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Unlike many women writers of her time, Sarah Jameson Craig lived at the bottom of the economic ladder. Nevertheless, she dared to dream the utopian dreams more commonly associated with educated women from the middle and upper classes.
Quoting liberally from unpublished diaries and memoirs, Joanne Findon’s Seeking Our Eden sets Craig’s life writing within the context of the American-based reform and utopian movements that stirred her imagination.
When the way women dress remains an issue even today, and skepticism about conventional medicine still fuels alternative health movements, Sarah Craig’s early feminist voice from the margins of Canada continues to be relevant and compelling.
To mark International Women’s Day (this Sunday, March 8th!), we’re delighted to have Joanne Findon as our guest blogger, reflecting on the work of Sarah Jameson Craig and her fight for women’s equality.
As we celebrate International Women’s Day, it’s good to remember that the battle for equality has been fought not just by a few famous women who were vocal and visible like Susan B. Anthony in the US and Canada’s Famous Five. In the 1800’s there were many other women – ordinary, obscure, poor women – who also lent their voices to the fight for equality.
One of these was Sarah Jameson Craig, my great-grandmother. No, you’ve never heard of her. On the obscurity scale, she’s a 10/10.
But she dared to dream of a better world for women just like her more visible sisters. And she wrote about those dreams for most of her life. As a teenager growing up in rural New Brunswick, she embraced two of the most radical reform movements of her time: Dress Reform and the Water Cure. Sarah was the first young woman in her community to wear the Reform Dress – a short dress worn over trousers and without a corset – much to the astonishment of her neighbours. She was also one of the first to promote the alternative health system also known as the Water Cure or Hydropathy – a method of health care that rejected the alcohol and opiate drugs of conventional medicine and actively recruited women to train as “hydropathic physicians.” Once married, she and her husband also tried to establish a utopian colony based on these principles. Her diaries and the memoir that she wrote near the end of her life detail her dreams along with her struggles against poverty and the hostile attitudes of her community.
Sarah Craig was particularly fervent in her crusade for Dress Reform, convinced that the tightly laced corsets of current fashion prevented women from taking their rightful place in society as full and equal partners with men.
Her strong voice rings out in her description of how she became a dress reformer when she was only seventeen:
I soon learned that the way women dressed was unhealthful, uncomfortable, as well as inconvenient; their fettering, hampering, monstrous skirts gathering and holding damp and filth, and their tightly compressed waists, excluding the air from the lungs, being positively and constantly disease producing ….The hooped skirt was but a reaction from the heavy quilted petticoat, and while kept within reasonable limits was an improvement. But my fellow students and I, having come in touch with the Dress Reform movement, had learned of a better, truer style of dress – more nearly patterned after the form it was to cover; some of the ablest hygienists being practical dress reformers, glorifying God in their bodies as in their spirits. The more we studied, the more deeply were we convinced that the “Bloomer dress” and its improved successor, the “American Costume,” were incomparably better than the common mode, in freedom of lungs, limbs and movements, in cost – in fact, in every respect except popularity. And seeing an army of heroic women, willingly, gladly, stemming the tide of popular opinion by voice and pen and attire, to help emancipate our sex from the thraldom of fashion, I resolved as soon as possible to join them. (Memoir, 35-36.)
Sarah’s fiery rhetoric in this passage mimics that of the reformers she was reading at the time. Her militaristic image of the “army of heroic women” is borrowed from them, and reveals the combative attitude that characterized her writing on the subject for many years.
Although her longed-for utopian colony never took shape, Sarah Craig’s dreams of a better life for herself and her children drove her to migrate westward after her husband’s death – first to New Jersey, where she met the famous dress reformers Mary E. Tillotson and Susan Fowler, then eventually back to Canada to homestead on the prairies, and finally to Kelowna, BC, where she ran a successful fruit farm. Above all, her desire for women’s equality never wavered. She was part of a wave of women’s rights activists that eventually brought the vote to Canadian women. In May 1917 she recorded in her diary that she had registered as a voter, exclaiming, “So I have lived to see the cause won, for which I helped to do battle in my young days!”
Always convinced that women could never get ahead if they were valued more as beautiful ornaments than as persons, Sarah Jameson Craig’s eloquent words give voice to the desires and dreams of many other obscure women like her.
Joanne Findon was a guest on CBC Radio New Brunswick’s Shift program to discuss Seeking Our Eden. In her interview, the author talks about Sarah Jameson Craig’s involvement with dress reform – the “American costume” and alternative health movements.
And for more images of the “American costume”, check out our Tumblr.
To learn more about Seeking Our Eden, click here.
For media requests, please contact publicist Jacqui Davis.
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