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womens work

Pioneer Life: Making Candles

Two hundred years ago, coal oil lamps were a rarity in the backwoods home. Hearth fires and candles were main sources of light. In heavily settled areas, a chandler might pass through once a year to sell their candles made with moulds.

Most pioneer women preferred to make their own candles. They saved tallow (animal fat) from butchered cows, sheep, and wild game like deer and bear. The tallow was boiled in water several times to rid it of impurities. Once tallow took on a waxlike consistency, it was strained to further ensure pureness. These processes help to prevent the animal fat in the candles from turning rancid. To camouflage the unpleasant odour of burning tallow, wild ginger or pleasant-smelling herbs were mixed in. Sweet smelling beeswax was sometimes added for a honey scent. Pure beeswax candles were reserved for special occasions as the wax was difficult to obtain.

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And Then He Said . . .

This past week, I listened to a podcast in which an award-winning author was interviewed about her writing life and most recent publication. She’s received critical acclaim for four New York Times bestselling novels and two short story collections. In short, she’s a force. Her rapport with the podcast host was energetic and his questions yielded rich content.

After a lengthy conversation, the author commented with surprise on the time. She needed to pick up her child from school. How sweet. How human.

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Women of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House”

Among my favourite girlhood books was the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Late 1800s pioneer life captivated me. Kathryn Adam, a scholar in midwestern women’s history and literature, regards Wilder’s female characters as historical resources that reveal “role expectations and feelings of western women”.

In her essay, Laura, Ma, Mary, Carrie, and Grace: Western Women as Portrayed by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Adam says that Wilder shows us “women engaged in the rigors of homesteading, women building community and culture on the frontier, women working to preserve the family in the face of bitter adversity (…) in a series of vividly realized frontier landscapes.”

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How to Make Butter in a Churn

In the novel I’m currently writing, one character— a farm wife living in the early 1900s—operates a home dairy and sells butter to local families. I recently discovered an inspiring historical document about a farming couple in the butter business—Samuel and Jane Spares from Northfield, Hants County, Nova Scotia.

Between 1885 and 1890, the Spares sold $770.00 of produce generated by their farm. Three quarters of those funds were generated by livestock products, but the remainder was owing to butter, oats, hay and wool. “The 350 lbs. of butter sold (an average of 58 lbs per year) was the most important of these products. Churned in the kitchen by Jane Spares and her daughters, home-produced butter remained an important element of this farm’s commercial output until the establishment of a dairy factory in the district after the turn of the century.”

With an interest in butter-making, I set out to learn the process used by our early families.

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