Coming in from the Cold: Reflections on the History of Women in Northern\n Canada

Although there have been a number of recent publications documenting and interpreting women's northern experiences, northern women's lives remain relatively under-studied in Canada.This essay examines the major published works on the history of women in the Canadian North since 1975, discusses some of the new models, and suggests possibilities for new research.RESUME Malge qu'il y ait eu un nombre de publications recentes qui documentent et interpreted les experiences des femmes du Nord, leur vie reste relativement peu etudiee au Canada.Cette dissertation etudie les ouvrages importants publies sur les femmes du Nord canadien depuis 1975, discute de quelques nouveaux modeles, et suggere de nouvelles occasions pour de nouvelles recherches.As the other essays in this issue ably demonstrate, the past two and one half decades have seen a blossoming of historical writing on Canadian women.The same could be said for the history of northern Canada, which has undergone its own renaissance in the same period.And while the field remains small, there have been a number of important works on northern Canadian women that mark the way for scholars in the twenty-first century.This essay examines the major published works on the history of women in the Canadian North over the last twenty-five years, and concludes that while progress has been slow, great inroads have been made both in documenting women's lives in the North as well as in creating new models for studying the context of those lives.In Canada, northern and arctic history remained the exclusive domain of popular historians until the late 1970s.The arctic, its trials and perils, the boom and bust of mineral and oil rushes, were the stuff of legend, and thus, left to legend makers and embellishers.The North was a place where brave men and sometimes dogs -but never womenchallenged the elements while seeking knowledge, wealth, and empire.Sir John Franklin, Robert E. Peary, Vilhjalmar Stefansson, and other men were legendary figures who faced great adversity with courage and (usually) great success.Even the fictional male characters created by Robert Service -Dan McGrew, Sam McGee, and their friendswere larger than life.When women appeared in any of these northern epics they almost surely fit one of three stereotypes: nameless, degraded Aboriginal women; faithful, saintly wives of missionaries and mounted police officers; and tawdry, but goodhearted practitioners of the world's oldest profession.Slowly, from the late 1960s through to the mid 1980s, historians reexamined these images as they sought to create a new story that contextualised northern Canadian history.

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