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Muddy Valley Farm

Monthly Archives: October 2019

Right Under My Nose

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Liza and Arrow, Seasons

≈ Leave a comment

A sweet little hand-turned yew bowl followed me home from the thrift store last spring. I had been looking for a bowl to keep my sock yarn under control, and this would be perfect! DH cut a curved slot for the line to feed through, drilled a couple holes to hold my needles, sanded it smooth and I was in business.

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I love my yew yarn bowl, but soon discovered that it is just too small for bigger projects. The balls of chunky acrylic I bought to knit C’s infinity scarf were twice its size! So I added “big wooden bowl” to my wish list, keeping my eye out for one on my sporadic thrift store visits. But no luck, and I refused to buy new, the up-cycling part is half the fun. Practicing my patience, an ongoing project, I kept on looking.

Recently Resident Gardener got a new puppy. Arrow is currently in training with Liza the barnyard protector, so that one day he may be just as useful and obedient as her. In the meantime though, he alternates between ‘adorable’ and ‘royal pain in the ***”. He helps me to practice my patience too.

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I was puppy sitting the other day (at ten weeks old we can’t let him out of our sight for a minute) when he dragged a dusty old wooden bowl out from the bottom shelf of one of the side tables. The same bowl that Little Bean (human toddler, similar stage of development) had pulled out back in the summer when she was visiting. From a spot apparently so inconspicuous that it regularly avoids the cleaner’s swiffer.

The penny hadn’t dropped the first time when Bean had discovered it, but it certainly did this time. Yarn bowl! This thing would make a wonderful large yarn bowl! I whisked it away from sharp puppy teeth, washed off the dust, dried it, then rubbed in a generous dollop of organic olive oil. It cleaned up nice.

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The bowl had come from my dear late mom, who had told me when she gave it to me that it had been her mom’s. “Munising” is burned into the bottom, in left leaning script. This is an indication – according to the Munising Wood Products website history page (thanks again internet) – that it was “hand carved” on a Michigan lathe in the 30’s or 40’s.

Possessing both precious family history AND collectable wood bowl attributes, it is remarkably perfect. I can’t bring myself to cut a slot in its side though. I just don’t think my Gram would like that. The bigger balls are all centre-pull anyway.

Right under my nose. A right sized bowl. Sitting quietly in my house waiting to be discovered, all the time I was looking everywhere else. As we all so often do.

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The thought made me smile, my day a little brighter. And to be honest, I could use a little cheering up these days. Sometimes lately, the weight of the world settles so heavily I almost gasp for air.

The computer age that makes it possible for us to connect like never before and the social media that was supposed to draw us together, instead pushing us into diametric, vitriolic camps. Pushing us apart.

A caustic election, energy, refugees, the economy, the climate crisis, Trump, wars and cars and polar bears, the rise of the scary far right. My countrymen, friends and acquaintances, even my own family, split by opposing viewpoints. Torn asunder. We used to be able to mostly agree on the way forward, or at least the goals. It seems to me that we have lost that, I hope only temporarily.

The world is “going to hell in a hand basket”, mom would say. And there isn’t much I can do, except hope for the best and support the right causes. Assuming, of course, that I can sift through the crap and figure out what the right causes are.

So when I need to escape for a little while, I shall set Gram’s yarn bowl right here in my lap, busy my fingers, and free my mind to consider all the good things right under my nose. Once I really start to look, they do get easier to spot.

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A Woman’s Right

16 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Jodi in Feminist farmer

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TL;DR It took 84 long years for all Canadian women to win the right to vote. On Monday October 21 I will go to my local school gym, and cast my vote. I can’t wait!

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Almost 150 years ago, in 1876 in Toronto, Ontario, Dr. Emily Howard Jennings Stowe started Canada’s very first women’s suffrage organization.

Born in 1831, Dr. Stowe was a woman ahead of her time. She had been refused entry to the University of Toronto in 1852 because she was female. Not until 1886 did U of T change that policy. So she got her teaching certificate, then taught public school, eventually becoming the first female principal in Canada.

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After marrying and having 3 children she tried to enter medical school in Canada but was refused because, you guessed it, she was a woman. So she went to med school in New York instead, graduating in 1868 at age 37, then moving back home to Toronto where she became the first woman to practice medicine in Ontario.

It took eight years, until 1884, for Dr. Stowe’s Dominion Suffrage Club to achieve their first victory, winning the vote for women in some Ontario municipal elections. But only for widows and spinsters. Married women didn’t need the vote you see…they had their husbands to take care of all that!

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Dr. Stowe and the suffragettes didn’t stop there.

  • In 1889 they petitioned Canada’s Conservative Attorney General to give widows and spinsters the federal vote. They were refused.
  • In 1903 Dr. Stowe died and her daughter Augusta, Canada’s first female MD trained in her home country, took over the club presidency.
  • In 1905 and again in 1906 the club petitioned Ontario’s Conservative premier for the vote and were refused.
  • In 1907 they organized a thousand person march, presenting the Ontario government with a 100,000 name petition. For a third time they were refused.
  • In 1912 the club petitioned Robert Borden’s Conservative federal government. “No”, they were told. Not until all the provinces say yes.

So they focused on supporting efforts to gain women the vote at the municipal level, and by 1915 women had won the right to vote in a few more Ontario municipalities. Then the suffragettes went back to the province to try again. But the answer was still no.

Between 1915 and 1917, BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba women all won the right to vote provincially. But not in Ontario, where Canada’s suffrage movement had been born. After yet another monster petition the provincial Liberals made the womens’ vote one of their election planks. But the Conservatives stayed in power.

And then finally in 1917, with the First World War raging, “a change came over the hearts of men”. Canadian men and women were making untold sacrifices for the war effort. In the spirit of the times, Premier Hearst’s Conservative Ontario government endorsed a private member’s bill, the Premier intoning solemnly:

6E51E592-362B-46C9-8BB4-B6AD7767F61D“Having taken our women into partnership with us, in this tremendous task, I ask, can we justly deny them the right to have a say about the making of the laws they have been so heroically trying to defend? I think not!”

The Liberals united with the Conservatives, (can you imagine that happening today??? 😳🤣🙄) and Ontario’s women’s suffrage bill passed.

In Ottawa, where Mr. Borden’s wartime Unionist Party (an amalgam of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals) had won a landslide election victory the previous year, on April 12, 1918, a bill was passed to extend suffrage to “all women in Canada”. But they really only meant non-quebecois caucasian women. 😠

When the federal bill passed, the remaining provincial and territorial hold outs gave in. Except Quebec, where women did not win the right to vote provincially until 1940. Oh, and except for women of colour, who couldn’t vote in federal elections either, until the 1940s. Oh and except for First Nations women covered by the Indian Act, who couldn’t vote federally until 1960!!!

All in all, it took 84 years; from 1876 to 1960, for all Canadian women to win the right to vote in any election in Canada. Close to a century of prejudice, of hard fought battles and rejection, of being knocked down and getting right back up, of derision and scorn heaped on the suffragettes year after year.

I am so grateful to the women (and men) who fought for this right on behalf of all of us, so tenaciously and for so long. Our society is the better for it.

On October 21 I will be thinking about Dr. Stowe and all the women whose shoulders I’m standing on, as I again relish the freedom, as a woman, to engage fully in our participatory democracy.

Voting is awesome and good for the soul. I can’t wait.

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