Communications, I-); John WsL University Press, 1998).

7. Survey texts that provide insight into the general experiences of Canadian. women and families during the Depression include Cynthia Comacchio, . of Fe flomnto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Veronica Strong-bag, wewnav waivesof wdWw19-1939 (Markham, Ontario: Penguin Books, 1988). One of the few works that looks specifically at Canadian women's lives in the 1930s is Denyse Baillargeon, T)o. Wo- Home trans. Yvonne Klein (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University h,1999). American works on women and the Depression far outnumber Canadian studies. They include Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, ed., wm (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999); Julia Kirk Blackwelder, of 929-1939 (inilege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984); Susan Ware, 19193qS(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).

8. Wendy Eileen Wallace, "All Else Must Wait: Saskatchewan Women and the Great Depression" @LA. Thesis, University of Victoria, 1988). . - 9. Veronica Strong-Boag, rPulling In Double Harness or Hauling a Double Load?" in ed. R Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, 2nd ed. (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1992), 401-23; Caxolina Antoinetta J.A. Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work in Manitoba" (MA. Thesis, University of Manitoba, 1988); Julie Dorscht, "'You Just Did What Had to Be Donee:Life Histories of Four Saskatchewan 'Farmers' Wives,'" in "Other" ed. David De Brou and Aileen Moffatt (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1995), 116-30.

10. Christa I, Scowby, "Pivine Dhntenfi Women, Identity, and the Western Producer" (MA.Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1996). Also see "'IAm A Worker, Not A Drone': Farm Women, Reproductive Work and the Western 1930-1939," Saskatchewan -48:2 (Fa11 1996), 3-15.

11. On the prevalence of heroic male nation-builders and the absence of women in conventional histories of Canada and the Canadian West, see Catherine A. Cavanaugh and Randi R. Warne, #8. (Vancouvec UBC Ress, 2000), 3,12; Veronica Strong-Boag, "Writing About Women," in -ut Modern ed. JohnSchultz (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1990)' 175-6; and Veronica Strong-bag and Anita Uair Fellman, eds., a. Wo- #. 3rd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2 On stereotypical images of women, see Susan Armitage, 'Through Women's Eyes: A New View of the West," in- "ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman and London: Univexsity of Oklahoma Ress, 1987), 9-18; Brandt and Black, "11 en faut un peau,'" 74; Beverly Stoeltje, "A Helpmate for Man Indeed: The Image of the Frontier Woman," of 88:347 (January-March,1975), 27-41; Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, TheGentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West, &view 49 (1980), 176-184; Elizabeth Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West," in- 14564.

12 Cavanaugh and Warne, 10. Also see Paula M. Nelson, "A Reflection on the Study of Women's History," Iourn4lof thc. 23 (Spring/Sutnmer 1996), 10; and Strong Boag and Fellman, 4.

13. David De Brou and Meen Moffatt, eds.,"a BewanWorn (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1995), 45. 14. Elizabeth Jameson, "Washburn, Chickens, and Crazy Quilts: Piecing a Common Past," 632,3 (Spring/Summer 19961, IS.

15. Nelson, "A Reflection on the Study of Women's History," 10.

16. Elizabeth Jamesonapproaches her book with several assumptions appropriate to my shtdy: (1) "People make their own history through daily acts that either preserve or transform existing social relationships and cultural meanings." (2) Wow much people can change their Lives depends on material circumstances, social relationships, and their understandings of their own and possibility." (3) "Everyone psesses multiple and often inseparable so& of *. identity." All -: Class.In Q@&Qg& (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 9-10.

17. Elizabeth Jameson, Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers," 147-8. Also see Strong- Boas Writing About Women," 181; Armitage, "Through Women's Eyes," 13; Ruth Pierson and Alison Prentice, "Feminism and the Writing and Teaching of History," )4 t la n tis 72 (Spring 1982), 42.

18, Eliane Leslau Silverman, utBest West; W- on the Frqpfier 1880-1930 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1984), iv; Piemn and Prentice, "Feminism and the Writing and Teaching of History," 42; Strong-Boa& Writing About Women,". 177; Elspeth Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," in -ve: V@rs om- *. ined. Libby Scheier, Sarah Shdand Eleanor Wachtel (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990), 76.

19. Strong-Boag, "Writing About Women," 175.

20. John Mack Faragher, "History From the Inside Out Writing the History of Women in Rural America," 33:5 (Winter 1981), 543. . . 21. Gerda Lerner, The. . Pasw~ Wov (New York Oxford University Press, 1979), 162-3; Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin, eds., Great flotonto: University of Toronto Press), 9; Franca Iaeovetta and Mariana Valverde, &&r C;Mnids; New floronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992)' I&.

22. Strong-kg, Writing About Women," 181; Bettina Aptheker,

Massachusetts Press, 1989), 12-5. For historiographical discussions on women's culture, see Eliane Leslau Silverman, 'Writing Canadian Women's History, 1970-82 An Historiographical Analysis," @. I 634 (December 1982); Gail Cuthbert Brandt, "Postmodem Patchwork: Some Recent Trends in the Writing of Women's History in Canada," #22:4 1991), 456-8; and Aileen Moffatt, "Great Women, Separate Spheres, and Diversity," 17-25, in Other Vw

23. Armitage, 'Through Women's Eyes," 14.

24. Julie Do& "You Just Did What Had to be Done," in- 116.

25. Strong-Boag, "Writing About Women," 194; Elizabeth Hampsten, Writing Women's History in North Dakota," *@Plains3 (Spring/Summer I%), 5. 26. See Eliane Silverman's observations on how the women she interviewed saw their lives on the Alberta frontier. Last Best WesL "Preface," iv.

27. See William Cronon's discussion on historical narrative, particularly his observations about "progressive" plots and "tragic" or "declensionist" plots, and the radically different ways two historians narrate the story of the American Dust Bowl. Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative," /73:4 (March 1992), 1347-76.

28. Sara Alpern et al-, eds., Lives of Mode= -(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, I*), 3-5. Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," 72-82; Cameron and Dickin, Great Dm3-18; JoanJensen, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 28; Susan Mann Tmfimenkoff, Terninkt Biography," Atlantis 10:2 (Spring 1985),1-9.

29. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, quoted in Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," 76.

30. Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," 76.

31. Cameron and Dickin, Great 6.

32. Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," 78-9.

33. Tmfimenkoff, "Feminist Biography," 4.

34. J.R. MillerI "D'Alton McCarthy, Jr.: A Protestant Irishman Abroad," in poswell's ed. RB. Fleming (Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn Press, 1992), 191; Cameron, "Biography and Feminism," 81.

35. Stephan Oats, quoted in Frances G. Wpenny. "Expectations of Biography," in wsw- Children, 15.

36. See Halpenny's discussion on Donald Creighton's use of pure biography. Ed., 16-20.

37. Carl Degler, "Preface," in JNom- , -- Wesward To- Lillian Schlissel (New York: Schocken Books,1982), 3.

38. Kate Graves letter to GeorginaI 19 April 1933.

39. Ibid., 24 March 1939; 22 July 1932. . 40. Elizabeth Hampsten, wvto Yo0 of ofem ~191Q(Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1982), 92; Gayle R. Davis, "Women's Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason," Wm'sSw 149 (1987), 12

41. GwNof-Wm (Winnipeg), March 1937,44.

4.2. Alice Butala letter to Violet McNaughton, Divide, Saskatchewan, 12 January 1939; Mrs Ted East letter to Violet McNaughton, Or-, Saskatchewan, 8 September. Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon, McNaughton Papers, Files 16,22. 43. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 28 January 1936.

44. Ibid., 19 April 1933.

45. Hampsten, to Yo- 95.

46. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 12 May 1938.

47. Gail Grant, "That Was A Woman's Satisfaction: The Significance of Life History for Woman-Centred Research," Canadian_Oral- -. 11 (1991), 35-7.

48. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 1514 August 1998.

49. Davis, Women's Frontier Diaries," 10-11.

50. Hampsten, Read This to Yo- 2639.

51. Kate Graves letter, 10 March 1932.

52 Ibid., 8 April 1931.

53. Ibid., 11 May 1937.

54. Ibid., 12 August 1937.

55. Ibid., 3 August 1934.

56. L.M. Grayson and Michael Bliss, eds., Wre- of J,ewto &B. p30-193Z (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), xxv.

57. Mrs. Ted East lettels to Violet McNaughton; Alice Butala letters to Violet McNaughton; Mrs. L.C. Shoebridge letters to Violet McNaughton, North Portal, Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon, McNaughton Papers, Files 16, 22. These women corresponded with McNaughton regularly, as friends and newspaper readers. Much of the content of their letters is of a personal nature, but the women understood that McNaughton might publish appropriate segments in the W-

58. Mrs. Ted East letter to Violet McNaughton, 16 June 1938.

59. Mrs. L.C Shoebridge letter to Violet McNaughton, 13 October.

60. Ibid., 15May 1933; 14 February 1937.

61. Mrs. Ted East letter to Violet McNaughton, 16 May 1938.

62 Alice Butala letter to Violet McNaughton, 25 Januaxy 1938. . . 63. E.W. Stapleford, to 0 --(Ottawa: King's Printer, 1939), 129.

64. "Report of M. & M. Visitation," 7 July 1931, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon, United Church of Canada, Edmund Oliver Papers, XW.D.14.c

65. Alice Butah letters to Violet McNaughton: 25 January 1938'26 January 1941. "Prairie Wife...by One of Them," Chatelaine. May 1935,29,32-3. "More about the World's Worst Job'" Chatelaine.June 1935,79. "Prairie Wives in Revolt!" Chatelaine. August 1935,16,48. Edna Jaques also appears to have prompted criticism for describing women's lives and generaI conditions near Briercrest, Saskatchewan, in "Drought!" November 1937,18,745; see Stapleford, Bpgort 128.

66. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 17 July 1933.

67. lbid., 29 June1937.

68. Hampsten, bdThis Onlv to Yo- 21. ~~OluE "Those Were Great Daysw:The History of Kate ~nv&,1866-1929

She could clearly remember the summer of 1893 when she was pregnant with her daughter Georgina at their former home at Maritana, Quebec. How hot it had been. How big she was with her two-week overdue baby. "And,oh, the lots of lovely astrachan apples!" She and her three older children walked across the road to the orchard to pi& them and she cooked them by the panful in the days before the baby's arrival. And the night Georgina was born, there was an electric storm and shower.1 Perhaps Kate Graves' memories of "red, luscious apples" and rain were sharpened by the fact that, on the Saskatchewan farm where she found herself in the summer of 1936 - mailing birthday greetings to forty-three- year-old Gqrgina - the temperature was 109 degrees Fahrenheit (K)in the shade, her garden was scorched, local farmers had harvested little or no wheat for eight years, and the family faced yet another year on government relief.2 How seventy-year-old Graves must have longed for the lush gardens, orchards and maple sugar groves that had smrounded her for the first forty- eight yeas of her life. How she must have questioned her decision to leave her comfortab1e home in the East for a homestead in southern Saskatchewan Of course, she and her family could not have known that economic and environmental forces would conspire to bring the province - including their district - to its knees in the 1930s. They could not have known the Great Depression would strike Saskatchewan more viciously than any other part of Canada and most of the world. Nor could they have predicted how drastically the decade would alter their lives and dreams. This chapter looks at Kate Graves' Me prior to the won.It attempts to define her in terms of her experiences, interests, temperament, and social, economic, ethnic, religious and educational status. In addition, it attempts to understand how Kate found herself in Saskatchewan in the 19308. Thus, the chapter takes us from her childhood and childbearing years in Quebec to her life as a middle-aged wife and grandmother on a Saskatchewan homestead. The person at the centre of this thesis was born Kate Edwards on March 11,1866, at Franklin Centre, Quebec (then Canada East), approximately twenty-five kilometres southwest of Montreal. She was one of eight children, four of whom died as young children. Both parents were Enghsh-speaking: Her father was a surveyor who had emigrated from Scotland as a child, and her mother was born in Canada East and came from a long line of New Englanders dating back to the late l6OOs.3 Later in life, Kate would speak proudly of her Anglo-Celtic heritage and would enjoy sprinlding Scottish sayings throughout her letters. Kate graduated from Huntingdon Academy in 1884 at the age of eighteen, with ambitions of becoming a school teacher. But her father declared that teadung would be "too hard a job" for his youngest daughter.4

Perhaps he adhered to the belief -- widespread among middle and upper- class Victorians - that women should not work outside the home; or perhaps he genuinely felt that tall, slender Kate was too frail for the demands of teaching. Either way, he used his patriarchal authority to point Kate towards a life devoted to domesticity and motherhood. On October 14,1885, Kate wed Thomas Edward Graves at Marittam, Quebec. She was nineteen; he was twentyane.5 Originally from Champlain, New York, Tom was a short man with a good sense of humour and a gift for reciting poetry. He held an engineer's certificate and was a skilled wheelwright' blacknith, carpenter and maker of horse-drawn ploughs and cultivators6 Tom and Kate's farm was the site, not only of two apple orchards and a maple sugar bush, but a carpentry shop and a small iron foundry which Tom owned with an older brother' John.' In 1888, he bought out his si'bling. The day the agreement was signed' Kate wrote in her diary that she would serve as bookkeeper. Although it was Tom who signed the legal papers' she clearly saw herself as a partner in the enterprise. "l hope we will be able to pay our debts," she wrote. "We have lots of them, but we are young and hope to succeed."B Kate and her husband did, indeed' prosper in the coming years. Between 1887 and 1901, Kate bore seven daughters and welcomed a five- year-old foster son from England into her home. Her last child, a boy, was born in 1907 when Kate was forty-one? Her life was a busy round of housekeeping, gardening, sewing, making maple syrup8raising poultry, caring for her children and aged parents, running the Maritana Post office, and exchanging social calls with friends and relatives. Tom was on the school board' Kate belonged to the Ladies Aid, and both regularly attended local Protestant churches and took an interest in politics (travelling once to Ormstown, Quebec, to hear Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier speak). There was money to pay for books, fancy dresses' the children's schooling, music lessons, and help with domestic and farm chmes.10 EventuaJly8five of Kate's daughters - including Georgina - went to teachefs college to take up the pmkssion Kate had been denied." Work, family, religion, education and an interest in community and public affairs were clearly valued in this home. Kate experienced her share of worry and sorrow during this period, as she nursed her children through illnesses and her beloved parents and thirty-six- yearold brother died. Still, she would look badc on her life in Quebec years later and say, "Those were great days."lZ In 1908, Kate's world was jolted by the news that there was "free land" for the taking in southwestern Saskatchewan. Tom's eldest brother George, who was married to Kate's sister Emma, urged Tom to go west with him to file on a daim_l3 Under the Dominion Lands Act of 1908, a homesteader could obtain a quarter section of land (160 acres) and purchase an adjoining quarter section by meeting certain residency and farming sequirements. Similar homesteading regulations had been in effect since 1871, but this was the first time the dry, short-grass plains stretching from Moose Jaw to Calgary were up for grabs.14 On April 19,1909, Tom and George each filed on 320 acres along the Wood River, about 140 kilometres southwest of Moose Jaw and forty-five kilometres north of the Saskatchewan-Montana border, in the future Rural Municipality of Mankota (R.M. 45).*5 In doing so, they joined the two million people who flooded the prairie provinces between 1901 and 1931. Most, We the Graves brothers, established their homesteads between 1909 and 1912, at an average rate of more than forty thousand a year. In Saskatchewan alone, the number of fanns grew from 13,445 in 1901 to 95,013 in 1911 - a seven-fold maease.16 Southwestem Saskatchewan saw its population ~mpfrom 46,560 people in 1906 to 178,200 in 1916. The number of farms in the area quadrupled.17 Anxious to take advantage of high grain prices, the newcomers wasted no time in breaking the prairie sod. Crop acreage in Crop District No. 3, which encompassed most of southwestern Saskatchewan (including Tom's homestead), soared from 20,000 acres (8,094 hectares) in 1907 to more than 600,000 acres (242,810 hectares) in 1914.18 It is hard to say what impelled Tom Graves to take up farming on the Wood River Hains at the age of forty-six.People were motivated to homestead for many different reasons.19 Perhaps Tom was influenced by his excitable eldest brother, who brimmed with money-ma- schemes.20 He may have thought he could "prove up" his free homestead in a few years and sell it far a tidy pmfit.21 Perhaps he was concerned about the shrinking availability of farm land in eastern Canada and wanted to give his two sons an opportunity to own land of their own.22 Or, perhaps he was seduced by Dominion government and Canadian Pacific Railway pamphlets that blanketed eastern Canada, the United States and Europe with images of "The . Last Best West": a utopia where a spirit of fteedom and egalitanamm. reigned, where the soil was fertile and the climate wholesome, and where the flat, unforested landscape was ripe for the plough.23 Western Canadian historian Bmce Baden Peel, who grew up in the vicinity of the Graves' homestead, writes that settlers were infused with "the optimism of a boom period."24 They thdled at the prospect of owning a half-section of land (more than most could ever accumulate in eastern Canada or Europe), and had visions of achieving swift financial success. Many welcomed a fresh start in a new land. 'We felt like new men," said one pioneer ye- later." More difYicuIt to explain than Tom's decision to homestead is his choice of location. His new farm, and his family's future home, lay in "P~s Trianglen - an arid region stretclung from the forty-ninth to the fifty-second parallel and encompassing southern Saskatchewan, southeastern Alberta and a small comer of southwestern Manitobk Fifty years earlier, Captain John Palher and other scientific expedition leaders had dismissed this 200,000- square-kilometre area as unsuitable for agricultural settlement. The strip between the South Saskatchewan River and the international border was particularly "useless," they said. Here lay a desert of cacti, sage and sandy soil "unfit for the abode of civilized man."26 Tom Graves' homestead was in the heart of this accursed country. The farm was situated on a treeless, atmost-level plain near the future community of McCord. To the south and west were gently rolling hills - the northem slopes of Wood Mountain and Pinto Butte. The "river" that bisected the property was little more than a creek, which usually dried up in summer. When Tom arrived, the land was thinly covered with natural grasses and, like all soils in the Brown Chernozemic soil zone, low in organic content. The fertility and texhw of the area's light brown soil varied considerably. Tom's land was not as rich as that of some farmers, but neither was it as sandy and fragile as some districts to the north and northeast. Tom's homestead was located in what is known, evocatively enough, as a "Cold Steppe" climatic region27 Records from the first three decades of the twentieth century show that annual precipitation in southwestern Saskatchewan was light, summers were short and hot, and winters were characterized by dramatic temperature fluctuations and little snow?B Not dydid less rain and snow fall in southwestern Saskatchewan than in most of the prairies (the annual average was twelve to thirteen inches), but precipitation levels were extremely unpredictable. Between 1914 and 1928, annual spring and summer rainfall in the Rural Municipality of Mankota ranged from four inches to fourteen inches. The area was subject to wuent droughts, partly because evaporation often exceeded predpitation.29 High temperatures and winds sucked moisture from the soil and burned vegetation. Surveyors reported in 1910 that the scorching July winds "felt like coming out of the hot oven."30 Recorded temperatures ranged from summer-time highs of 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) to winter-time lows of -53 degrees Fahrenheit (-52 Celsius)*3*As if such climatic vagaries weren't enough to contend with, homesteaders in Tom Graves' area could look forward to frequent early frosts and hail storms. Hail st~ckthe southwest quadrant more often than any other part of the pmvince.32 Clearly, farming in semi-arid southwestern Saskatchewan was a risky business. Historian Barry Potyondi says experienced farmers ''knew instinctively that Palliser had been right," and avoided the tip of the northwest- Great Plains.33 Tom Graves' lik in rival Quibec didn't equip him to make informed decisions about homesteading on the prairies.34 He may not have realized that the best agricultural land had been taken long before he reached the Westfand much of southwestern Saskatchewan was marginal at best.35 Perhaps he selected his homestead too quickly, caught up in the competition with thousands of other would-be pioneers lined up at Dominion lands offices aaoss southem Saskatchewan and AIberta. At the Moose Jaw land office alone, 9,573 people filed on homesteads in 1909 - 1,278 of them in the same month as Tom.36 Most likely, Tom Graves simply wanted to grow wheat He believed agricultural experts and immigration propagandists who exalted the area's capacity for wheat growing, and may even have thought he could counteract the semi-arid region's limitations by using dryland farming techniques promulgated by the pundits-37 Like thousands of others, Tom saw not parched fescue grasses, but "rolling seas of gain"38 How did Kate Graves feel about her husband's homesteading venture? Both she and Tom were ambivalent about living permanently in the West. Unlike Georgefs wife Emma, Kate did not immediately take up residence on her husband's homestead. She remained in Quebec while Tom spent the better part of each year between 1910 and 1913 proving up - breaking land and erecting a sod barn, blacksmith forge, and two-storey 16 by 24foot frame house worth seven hundred dollars.39 In a 1911 letter to his daughter Katey, Tom said: '7 do not know if we will ever move out here to live. Mama will have to come out next summer and see the place before we decide. Not a tree to be seeh"40 Scholars have debated women's response to the pioneering experience - some depicting women as reluctant pioneers, and others insisting that many women were involved in, and embraced, the decision to homestead.41 Tom's letter indicates that Kate had a say in the decision to migrate. There is no record of Kate going west to view the homestead before she settled there in 1914. Why she agreed to the move we do not know- If Tom was set on going, she may have felt it was her wifely duty to support him and to keep the family together. Given her Victorian upbringing and lack of economic independence, it would have been difficult for her to ddecide otherwise. Kate's granddaughter Enid (Wallace) Kolskog, who grew up near Kate in Saskatchewan and was emotionally close to her, says Tom itched to homestead because he loved "the wide open prairie," and her grandmother fell in with his wishes because "in those days women did what the men wanted you to do."Q The subject of Kate's role in the Graves' decision to homestead raises a number of questions about Kate's relationship with her husband - about how much weight her opinions carried and the degree of power each spouse *eyed. These questions will be discussed in further detail in chapter four. Kate's ambivalence about moving West was likely tied, as it was for many homesteading women, to the necessity of leaving familiar surroundings, hiends and relatives- No doubt it helped to know that her sister's family was already established on a neighbowing homestead, and seven of her nine children were moving, too. Historians frequently emphasize the social isolation women experienced on the frontier, but Kate and Tom's area, like much of the prairies, was thick with extended families and groups of friends and neighburs who travelled west together.43 With her extended family about her, Kate did not suffer from the same degree of loneliness that some female newcomers did. Nevertheless, adjusting to Iife on their barren homestead, with its dearth of greenery8 nearby towns and farm and household amenities, was not eksy for the forty-eight-year-old Quebec transplant. "I wished myself back east for a good year and sometimes since," she later recalled.44 A photograph taken a few years after she arrived shows Kate fetching water horn a pump in the middle of a beaten-earth farm yard with an unpainted, unadorned building (looking more like a granary than a house) in the background. She is neatly dressed in an ankle-length dress' sun hat and polished boots. Although rail-thin, she is obviously physically fit. On the back of the photograph, Kate has written, '!In my fifties." The caption indicates that part of her felt she was too old to be homesteading. Surely she had reached a stage in Mewhere she should be past such toil. Her comment could signify bitterness or bemusement- Either way, she was not overjoyed to find herself in such a time and place.45 Kate did acclimatize to homestead life, however, and over the next fifteen years became an intrinsic part of her rural community. She operated the local post office out of a granary from 1914 to 1921 (an occupation which brought her into fiquent contact with other settlers), helped birth her daughters' and neighbour women's babies' joined the women's section of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association, and regularly attended interdenominational Protestant church services - ultimately joining the United Church when it was formed in lm.46 She was an active member of the church's Women's Missionary Society, making quilts and packing clothes for "our mission work among the Indians of our North West"47 She raised poultry and churned butt=# and sold her produce to the local store. Tom served as a school trustee and was involved in farm organizations and the local agricultural sodety.48 Although Kate's daughter Georgina left for Alberta and another daughter moved to British Columbia, her remaining five daughters and foster son settled within a thirty-five kilometre radius of Kate and Tom's farm Edward, the youngest childf continued to live with them. Kate took pleasure in her garden, visiting with neighborn and caring for her growing brood of grandchildren. In these years the Graves became well-aquainted with the unpredictable nature of the climate. Drought struck in 1914, only to be followed by ideal growing conditions in 1915.49 A photograph taken that year shows family members up to their chins in a stand of oats that stretches to the horizon - a sight that must have confirmed Tom's vision of the bounteous West.50 Drought gripped the district again from 1917 through 1920, and many farmers were forced to apply for government relief in the form of seed grain.51 The area's parched, ove~4tivatedfarmland began to blow.52 Kate's daughter Katey (Graves) HatleIid, who lived in the municipality to the east, noted in 1920 that an all-day dust storm was "playing havoc with some of our wheatt"S3 More than five thousand Saskatchewan farmers, most of them in the southwest, abandoned their land. Then came a cyde of favourable crops, culminating in the bumper crop of 1928.54 Despite occasional crop failuresf Kate and her husband were reasonably well off. They were among the few people in the area who had money from the sale of property elsewhere to invest in their homestead.55 In addition, Tom received an inheritance fmm his father which he used to pay off the pre-emption in 1922.56 The Graves planted trees around the farmstead to break the wind, and Tom built a 24 by %foot bam, granariesf a cqwntry shop and a blacksmith shop.57 The house acquired a coat of white paint and green trim. While not luxurious, it was bigger and better appointed than the homestead shacks that dotted most of the countryside.58 Like most Saskatchewan fanners, the Graves did not have electricity or indoor plumbing, but Tom rigged up a hand pump at the kitchen sink so that Kate did not have to haul water from the yard (except in winter when the water pipe froze).59 Another feature which pleased Kate greatly was the good-sized pantry Tom built off the kitchen, complete with a counter-top and cupboards, where she could make cakes and cookiedo Kate and Tom purchased their first car in 1925 and, in the spring of 1929, subscri'bed to a telephone service31 Kate also acquired a $165 fur coat and was able to afford occasional paid domestic help.62 And she and her husband travelled. They returned to Quebec for an extended stay in 1917, and spent the winter of 1921 with their daughter Arma on the West Coast.63 In 1924 Kate took the tain to Fleet, Albertaf for a visit with Geoqina, her husband Bert and infant son64 Kate's letters to Georgina in 1925 blaze with optimism and prosperity. They've harvested lf633bushels of No. 1wheat, she's sold eight and a half dozen eggs for twenty-five cents a dozen, "Father" is building a new granary, the neighborn have new linoleum, cars and radios, and "our trees look grand."65 . As farmers, the Graves were relatively restrained when it came to purchasing land, farm arrimals and equipment. Many Saskatchewan farmers overextended themselves fhan&Uy in the 19209 by expanding their crop acreage and trading their horses in for tractors and other farm machinery.66 In 1926, the average Saskatchewan farm was 390 acres, and the average farm in the Rural Municipality of Madata and surrounding municipalities was 419 acres.67 The number of tractors, trucks and combines in the province doubled between 1926 and 1931, to more than sixty thousand-68 Tom and Kate Graves, meanwhile, kept their farm to appmximately 375 acres and stuck with a home-drawn plough. They did not amass sizeable cattle or horse herds.69 Nor, it seems, did they accumulate a large farm debt or mortgage.70 The spring of 1929 found the Graves family in an enviable economic position indeed.71 Kate Graves was now sixty-three years old and about to enter the final phase of her life. If we were to take a snapshot of her as she stood at the brink of the Great Depression, what would we see? Six main points concerning her age, economic position, ethniaty, temperament, class and past experiences become apparent. First of all, Kate Graves was an elderly, married farm woman. The 1931 census shows that five pex cent of Saskatchewan's 421,850 female residents fit this description72 Older women like Kate accounted for 20 per cent of the 107,683 married females who lived in rival areas.73 The province's elderly population was relatively small; 14 per cent of allresidents were £Sty or over.74 Secondly, we would see a woman who was economically dependent on her husband. According to the 1931 census, 63 per cent of Saskatchewan females aged fifteen and over were married. Very few of these women had jobs away from their homes and farm yards. Employed women made up only 12 per cent of the labour force.75 Kate Graves was a financially resourceful person who used money she made from selling butter and eggs to build a "wee nest egg."76 But the fact that she had little or no income independent of her husband and the fann put her in a vulnerable position. The homestead and preemption were registered in Tom's name alone, and her legal rights concerning the land and family assets were limited. Few prairie women in the first decades of the twentieth century owned land jointly with their husbands, and very few women obbined homesteads in their own names. (The Dominion Lands Act of 1908 prevented women from obtaining homesteads or pre-emptiom unless they could prove they were heads of fdes.) Saskatchewan legislation prior to 1915 would have allowed Tom Graves to use or dispose of the land and fdyproperty as he chose. After that date, Tom would not have been permitted to sell or mortgage the praperty without Kate's written consent, and she would have been guaranteed an interest in the home and land upon his death But the law did not prevent a husband from selling or willing to others the farm equipment, livestock, and household goods that made the farm a viable enterprise. Nor would Kate have had a daim to the land or assets if she divorced or separated from Tom.Her contriiution to the building up and maintenance of the farm would have counted for nothing. In fact, it was not until 1979 that Saskatchewan law recognized women's right to an equal share in family ~~perty-" The third thing our imaginary snapshot would reveal is that Kate Graves, like numy prairie residents in the early part of the century, lived chiefly among her own kind - socialidry: and worshipping with people who shared her language, faith and cultural background. More than two-thirds of the people she setfled amongst were Canadian-born, most of them Anglophones from Ontario or Quebec. She belonged to her municipality's, and the province's, largest ethnic group - people of British descent. In 1931, approximately 50 per cent of the population of Saskatchewan and the Rural Municipality of Mankota had English, Irish or Scottish ancestors. Although people of French Canadian, German and other ethnic origins settled in Kate's area, most individuals in her social drde were Eqglish~United Church-goers from Ontario, Quebec, the United States, and Britain. In 1931, the United Chdand the Roman Catholic Church vied for the largest number of womhippers in Kate's municipality. But her denomination dominated rural southem Saskatchewan as a whole, with forty per cent of the population daiming adherence's A fourth point concems Kate's tmperament and values. She habitually wore a severe expression for the camera, and it is true that she had a stern side. She made no bones about the fact that she disapproved of smoking, drhking alcohol, and playing cards on Sunday.79 She had strict ideas about right and wrong, and was not afraid to voice her opinions. "Sometimes when we get older, we can soften our blows quite easily,"Kate's granddaughter Enid Kolskog said in 1998 when she herself was eighty-five. "But I don't think Grandma ever did."80 Yet, family members also remember Kate as affectionate and warm-hearted - hugging grandchildren, aadlmg babies, and treating others with respect. "I remember a very kind person who would never say anything (negative) about anybody, and wouldn't allow anyone else to say anything/ says grandson Wes Hatlelid. "You could joke about someone's shortcomings, but you wouldn't joke behind their backs."*l Many who knew Kate Graves say she was "refined" - her education and breeding showed in her conversation and manners.82 "She was one of the gentlewomen of the day," recalls Hatldid. "You 'took' tea ...and she was very careful with her English and pronunciation."~3 Les Wilson, who grew up in Kate's area in the 19209 and '30s says, "My dad had a lot of respect for Tom and Mrs. Graves. They were more genteel, long-suffering folk"** This raises a fifth question, concerning Kate's dass. Determining her place in the social hierarchy is not easy, for class distinctions are fluid things that vary according to the criteria used. Should GteGraves' class designation be based upon her material wealth? Her husband's livelihood? Her social status in the community? Her education level? Her aspirations for hersel€and her children? Her sense of etiquette? There is a marked lack of consensus among scholars on the subject of dsss in rural westem Canada. Some, like sociologist S.M. lipset, say dass distincticms did not exist in rural Saskatchewan, that farmers were a "one-class community."85 Lipset treats farmers as a dass unto themselves, apart horn town and urban dwellers and "the big interests."& Some scholars lump farmers in with capitalists, while others say they belong to the working class.87 Some divide prairie residents into the "middle class" and the "working class," but fail to explain how they arrive at such dishctim.88 It seems wisest to say Kate Graves belonged to a middle category of farmers.89 At the top end of the scale were wealthy families who owned large farms and elaborate homes, and employed several full-time domestic and farm labourers. These families were generally English-Canadians who gravitated to positions of authority in the community*At the opposite end of the hierarchy were poor families who owned no land or whose farms were so small and unproductive that they were forced to hire themselves out as low-paid ''hired hands." Well-off famiIies might fall into this category if they offended local morals or belonged to an unfavoured ethnic group. Between these two extremes were "respectable families" who owned average sized farms and employed seasonal helpPo Kate meets these criteria on all counts. The Graves' farm was similar in size to many in the district, and their house was neither small nor grandiose. The couple's moderate income allowed them, at busy times of the year, to hire a man to help with field work and chores, and a woman to help with domestic work. They were among the roughly 42 per cent of Saskatchewan fanns who used hired labour of some sort in 1931.91 The Graves family also held responsible positions in the community. As an educated, well-mannerd,God-fearing AngleCeltic woman who attended one of the community's dominant churches and 40 belonged to its principal women's organizations, Kate Graves was nothing if not respectable. Lastly, it is important to consider Kate's past experiences and general attributes. The namative of her life to date shows her to be a resilient individual capable of uprooting herself at mid-life and adjusting to economic setbacks. She had a tremendous capacity for hard work and a keen sense of responsiity to family, church and community. She was a sociable person who -eyed meeting new people and spending time with relatives and women friends. She had witnessed serious illnesses and death, and had coped with emotional loss and family separation. She had a husband who valued her opinions, who attempted to lighten her work load, and whom she regarded as a partner. She used her energy and skills not only to help provide for her family, but to accumulate money of her own; a degree of economic independence was important to her. She was educated and intelligent, with interests that ranged from politics to the farm cooperative movement to church missionary work Last but not least, she was a principled person who strove to do right in the eyes of God, her family and her community. Kate Graves went into the 1930s with a considerable store of experiences and resources. She had witnessed good times and bad, and had pvenhaself to be capable, adaptable, selfless,and vigorous of mind and body. Surviving the Great Depression would demand all these qualities and more. NOTES CHAPrERoNE

1. Kate Graves letters to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, 30 July 1936,2 August 1938.

2. Ibid., 30 July 1936.

3. Genealogical documents compiled by Kate Graves and daughters, Kate Graves Family Papers.

4. 'The Late Mrs. Thomas E. Graves," newspaper obituary, 1941, Georgina Edith (Graves) scrapbook, Kate Graves Family Papers. Muriel (Griffiths) Bye phone interview, 29 January 2000.

5. Genealogical documents, Kate Graves Family Papers.

6. Pre-emption Patent Application, Homestead File, 1858791, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon.

7. Ethel F. Graves, "My Native Place"; "The Late Thos. E. Graves," newspaper obituary, 1941, Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths scrapbook. Kate Graves Family Papers.

8. Kate Graves diary, 19 April 1888, Kate Graves Family Papers.

9. Genealogical documents, Kate Graves Family Papers.

10. Kate Graves diary, 1888; Mary (Gordon) Edwards diary, 1898-99; Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths diary 1905-09. Kate Graves Family Papers. Kate and her family attended various Methodist and Presbyterian churches; they likely belonged to the latter denomination. Kate and Tom paid schooI fees and room and board for their daughters to attend high school in Omstown, Quebec The family regularly hired male farm hands and female domestic servants and seamstresses.

11. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, Edmonton, Alberta, 13 August 1998. Murid (Griffiths) Bye phone interview, 29 Januaqr 2000.

12. Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths diary, 1905-09; Kate Graves family genealogical documents; Kate Graves letter to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, 2 September 1932.

13. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998; Wes Hatlelid telephone interview, 14 December 2000. 14. Vernon C Fowke, National Polifv and (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 59-62 72-7; Bmce Baden Peel, "RM.45: The Social History of a Rural Municipality" (M.A.Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1946), 94-114;. . D.M. Loveridge and Barry Potyondi, Fromto the A ~UN~Vof the *(Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1983), 20-1; Gerald Friesen, Canadian. . (I'omnto and Londom University of Toronto Press, 19871,182- 6.

15. Homestead Files, 1859898,1858791,1858795,1859902, Saskatchewan Archives Board. Peel, "R.M. 45," 109-10. Thomasthomestead and pr-ption were the northwest and northeast quarters of section 24, township 5, range 7, west of the 3rd meridian.

16. Fowke, N- 73; GE. BritneU8J'he 36.

17. Between 1906 and 1916, the number of farms in southwestern Saskatchewan rocketed from 8,750 to more than 38,000. Barry Potyondi, "Losing Ground: Farm Settlers on the Periphery," in JVyvto ed. Thelma Poirier (Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan: Wood Mountain Historical Soaety, 2OOO), 139.

.* . 18. Barry Potyondi, Ip Palbef s T- In the. . 1850-1930(Saskatoon: Purich Publishing 1995), 112,129; Friesen, J'he 328-

19. Friesen, -. 242-73; R Douglas Francis, -e Wee (Saskatmn- Western Producer Prairie books#1989), 107-54; Loveridge and Potyondi, mrn Wood Mountain to 208 167; Peel, "ILM. 45," 174.

20. Wes Hatlelid telephone interview, 14 December 2000. Kate Graves letter to Gee- Edith (Graves) Griffiths, 26 July 1937.

21. Tom Graves was aware of the increasing value of his property. In a letter he wrote his daughter Katey from Milly, Saskatchewan (the community closest to the Graves' homestead), on June 8,191 1, he noted that the price the Hudson Bay was asking for land adjacent to his had jumped from eight dollars an acre in 1909 to twenty-eight dollars an acre in 1911. Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths scrapbook, Kate Graves Family Papers. . . 22. Friesen, The 251; Loveridge and Potyondi,-. W- 167; David Gagan, a (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 4040.

23. Francis, -s of the W& 107-154; Britnell, Wheat36; Hesen, . . 301-5.

. . 25. Ibid.; Friesen, 251.

26. Ka-iu Fung, ed., & of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, lW), 41; Captain John Palliser and Henry Yode Hind8quoted in Loveridge and Potyondi, . . 109-10; Francis, West, 5-8,20-1; Friesen, The 328.

27. Peel, "RM. 45," S8 7, 18-20; Coveridge and Potyondi, From Wood Whitemud, 29-42; Britnell, 5-

28- Britnell, 4; Peel, "R.M. 45," 27; Canada, Department.. . of A@dm8 to 1- Technical Bulletin No. 15 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), 13; "Submission by the Government of Saskatchewan to the Saskatchewan Reconstruction Coundl," Saskatchewan, Department of Agridture8 Saskatchewan Archives Board, Pamphlet File, Agriculture-Saskatchewan, 5-7; E.S. Hopkins, A.E. Palmer and WS. Chepil, L-. - . . (King's Printer, 1946), 58-

29. Loveridge and Potyondi, Wood Mountain to *em40; Fung, Allauk€ Saskatchewan. 41.

30. Quoted in Peel, "R.M.45," 25.

31. Canada, Department of Agriculture, to Factors& Usg 9.

32 Loveridge and Potyon& From W- to the 40; Peel, "RM. 45," 23- 6.

33. Potyondi, "Losing Ground," 138.

34. For a thorough discussion of settlers' lack of knowledge concerning the choosing and farming of land in dry southwesternSaskatchewan, and the Dominion government's irres6mibility in op&ng the area to settlement, see Loveridge and ~Gtyondi, Wood Mountain 160, 1181-3. The authors say the fact that 53 per cent of the land in RM, 45 Vom Graves' municipality) was filed on more than once, and 18 per cent was filed on three or more times, shows that "many settlers had very little idea of what they were doing." To give Tom credit, it should be nhted that most quirber sections which we& filed on several times were too rough or stony to cultivate. Tom chose arable land in the flattest, first-settled part of the m&apalitf, and he found it productive enough that he did not cancel his claim. See Peel, "RM.45," 118,120-4.

36. Peel, "RM. 45," 106-119; Loveridge and Potyondi, From Wood 153-161); David C Jones, &@w of (Edmonton: University of Alberta pmI1987), 33-41. 37. James Gray, Men Dm(Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1967); Loveridge and Potyondi, Woad 181-183; Potyondi, "Losing em,"142; Jm, of Qust. 30-33.

38. Frans van Waeterstadt, "Into the World: Letter from an Emigrant," quoted in Francis, Tmanes West 135. 39. Homestead Files, 1859898, 1859902, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon. It is interesting to consider that while Tom Graves spent more than half of each year in Saskatchewan, Kate cared for the couple's younger children and ran their Quebec farm (and perhaps their foundry business), probably with hired help.

40. Tom Graves letter to Katey Graves, 8 June 1911, Milly, Saskatchewan, Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths scrapbook, Kate Graves Family Papers.

41. Historians who emphasize that it was men who decided to move west, and that women reluctantly complied, include Lillian Sdissel, Wom1s *- of &s Westwm (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 10; and John Mack Faragher, -(New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 171. Scholars who question the image of the reluctant female pioneer and argue for a complex interpretation of women's involvement in the decision to migrate, and the homesteading experience overall, include Carol Fairbanks and Sara Brooks Sundberg, (Metuchen, New Jq, and London: The Scarectow Press, 1983), 7379,85; Jameson, "Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers,'' 149-50; Jensen and Miller, 'The Gentle Tamers Revisited," 187.

42 Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998. KoIskog, who was born in 1913, was Kate Graves' first grandchild and lived near her in Saskatchewan from 1916 to 1919 and from 1927 to Kate's death in 1941.

43. Historian Bruce Baden Peel mentions numerous extended family groupings in Kate and Tom Graves' area. The Graves' homestead was located in the most populous township in the municipality. In 1911, almost 30 per cent of the municipality's 447 residents lived in township 5, range 7; the population density was 3.63 per square mile. Yet, Peel emphasizes the social isolation homesteaders, especially women, experienced. "RM.45," 107-20,16%6. Other scholars who stress women's isolation on the frontier include Linda Rasmussen, et d, (Toronto: The Women's Press, 1976), 42; and Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 17. Scholars who note that pioneers often had kinship ties with their fellow migrants include Jamesan, 'Women as Workers," 149; and W. Peter Ward, who says: "Nothing in the memoir literature suggests that men and women often braved the hardships of pioneer life done." "Population Growth in Western Canada, 1901- 77," in- ~V-P - West ed. JohnFoster (Edmonton: University of Alber&aPress8 1983), 176.

44. Kate Graves letter to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, Saskatchewan, 18 August 1938.

45. Photograph, Kate Graves Family Papers. We can only guess at Kate Graves' first impression of the homestead, Elizabeth Ruthig, who first saw the Wood River Plains in 1909 and later became Kate's neighbour and friend, thought the vast prairie "looked a barren land. No trees, no buildings in sight; just prairie and sage brush and a long, long winding trail." Ruthig, "Homestead Days in the McCord District," wew- 122 (Winter 1954)' 22-7.

46. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998; Wes Hatlelid telephone intemiew, 14 December 2000. Kate Graves letters to Georgh: 8 April 1931; 20 April 1932 TheCentennial Committee of the Rural Municipalities of Mankota No. 45 and Glen McPherson No. 46, and Lncal Improvement Districts No. 920 and No. 923 (Saskatoon: Mankota Diamond Jubilee committee, 1965) 36; Peel, "R.M. 45," 276. The museum at McCord, Saskatchewan, contains a quilt embroidered in May 1922 with the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association logo, the word "Equity," and the names of local association members, including "Mrs. T. Graves" and "Mr. T. Graves."

47. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 6 August 1925, Kate Graves Family Papers.

48. Kate Graves letters to Georgina, 1925. -List=- VP Iulv 16th & 17th, 49. Peel, "RM.45," 198-201. The provincial government provided seed grain at reduced prices and instituted other relief measures to accommodate for the drought

50. Photograph, 1915, Kate Graves Family Papers.

51. Peel, "R.M. 85," 21&16; Loveridge and Potyondi, Wood Mo- to 181. Documents filed on October 5,1927, indicate that George Graves' family had received government relief in 1919 and had experienced several years of aop failures due to drought, early frost and hail. Homestead Files, 1858795.

52. Potyondi, "bsing Ground," 143.

53. Katey (Graves) Hatielid diary, 1920, Kate Graves Family Papers.

55. The Graves were suffiaently well off that between filing on the homestead in 1909 and receiving the patent to it on January 16,1914, Tom could afford to be away from his Quebec founchy and farm for more than six months of each year and, unlike most homesteaders, he did not need to find off-farm employment to scrape together the one to three thousand dollars in farm equipment animals and supplies needed to begm farming. Homestead He, 1859898; John H, Archer, Saskatchewan: A (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980), 100; Friesen, The Canadian. * 310. Once Tom and Kate sold their property in Quebec, they had even more capital to invest in their homestead. Only 10 per cent of dersin RM45 were in a position to sell property in eastern Canada and otk regions and use the profits to ship in farm start-up supplies. Peel, "R.M. 45," 154.

56- Genealogical documents, Kate Graves Family Papers.

57. Homestead File, 1858791; Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998; Gordon Graves phone interview, 7 November 1999; Allen McCrea personal interview, 12July 2000.

58. Britnell, TheWheat- 173; Peel, "R.M. 45," 234,236.

59. Wallace, "All Else Must Wait,"59,75; Veronica Strong-Boa& "Pulling in Double Harness," 406-7; Britnell, me WhEconomv, 177,179; Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 17 June1935.

60. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998.

61. Peel, "R.M.45," 278; Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 20 September 1925; 10 October 1939. The family traded or sold their first car for another in 1926.

62. Kate Graves letters to Georghx 19 October 1936; 25 June 1925.

63. Ibid., FtanWin Centre, Quebec, 6 February 1917, Kate Graves Family Papers.

64. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, Kerrobert, Saskatchewan, 25 November 1924, Kate Graves Family Papers. Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths and her husband Bert had one child, James,at this point They went on to have five more children, whom Kate Graves never met

65. Kate Graves letters to Georgina Graves Griffiths: 25 June 1925,6 August 1925,20 September 1925.

66. Britnell, The Wheat 29-42,29-42,;Fowke, a N- 81. For figures on farm expansion and farm debt in semi-arid municipalities to the north and east of the Rural Municipality of Mankota, see to J Use

67.- 67.- Uinversity of Saskatchewan, College of Agriculture, Department of Farm Management, Agricultural Extension Bulletin No. 52, July 1931 (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan), 46; Loveridge and Potyondi, From Wood

68. Calculated from Table XIV, Britnell, L- 41.

69. The RM. 45 relief ledger for 1934-35 shows that Tom Graves owned 320 acres (250 of which were under cultivation) and had eight cattle, nine horses, four pigs and forty chickens. Rural Municipality of Mankota, No. 45, Mankota, Saskatchewan, Relief Ledgers, 1930-1946. In. addition to their half-section in RM. 45, the Graves appear to have owned fifty or *-five aaes near their daughter May and son-in-law Matthew Wallace's farm, which was east of the Graves' home place in RM. 44. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 23 April 1930,s April 1931.

70. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgjna, Lafieche, Saskatchewan, 25 August 1945; Kate Graves letter to Geo-a, 8 April 1931.

71. The Graves were more fortunate than the one-third of prairie farmers who had mortgages on their farms in 1931. However, it must be remembemd that their farm income was not large (prairie farmers earned an average of six hundred dollars per year in 1930), and like most western farmers, they probably had invested most of their money in their land and had little cushion in the form of savings or non-farm investments. The 'average' prairie farm family possessed total capital of $14,000 and debts of about $3,000 in 1930-31," writes Gerald Friesen The C- . * 318. 72 Calculated from- of_Canada. Vol. m0* of Peon&, Table 13,114-5, and Vol. I, Table 17b, 45041. In 1931 in Saskatchewan, there were 22,057 married rural women who were age fifty and over. Of these women, 2,289 were age sixty- five to sixty-nine, (Kate was sixty-five in 1931). Half of the province's 6,619 female residents who were age sixty-five and older were married,

73. Ibid., calculated from Vol. 111, -of Table 13, 114-5. Saskatchewan's total population stood at 921,785 in 1931. Rural residents accounted for 68 per cent of that figure, There were 280,515 rural females and 141,335 urban females in the province; rural females accounted for about 67 per cent of the total female population.

74. Calculated from Britnell, Wheat Table VII, 21; and . . VoL I, Table 7,432. Women age 50 and over accounted for about five per cent of the Saskatchewan population in 1931. . . 75. Ciqps of _the Prom1% Vol. I, Table 8,433; Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 136.

76. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 16 August 1932

77. Rollings-Magnusson, Sandra, "Hidden Homesteaders: Women, the State and Patriarchy in the Saskatchewan Wheat Economy, 1870-1930," Prairie Fo-242 (Fall 1999), 171-283. Catherine Cavanaugh, "The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership: The Alberta Campaign for Homestead Dower, 1909-25," _Canadian Revie~742(1993), 198- 225; Prentice, et. aL, Canadian 2257; Ramussen, et al., AestYet to Re- 148-9. . . 78. Friesen, J'he Canadian Pram242-?3; Peel, "R.M. 45," 172,304,353-4; Archer, 358; Loveridge and Potyondi, 166-7;Britnell, The Wheat 186-7. In 1931, the Rural Muniapality of Mankota's population included 916 people of English, Irish and Scottish descent, 379 people of French origin, 209 Scandinavians, 162 Germans, 92 Syrians and a smattering of other ethnic groups.

79. Telephone interviews with Wes Hatlefid, 14 December 2000; Allen McCrea, 15 August 2000.

80. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal intem-iew, IS14 August, 1998.

81. Ibid.; Wes Hatlelid telephone interview, 14 December 2000. Kate Graves' daughters described her as "sympathetic" and "kind-hearted."Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 18 May 1941; Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, 12 May 1941. Kate Graves Family Papers.

82. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 1314 August 1998.

83. Wes Hatlelid telephone interview, 14 December 2000.

84. Les Wilson telephone interview, 12 March 2000.

. * 85. S.M. Lipset, . - Saskatchewan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 247. 86. %id,... s57-98,72 Also see JeanBurnet, Co-: A Sfydy of Rural *(Toronto: University of Toronto. . Press, 1951), 69-72,7543,105-113; and Edward Belt, and C- (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 87-8 and 10M. -. 87. J.F. Conway, West: of a 2nd ed. (Toronto: JamesLorimer & Company, 1994), 31; Cecilia Danysk, (Toronto: McUelland and Stewart, 1995); 9Bulletin No. 5546. 88. Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 50-55. 89. I have adopted the three-tieted social hierarchy of prairie farmers outlined in Friesen, 316.

90. Ibid.

91. Britnell, ple 43. "Times are Hardn: Saskatchewan, the G&S Farm and the Depression, 1929-194l

In the spring of 1930, Kate Graves reported that more than one hundred of the trees surrounding the farmstead were dead. "It seems to us this is no tree country," she wrote. "They were so nice last year, but the drought did it.'" The loss of many of their trees was a portent of things to come. In the twelve years between the onset of the Great Depmssion in 1929 and Kate's death in 1941, Kate and her family lost crops, gardens, loved ones and dreams. Like the rest of Saskatchewan they experienced economic, environmental, social and other changes that shook them to the core. This chapter explores Kate Graves' life in the context of the Great Depressionr What were conditions like in her home, her area and the province as a whole? How did she fare in comparison with other farm women and fdes? No part of Canada or the world suffered more during the Great Depression than the province of Saskatchewan. Drought, plunging wheat prices and the prolonged contraction of the Canadian economy codlated to almost destroy Saskatchewan society. At the heart of the province's problems were two main factors: p10nged drought and dramatically depressed wheat prices. Each phenomenon on its own would have brought farmers and the province considerable hardship. Together, they produced disaster. The drought led to sharply reduced wheat yields, while low market prices meant that whatever aops did make it to the elevator failed to bring farmers sufficient income to meet their production costs, let alone enable them to support themselves or stoke the economy. "To the greater part of the wheat economy the last ten years would have been extremely difficult even with normal prices," wrote economic historian AE. Britnd in 1939. 'The complete collapse of wheat and other agricultural prices produced a desperate situation"2 The impact of both the draught and the agricultural depression was magni€iedby the fact that Saskatchewan's predominantly rural population was almost totally dependent on wheat. By the 1930s, more than 80 per cent of the province's seeded acreage was devoted to the cereal cropf and in the drier parts of the province (namely the bulk of Pallisds Triangle) the percentage of wheatland rose to 90 per cent. Saskatchewan possessed more than half of the country's total wheat acreage? A 1938 Bank of Canada report noted that no other governmental unit in the civilized world was so reliant on a single commodity. "On average about 85 per cent of the value of all net production in Saskatchewan is supplied by the agricultural industry, and about 80 per cent of the cash income of the agricultural industry is derived from wheat."* The fortunes of almost everyone in Saskatchewan were tied to those of wheat.5 Furthermoref in the 1920%70 per cent of Canadafs wheat - most of it from Saskatchewan - was exported. Canada's share of the world wheat market was a whopping 40 per cent6 This placed Saskatchewan in an extremely vulnerable position Should anything happen to decrease crop yields at home, or grain prices abroad, the effect would rip through the Saskatchewan economy like the dry winds that were already beginning to denude the drj'lands in the 1920s. Saskatchewan's worst nightmare came true in late 1929, when a glut of wheat on the world market sent the price of wheat crashing down. From $1.03 in 1929, the average farm wheat price per bushel slid to 47 cents in 1930,38 cents in 1931, and 35 cents in 1932 - a four-hundred-year, worldwide low.' Dependent as it was on wheat exports, Saskatchewan was harder hit than any other province.* Between 1928-29 and 1933, the province's per-capita income fell by 72 per cent, compared with 42 per cent for Canada as a whole? Saskatchewan farmers' total net income dropped from $185 million in 1928 to minus $36 donin 1937. lo Throughout the 1930s, the value of farm income from wheat in Saskatchewan suffered considerably compared with the 1920s. From almost $286 million in 1925, it dropped to $17.8 million in 1937.11 The cumulative picture is even more devastating*Saskatchewan farmers' earned $1.1 billion less from wheat sales between 1930 and 1937 than they did between 1922 and 1929.12 To understand what these figures meant to individual farmers and the Saskatchewan economy, one must remember that income from wheat accounted for 80 per cent or more of the average southern Saskatchewan farmer's income.13 Kate Graves spoke for many farm families when she noted several times that "we have no money."l4 Kate attempted to earn money by sehgeggs, butter and cream, but the price of all agricultural products dipped sharply during the Depression Tom Graves did blacksmithing and carpentry work for local farmers, but few could afford to pay him. Thousands of Saskatchewan farmers could not pay their municipal taxes, meet their mortgage payments or support other sectors of the economy. By 1934, the provincial government was bankrupt15 Three years later, the Bank of Canada said the Saskatchewan economy had "almost ceased to function"16 Nor was this a short- lived phenomenon Saskatchewan farmers' total net income remained relatively low from 1929 through 1941, which means that the Great Depression lasted two years longer for Saskatchewan than for the rest of Canada.17 The Depression was not just about rock-bottom wheat prices, however. It was also about drought and a host of environmental scourges that threatened crops, farm land and thousands of farmers' ability to support themselves. Not once in the history of prairie settlement had people experienced the Like. The drought began in 1929 and reigned for ten years aaoss the entire Palliser Triangle and beyond.18 'The cloud of discouragement hung heaviest over Saskatchewan," writes prairie historian James Gray, "for the very simple reason that in season and out, Saskatchewan had it worst on all cotmts - worst drought, worst grasshoppers, worst rust, worst cutworms, worst hail."lg "One could never believe the desolation existing in southem Saskatchewan did he not see it himself: a shaken Minister of Ldmtu, Gideon Robertson, wrote Prime Minister RB.Bennett in 1931. "The whole country for more than one hundred miles in extent..& a barren drifthg desert."20 Newspaper reporters touring the devastated areas reported seeing land that was 'lifeless as ashes," "gaunt cattle and horses, with little save their skins to cover their bones," and people who appeared "haggard and hopeless."21 By 1937, the stricken area encompassed eighteen million aues - fully one-quarter of Canada's arable land In a speech to the House of Commons on February 11 that year, Minister of Agriculture J.G. Gardiner said the survival of nine hundred thousand people was at stake.= The dry heart of PaUiser's Triangle - including Kate Graves' district in the McCord area - bore the brunt of the environmental destruction. In places, hot winds turned the soil to the consistency of talcum powder and whipped it into dust storms that darkened the sky, choked roads and coated everything in their path23 "Terrible wind and the whole country blowing," Kate's neighbow George Hamilton wrote in his diary in the spring of 1930.24 Some days the air inside Hamilton's house was so laden with dust that the family had to light a lamp to see. At her farm down the road, Kate could hear the wind howling "veryfvery high" and see "the big weeds go rolling past."*s Cleaning up dust inside the house was a constant chore. Sand drifted several feet up the garden fence. In park of the municipality, blown soil filled ditches and buried fences and shelterbelts. '%low outs" -- patches of land entirely stripped of topsoil - appeared in RM 45 and ne@burhg municipalities.26 United Church officials assessing the region forty kilometres north of McCord said it was "like the Saharaf with not a green thing to be seed"'' Not all parts of Saskatchewan were turned to ddthg sand during the Great Depression. There were areas, especially north of the Yorkton-Saskatoon- Battleford line, that experienced adequate ainfall and normal crop yields. And some farms in the south had good years. But there were many that failed to yield a decent crop for six, seven, or more years in a row.28 One family who lived eighty kilometres southwest of McCord went fourteen years without a crop.29 Gop yield statistics tell the story. Wheat yields in Saskatchewan dropped from an average of 23.3 bushels an acre in 1928 to 2.7 bushels in 1937; the average annual value of the province's wheat crop from 1930 to 1938 was one- quarter of the average value for 1924 to 1928, and the value in 1937 was only one-eighth the previous figure-30 Kate Graves' region fared worse than most of Saskatchewan and the other two prairie provinces. Wheat yields in the Rural Municipality of Madcota dropped horn twenty-five bushels an acre in 1928 to five bushels in 1929, and stayed low for most of the decade. Farmers harvested no wheat at all in 1931 and 1937.31 The annual yield in RM.45 and surrounding municipalities did not exceed five bushels an acre for the six crop years between 1929 and 1934.32 Gop District No. 3 (which toolc in Kate's municipality and much of southwestern Saskatchewan), recorded the lowest crop yields in Saskatchewan for six years between 1929 and 1938; its yields were the lowest in the prairies for three of those years.33 The statistics translated into worry and discouragement for families like Tom and Kate Graves and their relatives. Many ye- they could not even salvage enough of their wheat crops for fodder, and had to rely on the government to sustain their animals. When Georgrna Edith (Graves) Gsths was hailed out in Alberta in 1934, her sisters in Saskatchewan commiserated by recounting their own experiences with crop failure- "It is very, very hard to lose a aop when you had the prospect of one," wrote Katey (Graves) Hatlelid, who farmed about thirty kilometres east of McCard. Katey said her family was experiencing its worst year yet Last year we had 300 bushels threshed and quite a lot of feed stacked- This year we have less ked by far and not a bit to thresh We will have to get relief feed to keep the chickem alive, and soon too. Our garden was good last year and that helped. This year it is very poor. If it would only rain even now we might have tomatoes and cucumbers, but it seems to dry up from day to day.34 Ethel (Graves) M-a, who lived with her husband Ed on the farm immediately south of Kate and Tom's, said: "We have almost got used to having no crop, as we have had nothing for thrashing for four or five years."JS Wind and heat played havoc with farmers and farmland in a number of ways. They destroyed mops and gardens by blowing away freshly sown seed, slicing off young sprouts, and scorching mature plants- They also dried up sloughs and native grasses, so that there was little for cattle and horses to drink or eat, and some farmers shot their horses rather than watch them suffer.36 'We need rain so badly it is a shame the pasture is so bare," wrote Ethel in June 1937. "The livestock would die of wony if they knew how to worry."37 Desperate to save their animals, many farmers turned to the only plant that seemed to thrive in the drought-stricken 1930s: the bushy, prickly tumbleweed. In September 1931, the McCord correspondent for the lodnewspaper said: A large quantity of green Russian thistle is being put up by farmers in these parts for cattle feed for the coming winter, and thus what has been looked upon as one of the special curses of the country is proving a blessing in disguise. Even fairly ripe Russian thistle stacked with a sprinkle of salt brine mixed therewith makes good feed.38

No doubt farmers were less pleased with the thistle when blowing soil caught in its spiny branches and entire fields - like the one across the road from the 55

Graves' farm - became dotted with hummocks that farmers found impossible to dtivate.39 Besides wind8drought and weeds8the -on brought hail, wheat rust epidemis, and swarms of insects and gophers that stripped gardens and amps of vegetation. In 1938, with Saskatchewan farmers looking at their most promising crops in years, hail, grasshoppers, wireworms, sawflies and rust destroyed UO-miEon worth of wheat.40 In Kate's municipality, phalanxes of green army worms wriggled over crops, barns8and houses; there were so many on the roads that vehicles spun their wheels.41 Kate wrote in 1937 that worms and grasshoppers polished off what little garden the drought spared. "Never tasted peas, beans, com, beets or lettuce this year," she said9 Saskatchewan's environmental and economic problems had enormous social consequences. A large proportion of the population was hwfcold, poorly clothed, ill-housed and in poor health. Hundreds of thousands quired government help. While between 10 and 25 per cent of urban residents were on relief at various times throughout the 1930sf the province's dpopulation suffered to a greater degree.43 "By the autumn of 1937, the completeness of the crop failure in that year had placed two-thirds of the rural population on the =lief rolls, and 290 of the 302 rural municipalities of the province had sought assistance from the government," writes A.E. BritneIl.44 The Saskatchewan government spent far more on relief than any other province -- more than three times the rate for each of the other Western provinces and the Canadian average. The province's 1929 to 1938 relief expenditures (financed mainly by the federal government) exceeded $153 miUion.45 Relief in drought-stricken nual Saskatchewan took several forms. In the first three! years of the Depression, many farmers who'd experienced crop failure . worked for muumal. wages on municipal road Several of Kate Graves' 56

neighbours, including George Hamilton, earned money this way.% The provincial government also distri'buted direct relief in the form of flour, coal, roOa and dothin& and agricultural relief in the form of seed grain, fodder, binder twine and tractor fuel.47 The Rural Municipality of Mankota received almost $600,000 in direct relief and nearly $1.5 million in agriculture-rehted relief between 1929 and 1939.48 The provincial government helped drought-stricken areas further by paying doctors a monthly amount and providing grants to hospitals to cover individual relief patients' bills.49 And, relief for some came in the guise of the fledgling dominion-provincial old age pension program. Between 1928-29 and 1937-38, the program dispensed $16.8 million to low- income Saskatchewan residents who were seventy and older. The number of . pension applicants more than tripled over the course of the decade, and officials recognized that the increase was directly due to the Depression.50 Certainly, it was persistent poverty that drove Kate and Tam Graves to apply for the pension in 1937, when they were seventy-one and seventy-three respectively. Kate wmte in June of that year that a pension administrator was considering her application: ''Ihope he hurries a little. Times are hard."51 There were years when virtuaUy every farm family in Kate Graves' region was on relief. Kate's letters and the Rural Municipality of Mankota's relief ledgers indicate that Kate and Tom received relief each year between 1930 and 1938.52 Municipal relief records also list the names of Kate's neighbows and five of her children's families.53 Both Kate's municipality and the Rural Municipality of Waverley, which bordered the Graves' land on the east, were acutely aware of their residents' plight. Codminutes are filled with pleas for more and speedier government help9 'This municipality has suffered more crop failm than many municipalities now obtaining relief and as a result practically 100 per cent of its residents are now absolutely unable to help themselves," said the Rural Municipality of Waverley's codon August 5,1933.55 Councillors asked the provincial govemment to increase relief food orders by 30 per cent and to send in train carloads of fruit and vegetables to compensate for gardens ruined by grasshoppers and drought. Hundreds of carloads of fruit, vegetables, do* fuel and other items were, indeed, shipped to southern Saskatchewan throughout the Depression, by the dominion government, the Red Cross, churches and charitable organizations. But government relief and donations were not enough to provide families with anything close to an adequate standard of living. Relief allotments were far fsom generous, and did not allow for fruits and vegetables.56 Some families were unable to obtain relief and sumived on nothing but potatoes, or bread and tea. ''Famine conditions are on us now," said a United Church minister at Mortlach, west of Moose Jaw. 'We have people in the neighbowhood who have been staming."57 No one in Kate Graves' circle stamed, but some family members went without coffee, tea, sugar, cakes and pies, and some neighburs ate Russian thistles as greens.58 The Graves' diet sometimes lacked variety, espeaally when the garden failed, but eggs, chickens, milk, home-ground wheat pomdge, bread,

canned pork, and food donatiom from other provinces sustained thern.59 Kate wrote on October 28,1937, that carloads of relief mots, aturnipsand apples had

amved. "My, I amglad we are to get apples at last"60 Relief apples were often bruised from being shovelled out of the train car, but frugal Kate canned the damaged ones. She was proud of her ability to make scant food supplies "spin out," and it is amadng to contemplate that, wen in the worst years of the Depression, she always had enough butter, eggs and relief flour in the house to produce a cake for company. And, she and her daughters always seemed able to provide turkeys, picldes and pies for family Christmas dinners and community fowl sup. Not surprkingly, the physical health of many Saskatchewan residents suffered during this period. Doctors reported cases of malnutrition and scurvy in southem Saskatchewan. The health of many people also deteriorated because they could not afford to seek attention for bad teeth, poor eyesight and other medical problems.61 Medical services and medical relief were not readily available in some areas. The poor general health of the people in Kate Graves' family and district is stdcing. Colds, flu and appendicitis abounded. Several members of Kate's family contracted diseases related to nutritional deficienaesb2 And several postponed necessary medical treatment - the most tragic case being Kate's eldest daughter Mary, who died of tuberculosis in 1933. The Great Depresion affected the lives of Saskatchewan residents, and Kate Graves' family, in many other ways. Farm homes grew more weathered and drafty as the decade progressed. Clothing and household utensils wore out63 Newspaper reporters touring the area southeast of Kate's municipality in 1934 reported that broken window panes were patched with cardboard, lard pails replaced worn out tea kettles, and two sisters took turns wearing "the" dress to school.^* A Red Cross observer wrote that bedding in Saskatchewan's southwestern municipalities was so scanty that people layered quilts with old newspapers to try to keep warm. "Many of the housesf now almost entirely without paint, have been banked up with earth and even manure, to prevent the entrance of the icy gale which searches out each chink and crevice."6s Economists estimated that "it would take W million to restore the clothing of the rural population of Saskatchewan to pre-depression standards."66 Many people, including members of Kate's family, could not afford gasoline or licences for their cars, so they took out the engines, hitched them to horses and called them '%ennett buggies" (after the prime minister) or "Andemon carts" (after 59

Saskatchewan's pmnier).67 Kate Graves' farm buildings were as grey as everyone else's in the 19309. George Hamilton banked his house with earth, and perhaps the Graves did, too.68 Both Kate and Tom were kept busy stoking the house's stoves in wintertime to try to keep the house warm. Neither rode in the family car anymore, but went by horse and buggy. Kate's hand-operated bread mixer had broken down long before. She scrubbed the family's clothes on a washboard because she couldn't afford a gasoline-powered washing machine. She wore second-hand clothes donated by churches and relatives in the East, and grew tired of wearing the same old brown coat year in and year out: "Once, coming out of church in August someone was saying they had not seen me. I said everyone should know me. I am not like the butterflies; I don't change my coat every year."@ Kate went without many things she would have liked during the Depression. She could not afford trips to Alberta and British Columbia to visit the daughters she hadn't seen for more than sixteen years. She could not afford a comfortable retirement on the West Coast, or in the communi~of McCord. Her "wee nest egg" shrank considerably. But she was not as desperately poor as women in districts to the southwest who collected dried cattle dung for fuel and sewed their families' underclothing, and sometimes their own ho-, out of flour sacks.70 Nor was she like the Saskatchewan woman who wrote Prime Minister Bennett to say her shivering family slept on gunny sacks71 Kate found the resources to feed and clothe herself and her family. She had blankets on the bed and coal in the stove. She had a telephone at a time when more than 32,000 Saskatchewan farmers dropped the service because they could not afford the annual eleven-dollar mtal fee.72 She could scrape together six dollars for an occasional month of household help. And, she could lend money to needy kin, send dimes to grandchildren for their birthdays, and buy stamps for letters. The Great Depresson threw all of rural Saskatchewan into poverty. Large and small- scale farmers alike were on relief. Nonetheless there were some, like Kate Graves, who fared better than others. Psychologicallyf the Great Depresion took its toll. Saskatchewanfsmental institutions overflowed with men and women suffering from ''Depession shOdCn73 The desperation in Mrs. Ted East's personal letters to West= &QCI~I= women's editor Violet McNaughton is palpable-74 This is the southwest Saskatchewan woman whose family experienced fourteen crop failures. Trapped in an unhappy marriage and plagued by medical problems and povertyf she said she understood why some people killed themselves or lost their sanity. EventuaUy, Mrs. East had a "nervous brealcdown," from which she apparently recovered. Kate Graves' friend and neighbour Carrie Bromley was not so fortmate, dying in 1939 while undergoing "insulin treatmentsf' at the Weyburn Mental HoepitaL'S Myrtle Moorhouse, who farmed northwest of McCord near Ponteix, describes the efkct years of dust storms, insects, relief, pitiful agricultural prices and blown-out crops had on her husband: ''He would walk from window to window crying, with his lungs M of sand that he had breathed in while seeding."76 Moorehouse's husband turned to alcohol and eventually committed suicide. Hewas not alone. People from Kate Graves' area who killed themselves during the Depression included a man who could not find farm work, a farm woman who took strychnine after her baby died of influ- and a seventy-six- year-old "devoted wife and mothef' who leapt into an abandoned well. 77 Thousands of people chose a less drastic escape route, abandoning their farms for new homes in northern Saskatchewan or other parts of Canada. Over the course of the decade, at least one-fifth of the population left the province.78 Kate Graves' region lost more than 22 per cent of its farm population The number of farms in the Rural Muni6pality of Mankota fell from 478 in 1931 to 383 in 1941 - the second highest decrease out of eight municipalities in the area79 At least forty-five thousand farmers - most with government help - migrated from southern Saskatchewan to the province's forested north.80 "Many People Leave McCord Area for North," said a headline in August 1931.81 The article reported that four fdes and nine train carloads of household goods had left the district. Kate's foster son Charles Graves joined the exodus in 1934. Although Kate hated to see him go, she said, "It is well, as he has just a sand pile."82 She was much less sanguine three years later when her son Edward and his young family left for Quebec in search of a fresh start "My it is lonesome without the young folks," she wrote in a rare expression of overt emotion the day after Edward left83 She went on to say that a once-prosperous neighbow was scouting for land near North Battleford, Saskatchewan. "Our best farmers talk of leaving." Although Kate and Tom ansidered following Edward to Quebec, they decided to remain in Saskatchewan. Said Kate: 'This seems to be home 'foreordained,' as a canny old Heiland man would say."s4 It is important to point out that people's lives were not entirely giim during the Depression The marriage rate slowed, but young men and women continued to wed and have children85 Edward married George Hamilton's daughter Dorothy in 1933, working for a local farmer for one dollar a day to earn money for his wedding suit Kate's eldest granddaughter Enid married at the height of the Depression in 1937, and delighted Kate a year and a half later by presenting her with her btgreat-grandchild. Grandchildren continued to arrive throughout the decade, and several of them visited and even lived with Kate and Tom. Besides her family, Kate enjoyed reading, working in her garden and. of course. attending meetings of the Women's Missionary Society and the local Homemakers' Qd.Saskatchewan farmers were voracious readers in the 1930s, bwingfreely from the growing number of travelling and extension libraries.86 The number of Rural Homemakers' Clubs in the province grew. inmasing farm women's oppmtunities for social contact-87 People also found -0yment in picnics. dances. rodeos, sports days. cullling bonspiels. community suppers. berry-picking expeditions, and other inexpensive activities. Listening to the radio was a favourite past-time among families and neighburs. Widespread poverty didn't stop people from purchasing or rigging up homemade sets.88 Although the Graves did not own a radio for most of the -on, Kate enjoyed listening to church sermons. political speeches. soap operas and other programs when she visited other people's homes; towards the end of the decade she often phoned her daughter Ethel to get the radio news. She liked to hear and read about what was going an in the world - about the Dionne quintuplets, King Edward VIKs abdication, and Hitleis machinations in

Emoppe.89 Like many people during the Depression, Kate was interested in politics?* But they were not a passion with her and she did not appear to see them as the solution to the province's. and the country's. ills. She was a Li'beral supporter from way back, and she didn't think much of the radical new party that emerged in Saskatchewan in the early 1930s, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). "I wonder if there is a chance that times will ever get back to normal without a revolution," she said in 1933. 'We hear so much Communist talk these days. We are not Sodalists in this house."91 Southern Saskatchewan did not begin to return to "normal" until the drought lifted in 1939. The *gleefully reported in June that unaccustomed rainfall had flooded out "three little pigsff in the McCord area and that wheat in low-lying spots was actually under water? Crop yields improved in 1939 and 1940. but plunged again in 1941. Grain prices remained low. Farmers in Kate's municipality and many others in the southwest continued to require government assistance into the 1940s. Only after farmers reaped a bumper aop in 1942 and wheat prices rose in 1943 could Saskatchewan genuinely say the Great Depression was over.93 For Kate and Tom Graves, the Depression began to ease when their old age pension cheques started coming in late 1937 and early 1938. Slowly, they began to re-build the farm. Edward returned in 1939, and the Graves stretched their thirty-dollar-a-month pension income to help cover his debts and support his family. Kate's garden began producing again, and the family's diet improved. For Christmas 1940, Kate and Tom felt they could finally afford to treat themselves to a radio. By the spring of 1941, the farm was in remarkable financial shape considering the previous twelve years. The Graves had accumulated a relief debt of several hundred dollars, and their municipal taxes were likely in arrears, but the provincial government reduced or cancelled most such debts in southern Saskatchewan during and after the Depression.94 Because they had gone into the Depression with no fann debt, the Graves were in a better position than farmers who faced years of unpaid mortgage bi3ls.95 Kate and Tom did not live to see the farm return to the level of prosperity it enjoyed in the 1920s' but they ensured that it survived long enough to be passed on to their son Edward and future generations. In fact, the farm would continue to support Graves family members into the first decade of the twenty-first century, more than sixty years after the Depression ended.% The final days of the Depression in Saskatchewan found Kate and Tom Graves still on the land. They were older and frailer, but they had survived an economic, environmental and social disaster of apocalyptic pqxxticms. Kate's experiences between 1929 and 1941 echoed those of countless other Saskatchewan residents. There was penury, illnessfdeath, family dis1ocation, environmental ruin, disappointment and worry. But there was also pleasure in family, friends, radio, and the taste of relief apples. Summing up Kate Graves' life overall, one could never accuse her of failing to live life My.From young motherhood through grandparenthood, she threw herself into the task at hand. She was physically, intellectually and sodally active to the very end. Her last twelve years were not what she hoped they would be. But she adjusted, just as she always had. Some people succumbed to mental and physical illness during the Depresion. Some fled. But Kate Graves endured. And she helped her family to endure. The balance of this thesis examines the various work and family-related strategies she used to survive. As we shall see, these strategies included, and were buttresed by, Kate's notions about men's and women's proper roles. 1. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 5 May 1930.

2. Britnell, The 68; H. Blair Neatby, Pow*. of ~floronto:MaadIan of Canada, 1972), 136; Thompson and Seager, -2-1939 1%; Lipset, Soclahsm,. - 119.

3. Ibid, 14,4841. . . 4. Quoted in Lipset, 44.

5. Ibid., 44-5.

6. A.E. Safarian, The in ~~~omnto:McCldhd and Stewart, 1970), 42.

7. Britnell, ne 72; Fowke,- Poliq, 259. Thex were the prices of No. 1Northern wheat on the Winnipeg Exchange. Farmers received considerably lower prices at the elevator; lower grade. wheat. brought even less money. James H. Gray, Jle Wm (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, I%), 199.

8. Safarian, Thein 84.

9. Thompson and Seager, Canada351. . . 10. F.H.Leacy, mto- of 2nd Qd. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 19831, M119-128.

11. Britnell, Wheat771.

12. Stapleford, 26.

13. Ibid.

14 Kate Graves letters to Georgina, 8 April 1931; September 1932.

15. Britnell, Wheat Ecanomv,8,98-9; JamesStruthers, PoFo State 1914-1PQL notonto: University of Toronto h,1983), 109,204.

16. Quoted in Stapleford, 267. . . 17. Leacy, Historicalof M119-128. Low agricultural @ces alone do not explain Saskatchewan farmers' prolonged economic difficulties. By inaeasing import tariffs in 1930 and 1931, the Canadian government protected eastern Canadian manufacturers' incomes at the expense of primary producers such. as farmers. Farmers' incomes fell rapidly, but their costs did not Friesen, . 385. Western agriculture bore the full brunt of both fluctuating exprt income and the rigid costs of the Canadian econorny,"writes A.E. Slfariw, The 199. 18. John Archer, Saskatchewan:(Saskatoon; Western Roducer Prairie Books, 19801, 225.

19. James H. Gray, Menstthe Deceff, (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1%7), 44-5.

20. Quoted in Strutha, No FQylt of Thg& 53.

21. "Milestones and Memories" by "The Stroller," --Post, 12 July 1934, quoted in Britnell, The60-1.

22. Gray, l3- 3.

24. George E. Hamilton diary, 1921-1932, McCord Museum, McM,Saskatchewan.

25. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 27 April 1937.

26. Peel, "RM.45," 389.

27. United Church officials were referring to the region between Cadillac and Lafleche. "Report of M and M Visitation," 7 July 1931, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon, United Church of Canada, Edmund Oliver Papers, A676, File XVILD.14.c A church official who was familiar with most of Saskatchewan said the area north of McCord dong Highway 13, between Assiniboia and Scotsguard, was "the worst place of all." "In that area there was no ploughing left The wind had blown the soil down to hard pan... around Ponteix the highway itself is blown out, the fence posts dong the mad are covered, the trees in the wind-breaks are covered with dust and have died - it is just a desert." %id, "Report of Visit of Mesrrs. Oliver, Cochrane, Endicott and Wilson to the Dried-out Area of Southern Saskatchewan," 7 July 1931. . 28. Gv, Dw555-6; Lip~et, SO- . 119; Blair Neatby, of 31.

29. Mrs. Ted East letter to Violet McNaughton, 8 September.

30. Britnell, Wheat, 69.

31. Peel, "R.M. 45," 220-390. 32 Loveridge and Potyondi, 213,2213,. . 33. Calculated from Tables 7,8,9, Hopkins, Palmer and Chepil, . 53-5.

34. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Flintoft, Saskatchewan, 12 August 1934.

35. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, 4 November 1934.

36. W- 1July 1937,12; Boyd Anderson, A of & . * (Sashtoon: Saskatchewan Stock Growers Assodation, 1988) 69; "Report of visit of Messrs. Oliver, Cochrane, Endicott and Wilson to the Dried-out Area of Southern Saskatchewan," 7 July 1931; Edna Jaques, All Wav: & (Saskatoon: Western producer Prairie books, 1977), 166-7.

37. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, 20 June 1937.

38.- 38.- 10 September 1931,2 George Hamilton wrote in his diqon March 1931, that he was burning Russian thistle. By August 1932, he was cutting and stacking it for feed. Also see Peel, "RM.B5," 389,391.

39. Allen McCrea personal interview, McCord, Saskatchewan, 14 July 2000; D.B. MacRae and R.M. Scott, South Cow:A of a Serigpf A*- in

(Saskatoon: Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 1934), 14.

40. Gray, Men 44, 50.

42. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 29 June 1937.

43. Alma Lawton, "Relief Administration in Sadcatom During the Depression," Saskatd\ewan -22 (Spring 1969), 58.

44. Britnell, The97. -. 124; Britnell, 98-9. 45. Lipset, Socrallsm, The

46. George E. Hamilton diary.

47. Blair Neatby, "The Saskatchewan Relief Commission, 1931-1934" 3:2 (Spring 1950), 41-56; Loveridge and Potyondi, From_Wood 219- 24

48. Some surrounding muniapalities received more, some less. Calculated hmTables 8,12,13, 14, IS, 16 and 17, Loveridge and Potyondi, From WvMountain 24.2-5.

49. Ibid., 221,243,

50. BritnelI, Wheat 11479. The number of old age pensioners in Saskatchewan increased from 3,343 in 1928-29 to 11,761 in 1937-38. In 1932, the maximum pension for a married couple Living together was $30 a month.

51. Kate Graves letters to Georgina, 29 June 1937.

52. Rural Muniapality of Mankota, No. 45 relief ledgers, 1930-40; Kate Graves letter to Georgi~,10 March 1932.

53. For example?there are 1-37 and 193940 records for Kate Graves8son Edward Graves, and 1936-37 records for her son-in-law Ed McCrea. Relief ledgers, Rural Municipality of Madcot., No. 45. Kate's foster son Charles Graves and sons-in-law M.J. Wallace and Martin Hatlelid are among relief recipients listed in the Rural Municipality of Waverley's minutes for 7 March 1931, Rural Municipality of Waverley, No. 44, Glentworth, Saskatchewan.

54. -ta. The FFanV-28-1978 (Mankota, Saskatchewan: Mankota Book Committee, 1980) 10-11; Minutes of Council Meetings, Rural Municipality of Waverley, No. 44,1930-42

55. Minutes of Council Meetings, Rural Municipality of Waverley, No. 445 August 1933.

56. Neatby, "The Saskatchewan Relief Commission," 47; Britnell, Jhe Wheat- 47, 151,169-70; Grayson and Bliss, The Wremd of -75-9. In 1933-34,the maximum monthly food allowance for a family of five was ten dollars, plus a bag of flour.

57. The minister told of a family that lived on flour for three months and had not eaten meat in six months. "Report of visit of Messts. Oliver, Cochmne, Endicott, and Wilson," 7 July 1931,19.

58. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 19 April 1933; Assaf, And the WwBlew, 29.

59. The Graves' garden was very poor in 1936 and failed altogether in 1937. Kate Graves Letter 14 September 1937.

60. lbid., 28 October 1937.

61. Britnell, Wheat 170-1; Wallace, "All Else Must Waii,"92-3.

62A young grandson developed rickets (assodated with lack of vitamin D and certain minds), and a granddaughter and daughter developed goiters (enlarged thyroid glads due to iodine defiaenq). At least eight members of Kate's extended family, and many neighbours, had appendectomies.

63. Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 171-5; Lipset, *. W;Loveridge and Potyondi, 216.

64. MacRae and Scott, 18.

65. "A General Vim of the Drought Area," Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina, Drought File, Red Cross Society Reports, 1936, SHS101.

66. A.E. Britnell, quoted in Lipset, . . 127-8.

67. Myrtle Moorhouse, Banting Publishers, 1 68. George E. Hamilton diary.

69. Kate Graves letter to Georgha, 19 October 1936.

70. Alice Butala letters to Violet McNaughton, 1December 1937; George Spence, Syrvivd of a -(Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1%7), S9;A&&& to #* 70.

71. Grayson and Bliss, -of 756. 72. About 34 pa ant of saska@chewanfarms had the telephone in 1931. Britnell, The Wheat 179-80. The Graves a telephone on June l2,1929. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 9 July 1937. 73. Brimell, me 143; Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 45,71,84-85; Scowby, "I Am a Worker," 12

74. Mrs. Ted East letters to Violet McNaughto~16 May 1938, 20 July-

75. Kate Graves letter to Ceorginil5 December 1939-

n. Kate Graves letter to Geor@&10 March 1932; Province of Saskatchewan Records of Registration of Bath, 13 hafib= 1940,26 May 194l, Rural Municipality of Mankota. The elderly wo- whose My found at the bottom of a forty-foot abandoned well lived on a farm noah of MM.7 2 s~eptember 1938,l- . 78. Lipset, Aman'an S- . 131.

79. Loveridge and Potyon& HW~-Athe 320-

80. Britnell, 202-3-

82 Kate Graves letter to GeorgP, 27 Fehar~19340

83. Ibid., 29 June 1937.

84. Ibid, 18 August 1938.

85. Britnell, The 18-

86. Brimell, 1211216. At various times throughout the decade, Kate appears to have read the Regina the -~wspapI and a newspaperethe- Franklin Centre, Quebe~ called the 87. Ibid, 121. At least two new Homemakers' Qubs formed in the McCord area. (Wood Mount& Historical Society, 1%9), 227,231.

88. Accordjng to cenauo for 1931, about 20 per cent of Saskatchewan farm homes had a radio in 1931. Britnell, 179. However, Bruce Baden Peel says most farms in RM.dS hd a radio histories and memoirs of the 1930s commonly mention radios. Peel, "RM.AS," 283-4;Moothouse, Buffalo 30; Eldm Anderson, meaPanorama Publications, 1996), 28-63; Came to Wwd 167; "prairie Wives jn Revolt," ~CI'OIO~~O),August 1935,19.

89. For ample, sce Katc Gmvg letter to Georgi~,26 Apd 1929: "I guess there will not be war for awhile. Hitler is afraid now- Tried twisting the lion's tail, getting him roused at last." 90. For an excellent sense of political views in Kate Graves' region in the 1930s, including tension between Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and other political party supporaers, see Moorhouse, WrnVal& 2526; and Boyd Anderson, -(Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan: Windspeak Press, 1996), 201-10.

91. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 3 April 1933.

93. Lipset, Soaallsm,* * 131; Loveridge and Potyondi, Wood 232-5.

94. Britnell, The 83-9. Rural relief was regarded as a loan which the farmer was expected to repay. Rural Municipality of Mankota relief records show that Tom Graves owed $283.57 for agricultural relief as of June 1938, and that the government cancelled half this debt in 1946 and the remainder in 1947. A "special relief ledger" for 1937-38 shows that the Graves also owed $183.28 for relief food, fuel and flow as of March 1938. In 1938, most relief in RM. 45 up to and including 1935 was cancelled, and in 1945, direct relief advances from 1935 through 1941 were cancelled. mta. 50 Y- 10-1 1. As the family's aops improved near the end of the depression, Tom was able to pay off a bank debt (for lumber used to build an addition onto the house earlier in the decade), and at least some of the family's municipal taxes. Kate Graves letter to Georgina: 10 October 1939; 2 October 1940.

95. Britnell, Wheat Ecow88-9. It appears that there were no signrficant loans outstanding when Edward Graves took over the family larm upon Tom Graves' death on July 13, 1941. Katey (Graves) Hatleiid letter to Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 25 August 1945.

96. Today the farm is owned by Kate Graves' grandson, Murray McCrea, whose mother was Kate's daughter Ethel (Graves) McCrea. CHAPTER THREE "I Like to Hoe MyOwn Row": Gendered Work Strategies

There is no gainsaying the fact that those brave, thrifty prairie farm women have never had the need of credit rightfully their due for the sacrifices they so willingly made in helping to maintain home and family in the real-life tragedy of these discouraging and distressful years. - George Spence, Member of the Legslatwe, Kate Graves' constituency, 1934-1938.1

Kate Graves' letters shed considerable light on what it meant to be a "good" Saskatchewan farm woman in terms of work during the Great Depression. Virtually every letter describes long days filled with labour in the service of Kate's family, home, and farm. Her values concerning work are very much in evidence. There is no doubt that Kate's work - and her ideas about work -- helped to sustain her and those around her. This chapter deals with the economic and attitudid strategies Kate employed to help feed and clothe her family and ensure the survival of the family farm. Kate's letters make it clear that her domestic and farm work strategies were exceedingly important. They show the extent to which Kate's family and the farm relied economically on her. At the same time, on a more subtle level, the letters reveal the limitations of Kate's work strategies. Yes, Kate Graves and Saskatchewan farm women like her worked extremely hard during the Depression Yes, they employed a range of vital work strategies; but they did so with the understanding that they were only doing what was expected of women and that they must not challenge male hegemony. Kate's letters and other sources show that rural women assumed inaeased respmsibility for the survival of the family and the farm, but they did not enjoy a concurrent increase in SdCio-economic power. They were bound by long- standing notions regarding gender and work that prevented them from assuming inaeased authority within their households and society at large. Women and men alike strove to adhere to a "separate spheres'' model which decreed that farm men were breadwinner-bosses and farm women were domestically-oriented subdinates. They could not allow women's work to outshine men's. Thus, as the comment by Saskatchewan politician George Spence demomhates, much of the work farm women did "to rnaintain home and family" went unrecognized and unlauded. In essence, this chapter explores the tension between rural Saskatchewan's awareness that farm women were playing a heightened economic role in the 1930s8and the need to discount this role in order to maintain the status quo. The chapter initially looks at the work strategies Kate Graves and many of the province's 164,000 dwomen used to sustain their familig and farms.2 It shows how women's economic resmrcefuiness and work influenced family members' well-being and the fate of the fann The chapter then discusses the fact that women's valuable contri'butiom did not translate into recognition and power, mainly because separate spheres ideology legitimized the marghlhtion of women's work. Men's and women's identities were tied to their location in their prescribed spheres, md they went to great lengths to preserve gender work boundaries. In the years leading up to the Great Depression, work on most Western Canadian farms was dearly divided along gender lines3 Generally, men devoted most of their time to the farm's principal source of income: wheat They worked in the field and tended to the horses, range cattle and farm equipment. Most women were principally engaged in housewo~lc,the care of children and adult family members, and dairy, poultry and garden work. They spent most of their time indmand near the house. The 1930s saw little change in this fundamental division of labour.4 Most men continued to direct their attention to crops and the farm operation as a whole. Some women joined men in the fields, but the vast majority stayed home. As we shall see, women's home-based work intensified and the value of their labour increased, but definitions of "men's work" and "women's work" remained almost constant throughout the decade. It is doubtful the Graves family and their farm would have survived the Depression without the countless hours Kate spent separating cream, churning butter, raising chickens, cooking, cleaning, sewing, laundering, gardening, carming, scrimping, and saving. When drought and low market prices decimated the family's wheat income, it was Kate's work in the house and yard that took up the slack. Like thousands of other western rural women, she was the farm's economic maiirstay.5 American sociologists Cornelia Butler Flora and JanL. Flora argue that farm women on the Great Plains historically reduced economic risks on farms by diversifying farm operations and providing "hidden but necesary" work6 Similarly, Canadian historian Carolina Van de Vorst argues that Manitoba farm women's efforts bdfered families during economic downturns such as the Great -on: Wheat cheques may have financed the bulk of farm improvements in prosperous years, but womenfs economizing and their sale of butter, cream, poultry products, vegetables and country provisions provided the family and the farm with the material means critical to &val in poor economic times7 The work strategies Kate Graves used to help get her family and the farm through the Depression were many and varied. First of all, she and the women in her family laboured long and hard. Secondly, they employed reproductive, or unpaid, strategies related to food preparation, housework and child care. And lastly, they generated critical income from domestic-related farm products. Directly and in-y, these strategies supported household and farm activities. Perhaps the strategy that most defined Kate Graves was her unrelenting will to work Her letters describe days that began at 5 am. and ended at 10:30 p.m.8 It seems she rarely sat down except to write letters. "I am told by some that I never seem to rest," she wrote in 1935. "Well, I must say I like to hoe my own row and keep going as long as the Lord gives me strength."9 Neither her advanced age nor bouts of illness slowed Kate down.."I can't stand much heavy work, but can get around as quidc as many younger folk+" she said on December 17,1934.10 Despite persistent indigestion and pains in her side and left arm, she worked in the garden and house with her daughter-in-lawDorothy and her granddaughters. "I work or help all the time," she said. "Could save myself more than I do if I would."ll Her arm bothered her so much in the spring of 1940 that she often soaked it in the hot water reservoir attached to the kitchen stove to try to relieve the pain. "I have not been so well, yet keep agoing," she said.12 Kate wasn't the only woman in her family who seemed driven to work. Her daughter Ethel (Graves) McCrea, who was seven months pregnant and whose doctor had ordered her to stay in bed until late moming, insisted on rising at 6:30 am., milking two cows, feeding and watering skty-nine chickens, and undertahg a -or housecleaning. Despite the doctds concerns, she said, "I have got along quite well so farf and I hope to continue to, as it is hard to be laid up when one wants to be up and doing." 13 The Graves women's long, arduous work days were consistent with those of many Saskatchewan farm women during the Depression.14 A West- -survey estimated that the province's farm women worked a minimum of 12 hours daily.15 A sixty-three-year-olddomestic worker told the newspaper that she worked fifteen to seventeen houts a day, and another farm woman said she put in sixteen-hour days "millring cows, caring for poultry and a large farm garden, and keeping house for five of us.. .and hying to economize, patch and do without."'6 The latter woman's comment sums up most rural Saskatchewan women's work strategies in the l93Os.l' Women met their family's subsistence needs by providing dairy, poultry and garden products for the table. They kept the household running by preparing meals, washing dishes, laundering clothes and minding children. And they economized by patching old do- sewing bedding and clothes (often out of second-hand clothes and cotton flour bags), postponing the replacement of worn out household items, and refusing to purchase non-essentials. By assuming responsibility for these unpaid domestic activities, women kept the family's work force functioning and its cash expenditures to a minimum. Precious income could then be directed toward farm expenses rather than family provisions.lS Like most Saskatchewan farm women, Kate Graves and her female relatives spent the bulk of their time engaged in domestic household tasks. 'We seem to accomplish little besides meals and the daily work of a farmefs home," Kate wrote in 1934.19 Her entire day was structured around meal times. This arrangement was particularly convenient for men. It was assumed that whatever else she was doing - whether she was at home or away - she would have men's meals on the table, or arrange for other women to feed them. Kate frequently mentioned returning home in time to start meals and the need to interrupt her writing to begin cooking. "It is almost six, so I will get supper," she wrote on

April 6,1931. "Men may be here soon."20 When Kate was away visiting relatives, she arranged for her granddaughters or her daughter-in-law Dorothy to provide Tom's meals. The extent to which Kate's work supported farm operations by nourishing male workers is readily apparent. Not only did she regularly feed her immediate family and the grandchildren who lived with her, but she often fed the farm's hired help, keshmg crews, salesmen, men for whom Tom was doing blacbmith work, her sons-in-laws and their hired men, and other male visitors. In a one-month period in 1934, Kate cooked and served sixty meals for people besides herself, Tom and a grandson= I have had lots of company for meals. A man who worked at our arwas here for 3 or 4 dinners. Jesse Rule (was here) one day. Charley was here for dinner one day, and Fernie two, and others, and so it keeps me busy - baking bread and so on Bob's man was here 3 nights and for rneals."zl Kate also reported on May 4,1934, that her daughter Jessie, who lived on a ranch in the hills to the south, "has had so many men, with branding and vaccinating the cattle, and two hired men. Small giants who eat like all possessed. We have had them here several times."*2 Kate's daughter Katey womed about the toll meal preparation was taking on her mother. On August 27,1937, she wrote: Dear Mother, she is so little and hail these days, but her spirit is just as keen as ever, and she has so much work to do, and such a lot of people for meals. It just surprises me how she does it ali. And she is such a good cook, no wonder people love her cooking. But it makes her far too much wmk23 For Kate and other women in her family, providing meals meant considerable time and labour. It meant kneading quantities of bread dough and many tums of the butter churn handle. "Yesterday..l baked six loaves of bread and a lot of buns. Enid churned and I made over 10 lbs of butter," Kate wrote on June 24,1932.24 Providing meals also meant caring for Kate's approximately fifty chi* hatching chicks, providing feed and water, gathering eggs, and preparing birds for the roasting pan. It meant sowing, weeding and harvesting garden vegetables. 'The garden was the main source of food for the family," recalls Kate's granddaughter Enid. "Everybody depended on their garden for vegetables."*S And, it meant canning dozens of items for winter consumptioh On August 18,1938, Kate reported that she had canned twenty-two quarts of beans, twelve quarts of peas, and many jars of bean, beet and cucumber pickles. Her daughter Emma did up more than fifty-six jars of peas in the summer of 1935. "She is a hustler," said Kate? Kate and other women in the family also preserved wild berries and larger fruit' which they purchased in bulk in the fall. In November 1934, Ethel said: "I made up 100 quarts of saskatoom and a box of crabs (crabapples), two of prune plums and two of peaches and three baskets of grapes' so we don't have to buy much dried fruit"27 Kate and the women in her family also canned chickens8pork from the two or more pigs the family usually kept, and beef they obtained in a sharing arrangement with their neighbows (known as a beef ring). Other work strategies which helped to sustain Kate's household included washing clothes, sewing, and general economizing. Doing the familfs and hired hands' laundry was a gruelling affair that involved carrying and heating water to fill washtubs' scrubbing clothes on a washboard, rinsing clothes' hand-cranking a clothes wringer' emptying the wash tubs, hanging clothes on the line to dry, and ironing. The entire process could span two days. Kate displayed considerable resourcefulness when it came to economizing on clothing. She saved money by mending clothes, knitting mittens8sewing quilts out of cloth scraps8altering donated dresses' and making rag rugs. Sometimes her daughters sewed dresses for her out-ofinexpensive material. Kate also proved her economizing mettle with food by replacing store-bought rolled oat cereal with home-ground wheat, and converting much of the family's rnillc into cottage cheese. 'We three like it very much and no milk is wasted with me when it SOW."^^ And Kate made limited food supplies stretch out, no doubt with the help of her cooking skills. "We are a little short of fruit this year. Going a little easy with it. Will have enough if we eat reasonably. Some people don't know how to make things spin out like your mother."29 Another of Kate's strategies involved the care of children- She often tended young grandchildren so that other women and men in the family could do their work, and she saw to the needs of the one or two school-age 78 grandchildren who lived with her throughout the Depression. Although the older children helped Kate and Tom with domestic and farm chores, Kate's daughter Katey observed that their presence meant a heavier workload for Kate. "So much extra washing and mending, and Mother has to do all her washing on a board ...Poor Mother at the age of seventy still bringing up d-"30

Kate Graves and other women in her drde clearly bore an enormous workload, yet they appear to have accepted it without question..Such toil was expected of them, and they expected it of themselves.31 Y-amworking very hard just now," Kate wrote in July 1940, at the age of seventy-four. "Just canning and the daily work, like all the women."32 Kate recognized that she worked hard - sometimes "too hard for one of my years" - but she was not resentful of her lot.33 She was proud of her capacity for work "I find lots to do here and often feel tired, but I still have ambition," she said.34 Indeed, Kate judged other women according to their ability to handle a heavy domestic workload without complaint. Many of her letters express admiration for women who are "good workersf' and have "amiable" dqositions. "Katey is so clever," she said in December 1934. Wow she manages and keeps things running so smoothly these days - and no complaints. All the family love her so."Js And, "Emma cooks for seven besides herself. Does not complain."36 In Kate's eyes, working hard and maintaining a cheerful demeanour were synonymous with being a good farm wife and mother.37 Expectations of farm women did not stop there, however. Not only were Kate Graves and many other rural Saskatchewan women expected to wdlingly work themselves to the bone performing unpaid tasks at home, but they were wedto devise income generating strategies that would help to carry the farm and family. Both nral Saskatchewan society and women themselves believed that paid labour were part and parcel of women's work38 Throughout the Depression, large numbers of Western Canadian farm women sold and bartered eggs, butter, chickens, turkeys, cream and garden vegetables. When environmental and economic conditions allowed, many women increased production of such items and branched into other areas like wool and honey.39 Most of Saskatchewan farm women's eamings in the 1930s came from the sale of poultry and dajl products. Statistics demonstrate the dramatic effect women's work with chickens and cows had on the province's farm economy. The percentage of Saskatchewan agricultural revenue from dairy and poultry products rose from 4 per cent in 1928 to 23 per cent in 1937. Meanwhile, the percentage of revenue from wheat fell from 80 per cent to 33 per cent. Saskatchewan farmers continued to depend on wheat for most of their income in the 1930s, but the grain's relative importance shrank considerably. Meanwhile, the importance of dajr and podtry products increased five-fold.40 Poultry was an especially popular cash crop in Depression Saskatchewan, as it seems branging chickens and turkeys required little more than grasshoppers to swive.41 Kate, her daughters, and many other women in her area raised poultry for sale. 'Most everyone went into turkeys to get a few doUars," recalls one local resident." Kate mentions selling two young roosters to a local man for fifty cents, and selling her surplus roosters to the buyer from the Swifts company, out of Moose Jaw. Every December, families in Kate's region helped to slaughter each other's flocks and prepare them for market33 Selling eggs was another important income earning strategy. In May 1930, Kate reported that her hens laid twenty-six eggs per day. "We eat 12 a day if alone and more when wehave company, then use a good few to cook. Yet we sell a few dozen each week."u George Hamilton took twenty-sevendozen eggs to town on April 25,1931, and he and his neighbow sold sixty dozen eggs in McCord a year later.45 (Although Hamilton doesn't say so, the eggs were almost certainly the product of his wife's labour.) Besides poultry products, manmany women in the prairie provinces sold butter and cream. In fact, government officials remarked that growth in the dairy industry was "one of the bright spots in Saskatchewan agriculture'' in the 1930s. More cream was shipped to the province's sixty creameries than ever before, resulting in a doubling of commercial butter output over the course of the decade9 Kate and several relatives shipped cans of cream to Saskatchewan creameries throughout the Depression. She also sold milk to neighbouring families, and considerable amounts of butter to a local store and her son-in-law Bob McCrea In January 1935, for example, she sold Bob sixteen pounds of butter, for fifteen cents a pound. She also appears to have sold her butter to a creamery. It wasn't easy producing large amounts of butter, especially in hot weather. Gallons of cream had to be separated, transforxned into butter in a barrel chum, cooled in the cellar and pressed into one-pound prints (moulds). large crocks or cans. But. Kate managed. "It is a job in the summer to make first class butter," she wrote on July 26,1937. "It takes about 11 days to fill a 5 gallon can. And ours was called no. 1special, which pleased rnef.4' Kate and other farm women did not receive much for their labour. Eggs that Kate sold for twenty-two cents a dozen in 1925 went for as little as four cents a dozen in the 19309, and butter that once brought one dollar a pound dropped to seven cents a pound.* A five-gallon can of cream fetched $1.50.49 But women and their families were grateful for the income nevertheless. Time and time again, prairie people who lived through the Depression say that farms and families could not have shvedwithout the proceeds of their butter, poultry and cream. 'We bought groceries, repairs, everything, all from a aeam cheque," says a woman whose family farmed near Saskatoon.50 Kate Graves, herself, recognized the value of her income generating labour during the Depression She said she and Tom felt fortunate to have eggs and butter to "swapf' for groceries, and she believed that "if we could get a fair price for eggs and butter we would need no relief."Sl Kate's income, small as it was, allowed her to buy groceries and other household items that were not covered by the relief allotment. It may have purchased the garden seedsf cases of cucumbersf and dress material she bought at the local store. On April 17,1937, Kate mentioned that she sold eggs in town and bought "some towelling and cotton and groceries."52 Her income may have financed the wages she paid her domestic helpers, the small gifts she purchased for family members at Christmas time, and loans she made to her husband and other relatives. It may also have enabled her to invest in farm animals, including two cows, a horse and the "four young cmkels" she purchased in 1938.53 Kate seemed particularly proud of her few livestock purchases. "I own one cow, a fine holstein," she said on July 26, 1937. "Have always owned her."54 The fact that most of Kate's eamings went towards the family's household needs meant that Tom could direct much of his income towards farm expenses. He spent money he earned as a blacksmith on building materialsf and may also have used it to buy pigs and horses. In 1938 and 1940, Tom paid the family's municipal taxes and a bank debt out of the fann's wheat cheques.55 The Graves' income from wheat and Tom's blacksmith work was unreliable during the Depression. Crop yields were low, wheat production costs often exceeded retunsfand many people couldn't pay Tom for his blacksmith work.56 Tom's declining health also meant that he wuld accomplish less and less in his shop. But Kate's poultry and dairy-related labour ensured that the family enjoyed a small but steady cash flow.57 Thus, not only did her eamiqgs finance the household, but they directly and indirectly financed the fann. The economic contribution Kate Graves and other farm women made to their families and farms in the 19309 cannot be over-estimated-By working extremely hard and punning vital work strategies at home and in the market, rural women influenced the course of their families' lives. Often it was women's work that kept families on the land. The turning point for the Graves family came in 1937, when Kate's son Edward moved to Quebec. Kate dedin Saskatchewan - raising chickens, growing a garden, and caring for family members and farm workers. Her efforts ensured that two years later, when Edward's Quebec venture failed, he had a farm to return to. Soon after his mother's death in 1941, Edward inherited the farm. By sustaining the farm as long as she did, under very difficult circumstances, Kate ensured Uat family members would continue to benefit from her labour long after she was gone. As we have seen, Saskatchewan farm women shouldered enormous work reqmuibilities in the 19309. Their families' very survival depended on them. But did the increased value of women's work translate into increased recognition and power? Did Kate Graves and her peers acquire greater authority in sodety and the home? The answer is "no." Farm women's work remained largely invisible during the Depression. Women toiled in obscurity at their domestic tasks and, when it became apparent that their poultry and dairy-related work had become the farm's economic mainstay, it was often appropriated by men Historian Bruce Baden Peel, who -aced and wmte about the Depression in Kate Graves' municipality, said: Formerly wheat farmers had scoffed at the raising of poultry or the selling of dairy products as a means of earning a livelihood. Poultry and cows were only for women folk to make a little pin money. During the drouth years many a dirt farmer depended upon his small flock of poultry and few cows to supplement his meagre relief grocery cheques.58

Although Peel recognized the inmead importance of chickens and cows, he attnited ownership of them to male farmers. Womenfs pin money became men's farm income. Like Peel, many of Western Canadafs male-dominated farm families and public institutions failed to give farm women their due. They tended to deny them economic and social equality, both inside and outside the home. Not that most farm women demanded equity. Necessity and tradition kept them tied to their roles as the farm's uncomplaining domestic servants and unseen economic props. A number of sources indicate that male farmers, government authorities and observers developed a new avtionfor poultry and dairy products in the 1930s. George Hamiltonfs diary shows that he was much more interested in eggs and poultry than he had been in the 1920s. Between 1921 and 1928, he mentioned selling eggs three times; he only noted their price once. Between 1929 and 1932, however, he mentioned selling eggs six times, and noted the price each time. He also noted at least ten occasior~~when his family and the neighbows butchered or sold turkeys, roosters and chickens. He made no mention of such activities in the 1920s. Nor did he mention the fact that poultry was likely his wife's responsiity.59 In 1937, Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture J.G.Taggart told the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations he would like to see all Saskatchewan farmers raising dairy cattle' poultry and gardens, and that a growing number were doing just that. "It is the rare farmer nowadays in Saskatchewan who does not keep poultry and attempt to keep a garden. His methods may not always be of the best, but the effort is made anyway."6* Newspaper reporters who toured drought-stricken southern Saskatchewan in 1934 mentioned districts and individual farmers who relied on poultry and miUc cows for sustenance and income. "Poultry are kept for family use and are regarded as a necessity," they said of one area "One farmer markets 16 fowl every two weeks regularly; he sells four dozen eggs a week/"'= And, farmers attending a meeting in 1939 in Kate Graves8area pointed out that money from butter and eggs "bought necessities not posmile to procure with the relief order." The farm- passed a resolution asking the government to continue relief payments because income from dairy and poultry pducts alone was insufficient to meet families' needs. "The low price of farm products of this nature seems to make it clear that unless a farmer were milking numberless

cows and raising countless hens his returns would necessarily be vqsmdL8'62 These sources suggest that individual farmers, the government and the press reagnized the value of poultry and dairy products - and assumed that they fell under the purview of men The enormous amount of work women did with poultry and cows was not publicly acknowledged. In essence, men tended to receive credit for women's work They came in at the end of the process - after women had fed the animab8milked the cows and churned the butter - and helped to collect the money and discuss the importance of "theif' chickens and cows with reporters and at public meetings.63 Women's much larger work investment was rendered largely invisible. Interestingly, some farmers may have had mixed feelings about being associated with chickens and cows during the Depression. Comments by several observers suggest that respected farmers were dismayed at having to rely on non-wheat income. For insbnce, a United Church minister descri'bed a "real farmer" who was "living off his few chickens. He is a good mah..Now he is

strictly up against itff64The subtext was that Ulings were pretty bad if men had to stoop to relying on chickem and cows. Chickens and cows were for women. "Real" farmers grew wheat. Newspaper reporters and other observers weren't the only ones who failed to acknowledge farm women's economic contributions during the Depression. Neither the dominion government nor the legal system recognized the economic value of farm women's work Canadian census takers did not record farm women's work as housewives or their role in the production of milk, cream' butter, chickens' eggs, vegetables, honey and other farm produ~ts.~5And the labour and money women invested in the farm was not legally recognized or pmtected.66 Their direct and indirect contributions to the farm did not give them income or prom rights. Firstly' they were not guaranteed wages for their housework or farm chores; even the butter and egg money legally belonged to their husbands.67 And secondly, they had no legal right to half the marriage property if the marriage dissolved. Even if they invested money in farm livestock or other aspects of the farm operation, most did not have their name on the property title or a legal partnership contract that secured legal and economic recognition for their contri'bution. Like pioneer women before them, and farm women who came after' thousands of Western Canadian farm women were in a tenuous economic and legal position during the Great Depression. Writes historian Nanci L. Lanf ord: The farm or ranch woman remained an unpaid and overworked employee in her husband's business, and the law reinforced the views of subsequent generations that this was just the way it was. In 1984, only 40 per cent of Alberta farm women reported that they had any legal partnership with their husbands in the family enterprise.68 How was it that the majority of Saskatchewan farm women received so little recognition for their work in the 1930s? What explains such profound social maqhdhtion? For the answer, we must look to the early nineteenth century and the flowering of the ideology of separate spheres.69 Victorians in eastern Canada (as in the United States and elsewhere) were bombarded with the message that women we"naturally" fitted for the private sphere and men for the public sphere. Clergymen, medical authorities8the popular press and organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union exalted women's domestic and maternal roles. Ideal women were submissive, pious, morally upright wives, mothers and daughters who cared for home and family while their menfolk engaged in the aggressive world of business and public affairs. 'WomanNsfirst and only place is in her home," said one idealope in 1874.70 Women's realm was defined by their reproductive activities, and men's was defined by productive work. These ideas supported and were intertwined with pahiarchal notions about male superiority. Men were held up as family breadwinners and chief decision-makers, while women were constrained to be supportive, deferential dependants71 Separate spheres ideology made its way west with the pioneers, where it was propounded by religious leaders, women's organizations, and farm periodicals and educatm.72 In the years before the Depression, women who attended the Manitch Agricultural College's domestic science courses and public lectures learned that the ideal farm woman was a capable household manager and helpmate to the farm's "senior partner."'3 Not only was she an efficient housekeeper, but the model farm woman was a nurturing cheerful and appropriately submissive companion for her husband and children. "There is more than manual labour to be done if there is to be a real home," said a Women's Institute guide. "The mother must radiate cheerfthe~~~hope, faith, and again faith. She must generate energy and emulation and perseverance. She must lead and yet appear to trail behind."74 Men, meanwhile, were uged to be efficient farm businessmen who provided a solid material foundation for their families and allowed their wives sway in their separate sphere. "The traditional patriarch gave way to the benevolent patriar&/ writes scholar Jeffery Taylor. Wewas still firmly in control but in a managerial rather than a patemal sense."75 Men were bosses and women were their willing, hardworlang helpers. A woman writing in the mcomparedthe ideal farm husband and wik to an efficient team of horses: "John may lead the load, but Mary surely

does her share of the p~Iling."~6 Many Canadian and Amexican scholars have debated the extent to which men and women on the western frontier actually adhered to the separate spheres ideal. The consensus seems to be that distinctions between the spheres were initially blurred - that women took on fieldwork and other chores that traditidy belonged to men-" As homesteads became established and farmersNgeneral prosperity grew, however, it appears that gendered work divisions hardened. Women became inueashgly respomiile for household, garden, dairy and poultry work, and men became solely respo~l~l'blefor cmps.78 "On expanding farmsteads, grain production grew into an exdusively male endeavour, a trend which started before the turn of the century and continued on in the twentieth century," WTites Carolina Van de Vor~t~~~ By the onset of the Depression, then, the image of the dominant male wheat farmer and his lesser domestic helpmate was firmly established in Westexn Canada. Separate spheres ideology was alive and well, and continued to operate throughout the decade.80 Even though the relative economic importance of farm men's and women's work was reversed during this periodNmany people clung to patriarchal ideas about male superiority and sexual division of labour* They wntinued to divide labour along gender lines and to accord fann men more recognition and paver than farm women because, in many cases, their gender identity and status were at stake. When wheat crops failed, men's image of themselves as "real" farm men was threatened. It is hardly surprising that they would strive to maintain authority over their fields, farms and familes. Many of them took public credit for women's essential work with chickens and cows - and relegated women to the shadows - because they had to be seen as providers and heads of households. Wheat was more important than chidcms and cows, but in the absence of wheat, men would make do with controlIing the products of women's work. It went without saying that proceeds from women's products would b absorbed into the (de)farm economy.81 This is not to suggest that all farm men saw things this way, but it does help to explain why farm women tended to be marghdked and why their work was generally subsumed by men during the Depression. . . 1. George Spe!ne8Survival of a Vm(Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1%7), 69. Between 1934 and 1938, Kate Graves8 farm was located in the provincial constituency of. Notukeu and was rep-ted by Spencer a Liberal. -ve mve (Regina: Queen's Printer, 1971), 51,126,166; James H. Marsh, ed. Canadian ed. noronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999) 2227.

2. There were 164,165 females age fifteen and over in rural Saskatchewan in 1931. Seventh Table 18,958.

3. For a thorough discussion of male and female work roles on commercial Manitoba grain farms, see Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work in Manitoba," 79-120. On Alberta and Saskatchewan farm women's segregated work roles, see Nand L. Langford, "First Generation and Lasting Impressions: The Gendered Identities of Prairie Homestead Women" (PhD Diss., University of Alberta* 1994), 78,171. Also see discussions concerning the "sharply gender- divided work pattern" on large wheat farms on the American Great -# and on American farms in general. Nancy Grey Osterud, 'Gender and the Transition to Capitalism in Rural America," -667:2 (Spring 1993), 20-22; Carolyn E. Sachs, . . (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Allanheld), 1983, 46-7.

4. Van de Vorst, 'A History of Farm Women's Work," 7Pln; Scowby, r)ivine Dis~onttent~"56- 87,128-146; Kate Graves letters to Geotgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths, 1930-1941.

5. A female Western contributor conducted an informal su.of the newspaper's readers in 1936 which determined that garden work, milkrng and raising poultry were "on most farms part of the routine work of the housewife, and were considered the mainstay in providing for the needs of the family." Quoted in Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 144.

6. Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora, "Structure of Agriculture and Women's Culture in the Great Plains," -8 (F819881, 195-7.

7. Van de Vorst, "A Histoy of Farm Women's Work/ 230.

8. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 19 April 1933; 2 May 1933; 21 March 1932. Kate sometimes rose at 4:30 a.a to make breakfast for Edward so that he could line up early at the elevator in McCord for relief oats.

9. Ibid., 5 December 1935.

10. Ibid., 17 Decembet 1934.

11. Ibid., 15 May 1933.

12Ibid., 14 May 1940.

13. Ethel (Graves) McCrea 1- to Georghm, 20 June 1937.

14. It should be remembered that Saskatchewan farm women's work in the 1930s was made doubly hard by adverse environmental conditions and poverty. See Mrs. Ted East letter to Violet McNaughton, 8 June; Gray, Wm174s; Wallace, 3,14,59; Spence, 69; Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 21 April 1932; 2 May 1933; 25 May 1936; 17 April 1937; 11 May 1937.

15. Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 77.

16. Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 160; Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 140.

17. Saskatchewan farm women's work strategies crossed and connected the lines drawn by post- industrial work categories that separated private household consumption from the public arenas of wage-work and market Women's "productive labouf produced dothin& eggs, dairy products, vegetables and canned goods for home use. Those same produds generated cash in the marketplace or could be bartered for needed items. And women's "reproductive labo~reproducedsocial life and provided domestic services. Rural ;omen during the Depression stretched family resources by caddy patching clothing, and knit communities and families by observing birthdays and holidays and maintaining communities and church gatherings - even as they literally reproduced the next generation An historian who divides women's labour in the home into not two, but five categories, is Vem~caStrong-Boag, "Keeping House in God's Countgry: Canadian Women at Work in the Home," in On I& " ed. Craig Heron and Robert Storey (Kingston and Montreal: Mffiill-Queen's University Press, la),124-51.

18. Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work," 1264,169. 19. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 15 June 1934.

20. Ibid., 6 April 1931.

21. Ibid., 27 February 1934.

22. Ibid., 4 May 1934.

23. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafledre, Saskatchewan, 27 August 1937.

24. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 24 June 1932.

25. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog telephone interview, 27 January 2000.

26. Kate Graves letter to Georgim, 5 August 1935.

27. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgha, 4 November 1934.

28. Kate Graves letter to Geoqha, 17 June 1935.

29. Ibid., 19 April 1933.

30. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 20 March 1936.

31. Christa Scowby argues that Saskatchewan women worked hard during the Depression "not out of a sense of nobility or devotion to duty, but because there was work to be done and the was no one else to do it" And, Saskatchewan farm women who became farm wives between 1936 and 1945 told Julie Dorsch they "just did what had to be done." No doubt Kate Graves and other women in her family felt the same way about work to some extent. However, Kate's letters also reveal that she took pride in her hard work and saw it as a moral virtue. It also seems that Kate's work made her feel needed and important, and that it allowed her to keep her mind focussed on issues other than the desperate overall situation in which she and her family found themselves. In this way the act of working served as a survival mechanism for Kate during the Depression. Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 6; Dorsch, "You Just Did What Had to Be Done," 113.

32 Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 26 July 1940.

33. Ibid., 24 May 1937.

34. Ibid., 21 March 1938.

35. Ibid., 18 December 1934. 36. Ibid., 27 May 1935.

37. The chief thing Kate Graves' former neighb011.r~W. Assaf, remembers about his mother is that she was a quiet person who never complained and who sacrificed her needs to those of the family. When Assaf s mother died of cancer in 1934, at age 45, Kate attended her funeral. "How she worked out here," said Kate, "and such a nice garden." Gssaf, 26; Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 4 May 1934.

38. There was one important distinction: Married women generated income, ideally, by selhg products produced at home, while only single women earned wages. The latter could do laundry, cook, sew and teach - in other words, perfonn a variety of productive and reproductive labour for wages. Their mothers, who did similar work at home, made an wen greater economic contribution to families and farms, but one not as easiiy measured in terms of hourly wages or the going price for eggs and butter.

39. Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work," 151-71;Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 12844. -. 40. Calculated from Britnell, W)teat 71-2 ;and AhGOV- (- (- 1937)

41. Peacock, to 58; Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 160; MacRae and Scott, 7.

43. Kate Graves 1- to Georgina: 6 December 1932; 13 November 1934; 18 December 1934; 179,184; George E. Hamilton Diary.

44. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 5 May 1930.

45. George E. Hamilton Diary.

46. of of the pro- of Saskatchewan. 1954-55, 47. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 26 July 1937. For detailed descriptions of the butter-making process, see- 123; and Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work," 162 One of Van de Vorst's informants said that after making ten pounds of butter (which Kate often did), "you would ache in your back from standing up." Kate's hard work produd a superior product that would have brought the family more money than a lower grade of butter.

48. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 20 September 1925; 21 April 1932; 22 July 1932

50. Saskatchewan Women's Institute, # (Saskatoon: Saskatchewan Women's Institute, 1988)' 24. Also see Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work," 151-71; Peacock, Wheat Farmer,; Wav- 123.

51. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 8 April 1931; 19 April 1933.

52 Ibid., 17 April 1937.

53. Kate Graves letter to Geo@na8 11 November 1938.

54. Ibid., 26 July 1937. Also see 3 September 1937, in which she said she paid for half of another milk cow and "claimed" part of a horse.

55. Ibid., 10 October 1939; 2 October 1940. It should be noted that Kate's poultry and dairy- related income was not sufLicient to meet all of the faxxuly's household needs. For the first two- thirds of the Depression, the family relied heavily on relief for food, fuel and clothing. Later, Kate and Tom's old age pension cheques made a critical contribution to the family economy. And some of the farm's wheat income, and no doubt Tom's blacksmithing money, paid for groceries. Kate says Tom used part of the 1938 and f 940 wheat cheques to pay accounts run up at the pcelystore.

56. Ibid. 18 August 1938. Thomas told Kate grain prices were so low it would take three harvested bushels to pay for every bushel of seed he planted.

57. Van de Vorst, "A History of Fann Women's Work," I%, 167-9.

59. George E. Handton Diary. The diary provides an excellent account of his daily work activities; poultry care is not among them.

60. "Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations: Agriculture in Saskatchewan. Address by Honourable J.G.Taggart. December 16,1937," Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina, Pamphlet File, Agriculture-Saskatchewan.

61. MacRae and Scott, In 7, 13-4. 63. Many men aka helped butcher the poultry.

64. "Report of visit of Messrs. Oliver, Coduane, Endicott, and Wilson," Edmund Oliver Papers; also see MacRae and Scott, In the- 13.

65. Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 61,145; Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 209.

66. Rokgs-Magnuswm,"Hidden Homesteaders," 179-80; Strong-Boag, "Pulling in Double Hamess," 411,416; Langford, "First Generation," 8,143-4,148,159,170-2.

67. A number of Canadian and Anterican scholars assume that most women controlled their earnings from eggs, butter and other a@cultud products. For example, Osterud, "Gender and the Transition to Capitalism," 22; JoanJensen, to Woa (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 238; Van de Vorst, "History of Farm Women's Work," 151-69. However, it seems that prior to and during the Depression, the husbands of a significant number of women did not allow them to keep their earnings. A 1922 smey hund that only 17 per cent of Manitoba farm women had personal spending money. Langford, "First Generation," 142-4,171. Also see Strong-Boag, "Pulling in Double Harness," 411.

68. Langford, "First Generation and Lasting Impressions: The Gendered Identities of Prairie Homestead Women" (PhD. Diss., University of Alberta, 1994), 170. Also see Michelle Boivin, 'Tarm Women: Obtaining Legal and Economic Recognition of Their Work," in in. Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women (Ottawa: Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1987), 49-90. . . 69. For discussion concerning separate spheres ideology, see Comacchio, The Boa20- 21,152-5; Rentice, et al., Canadian Wppl~,1 ed. Ramsay Cook and Wendy 1976); Barbara Welter, "The Cult of TN~Womanhood: 1820-1860," -18-2 (SUNXI- I%), 151-74

70. Quoted in Fkentice, et d., -n W- 157.

71. These were middle-dass prescriptions, but came to be "the measure of respectability" for working+lass men and women as well. Cook and hiitchinson, The6.

72. Langford, "First Generation," 41,de; Robert L. Griswold, "Anglo Women and Domestic Ideology in the American. West . in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," in Utomen. ed. Led, Wssel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press; New York Harper CobPublishers, 1988, 1990)# 15; Marilyn Barber, "Help for Farm Homes: The Campaign to End Housework Drudgery in Rural Saskatchewan in the 1920s," -canadensis1 (June1985), 6-8; Eliane Leslau Silverman, "Womm and the Victorian Work Ethic on the Alberta Frontier: Rescription and Description," in The R& 19Saskatchewan.19Q ed. Howard Palmer and Donald Smith (Vancouver: Tantalus Research Limited, 1973), 93.

73. Jeffery Taylor, 1 1Movement- Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994), 76-9.

74. Quoted in Taylor, . . 80. . 76. Quoted in Taylor, - 73. - 77. While there is no consensus on how one defines the biurring of pddspheres on Western Canadian farms in the early decades of the twentieth century, for the purposes of this thesis women's traditional sphere encompasses work that took place in the home and yard, including work associated with the garden, milk cows and poultry. Men's sphere encompasses work in the fields and work associated with horses, beef or range cattle and farm machinery. For a genuine blurring of spheres to occur, men and women wddneed to spend sustained amounts of time in each other's work realms. On the gendered aoss-over of work mles during the pioneer period, see Van de Vorst, "A History of Fann Women's Work in Manitoba," 35-67; Silverman, Women and the Victorian Work Ethic," 92-4; Langford, "First Generation," 65-8. As Langford notes, it was not a "two-way exchange," as most men only did men's work, while women did both men's and women's work

78. Although wdmen ventured into the public sphere when they sold poultry, dairy and garden products, these activities were home-based and traditionally considered women's work. Thus, they did not significantly blur gendered work lines. Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 11,58-9,128.

79. Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work," 82.

80. An artide which encapsulates separate spheres thinking in Western Canada in the 1930s is "The Home Beautiful," Cvoand-WmMay 1937,22. Writer Irving Gould profiles a farm family near Hemaruka, in drought-stricken southeastern Alberta. The husband works the fields, e-iects farm buildings and r&airs vehicles in his well-equipped shop, which is "the hub around which the entire farming operations turn." Meanwhile, his wife maintains a beautiful, cultured home environment amid soothing gardens.

81. Butter and egg money that many women once called their own was, of necessity, sacrificed to the needs of the farm and family during the Depression. So, although the economic value of women's work increased, one could say they actually lost economic power. CHAPTER FOUR Wow Fathex Says I Cannot Leave, They Need MeVery Much": Women's Response to Marginahation

Thus far we have observed that farm women's labour generally did not buy them increased public recognition and power in the 1930s because Saskatchewan society clung to traditional ideas about men's and women's proper spheres. Now, let us see how Kate Graves and her peers responded to their marginahation. How were assumptions about men's and women's work roles manifested in Kate's fdy,and how did they affect the amount of power she wielded in her household? It seems that this family granted women authority in their particular sphere?but ensured that men retained their dominant status vis-B-vis the farm and family. Prairie farm women's response to their inequitable position took a variety of forms during the Great Depression Many women knew the value of the work they did and wrote the Prod- and other publications seeking fairer treatment for farm women and greater acknowledgement for their work' Some bridled at men's dominant economic position in society and the home. One woman equated marriage with slavery and said a husband was not "a real fifty- fifty partner."2 Other women believed they -eyed equal partnerships with thehusbands. To some, this meant that men's work and women's work complemented each other and contributed jointly to the maintenance of the farm and family. To others, equal partnership meant that husbands and wives willingly performed work in each other's realms. One woman said she helped outdoors when ha husband was away or busy, and 'T get help with washing and other housework when he is not busy."3 Interestingly?the vast majority of women who voiced their opinions in the press assumed that women's primary responsibilities were to their homes and families. Even the loudest critics did not question this basic tenet of separate spheres. Many women vigorously asserted the "sanctity of the family" and women's maternal and domestic roles. 'Women! Your place is in the home,"wrote one correqxmdent,4 r a female essayist said there was: no higher, holier or more important mission than the making of a happy home ...there is no public official, no professional man, whether he be lawyer, dodor, clergyman or businessman, so imp-t to civilization as the mother, the home-maker.5 Kate Graves certainly bought into prevalent ideas about men's and women's work responsibilitiesP She expected both sexes in her family to follow the separate spheres blueprint Women were to excel as homemakers and mothers. Thus, her daughters and granddaughters were praised for carrying out gender spedhc work like housework, sewing and childcare. "Emma is a great little manager," she said of one of her daughters. "She is a good cook and can sew nicely."' She recalled that her daughter Mary was "such an excellent housekeepe~,"and she hoped Mary's daughter Enid would "prove as good as she grows older and has it to do. She will, I am sure."g She also commended Enid for being "good in her way with childred"' At the same time8the blueprint dictated that men assume positions as breadwinners and heads of households. In Kate's view8 they must work hard, assume overall responsibility for the farm and family, and provide dependents with adequate shelter and physical comforts. She praised her son Edward, her husband, and her son-in-lawEd McCrea for being "god workers'8 and showing "ambition8' "Ed is not one bit lay," she said.10 When Kate's son-in-lawBob McCrea (Ed's brother) bought a large supply of groceries for his family8Kate declared that '%e is a good provider."" Although Kate usually refrained from overtly &ticking family members in her letters, she didn't hesitate to condmthem when they veered from the model of the good homemaker or the good breadwinner. She believed her daughter-in-law Dorothy to be a poor household manager who "does not how the meaning of being economical,'' and she stripped Bob of his "good provider" status when he developed alcohol and money problems:12 Bob is boozing pretty bad owing to that Beer Parlor. They need so badly a floor in their kitchen and have no W.C. (water closet) or any sewing machine. It is terrible and he is an idler..Such a man would drive me crazy. I like a worker ...It is sad for the wife and family. Most men and women in Kate Graves' world held fast to their socially constructed work roles throughout the 1930s. Although the men were no longer the family's true breadwinners, they and the women in their lives behaved as though they were. Obviously, it was important to these families to sustain the status quo. Perhaps men's and women's gendered identities and self-esteem depended upon it Hence, they employed a number of strategies to ensure that men's work remained apart from women's work, and that men essentially retained their dominant status. Firstly, men and women continued to perform presai'bed gender tasks. We have seen the type of work that principally engaged women in Kate Graves' circle. As for men, drought or no drought, they continued to get out there on the harrows or the mower, doing what field work there was to be done. The fact that some farmers in southem Saskatchewan reseeded their crops several times in a row after they were blown out suggests that they were driven to do field work against all odds and all logic13 Other work the men in Kate's cirde performed included repairing farm equipment, cutting weeds, fencing, butchering pigs, and hawwater, coal and relief feed. Feeding, watering and herding cattle and horses also appears to have been men's work. Men's work responsibilities frequently took them to the neighbows and to town, where they conducted business with other men - selling grain at the elevator, paying store 98

accounts and filling out relief and grain permit applications. Men seemed to have easier access to transportation than women; women often relied on men to drive them by car, wagon or buggy to town and elsewhere. Perhaps this is why men often accompanied women to sell their poultry, eggs and butter, or like George Hamilton, sold these products themselves.l* Men rarely crossed gendered work lines, and if they did, it was in limited ways. For instance, the men in Kate's immediate family ploughed the garden and planted corn and potatoes, and Thomas and Edward sometimes milked the family's cows. After her son left for Quebec, Kate wrote: "Edward was a good milker and cared so nicely for cattle and horses. I never needed to worry when he was at the helm."l5 Men's direct involvement in poultry seems to have been limited mainly to December butcherings - men killed and pIucked outdoors and women cleaned and pulled pin feathers indoo~s- and accompanying wives to town to ship dressed poultry and sell eggs.16 If men weren't busy with their own work, they sometimes "helped" women do the laundry. Edward sometimes hauled water from the river and turned the handle on the clothes wringer-On a few occasions, Thomas helped prepare food. 'q told your Pa to put bread in oven," wrote Kate, "and he was baking it when we came home at elwen-Had potatoes all pared. He is a treasure."l7 Kate was pleased, and a trifle amused, when men in her family tackled women's work When her daughter Jessie was sick, Kate observed that although Jessie's husband Bob was "chief cook and bottle washer," it was a good thing their teenage daughter was on hand.'* She also noted once that Tom was mending one of his coats: 'This is the second one this afternoon, and he says there is still a third for him to work at. I am sure you feel sorry for hia He says he is so particular he has to do it hhself.19 A letter by Kate's son-in-law Matthew Wallace hints at what men in the Graves family thought about crossing gendered work boundaries. Matthew, who had been widowed for a year and was the father of twenty-year-oldEnid and eleven-year-old Sylvia, noted that Enid would be away for ten days, until April 1. "I will be quite a cook by that time, don't you think? If Enid and Sylvia go off and leave me I guess I will be able to get along."20 Matthew felt the need to assert that he knew that it was his daughters' job to do the cooking, and to joke about the fact that he would be doing women's work Perhaps he was embarrassed to find himself in such a position. In fact, Kate's letters show that Matthew often invited his relatives for dinner and, as Kate invariably pointed out, was a good cook. It was not the norm for men to occupy women's work sphere in this family. The fact that Kate always commented on it when men aossed gender work lines, that she painted Thomas as something of a character for mending clothing, and that she and Matthew joked about men's attempts at women's work shows that such things didn't happen often?' One particular comment by Kate shows just how entrenched her ideas on men's and women's appropriate responsibilities were. "Matthew had dinner with us last Friday," she said on January 28,1936. "I thought if Mary could have seen his overcoat - needing mending - he does his best though."= Even though Matthew's wife Mary was dead, the expectation that she would be appalled at and feel responsible for the condition of Matthew's coat was there. So was the assumption that a man couldn't be expected to take care of of clothing and himself without a woman's guidance. The women in Kate's family occasionally made forays into men's work sphere. Kate's daughters Ethel and Jessie sometimes ran the farm or ranch when their husbands were away. When Ethel was in charge of the farm in the summer of 1937, Kate noted that she had "lots of chores to do." In addition to caring for 141 chickens, "a little colt has to be brought up by millc in a pad"'3 Ethel was also responsible for the farm the following summer when she was pregnant and supposed to be cutting back on her work. When Jessie's husband Bob went to Quebec with a train car load of horses to sell, Jessie wrote, "We miss him alot and I have all the worry of the pasture cattle on my mind."24 Although Jessie had the help of a male hired hand, and Ethel was aided by a teenage niece, the burden of responsi'bility rested with them. This is not the same as saying they had ultimate authority for the farm operation, however. There is a difference between having work respom%ilitiesand having power, between temporarily managing a farm and owning it." As will be discrtssed hter, the women in the family likely enjoyed fewer overall economic and decision making privileges than their husbands. Although Kate noted the extra work required of women when they were left to mind the farm, she did not praise them in the same way that she praised men when they crossed into women's work camp. Perhaps Kate and other women in her family took it for granted that they would assume men's responsibilities when men were away. Kate seemed to think it was having a "trusty hired man" on the ranch - not a wik -- that gave Bob McCrea the freedom to travel around the countryside.26 Perhaps it was simply expected in Kate's family that women would do men's work when men deemed it necessary?' Men could count on women to assume men's responsibilities when men went off the farm, but women could not count on men to handle women's work for any length of time.28 It seems from Kate's lettas that women appreciated men's occasional help with meals, laundry and other women's work, and interpreted it as a sign of though-ess towards women. Such help was welcomed, but not expected. Men decided whether or not they would help out, and if they were busy with men's work, or chose not to do women's work, that was their prerogative. George Hamilton's diaries indicate that he helped with laundry during the winter months, but not during the rest of the year when he was busy with the aops. Tom Graves tended to only take up the sewing needle in the winter time, when there was little outdoor work. And Kate's granddaughter Enid (Wallace) Kolskog says Kate was fortunate that her men folk did some garden work There were families where the men rarely set foot in the garden: There were husbands and there were husbands. Some sure helped, and o*ers took it for granted that the garden was where the woman was supposed to be. She was the boss in that area. Even if the men had time to pitch in and help with hoeing, they wouldn't think of doing it because that was for her to d0.29

Occasional exceptions aside, Kate and others in her family seemed to take men's and women's segregated work respomiities for granted. They assumed that farm women's principal place of work was the house and yard, and that men's realm extended to the fields and beyond.30 They assumed that men would conduct most of the business concerning the farm, and that men would work and control the land. Sometimes Kate actually spoke of grain aops as belonging to men. It is not surprising, then, that women in Kate's family apparently did not do field work or herd cattle. Using wives' and daughters' field labour would have made economic sense; even if the farnily had to pay a female domestic to replace the woman's work in the home, it would have been cheaper than hiring a male fieldworker.31 But, the men in Kate's circle employed a number of strategies which, m effect, kept women out of the field. Often, men exchanged labour amongst themselves or hired male relatives to do the work. On many occa~ions,Kate's aale relatives and other men in the neighbourhood banded together to do each othem' field work. Sometimes complicated arrangements were worked out between men to take care of outdoor tasks. One year, for instance, Edward hired hjmsel£out to do harvest work for a neighbow and arranged for a male cousin to do the outdoor chores on Kate and Tom's farm m exchange for a milk cow. At least two of Kate's -in-laws appear to have had permanent or semi-permanent hired hands. Even though the families in Kate's cirde were on relief and operated on the edge of sumival, they found the resources to ensure that only men worked with wheat and cattle herds. Kate noted on Apnl20'1936, that her son-in-law Bob had hired a man so his daughter Marjorie "won't have to ride the range."32 And Kate's daughter Ethel wrote on November 4,1934, that her family's aops had been poor for four or five years in a row and that they required relief feed for the horses, pigs and chickens. But somehow they managed to pay their grocery account at the local store and their hired hand's wages "Cattle are not worth much but we will have to sell some to pay a few debts that have to be settled. We sold a few horses but the money won went to Tidqr...also our man."33 In Ethel's family, paying the hired man was as much a priority as covering the grocery bill.34 Perhaps one reason people in Kate Graves' circle eschewed female field labour was because they belonged to an established family/community network that offered a plentiful supply of male workers.35 But there may have been more to it than that. By not involving women in field work, these people were actually going against a historical pattern. According to this pattern, farm familes in Western Canada and elsewhere in North America used women field workers when they were hurting economidy, and did not use them when they prospered. Middle and upper strata farm women rarely engaged in field labour.%When so many Saskatchewan farms became economically unstable during the Great Depression, large numbers of women returned to the field. Indeed, there were families in Kate's area and other prairie regions who relied on women's unpaid work in the field during the Depre&m One woman in the neighbowing municipality of Waverley did most of the family's stooking and "helped" stack feed27 A woman who wrote the West- Prod~saidmany women were "doing a man's work outside as well as looking after a home and children..-simply because hubby hasn't got the money to hire anybody to do it"38 And a Red Goss observer said there were farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan "whose wives have driven teams in the field and handled spades and pitch forks to aid in the struggle for existence."Jg However, it seems that most people in Kate's vicinity, and Myher family, were reluctant to let go of the desire to keep women back at the house. The fact that Kate's family went to such lengths to ensure that fieldwork remained a male preserve shows how important it must have been to them to maintain gendered work identities. Perhaps the men's status as breadwinner- bosses, and their mid-level position in the male agricultural hierarchy, was at stake. The men in Kate's fdymay have needed to control the aspects of farming which rural Saskatchewan deemed most important in order to think of thdvesas masculine beings and dominant figures in their households. They may have felt that relying on women's field labour made a man even less of a ''real" farmer than if he relied on his wife's chickens; thurgs would have to be prew bad indeed for a decent man to allow his wife to drive teams and handle spades. It seems the decision to exclude women from the field was less about economics than it was about male pride. Not that women would have been eager to add field work to their enormous list of responsiities. In fact, the women in Kate's family may have demonstrated agency by resisting men's work-* While men banded together to get the farm chores and fieldwork done, women likewise worked together to handle work in their sphere. Often Kate and Ethel, or one of Kate's other daughters, spent the day working together, and sometimes Kate's daughter-in- law Ida Graves or niece Maude Flick came to visit and work. *Maudevisited us from Thurs. am.until Wed. p.m.," Kate wrote on August 2,1938. "She was a great help to me in canning peas and beans, and we did up apricots and gooseberries and saskatoons."41 On many occasions, Kate and her daughters hired female teenage relatives or other young women to help with housework, poultry, and mdking. Even though money was scarce they, like their menfolk, found enough to hire workers of their own sac. In September 1937, Kate and her husband were nine dohin debt on their relief bill at the grocery store, yet Kate hired a neighbour girl for five weeks to help with milking and other chores. The women in Kate Graves' family, and their men, must have been prepared to do whatever it took to ensure that women's work got done by women. No doubt it was as important to women's gendered egos to manage the home as it was to men's to oversee the fields. This brings us to the question of how much personal power Kate and the women in her family wielded. Did their work and economic contributions translate into authority within their households?* It appears that Kate and her female relatives were entitled to make decisions in their particular realm. The women controlled their work processes and made decisions concerning their housework, poultry and gardens. For instance, in 1941 Kate told her daughter- in-law Dorothy she could have all Kate's chickens in exchange for six eggs a day. Kate was also in charge of hiring fexnale help. On April 13, 1939, she said: "Jessie Burnard coming on 18th to work a month for me. I hope to clean house and make garden.=Itold her mother I could only give her $6 a rnonthm43Sometimes the women in Kate's family shared domestic workers. Women may also have decided on the purchase of most household goods. Kate Mote on August 2, 1938, that she had obtained a cold pack canner from Eaton's catalogue, and on May 28,1940, she said, T bought a twdnamer oil stove."" There is no indication that Kate sought Tom's approval for her decisions regarding the chickem, hinng domestic workers8or her household purchases. Men, meanwhile, enjoyed decision making authority in their sphere. Kate indicates that it was Tom who bought the family's horses and made arrangements with other men to handle men's outdoor chores and field work. For example, on May 18,1940, she said he paid his son-in-lawEd to put in the aop. and a year later she said he bought another horse to do field work. "This is five he has bought."45 As noted earlier' men's work realm was greater in circumference and was accorded more status than women's realm. Men travelled farther afield, making decisions concerning the farm and proceeds of the grain crop (if there were any). On September $1940, Kate wrote: Your Pa went with Ed to Mankota to see the secretary treasurer of our municipality8Mr. R H. Stinson. One has to get a permit before they can sell any wheat and Father paid Ed all up. You see Ed put in the seed and then combined it and drew our wheat to elevator.* George Hamilton's diary indicates that he often worked, travekd to town, and conducted business with male neighboms and relatives. "Bought Harry's farm," he noted on October 7'1929.47 The men in Kate's circle seem to have discussed their decisions concerning the crops and the farm with their wives. Kate, Katey and Ethel knew what fieldwork the men were doing, what state the crops were in, and how the proceeds were being spent Kate obserrred several times that Thomas had cashed the wheat cheque and paid various bills. Katey wrote on March 20,1936, that her husband hauled wheat to the elevator because they needed the money to pay for their daughter's post-secondary teaching education. No doubt the women believed they were in econdc partnership with their husbands8and influenced decisions conceming the farm. But the fact remains that they were the men's decisions to make. The men owned and controlled the fields?and made decisions conceming the products of the fields. This gave them more overall power than women. The question of Kate's power relative to her husband naturally arises. How equitable was her relationship with Tom when it came to major decisions conceming the family and farm? This is a difficult question to answer. On the one hand?Kate appears to have been a dynamic force in her household and marriage - a strong-willed, competent woman who was certain of her opinions and who actively participated in decisions concerning the farm. On the other hand, she regarded the men in her family as heads of households who had ultimate decision-making authority.48 She deferred to her husband on several occasions, even though the issue at stake was important to her. And she never complained about him or criticized his decisions. It seems as if there was a tension between Kate's desire to daim authority and her desire to appear to be a proper, submissive farm wife. Kate's letters indicate that she and Tom often talked over issues concaning the farm and family. For instance, in the summer and fall of 1937, Kate and Tom frequently discussed Edward's move to Quebec. On July 26,1937, Kate wrote: When Edward wanted to go I thought we ought to buy one of his cows so my holstein would be more contented. And father and I each gave him ten dollaft (my idea and father thought it a good one). I said we might as well milk two as one39 Interestingly, Kate said buying We cow was her idea, but put it in brackets. She took credit for the idea, but did not want to emphasize it too much. Perhaps that would have been unseemly. In subsequent letters, Kate mentioned the difficulty she and Tom were having deciding whether or not to follow Edward. Once they decided to stay in Saskatchewan, Kate wrote: We will be starting out again and will have to live on our pension... $15 each will come to almost $1 a day and I feel we can do it No rent to pay. Just ourselves and Kate (a granddaughter). We want her with us, for we want her good ears to hear a.she can cany in coal and do many chores like carrying water for the hens. And father may be able to do a little work of a light nature.50 Kate's statement reveals the degree to which she and Tom discussed arrangements concerning the farm, and the fact that Kate felt empowered to say whether or not their plans were kasible. Kate's comments suggest that she and her husband were a decision-making team and that she enjoyed considerable agency in her marriage. However, other comments undermine this impression. For instance, Kate wrote on October 10,1939 that she and Tom planned to move into a new part of the house and give their quarters to Edward's family. "Your pa decided we must give them all this part I hated to give up my bedroom from 25 years, but one must give in at times." Kate did not say so, but she was also relinquishing her treasured pantry.51 She also wrote as though Tom had final say concerning the timing of visits to their daughters Katey and Emma. And she said several times over the course of the Depression that Tom had vetoed her wish to visit Georgina in AIberta. "Your father says I cannot leave," she wrote in August 1932. "They need mevery much. Lots to attend to and a busy time."52 Kate emphasized that she would like to see Georgina, but that Tom was probably right. "I felt so sotry I could not go to see you..but your Father said I could not leave now and there is all I can do one thing sure."53 Kate's statements give the impression that she bowed graciously to her husband's will even when she was unhappy with his decisions. They tempt one to think Kate had less power than Tom in their marriage. How do we reconcile the image of Kate Graves as the equal decision- making partner with the image of Kate as the obedient wife?54 Knowing what we do about Kate's nature and her values about men's and womenfs gendered roles, we must be cautious about accepting some of her statements at face value. In all likelihood, Kate chose words which supported her image of herself as the model (submissive) fann wife and Thomas as the model (dominant) farm husband. Consider the times when Kate said Thomas would not let her visit Georgi~.For all weknow, Kate and Tom discussed the topic together and agreed that Kate should not go. Or Kate decided herself that she should not go, and passed on aspects of her diswsion with Tom that supported her decision Presenting thk decision as if it were Tom's allowed Kate to create the impression that he was in charge and she was doing his bidding. This interpretation is supported by the fact that many letters show Kate to be an independent person who decided herself if and when she would visit people. There were times when Kate could probably have gone to see Georgina, but chose not to fa her own reasons.55 Tom's opinion does not appear to have been a factor on these occasions. Nor did he present obstacles when Kate decided to visit various female relatives in Saskatchewan for days or weeks at a time. In fact, Tom does not appear in general to have been an authoritarian presence. Often when Kate said she could not go to see Georgina, she added that she wished it were otherwise. "I am not giving up hope of getting to see you and those dear little grandchildren yet when times improve."" The underlying message was that, if it were up to her, she would go. But Tom would not let her. Kate got to look good in her own eyes. She got to assert her identity as a good mother who wished to be with her daughter, and a good wife who submitted to her husband and her domestic obligations. She subverted her own power in order to maintain the facade of a socially acceptable marriage between a dominant husband and a compliant wife. No matter what the reality, no matter whether Kate had 109

economic and decision-making agency in her household or not, the net effect was the same. Overtly, she wielded little authority beyond her pmmibed sphere. She allowed herself and those around her to believe that her man was in charge- In summary, Kate Graves and farm women like her made a critical economic contribution to their families and farms during the Great Depression They worked extremely hard and demonstrated increciiile reso~essin their efforts to keep their loved ones and the farm economy afloat-Kate Graves, for one, was proud of her labour and her ability to invest in a cow or two. Yet farm women garnered few rewards in terms of public recognition and personal power. The law ensured that, despite the work and money Kate Graves and other women invested in their homes and farms' they were not full economic partners with their husbands. Saskatchewan society in general discounted farm women's work, or ascriibed it to men. Men's pride demanded that they continue to be seen as breadwinner--bosses, in charge of fields, farms and families. This appears to have been the case in Kate's own family, where women exercised authority in the home sphere but not beyond. Some women called for recognition and economic etyfor prairie farm women. But Kate Graves and the majority of rural Saskatchewan women were not among them.57 They strove to be good farm women, unobtrusively shouldering their domestic workloads and upholding male power. Kate and her pee^^ knew that their work was essential, but they hadn't the inclination or energy to challenge the pahiardral system. They were bent on sustaining their families and ensuring their own survival, and part of sdvingwas not examining too critically the status quo. Clingbg to traditional gender work roles promised women and men a degree of stability in a world tumed upside down? NOTES: CHAPTER FOUR

1. Scowby, "Divine Discantent," 63,1406; Strong-Boag, J& New Da100-101.

2. Quoted in Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 65.

3. Strong-bag, New nab 101.

4. Quoted in Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 61.

5. Quoted in Wallace, "AU Else Must Wait," 80.

6. It is not surprising that Kate Graves held these views, as she grew up and raised her family in the second half of the nineteenth century, when separate spheres ideology was at its peak. As Cynthia Comacchio has noted, "a family model based on a gender-defined male- breadwinner ideal". - survived in Canada, to a greater or iesser degree, into the mid-1950s and beydTheInfrnlte& 154-5. 7. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, Flintoft, Saskatchewan, 5 February 1933.

8. aid., 19 April 1933.

9. bid., 12 June1936. lo. Ibid., 14 September 1937; 17 March 1936.

11. Ibid., 10 January 1935.

12. Ibid., 14 September 1937; 17 March 1936. Kate's daughter Katey also judged women according to their abilities as domestic managers. See Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 20 March 1936.

13. "Report of visit of Messrs. Oliver, Cochrane, Endicott, and Wilson," Edmund Oliver Pap.

14. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 12 November 1936. "Ethel and Ed shipped some dressed poultry today. Ed took them to Assiniboia in his truck car. Ethel says she will be sure to ship them alive next time. So much work." Although Ed transported and sold the poultry, Ethel thought of the poultry as hers and decided what form the final product would take.

15. %id, 29 June 1937. Although Scowby and Van de Vont say milking was primarily a female responsibility in the 1930s, not all Saskatchewan farm women thought it was women's work. One mother thought it was "ddy-like," and forbade her daughters to touch cow's udders. They were allowed to crank the cream seperator and churn butter, however. Whilsmith, Hear the174,118.

16. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 18 December 1934..

17. Ibid., 29 October 1931.

18. Ibid., 16 Aug 1932 19. Ibid., 27 Decemhr 1934.

20. Matthew Wallace letter to Georgina, 19 March 1934.

21. The fact that men in Kate's area rarely performed domestic work in the 1930s is supported by a scrapbook kept by Gertrude Wood, who lived on a fann near Glen Bain, north of McCord. The scrapbook features a magazine illustration of a smiling, aproned man drying dishes. At the bottom of the picture, Wood has written, "In Glen Bain?" "Happy Homes" Scrapbook, 1936, Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina, Gertrude Wood Collection, R-E2009, Homemaker Original File.

22. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 28 January 1936.

23. Ibid, 12 June 1936.

24. Jessie (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, Milly, Saskatchewan, 35epternber 1937.

25. Langford, "Eirst Generation," 171-2,174.

26. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 12 November 1936. As late as the 1980s, North American farm women have tended to discount their non-domestic farm work, to iabe1 themselves. . mere "helpers" when they do men's work Boivin, "Farm Women"; Sachs, %- 7.

27. See the excellent discussion on the ways in which the patriarchal system controls women's labour, particularly in agriculture, in Sachs, Tbp In- . . xi-xii: "A patriarchal division of labour operates in several ways. First, men rarely perform women's work. Since men's work is more important, they do not have to be involved in domestic work Second, men attempt to control their own malm through the exclusion of women In agricuitural production, however, a contradiction emerges for male farmers. On the one hand, men attempt to dude women from work in the agricultural realm. The hierarchical system between men fanners confers higher status to men who are able to afford to keep their wives out of agriculture. Wealthier farmers keep women out of the fields. On the other hand, many farmers are caught in a cost-price squeeze and are unable to keep women removed from agricultural production-.In these instances, men decide which work women perform."

28. Kate Graves often said she could not visit Georgina's family in Alberta because her husband and son needed her labour. Once, she said that she could not go until Y can have a housekeeper in my absence." In other words, the men ddnot be expected to cook their own meals and tend to "women's work" long enough for her to be away for some time. Kate Graves letter to Ralph Griffiths, 23 May 1938, Kate Graves Family Papers.

29. Enid (Wallace) KoIskog telephone interview, 27 January 2000.

30. AIthough Kate assumed that farm women had dearly defined work responsibilities, she apparently did not object to them working at off-farm, non-domestic jobs, such as teaching. For example, Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 3 April 1933.

31. Strong-Boag, "Pulling in Double Harness," 410; Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 130. Wages for female help on farms were typically half those for male workers. In 1938, a female farm worker normally earned $10 a month, while a male earned $22 a month. Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 173-4.

32. Kate Graves letter to Georgina. 20 April 1936.

33. Ethel (Graves) letter to Georgi~,4 November 1934.

34. As further evidence of the family's resourcefulness when it came to finding money to pay for male hired help, Kate notes that Ethel's husband Ed tried to get "the Gov't bonus to give his mem" She may have been referring to the federal Farm Placement Program, which subsidized the hiring of farm workers. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 1December 1938; Wallace, "All Else Must Wait," 173-4.

35. However, it was not always the case that men were readily available to do outdoor chores and fieldwork for Kate and Tom Graves. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 4 November 1932; 6 September 1940. . . 36. Van de Vorst, "A History of Farm Women's Work,". 82-6;. Sachs,m~nvlslble F- 46, 55-6; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Wvan Rev- present (New York: Word University Press, l-), 406.

38. Quoted in Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 130.

39. "A General View of the Drought Area," Red Cross report, 6.

40. Langford, "First Generation," 171.

4 1. Kate Graves letter to Geoqina, 2 August 1938.

42. No doubt many family members saw and valued the work the women did Kate knew how hard her daughters worked, and vice versa. The children of Kate's daughter Emma (Graves) Hatlelid later appreciated their mother's work, although they saw her principally as their father Martin's helpmate: "In all his work he was ably supported by his wife whose resourcefulness in the lean years with apples, beans and codfish kept the family eating well, and whose ingenuity in turning second hand clothing into pretty dresses for the Christmas concert deLighted her daughters." to W- (Wood Mountain Historical Society, 1969) 210. The sources provide few direct clues as to how men in the famdy perceived the women's contributions during the -on

43. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 13 April 1939.

44, Ibid., 2 August 193628May 1940.

45. Ibid., 24 March 1941.

46. Bid., 6 September 1940.

47. George E. Hamilton Diary.

48. For instance, even though Kate and her daughter Katey disapproved of Bob McCrea's behaviour, they considered him (not his wife Jessie) to be responsible for financial and other decisions concerning his fimily. In 1938, Kate said she and Tom felt they must continue to board two of Bob's daughters. 'They were to pay $1 a week each this year. I told Bob we just had to have it We have kept them for nothing before this, with the exception of some little gift (not money). Well, I hope Bob gets busy and hunts us up a little dough." It is interesting that Kate discussed the issue with Tom and then took responsibitity for arranging matters with Bob. Perhaps she was responsible for this arrangement because it fell within the domestic realm. Kate Graves letters to Georgina: 1December 1938; 17 August 1939. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 20 March 1936.

49. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 26 July 1937.

50. Ibid., 24 January 1938.

5 1. Ibid., 10 October 1939.

52. Ibid., 16 August 1932.

53. Ibid., 2 September 1932

54. Kate's granddaughter Enid (Wallace) Kolskog believes that Thomas was the principal decision-maker in the marriage, "except I can see Grandma sticking up for something that she really wanted or believed in, that they needed. She wasn't a pushover, not by any means." Personal interview, 13-14August 1998.

55. Her reasons often centred on lack of money or the need to care for her husband and family. These were not always legitimate excuses. For instance, Georgina's husband Bert Griffiths would have paid her train fare if she had gone in August 1932. Chapter five of this thesis explores in greater depth Kate's likely motivations for not going to see Georgina Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 16 August 1932

56. Ibid., 2 September 1932

57. Although many prairie farm women wrote the We- Pmandother publications in the 1930s seeking equity, they were far outnumbered by women who maintained a pubhc silence. In 1925, the -had 15,000 women readers. Scowby, "Divine Discontent," 26. Even if every one of those readers wrote the newspaper during the Depression, they were few in number cornpad to the 164,000 rural women in Saskatchewan alone. . . 58. Comacchio, 125; Strong-hag, New Day, 137. CHAPTERFIVE ?IThirrk So Much of Edwardw

Kate Graves was thrilled on December 5,1932, when her son Edward asked her to help him choose the fabric for a new, tailor-made suit. "Has to be specially nice suit this time, for he is going to be married," she wrote Georgina excitedly. "Just think of it! The last of eight to jump the broomstick."^ Thus began an eight and a half-year saga of joy, sorrow, anger and betrayal that would demonstrate the profound sense of love and respons1Mity Kate felt towards Edward, the lengths she would go to in order to support him and his family, and the patriarchal notions that undergirded Graves family relations during the Great Depression Kate's bond with Edward was a dominant theme in her life throughout this period. Although she supported her other children and relatives in many ways, she consistently invested more money, energy and emotion in her only natural-born son.2 This strategy not only helped Edward and his young family endure, but it reinforced assumptions about male and female roles within the Graves family. Ultimately, it fed Kate's identity as a good wife and mother, and sustained a family system that favoured males. This drapter begins with a brief discussion of the central role family played in getting Kate Graves and her kin through the Depression. It touches on some of the family-related strategies employed by women in particular- From there, the chapter moves into the full story of Kate and her husband's relationship with Edward and his wik Dorothy, ham the younger couple's marriage in 1933 t3umugh to the older paifs death in 1941. Entwined with this narrative is a discussion of the key ways in which both couples benefited from their relationship, the strains that developed between Kate and Dorothy, the emotional loss Kate felt at being separated from her son part-way through the -on, and the gendered impIications of the Graves family's strategies concerning Edward and his wife. What, in the end, did these strategies mean for Kate and the other women in her family? Like thousands of other poverty-stricken Canadian familes, Kate Graves and her kin pulled together to help each other though the Depmssion.3 We have already seen that people in Kate's extended family often did work for each other, or worked together, in the house and field. Family members also gave each other direct economic support- Georgina and her husband lent money to some of their Saskatchewan relatives, and Kate lent train fare to a grandson who wanted to work for Georgkds family in Alberta. Kate's granddaughter Enid used part of kwages as a domestic to buy clothes for her younger sister and to pay a neighbour woman to do the family's washing. Kate's relatives in Quebec occasionally sent her used clothing and money, which she distributed among the family. Often, Kate gave her grandchildren coins for birthdays and doing chores. Family members also gave each other food and other items. Tom Graves made chairs for his children and other family members, and Kate gave her daughter Jessie McCrea her sewing machine and bought clothes for Jessie's children when they lived with her. Kate's son-in-law Bob McCrea gave her wild berries, Georgina sent her garden seeds, and her other daughters often brought cream, meat and garden vegetables when they visited. Although both male and female kin aided the Graves family economically, the task of numving family members physidy, socially, spiritually and emotionally fell mainly to women -- as it did in a vast number of Canadian homes in the 1930s.4 As we know from chapter three, the Graves women physically supported their fdesvia their homemaking and childcare skills. Equally critical were their efforts to guard family members' health. Women oftm exchanged remedy suggestions, sought medical attention for loved ones, and nursed ill family members. When Kate's daughter Jessie gave birth in late 1932, and Kate's daughter Mary became ill with tuberculosis the following spring, it was Kate who nursed them at her home. When Tom's health began to fail, it was Kate who called the doctor and who reminded Thomas to take his medicine. And when Kate and Tom were bedridden with influenza, it was Kate's daughters who came to care for them. The women in Kate's family also nurtured family members' spiritual lives by encouraging them to take an interest in church and the Bible. Kate regularly attended church with several of her offspring and their familiesI urged Georgina to join a church women's group, taught her granddaughter Kate her bedtime prayers, and promised a new Bible to grandchildren who memorized the Ten Commandments. socially, the women sustained their families by organizing family picnics, reunions and dinners. No individual's birthday or couple's wedding anniv- appears to have gone uncelebrated. These occasions, along with the many letters, gifts and photographs the women exchanged, senred to keep family members co~ected.~ Women in the Graves family seemed to take special pleasure in each other's company.6 They often visited female friends, worked at community suppers and attended women's meetings together. And they liked to visit each other for days or weeks at a time. These visits were regarded as holidays; Kate believed that they helped to keep her cheerful and healthy. And, WyHwomen played a vital emotional role in the Graves family. They were its "tension managers," offering sympathy, affection and advice to stressed kin7 They listened to and identified with men who klt "blue and discouraged about failed amps, consoled each other when Kate's daughter Mary died, and axpressed pride, fondness and con- for various family membexs.8 Kate often told Ceotgina how much she loved her, empathized with her workload, and advised her on how to mother her children. Again, much of the Graves women's emotional energy was directed at other female relatives. This is not to say that aIl women in the Graves family enjoyed an equal measure of affective support, or that they garnered more emotional consideration than men. Kate and some of her daughters privately judged Edward's wife Dorothy for not Living up to their idea of the proper wife and mother. At the same time they were remarkably tolerant of Edward, even though he fell short of the male ideal. The women's support for Edward was unconditional; their support for Dorothy was anything but. Let us retum now to the story of Kate, Tom, Edward and Dorothy. Edward Graves married Dorothy Hamilton on January 19,1933, when he was twentyfive and she was eighteen? From the very beghming, Kate and Tom took a keen interest in and helped to bolster the young couple's finances. The four of them considered moving a small house onto the farm for Edward and Dorothy - Tom made an offer on the house by mail - but in the end they decided to live together until they could afford to build an addition onto Kate and Tom's house. It was not uncommon for young married couples and elderly parents to share accommodation as a sunrival strategy during the Depressionlo Depending on the province, four to nine per cent of households were multiple- family in 1931, and historian Denyse Baillargeon found that most of the couples in her sample of working class Monkalers lived with family members, usually the husband's parents, for the first few months to two years of their rnarriage.11 It is interesting to note the patrilocal nature of these arrangements. The Graves and many other Canadian f-es assumed the bride would throw her lot in with the male side of the family. The fact that Dorothy and Edward did not move in with her parents, who owned a larger farm a short distance away, suggests that their choice of residence was based more on custom than pragmatism. At first, Kate was pleased with her daughter-in-law and enjoyed her company. She reported that they shared an interest in house plants and planned to work in the garden together. Dorothy showed considerable promise as a homemaker and wik. "She has mopped kitchen and now is hitting a pair of socks for Edward," Kate wrote in 1933. "Very industrious always. A good knitter and in time will be good at sewing."l2 Soon after, Kate noted that "Dorothy makes good bread and pies, and some cakes are fine like chocolate cake. She is great at darning, and mends nicely. I tell you Edward's clothes are kept in order."lJ Kate thought Dorothy washed the fancy bedspreads and white sheets she had received as wedding presents rather often, and five months after the marriage, Kate had yet to see the grey flannelette sheets and used quilts she had given Edward on the dothes line. Still, Dorothy was "kind and a great worker," and Kate was delighted when she gave her a cake with "Mother of Mine" written on it for Motheis Day.14 Two years later, Kate's opinion of Dorothy had deteriorated considerably. Edward continued to be "a comfort," but Dorothy was not always pleasant to live with: She has sulky spells and don't speak to me for hours. Always has them wash days. Then she feels better towards end of day and gets talkative. The Irish in her. Seems so childish, when we have not had a word of trouble. Just gets into a mood. I have been advised to take no notice of it, and I try to be pleasant. I never refuse to speak.15 Not surprisingly, the women's working relationship was sometimes strained. Kate resented the fact that Dorothy disappeared upstairs on butter churning day. "It is a lot of work for me and she won't turn her hand over if I churned all hours."l6 By this time, Dorothy and Edward's son Gordon had joined the household and Dorothy was pregnant with their second child. Kate and Tom were very fond of their son's first born, and liked to hold him while Dorothy accomplished her chores. "Gordon is so strong and full of via We are proud of him. He is a dear boy, and his Grandpa has made him a fine wagod"'7 Kate and Tom's avid interest in their grandchild was a major source of tension in the household, however. Kate was stung when Dorothy accused them of spoiling Gordon. "She plainly said she wished we would let her bring him up and so I ammore than willing. I brought up quite a few. She has lots to learn. One thing she was never taught respect for her elders. I never meddle with him."l8 Kate denied any msponsibility for the friction between herself and Dorothy: "Never think for a moment I am hard with D. I have been so lenient that she got thinking everything was hers here and was very independent and openly wishing we would get ouif"'9 It appears that Dorothy expressed her feelings openly, while Kate tried to maintain an equanimous exterior but fumed inwardly. "I never start a quarrel, but it is born in me to not forget mean things said by anyone unprovoked," Kate wrote five weeks after one heated encounter.20 Kate believed Dorothy to be immature, grasping, aggressive and prone to 'loud, uncontrolled" rants. She saw herself, on the other hand, as controlled,~civilizedand superior. 'q always think a sulky person must have an inferiority complex and are to be pitied," she said.21 Kate was relieved when she and Tom finally moved into the newly completed addition to their house in June 1935, two and a W years after Dorothy and Edward's wedding. Although the two families continued to have considerable contact -- they were separated by a single door, and Kate and Tom continued to use the downstairs bedroom in Dorothy and Edward's section - relations between the women apparently improved.22 "They all seem to be getting on fine together now that they have their own part of the house," wrote Kate's daughter Katey in March 1936.23 Gordon and his younger brother Billy visited Kate and Tom several times a day, -thy surprised Kate with a "very pretty" cake for her seventieth birthday, and realizing once that Dorothy was pressed to get her children ready for a visit to her parents, Kate invited the young family in for dinner. Kate did not refrain completely from criticizing Dorothy, however. She mentally reproached her for not helping local women cook for a community meal, and she subtly derided her mothering skills when she noted that Gordon had a cold. 'No wonder. Barefoot one day and the next with heavy woolen stockings and slippers on"24 On a windy spring day in 1937, Kate wrote that "Dorothy picked this horrid day to wash all her quilts great and small," and that the line broke and three of the quilts "wallowed in the dust"25 She apparently shared her opinions on Dorothy's homemaking abilities with Katey, who said: 'morothy ... is a poor manager, but mother helps her by tending the babies whenever asked."26 We must remember that we are only hearing Kate's side of the story. It cannot have been easy for Dorothy to live under the eye of her mother-in-law for years in a row. The two women had vastly different personalities and interests. Dorothy was a jovial young woman with a hearty laugh and a penchant for romance novels.z7 Kate was an elderly, sharp-minded woman who liked to read newspapers and discus politics and world events. One senses that Kate felt she had considerable experience to share with Dorothy in the way of homemaking and life skills, but believed that Dorothy neither respected nor was open to her wisdom. Kate's granddaughter Enid, who hewboth women well, says they should never have been thrust together - that it was inevitable that problems would develop. The two familes were likely aware that their living situation was far from ideal. Historian Veronica Strong-Boag says many Canadians in this period 'Twlieved that living together in a two or three generation group was fraught with danger ... Certainly there were enough concrete reasons in terms of limited acammodation and finances, not to mention incompatible temperaments, to make living together espedally di€ficult."28 As we shall see later, however, there was more to the codlict between Kate and Dorothy than aamped quarters and a dash of temperaments. Problems aside, the elder and younger Graves both benefited from their living arrangement. It saved Edward and Dorothy the cost of purchasing or renting a separate househoId, and allowed both parties to share livestock, household and farm equipment, and relief allotments for fuel and food. The arrangement also had emotional advantages. It fed Kate and Tom's bond with their son and his children, and it made the older pair feel good to know they were aiding Edward financially. Historian JamesSnell says that many elderly Canadians in the first half of the twentieth century "enjoyed the status and power that came from their interaction with their sons and daughters or other relatives - aiding them in 'getting a start,' sharing a home or farm... or providing less tangible assista..ce."29 Just how £inancially and emotionally intertwined the two fdeswere became clear in 1937. Metyin the Graves' home built throughout the spring as the family realized that they were facing their worst year yet. On May 11, for the first time, Kate provided a sustained description of the environmental devastation the family was experiencing and their response to the loss of their

Edward is discouraged out and out. We have had a terrific dust storm all day and our crop is blowing out same as other people's and he says all the hard work and early rising going for naught, He would Iike to move right off. He wishes he was back in Franklin Centre or Peace River or some place with bees...We sure will find it hard to carry on if our wheat is allgone.30

Kate expressed her own distress through that of Edward and Dorothy. "I do not think people should stay on here. This is about enough...Dorothy says she is going to walk out if she has no other way."31 A month later, the family's mood had switched to excited anticipation. 'Well, I can hardly tell you the latest news at our place," Kate wrote. "Edward had me write to Colin B. Edwards and ask how chances were back there. We all felt we would like to go back if we could get a house to Live in, and Edward wanted work"32 The years Kate had spent writing to and sustaining connections with Quebec kin paid off. Word came that local farmers expected to reap abundant hay and apple cropsI and that there were several farms available for rent or purchase. "And Edward decided to go east," said Kate. "Go in our car-"33 At the end of June, tlurty-nine neighborn and friends gathered at Kate and Tom's house for a farewell party for Edward and Dorothy. The young couple stood in the doorway between the two parts of the house as their friends presented them with an envelope containing $4.95. "Edward spoke so well, thanking them and in a good dear voice," said Kate. 'We said just the right words ...He should have been an orator."3* Kate derived comfort from the knowledge that their friends and relatives supported Edward's decision to leave. '%verybody seems to think he has done right to go when there seems no hope of getting any crop."35 Kate and her cirde thought it made sense for Edward to leave drought-stricken southern Saskatchewan, espedally since he would be back in "our native land" and dose to helpful relatives.36 By leaving, he was proving his worth as a man. "He has been a good, hard working man and he is tired of not being able to earn his living and sick of breathing dust..and he did not like living on relief; said Kate37 Said Katey: We is young and a very wiling worker."38 Far from seeing Edward's leave-taking as an admission of defeat, Kate and her family saw it as evidence of a desire to be a good breadwinner and Mprove his family's fortunes. Interestingly Dorothy, who was pregnant with the couple's third child, was cast as the suffering but supportive mate. Kate described her as "brave" and "wibg," and Katey wrote: Poor Dorothy. I felt sorry for her the day they were in town. She looks so pale and drawn. Her condition, I sup,although she is not expecting till December. Her mother, Mrs. Hamilton (George) has two cancers on her breasts...so Dorothy will hate to leave her like that. But they are both bound to g0.39 The departure of Edward, Dorothy and their two young sons in Kate and Tom's 1926 Chevrolet left an aching void in the elderly couple's life. "Father has come in several times but can't seem to settle down to anything and has gone out again," Kate wrote the day after they left. "Wemiss the folks so much." Kate mourned the loss of Edward and the "littleboys" in particular. We.were fond of them and they were so deeply attached to us. Gordon could not rest unless he knew where Grandpa was...At times when the wind was bad, he sat in here and sucked his thumb a lot or played about, and he and Billy scraped all my dishes when I made a cake or pudding.40 Over the next two months, Kate and Tom weighed whether or not they should follow Edward to Franklin Centre. They were tom between remaining on the farm in which they had invested so much energy and capital, and giving their son the amount of financial and emotional support he seemed to need and expect. A small part of Kate and Tom realized that their son was overly dependent on them. "'Fathersays we can live much better without Edward than he can live without us," Kate wrote on July 26,1937. But they found it very difficult to deny him: "Edward now wants the horses to plow and work his rented fann and the cows also. We have decided if we stay here to keep the cows and horses, and of course it bothers me to know that Edward needs them to start fanning."" Kate's letters from the summer of 1937 are among the most emotionally intense of the collection. Clearly this was one of the lowest points of the Depmssion for her, not because she experienced unparalleled environmental and economic disaster, but because she was separated from her precious son She was uncharacteristically rattled and indecisive. Y cannot be sure of anything now," she said, and admitted to being "somewhat more disturbed in mind."Q Kate's daughters were well aware of the loss and uncertainty she and Tom were feeling, and did their best to advise and comfort them- After Edward and Dorothy drove out of the yard, Ethel made a point of coming over for the afternoon, and Katey visited several times in the following weeks. The daughters seemed to believe that their parents were more emotionally reliant on Edward than the reverse. Mother and Dad are so bound up in them," said Katey.43 Finally, Kate and Tom decided they would make the move. Thomas would take a railway car loaded with the family's pssessions to Frankkt Centre, Quebec, and Kate would follow later in the fall. But just before Tom departed, Kate received a ''horrid" letter from Ella Stevenson, a relative with whom Edward and Dorothy were staying, advising her "that Dorothy could not look after me if I were sick - she had her hands full - and I had better think long and deeply before I left my daughters and granddaughters and went eastemuThe incident fanned the old feelings of bitterness Kate felt towards Dorothy. She believed that "Dorothy has been making a confidant of Ella," who had been "mean" to and unappreciative of her own mother-in-law. "Ella...forgets it was Mr and Mrs Stevenson who gave her and Fred the big start towards prosperity."45 The popular pesin the 19309 regularly raided the spectre of the "mother- in-law bogey": the difficult female elder who interfered in younger family member's lives.& But Kate tended to see herself and other elderly women in her family as victims of heartless daughters-in-law. She felt betrayed by Dorothy. She had done all she could for her son and his wife, and this was the thanks she got. Much as they loved Edward, Kate and Tom decided they would not move east aft= all. This incident shows that Tom backed up Kate emotionally and that Kate was not a doormat who would knowingly put herself in a hostile situation; not only did Kate refuse to go east, but she wrote Ella a retaliatory letter. Above all. the inadent demonstrates the powerful role family dynamics played in the course of this family's history. Edward found himself in a sticky situation. Although he wished to mollify Kate, he was no doubt conscious of his wife's and his host's feelings. He did not succeed in changing his mothefs mind about staying in Saskatchewan, but he easily amvinced her that he was on her side. Said Kate: I am sorry for Edward. He wants us to go so much and says he will guarantee I get care if sick And he wrote in last letter that he never for one minute would have left here if he had thought I was not to go too. Dorothy is the mean one and underhanded.47

Kate placed the blame squarely on Dorothy. Edward, perhaps wishing to show his mother that he was the head of his household, insisted that Dorothy had agreed to "do whatever he said" on the matter. But Kate would have none of it.

'We know her. A very selfish woman she is."48 Kate discussed the issue with her daughta at length and was bolstered by their allegiance. Two of her daughters even wrote letters to Ella supporting her. "Girls are all of one opinion that I must not go East and 1am persuaded I never care to go and live with Dorothy or near Ella," Kate wrote on October 8, 1937.0~1a self-pitying note, she added: "I think so much of Edward and know he would like to have us there, but he may have his hands full and no time for his old parents."49 Kate felt it was better to stay with her "good loving daughters and granddaughters who would not want me to go and be under that Dorothy agai~t."SoIt is interesting that she mentioned her daught-' wishes only after she had made up her own mind to stay. Kate had been quite prepared to leave her four daughters and numerous granddaughters in Saskatchewan, and to travel farther than ever from her daughters in Alberta and British Columbia, in order to be with her son Her letters expressed little regret at the thought of leaving them. When faced with a choice between her son and "the girls,'' she chose the former. When that option became unfeasible, she elected to see herself as the fortunate mother surrounded by "good loving daughters and granddaughters." Although they did not go to live with Edward, Kate and Tom followed through on their plan to give him most of their possessions. In mid-September, Tom left for Quebec in a railway car containing Kate's good cook stove, the

kitchen table and all of their farm livestock - including "p~x.two WWS."~~ Edward's side of the house was stripped bare. 1miss everything," Kate wrote the day after Tom left. UEven Lady, our dear old faithful dog went to Edward, and some three dozen fowls."s2 Shipping the goods took most of Kate and Tom's meagre resources, including her first old age pension chques. The dominion government paid part of the cost, and Kate and DorothJ's father, George Hamilton, split the mhder.53 Left with little money, no livestock and few furnishings, Kate and Tom were willing to jeopardize their own ability to fann in order to give their son every opportunity to succeed. Not only that, but Tom was willing to risk his health to go to his son Kate and her daughters worried at the thought of their frail paterfamilias, who was seventy-four and had a weak heart, trav- for days in an unheated railway car and being solely responsible for feediq, watering and guarding the animals.s4 As it happens, Tom fended off ill-intentimed "rod riders" on at least one occasion, and arrived in Fradch Centre desperately ilL55 "I have been very anxious about him, as Edward wrote me father was not so welI," Kate told Georgi~on November IS, 1937. "Edward wrote he found he had aged greatly in last two years. I answered that I tried to make him understand last spring how poorly father was, and he could not see itof'56One wonders why Edward and other family members allowed Tom to make the hip. But it appears that Tom was detemxined to go. "Dad is so anxious to be with Edward and the little boys

again," wrote Katey. "He just seems to live for then"57 Kate and Tom had mixed feelings about supporting Edward's venture in Quebec A letter Kate wrote on September 3,1937, shows that on the one hand they were proud of the generosity they demonstrated towards their son and his wife. 'We know they will find it hard sledding, and few would have given them as much" On the other handf they begrudged the help they gave Dorothy. "It seems a shame to give all we have to Edward, as Dorothy profits by it," said Kate. Her bitterness towards her daughter-in-law knew no bounds: "She never appreciates a thing we did. Like the leech's daughterf cried more, moreOf'58Not only that, but Kate judged Dorothy to be a poor wife for Edward - a "spender" who squandered her husband's (and his parents') resmxes. 59 Part of Kate's animosity towards Dorothy sprang from deep-seated doubt

about Edward's business sense.40 Edward had rented an expensive farm for two years, with hopes of buying it. Said Kate: A nine thousand dollar farm and he has no capital at his back. Just brawn and muscle and a good man. He is a good worker and does want to get ahead. My best wishes are with them, but I cannot believe he will ever own the place.61 Kate pointed out that Edward would have to pay $325 a year in rent, plus at least $200 in living expense, because "his wife knows nothing of being economical."62 Somehow,it was Domthfs fault that Edward was getting in over his head financially. Somehow, Dorothy was to blame for the fact that Kate and Tom chose to sacrifice themselves for their son. Rather than admit that Edward was financially dependent on them, and that his ability to make business decisions and support his family was £lawed, Kate scapegoated Dorothy. Kate could not allow herself to see Edward as anything but "a good man." Tom spent several months in Quebec recovering his health and "fixing lots of things for Edward. Making a big trough and axe handles, pick handles, etc"63 After Tom returned to Saskatchewan in late 1937, he and Kate went to stay with their daughter Katey and her family for several months. "Katey is a fine daughter," Kate wrote on January 24,1938. "Always in good humour and so thoughtful of our comfort. It has been fine every way to have had this nice winter together."64 Kate often referred to Katey and her other daughters as "kind" and "good company." She knew that she could count on them to take care of her and Tom emotionally and physically. Moreover, she expeded them to do so. Evidently she and most women in her family conformed to the widespread contemporary belief that it was up to daughters -- and daughters-in- law - to care for elderly family membersP5 Kate forgave her son for not noticing how frail his father was, but one wonders how easily she would have forgiven her daughters for not being sensitive to their parents. The fact that she snapped at Georgina in the fall of 1937, when Tom was in Quebec and she was feeling lonely, indicates that she expected her daughter to meet her emotional needs. "Your last letter was so short, hardly deserves an answer. I would write a longer letter to anyone. I am so alone now. Don't forget to tell me about the children and how you are."" Dorothy certainly drew flak for not being as caring as Kate and her daughters thought she should be. "Dorothy is not kind to Mother," observed Katey.67 Not only did Kate expect her daughters to be solicitous of her, but she expected them to understand when she and Tom favoured Edward with their affections, mcmey and physical presence. Georgi~was informed that Kate was writing her less often than usual because she was penning two letters a week to Edward: "He seems anxious to get them, poor boy."68 Georgina was told her letters were too short: "Edward writes me a much longer letter, usually two full sheets of a tablet like this."69 And, she heard how delighted Kate was to receive a birthday phone call from "our son" urging both her and Tom to come to Quebec for sugaring. It seems the elderly couple had written Edward to say that Tom might visit a second time70 In the meantime Georgina, who had not seen her mother for thirteen years, was told repeatedly that Kate could not afford to make the 640-kilometre train trip to see her because she had spent all her money to ship Edward's things to Quebec71 And Tom refused to go. On May 23,1938,

Kate wrote: ' Father says he can't go anywhere. Wants to stay right here. He is missing Edward, you see. After 30 years together and looking to help and care, father and son were so attached and he misses his companionship. Edward could talk on so many subjects. He read and he was a cheerful companion, often putting the best look on a thing when something went vvrong.72 One wonders if Kate was actually speaking more of her own bond with Edward than of Tom's relationship with him. It is clear that she both adored and identified with her son. "Everybody around here knows Edward and I were very much attached in every way," said Kate. "So many things we thought the same about."73 In the years before Edward left, Kate often wrote that she could not visit Georgina because she could not afford it or because she had to stay and take care of Tom, Edward and his family. When Tom and Edward were in Quebec, she said she could not visit because she did not have the money. When Tom returned, she said they had neither the money nor the will to visit. But the fact is, Kate found the resowas to finaxtce Edward and Tom's trips to Quebec, and Seriotxsly considered sending Tom for a second visit. Whatever the excuse, the message was that "our sonf' was more important than Gee*. To explain such favouritism, we must look to the patrhmhal society in which Kate Graves and her family lived. Many Canadians in this period believed that men were superia to women, and sons were superior to daughters.74 Although Kate said she loved her daughters and would have liked a dozen, she and the rest of the family regarded Edward as more equal than "the girIs."'S They doted on him from the moment he was born in l9O7.76 Perhaps Kate and Tom felt that, after seven daughters, their family was complete. This is precisely how prominent Saskatchewan CCF supporter Gertrude S. Telford and her husband felt when their son arrived in 1927, after the birth of two daughters.77 Many families made no secret of the fact that they favdboy children. Edward and Dorothy hoped their own first child would be a boy, and Georgina's private papers are full of poems and artides extolling "Mother's Boys."78 The Graves men and women, like the vast majority of Canadians, unconsciously accepted and perpetuated the notion that girls were second-best79 Although they missed Edward, Kate and Tom managed very well in his absence. With the help of their pension and their daughters and their families, they continued to farm. Kate's daughter Ethel gave them a dozen hens, and Ethel and Kate's other relatives often gave them milk, butter and cream. They bought a new mattress, a new McClary cook stove for "$44.75 in cash," and a used Siersewing machine. Their son-in-lawEd McCrea did most of the fieldwork and often drove them places, as they had no horses. Two of their grandsons helped hoe potatoes, and their granddaughter Kate helped care for the chickens and their two pigs. Meanwhile, Edward wrote often to say that he was working hard and that he missed his parents. Soon he hinted that he would like to come "home." Perhaps he missed not only his parents' emotional and economic support, but the network of dose male relatives and neighbows who once shared his 131 workload. Ultimately, Kate and Tom's doubts about Edward's ability to make a go of it proved correct. In late 1939, Edward relinquished his farm, sold his parents' stove and livestock to pay down his debts, traded the car and three hundred dollars for a "V-8 Ford coach," and announced that he and his family were heading back to Saskatchewan. As soon as Tom heard the news, he began building a new bedroom for Kate and himself in the "west part" of the house. He and Kate hoped to prevent friction between the two families by giving Edward's family the entire east section. "I want to have peace for Edward's sake," Kate said. "He is dear to me."80 She dreaded Dorothy's return, however.

"She is large and aggressive as it were. ~."8* When Edward and Dorothy arrived in early December 1939, Kate was so excited that she was almost rude when she told Georgina for the umpteenth time that she could not travel to see her. "Not possible to go out for a visit now. Sorry, but I amso busy. I w'd like to see you. Mother."B2 Neither Kate nor Tom seemed to judge Edward harshly for his ill-fated *own in Quebec. The worst Kate said was, 'We feel so sorry he did not bring cows. Hehad to straighten up with Floyd (Ella's son) and has little left"83 A few months later, she noted briefly that she and Tom could have bought a radio if they hadn't had to pay so many debts "for others" the previous falLu Besides the fact that Edward had depleted his resources and missed his parents, it made good sense for him to return to Saskatchewan when he did. The drought had broken, Kate and Tom's farm was again producing grain and, thanks to their old age pensions, the elderly couple were in a better position to help their son than they were two years earlier.85 In addition, the family may have thought it wise to locate Edward on the farm he was expected to inherit. 'This farm is to be his, of course," said Kate.86 Georgina and her siste~were given to understand that, not only did Edward take first place in his mothefs heart, but that he had first claim on his parents' land-KAte and Tom adhered to the belief - common among Canadian farm families to the present day - that land (and the economic power associated with it) should be passed down to sons rather than daughters.87 It was assumed that Edward would get the fannf and his sistem would get their mothefs dishes.88 No doubt the family reasoned that Edward deserved the farm because he helped his parents work it They discounted the fact that the daughters laboured in the house and yard when their parents were establishing the farm, and that they continued to support their parents physically and emotionally as they aged. Just before she mentioned that Edward would get the farm, Kate described in detail the excellent rare four of her daughters had given her when she was seriously ill with influenza. Kate valued her daughters' work as the familjfs nurtums, but did not consider rewarding them with a share of the family

Kate and Tom's lik with Dorothy and Edward soon medits former pattern The elderly couple often cared for the younger pair's children, and subsidized them economically. They gave them a stove and bought them a barrel of coal oil. "Wehelp them all we cart," said Kate.89 Family tensions also began to build. In the fall of 1940, when Tom's health was parficdar1y poor, Edward spent considerable time away from the farm working for neighbouring farmers. Kate said Edward needed the money to buy a licence for the car. "But he was needed at home," she fretted. "Your father had the worry of the whole harvest on his shoulders."90 Another timef Kate noted: Dorothy and Edward are not generous with helping us. She seems to demand all his time in a way. If he comes and sits down, generally calls or sends for him... It is nice to have Edward, but we feel he is bossed too much. It is her folks she thinks of. At times she is fine, and again won't t& Sort of sulks.~l 133

Things came to a head on April 21,1941. Kate reported that Dorothy attacked her and Tom verbally and that, for once, she fought back The chip was off @oroth.s)shoulder and she gave your parents an Irish tirade which did not sit wd. No one could talk or tell her anything, as she has the loud, uncontrolled Irish delivery. And since (then) we have no talk between us whatsoever. She has always tried to run the whole place and I am tired of it We Scots are not what one may call quarrelsome, but boy we donft get over it easy, or are we scared at all. You can't sit on a thistle. I guess we will be at outs for awhile. Edward and the children are in and out as uSual.92 Once again, we must remember that Kate's letters only give us her version of events. They do not say what Dorothy was upset about on this, and other, occasions. Nor do they tell us how Dorothy and Edward perceived their life with Kate and Tom. What the letters do indicate is that Kate's relationship with her son and his wife was imbued with considerable emotion, and that Kate coped with her feelings in a variety of ways. The fact that she referred disparagingly to Dorothy's ethnicity when descriitheir conaicts is suggestive of more than simple prejudice. Perhaps Kate blamed Dorothy's behavim on her Irishness because that was more palatable than admitting to herself that she disliked Dorothy and was not the good Christian woman she purported to be. Kate could not admit to herself that she was intensely jealous of Dorothy and found it hard to share her beloved son with her. The letters also suggest that Kate could not allow he& to see Edward as less than perfect. Incapable of bemg angry with her son, she directed her frustrations at Dorothy. And her weapons of choice were the pahiarchal notions that she had been steeped in since birth and that surrounded her m 1930s rural Saskatchewan. Kate's troubled relationship with Dorothy throws into relief her ideas about women's familial roles. Kate believed that Dorothy was not a good female family member because she did not fit the separate spheres template. She was not a submissive wife, mother and daughter-in-law who provided her family with a calm, nurturing environment. She bossed her husband, wasted his hard- eamed money, was an inefficient and unhelpful worker, engaged in emotional pyrotechnics, and was insensitive to her elders' needs. In fact, she was Kate's perfect fail Everything that Kate could not tolerate in herself was proj'ected onto her daughter-in-law. Focussing on Dorothy's supposed flaws allowed Kate to believe that she, herself, was an ideal woman. She knew how women should behave. Meanwhile, Edward was excused for diverging from the model of the dominant breadwinner male and for not being attentive to his parents. Although Edward's family relied economically on Kate and Tom, the older couple continued to see him as the hardworking well-intentioned, independent head of his family. Kate would have liked Edward to help more around the farm, but she did not judge him harshly for his slips. Rather, she and her daugh- blamed Dorothy for pulling him away from his fitial duties. "Edward...seems to think a lot of Mother and Dad," said Katey, "but his wife is so jealous if he shows it."93 Kate criticized Edward for taking off-farm work at harvest time (one of the few occasions she expressed negative thoughts about him), but she also realized that he had his priorities. A woman might be expected to put the well-being of her elderly parents and the overall family first, but not a man. It was undestood that a man needed to gamer a wage, and that he needed to look out for himself and his immediate family. Ultimately, the story of Kate, Tom, Edward and Dorothy shows the extent to which gendered ideas coldGraves family relationships in the 1930s. Kate and her husband felt compelled to devote an inordinate amount of emotion, energy and money to Edward because he was a man. The strategies they used to get him through the Depression -- from sharing their home with him, to financing his migration east, to promising him the farm - were rooted in patriarchal ideas about the relative value of men and women. Kate loved her daughters and appreciated their emotional and physical support. She enjoyed spending time with them and giving them small gifts. She praised them for fdfUing their roles as good wives, mothers and daughters. But she did not value them as much as she valued her son. 'The girls" were only doing what was expected of women. Nor did she support the other principal woman in her son's life: his wife Dorothy. Kate Graves was willing to devalue her daughters and assail her daughter-in-law in order to elevate her son - and herself- Attacking Dorothy allowed her to bolster her image of Edward as the ideal breadwinner malef and her image of herself as the ideal mother, wife and homemaker. She was not alone, of course. Thousands of Canadian women instinctively aligned themselves with the males (and undermined the females) in their fadies in the 19309. No doubt, on some level they believed that this strategy would help them and their hmilies survive. 1. Ibid., McCord, Saskatchewan, 6 December 1932.

2. It is interesting to note that Kate spoke of Edward as the last of her eight children to marry. Counting her foster son Charles W'iam FothergiU Graves, she actually had nine children Genealogical documents, Kate Graves Family Papers. . 3. Comacchio, -e . Bob126-30-

4. Strong-Boag, J'he New Dav, 113.

5. On women's roles as "ritualists" who celebrated family occasions and sustained family connections, see Prentice et. al., WQPI~I~~162.

7. Pat Armstmqj and Hugh Armstrong, a Do- Wwd -(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), 67-8,100-1.

8. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgha, 4 November 1934.

9. Genealogical documents? Kate Graves Family Papers.

10. Comacchio, -a- . . 128; JamesSnell, 'The Family and the Working-Class Elderly in the First Half of the Twentieth Century?"in # ed. Loli Chambers and Edgar-Andre Montigny 499-510.

11. Strong-Boag, mew% 122, Baillargeon, 6%5,159. 12. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 3 April 1933.

13. Ibid., 2 May 1933.

14. Ibid., 15 May 1933. Note that Kate did not say she gave the sheets and quilts to both Edward and Dorothy.

15. Ibid., 18 March 1935.

16. Ibid., 27 May 1935.

17. Ibid., 18 December 1934.

18. Bid, 27 May 1935.

19. Ibid., 1July 1935.

20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 21 April 1941; 18 March 1935.

22. Murray McCrea sketch of interior of Kate and Thomas Graves8house, 14 July 2000. Personal collection of Cristine Bye.

23. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 20 March 1936.

24. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 17 June 1935.

25. Ibid., 17 April 1937.

26. Katey (Graves) Hatielid letter to Georgina, La Fleche, Sitskatchewan, 20 March 1936.

27. Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998; Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 15 April 1940.

28. Strong-Boag, The New Dav, 186.

29. Snell, The Family and the Working-Class Elderly," 500.

30. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 11 May 1937.

31. Ibid. h a decade's worth of letters, this is one of the very few times Kate speaks with frustration about the Depression. And then, she does it through Edward and Dorothy.

32 Ibid., Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 11 June 1937.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 29 June 1937. 35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 3 September 1937. 37. Ibid., 19 June 1937.

38. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgha, Lafleche, Saskatchewan, 18 June 1937.

39. Ibid.

40. Kate Graves letter to Geotgina, 29 June 1937.

41. Ibid., 26 July 1937.

42. Ibid., 20 June 1937; 12 August 1937.

43. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letters to Georgina, Lafleche, Saskatchewan.

44. Kate Graves letters to Georgina, 3 September 1937. 45, Ibid.

46. Strong-Boag, DeNew day^ 184.

47. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 23 September 1937.

48. Ibid., 3 September 1937.

49. Ibid., Wood Mountain, 8 October 1937.

50. Ibid., 23 September 1937.

51. Ibid., 3 September 1937.

52 Ibid., 14 September 1937.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 15 November 1937; Anna (Graves) McFee letter to Georgina, New Westminster, British Columbia, 27 September 1937, Kate Graves Family Papers.

55. Wes Hatlelid telephone interview, 14 December 2000; Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal intenrim, 13-14 August 1998.

56. Kate Graves letter to Geotgina, 15 November 1937.

57. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafieche, Saskatchewan, 27 August 1937-

58. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 3 September 1937.

59. Ibid., 23 September l937.

60. Ibid., 26 July 1937; 3 September 1937; 14 September 1937.

61. Ibid., 14 September 1937.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 28 October 1937.

64. bid., 28 October 1937.

65. Light and Pierson, rJo- 316; Snell, The Family and the Working-Class Elderly," 502

66. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 18 October 1937.

67. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, 27 August 1937. 68. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 3 September 1937.

69. Ibid., 31 January 1939.

70. Ibid., 24 March 1939.

71. Ibid, 3 September 1937,23 September 1937.

72 %id, 23 May 1938.

73. Ibid.

74. Strong-Boa& New Dw 8. 75. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, September 1932.

76. Georgina (Graves) Griffiths diaries, 1907-1909;Enid (Wallace) Kolskog personal interview, 13-14 August 1998. Although Kate spoke positively of her foster son Charles, who lived near Kate and Thomas' fann in Saskatchewan and visited them regularly, she did not mention him nearly as often or as affectionately as she did Edward. See Kate Graves letter, 18 March 1935.

77. Ann Leger-Anderson, "Marriage, Family, and the Ceoperative Ideal in Saskatchewan: The Telfords," in in Win- 8 - 305.

78. Kate Graves letter, 8 March 1934; See "Mother's Bays," "One Way to Rear a Boy," "Boys Make Men," 'The Boy of Yesteryear," and "My Baby No Longer," in Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths Scrapbook, Kate Graves Family Papers. Georgina kept this scrapbook throughout her adult life. She had three sons and three daughters. Also see a rural Ontario woman and her doctofs response to the birth of her fourth daughter, in 1928, in Light and Pierson, N&% Raad, 178.80.

79. Strong-Boa&- New 3,8,11.

80. Kate Graves letter to Georgirta, 10 October 1939.

81. Ibid., 25 September 1939.

82. Ibid., 5 December 1939.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid., 15 Aprrl1940.

85. For a discussion on the ways in which the old age pension empowered elderly Canadians to help their families in the 1930s and 1940~~see Snell, 'The Family and the Working-Class Elderly," 506.

86. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 29 May 1939.

87. Sally Shortall, Warnen and Pow= (London: Maadan Press, and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1-45; Boivin, "Farm Women," 67.

88. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, 5 May 1941.

89. Ibid., 28 May 1940.

90. Ibid., 6 September 1940.

91. &id, 10 June 1940.

92 hid., 21 April 1941.

93. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, 27 August 1937. CONCLUSION uAVe y Remulrrble Womm"

On the afternoon of May 2.1941, Kate Graves penned her last letter to Georgina. She talkedf as she often did, of her relatives and her work But most of the letter concerned her fears for her husband Tom. Hewas very feeble and she believed he would not recover. "Oh, how I long to have poor father better. He was so splendid and knew just how to do things. He does not suffer pain, but oh, so tired." Kate admitted to feeling exhausted herselE. '7 am tired out. My feet seemed to play out yesterday."l The next moming, Kate moved slowly around the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes and tidying up.2 The feeling of indigestion that had troubled her off and on for years was back. Suddenly, it grew worse and she telephoned her daughter Ethel and asked her to meover. Then she sent a granddaughter to the garden to fetch Dorothy. Several grandchildren watched anxiously as Dorothy and Ethel applied hot water bottles to Kate's chest and back in an effort to ease her pain. ''Iam so cold," said Kate. '=ow can you be cold when it is so hot in here?" Dorothy asked. 'Well, this is the death sweat" "Oh, no, it can't be that." "Yes. I have taken care of lots of people and I know what it is." Kate told the women she would like to lie down upstairs. One of the grandchildren ran to the workshop to fetch Tom, who hurried in and sat beside her while Ethel and Dorothy went upstairs to pepare her bed. "What can I do for you?" Tom asked. "I amdying," she said. When Ethel returned a moment later, Tom said: "She is gone." Ethel called. "Mother, Mother, you can't be dead" But Kate had relaxed, as if in sleep, and the room was stiu Kate Graves' death from heart problems at the age of seventy-five came as a terriile shock to her children3 They had expected their wiry, spirited mother to go on living for many years. Conscious and capable to the very end, Kate was so central to her family's world that they could not imagine life without her. In the following days and weeks, they struggled to come to terms with their loss. ''It doesn't seem possible that Mother has gone," wrote Edward. 'q expect to see her looking out the window every time I come home from town."* "I miss her so much all the time," said EtheL "It seems hard to think with all the daughters and sons Mother had, no one was there to hold her hand when she passed away."5 'I>ear, dear Mother," said Katey. "She always said, 'Death always brings regrets' but I don't want my children to feel too badly. I have the best children in the world?" Katey and Ethel wished they had stayed with Kate on the long nights when Tom was so ill. Georgina wished she had journeyed to see her mother before it was too late. Edward certainly had regrets. '"Poor boy," said Katey. "He didn't realize his mother was so old and frail."' She added: Edward has shed many bitter tears. He wishes he could make it up to Mother, all his thoughtlessness. But he thought Mother would live many years yet. I told him to be good to Father now and that would be doing what Mother wished. They are good to Father, but it was Mother who longed for their love.8 Kate's daughters tried not to dwell on old grievancesBhowever. Rather, they focused on the esteem that Kate's family and community felt for her, and her many fine qualities. They were proud of her domestic and mothering skills, and the fact that she was so hard-working, youthful and well-liked. Katey said: I think that Mother was happy to be well and able to keep up with her work 'ti1 the last. Her cans of meat, pickles, etc, her plans and garden and her flowers, and then she had so many friends, and she led the useful life of a woman 20 years younger..l think she was a very remarkable woman9 "Where could we girls have got a better mother?" asked EWlo Kate's funeral was also a source of consolation. The United Church minister told the congregation that she had lived "a long and useful life," and he praised her for being a good mother, community member and Christian: A kindly and devoted mother who brou@t her children up in the nurture and in the Admonition of the Lord, she saw to it that in her home,culture and religion were entwined in the fives of all. A devoted member of the Church of God, she possessed a depth of spiritual lik which was the envy of us all. She was a woman of deep convictions who never adjusted her views to be on the side of the majority. She took the Word of God as a guide in her methods of appraisal, in her approvals and condemnations. One of God's living letters, she made the community the purer and more invigorating by her purposeful and useful life.11 Although Tom was '%raveff and "bore up under his sorrow," Kate's daughters noted that most family members cried at the funeral. "I know it would have pleased mother to see how sorrowful her grandchildren as well as her children present at the service felt," said Emma.12

It appears that Kate Graves' family and community saw her as she wished to be seen - as a good woman who worked hard in her proper sphere. Her minister lauded her moral rectitude and her uplifting influence on her home and familyf while her family valued her as an emotional and physical nwhmr. Such commendations were all Kate could have asked for. As we saw in chapter three, she and her peers played a heightened role in sustaining the family economy during the Great Depmssion. But their work did not translate into economic, legal or public recognition because Saskatchewan society was intent on maintaining the separate spheres model of male breadwinner-bosses and domestically oriented female subordinates. Chapter four showed that Kate and her family adhered to prevalent ideas about men's and women's work responsibilities and pursued a number of strategies to sustain the status quo.

Thus, Kate did not gamer public recognition or official provider status in her household, but retained her authority in domestic matters, worked with other women in the house instead of the fields, and had the satisfaction of knowing that she was a model farm wife. In chapter five, we saw that Katefs gendered assumptions also helped her to order her priorities in terms of dispensing emotional, economic and physical suppart to. family members thtou~outthe decade. Although she supported her kin in many ways, and valued her relationship with hadaughters, she invested mcst of her resources in her son because she internalized patriarchal notions about male superiority. She discounted her daughters' familial contributions and scapegoated her daughter-in-law in mder to uphold her son as the ideal male and heftelf as the ideal mother. In the process, she sustained and perpetuated assumptions about male and female fdyroles. In the final analysis, Kate Graves' experience of the Great won centred around her commitment to work and f&nily. She invested her energy and identity in these areas, and they in turn sustained her. Amidst environmental, economic and social upheaval, she focussed on the family and upholding patriardzal notions about gender roles. Thus, it is no surprise that she did not reap public recognition for her contributions. She did not seek such recognition. The good farm woman's reward was the tears of affection and 145 remorse her family shed at her funeral, and the belief that she had raised children who met society's definition of good women and men. "I think that

Mother was pleased that we all had our homes and children and husbands," wrote Katey soon after Kate's death Kate's legacy reflected the values that she upheld and exemplified in iife. Said Katey: God has been good to spare her to us all these years, and now we must be good and show that we deserved it, that is deserved such a mother. And we must remember that our families are our first consideration, and that if we do our best to bring our children up right we will be doing her wishes.13

In a sense, this thesis has been an attempt to give Kate Graves her due. Most historians of the Great Depression, and of the prairies in general, have peqxtuated the notion that it was men's activities in the public realm that really counted. A great deal of the literature focuses on the plight of single transient men and the actions of a handful of politicians- Ordinary Nal women's contriitiom have been largely ignored- By drawing on Kate's own words, this thesis reminds us of the presence and importance of women in the largely private arena of domestic work and family life. Not only were women like Kate Graves present, but they made a huge difference in the lives of their families, farms, and rural prairie society. The thesis joins a small coterie of scholarly works which make visible ordinary prairie women of the 19308. It differs from these few works in certain regards, however- Wendy Wallace depicts Saskatchewan women in general as victims who retreated from feminism, while scholars like Veronica Strong-Boag and Qvista Scowby depict many prairie farm women as matemal feminists who recognized and actively sought recognition for their work via the pages of the rural press. This thesis suggests that the vast majority of Saskatchewan farm women maintained a public silence on their contributions during the 19309 and were not outspoken feminists, but were active agents in their homes and society nonetheless. By examining Kate's lik, we hgm to see how individual women and families coped with the -on, and organized their lives along gendered lines, on the ground. The thesis shows that this woman - and many like her - were not only visible and important individuals, but they were highly complex. Kate cannot be stereotyped as a victim or a hero. The reality of her life lay somewhere in between, and in the end, cannot be fully grasped. All the historian can do is read her letters, try to puzzle out how she saw her lik and the world around her, and attempt to recreate and explain her experiences of the Great -on. This thesis ultimately contributes to our overall understanding of the Depression by bringing private memory into the realm of public history. It reminds us that the decade were as much about individuals' lived experiences and coping strategxes as it was about public protest Kate encourages us to see small daily deeds like preserving fruit, stretching egg money and nurturing family members for what they were: vital acts of resistance in catastrophic times.

The story of Kate Graves and her family does not end with her death in May 1941. Two months after Kate died, Georgina finally travelled to McCord to visit the father and siblings she had not seen for nineteen years. Tom died soon after, on July 13,1941, at the age of seventy-seven. The newspaper obituary mentioned his marriage of fifty-five years to Kate, his decision to homestead in Saskatchewan, his blacksmith and carpentry work, and his "kindly, genial disposition."l4 Edward assumed ownership of the farm. Five years later, on September 25,1946, he suffered a fatal heart attack The suddenness of his death at the age of thirty-nine stunned his family and community. "A very sad thmg happened this am.," Ethel wrote in her diary. "Edward passed on to his heavenly home. He was so young to die. Dorothy is brave but feels her loss very hard to bear."==Obituaries in the Frankljn Centre and McCord-area newspaF both mentioned Edward and Dorothy's two-year stay in Quebec. The latter newspaper observed that "the esteem in which Edward was held in the community was made manifest by the large congregation that attended the last rites."l6 Dorothy and her five young children stayed on the farm for another five years, with Ethel's husband Ed McCrea and other male relatives tendLng to field work. Dorothy re-married in 1953 and the family settled in Manitoba. She sold the farm to Ed in 1958, and he sold it to his youngest son Murray in 1965. The next year, Murray tore dawn Kate and Tom's house; part of the wooden floor (including the trap door that once led to the cellar where Kate stored her butter, eggs and preserves) was left intact and became a barnyard fence. This weathered fence, the original barn and Tom's long-vacant arpentry shop still stand. So do a number of carragana bushes and maple trees that revived after the Depression. The farm was home to Murray's four children into the and it supports Murray (who turned sixty-four in September 2001) and his wife Norma to'this day." As for Georgina, she preserved her mother's letters from the Depression until her death at Coronation, Ahrb8in 1973. Her three daughters -Jean (Griffiths) Checkel, Anne (Griffiths) Rodvang and Muriel (GrZfiths) Bye - kept the collection and passed it along to this author with the understanding that it could contn'bute to historians' knowledge of their grandmothefs, and other prairie women's, experience of the Great Depression. Ultimately, the story of Kate Graves and her family is one of suffering and survival. It is the tale of the Great Depression, writ small. Most members of Kate's extended family lived to see the end of the Depression and to lead productive lives that nurtured further generations. Some family members endured great losses d- this period and in succedng years. Edward's heart attack suggests the enormous toll the Depression took on him. The fact that Dorothy, who had spent most of her marriage coping with economic hardship and stressful relations with her mother-in-law,went on to raise five children by haself speaks to her resiliency and resourcefulness. Some family members, like Kate, did not quite make it to the end of the Depression Nevertheless, Kate ensured that her family survived. Not only that, but she inadvertently saw to it that her own story would endure. The letters she sent her daughter in Alberta helped to sustain Georgina in the 1930s, and made possible the survival of Georgids children and her children's children They held out the possibility that, one day, a great-granddaughter would produce from them a memory of an ordinary-yet-remarkable Saskatchewan fann woman. 1. Kate Graves letter to Georgina, 2 May 1941.

2. This description of the evenl of May 3,1941, is taken from: Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, 5 May 1941; Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to GeoT&iM, 12 May 1941.

3. Kate Graves' death certificate said she died of "coronary thrombosis," and that she suffered from "previous mild attacks of angina." Doctors told Kate's family that a heart condition had caused Kate's recurring attacks of "indigestionwandpain in her arm and side. Province of Saskatchewan Record of Registration of Death, 3 May 1941, Rural Municipality of Mankota, No. 4s.

4. Edward Graves letter to Georgina, 27 May 1941, Kate Graves Family Papers.

5. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, 12 May 1941.

6. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, Lafleche, 18 May 1941.

7. bid., 5 May 1941.

8. Ibid, Lafleche, 18 May 1941.

9. Ibid.

10. Ethel (Graves) McCrea letter to Georgina, 10 June 1941.

11. P.G. McCready, "Funeral Oration for Kate Graves," 5 May 1941, Kate Graves Family Papers.

12. Emma (Graves) Hatlelid letter to Georgina, 6 May 1941, Kate Graves Family Papers.

13. Katey (Graves) Hatlelid, Lafleche, 18 May 1941.

14. The Late Thomas E. Graves," Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths scrapbook.

15. Ethel (Graves) McCrea diary, 1946-1949, Kate Graves Family Papers.

16. "Obituary: The Late Thomas E. Graves," 1946; "Franklin Centre," Gleaner.9 October 1946. Georgina Edith (Graves) Griffiths scrapbook.

17. Gordon Graves phone interview, 7 November 1998; Enid (Wallace) Kolskog interview, 16 September 2001; Allen McCrea personal interview, 14 July 2000; Murray McCrea phone interview, 17 September 2001. REFERENCES

MANUSCRI!T COLLECIlONS AND ARCHIVAL Kate Graves Family Papers. Letters, diaries, photographs, genealogical documents, scrapbook. The papers principally consist of letters from Kate Graves to Geo- Edith (Graves) Griffiths, McCord, Saskatchewan. 1925,1930-1941. Personal coUection of Cristine Bye. McCord and District Museum. McCord, Saskatchewan George E. Hamilton Diary. 1921-1932. Prmeof #g 177.. of the.

Rural Municipality of Mankota, No. 45. Mankota, Saskatchewan. Province of Saskatchewan Records of Registration of Death. 1926-1941. Relief Ledgexs. 1930-1947. RdMunicipality of Waverlq, No. 44. Glentworth, Saskatchewan. Minutes of Council Meetings. 1929-1945 Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatoon. Homestead Files. Canada. Department of the Interior. Land Patents Branch. 1858791.1858795.1859898.1859902. McNaughton Papers. AID. Files 16,22. United Church of Canada. Edmund Oliver Papers*XVILD.14.c. Saskatchewan Archives Board, Regina. Drought File. Red Cross Society Reports. 1936. SHSl01. Gerhude Wood Collection. R-E2009.Homemaker Original File. Pamphlet File. Agrid~Saskatchewan.Department of Agriculture. "Royal Commission on Dominion-ProvincialRelations: . Agriculture in Saskatchewan. Address by Honourable J.G. Taggartt December 16,1937." Pamphlet File. Agriculture-Saskatchewan. Jkpartment of Agridtute. "S-on to Saskatchewan Reconstruction CounciL" INTERRVIEWS MUrjel (Gri£fiths) Bye. Coronation, Alberta. Telephone interview. 29 January 2000. Gordon Graves. Edmonton, Alberta. Telephone interview. 7 November 1998.

Wes Hatlelid. Calgary, hrta.Telephone interview. 14 December 2000. Enid (Wallace) KoIskog. Edmonton, Alberta. Personal interview. 13-14 August 1998. Telephone interviews. 27 January,22000. 16 September 2001. AUen McCrea. McCord, Saskatchewan. Personal interview. 14 July 2000. Elbow, Saskatchewan. Telephone interview. 15 August 2000. Murray McCrea. McCord, Saskatchewan. Telephone interviews. 20 May 2000. 17 September 2001. Les Wilson. Assidmia, Saskatchewan. Telephone interview. 12 March 2000.

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