Month: January 2022

Sydney Harker is a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Dr. Jane Errington and Dr. Laila Haidarali at Queen’s University. Her current research examines how categories of beauty were employed and understood in Ontario from the mid to late nineteenth century. She is the co-author of “A Complex Faith: Strategies of Marriage, Family and Community Among Upper Canadian Quakers,1784-1830.” (2021). You can read her article ” ‘A Galaxy of Youth and Beauty’ : Beauty Entertainment in Late Victorian Ontario” in JCHA/RSHC issue 32 no.1.

How did you become interested in the history of beauty contests and beauty standards? 

My interest in beauty stemmed from an exhibit on Canadian immigration texts curated by Kim Bell at W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections library in 2019. Included was a Canada West: The Last Best West magazine from 1911 where the cover illustration was a Gibson Girl-esque figure holding a bushel of wheat. The image was incredibly similar to a popular 1910 photograph of actress Billie Burke. I was struck by the use of beauty to romanticize and promote an idealized agricultural society in western Canada and from there I started reading as much beauty history as I could. It was a departure from the work I expected to do, but I’m grateful to my supervisors for supporting me.  

Your article discusses that there was a class distinction between certain kinds of beauty entertainment and the women who participated in them. How strict were these kinds of boundaries? Did they have similar understandings of beauty or were the women involved judged with different criteria? 

The boundaries were fairly strict, but context of place was very important. Women who performed in theatrical beauty shows and on stage were paid performers who generally came from urban working-class backgrounds. There was a degree of anonymity to these women that was not present at local beauty contests, where contestants were pulled from a middle-class audience and the events were often community based. We get a sense of this from newspaper announcements that named local winners but never named participants in theatrical beauty shows unless they were a well-known performer. As far as understandings of beauty go, beauty contests generally upheld western standards of beauty, though beauty shows often capitalized on a growing interest in showing “foreign” forms of beauty, driven in part by late nineteenth century interest in Orientalism. This is where we see the introduction of beauty “types” and advertisements that used loaded terms such as international, or a congress of beauties.  

Your article discusses how beauty contests became tied to nationalism. Could you expand on that in relation to Canada’s role as a settler state?  

A lot of excellent work has been done on the connection between beauty contests and nationalism, particularly in the twentieth century. What we see happening on a smaller scale in the late nineteenth century is the use of beauty contests as a form of civic pride where contests were included at public events to promote a particular vision of a city or town. There is a striking scene relayed in the Perth Courier of a 1903 agricultural fair in New Liskeard (today Temiskaming Shores) where author J. M. Walker discusses the “throbbing of a distant kettledrum and the strains of ‘Hiawatha’ play[ing]” at the fair where a beauty contest was held. 1903 was the same year the town was incorporated, and construction began on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, so there were big economic and settlement plans for New Liskeard. The area was the traditional territory of the Algonquin, notably the Wabigijic (Wabie) family. Madeline Theriault, who was part of the Temagami First Nation, wrote in her autobiography, Moose to Moccasins: The Story of Ka Kita Wa Po No Kwe, that her great-great grandparents, Joachim and Angèle Wabigijic, were living in the area that later became New Liskeard and were forced from their land (26). In an edited version of land surveyor A. H. Telfer’s travel diaries, Worth Travelling Miles to See: Diary of a Survey Trip to Lake Temiskaming, 1886, editor Lorene DiCorpo details attempts by Joachim and Angèle’s daughter Nancy Wabie from 1917 to 1934 to gain compensation from the Canadian government for her father’s land in New Liskeard (135-144). This is important because the scene at the fair described by Walker is an interesting conjunction of highly stylized Indigenous presence and imagery at a settler event that also held a stylized beauty contest. It is an evocative and stark image of cultural and symbolic settler appropriation as the backdrop of a beauty contest where only settler women participated. The contest was a way to communicate the pride and vision of the town and its settlers, denoting who belonged in New Liskeard and who was to be celebrated.

“The Night Owls beauty show,” 1892, priJLC_ENT_000231, courtesy of the Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p16003coll4/id/2389/

Your article discusses the role that the press had in creating beauty standards used in Victorian beauty contests. Do you think that social media could have a similar effect on how we perceive our bodies?  

This is a big question. Social media is certainly a heightened medium of communicating beauty standards and decentralized in the sense that the agents of influence (or influencers) go far beyond the late Victorian era socialites and stage actresses, and beauty and body trends move a lot faster. Because the type of social media we see is broadly shaped by how we use it, it can introduce people to understandings of their bodies that challenge hegemonic beauty standards and create ideas of beauty that fall outside of the dominant system. At the same time, most of us are at the whim of the algorithm when it comes to what content is prioritized and put in front of us, perpetuating certain beauty and body ideals that ostracizes and harms anyone who fails to present as or perform within largely held standards of thinness, whiteness, and ability.  

Have you read anything interesting lately? 

I recently picked up Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind (2022). It’s a compelling collection of poems that feels the right amount of hopeful for the moment. 

Frederick Glover is a professor in the Department of History at St. Mary’s University Calgary. His work deals with missionary work in the Korean peninsula. He is the author of Friends, Foes and Partners: The Relationship between the Canadian Missionaries and Korean Christians in North-eastern Korea and Manchuria from 1898 until 1927 (2017). You can read his article “‘Very clever and yet too highly flavoured’: Why Robert Grierson’s History of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Korea and Manchuria was Unfit to Print” in JCHA/RSHC 32 no.1.

How did you become interested in Asian-Canadian relations? How did you decide on looking at Korean communities specifically? 

I became interested in Korean-Canadian relations as a consequence of living in South Korea. Soon after moving to South Korea in 2002, I started to have a strong desire to learn everything I could about Korean culture and Korean history. I realized that this knowledge would help me to better understand my adopted country. Therefore, I read as many books as I could about Korean culture and history and one of the best places to buy these books was the Royal Asiatic Society bookstore in Seoul. Through my reading, I learned of the Canadian missionaries in Korea and Manchuria, and I wanted to learn more about them and the Koreans with whom they lived and worked. I continued to study Korean-Canadian relations when I began my PhD, however, I also started to study the history of Asian-Canadian relations and the history of Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, Sikh Canadians, and of course, the history of Korean Canadians. I decided to investigate the history of Korean Canadian communities in the future because it is a natural extension of the work I did for my PhD thesis. A large percentage of the pioneering Korean immigrants who came to Canada in the 1960s were originally from Hamgyŏng and Kando. 

Your article centres on the unpublished work of one missionary. How did you find this hidden story?

I came across Robert Grierson’s booklet while doing research for my PhD thesis at the United Church of Canada Archives in Toronto in the summer of 2014. I was particularly interested in the booklet because I became quite captivated by Grierson when reading his letters and diary at the archives. His writing was unique compared to his colleagues. While many of them were reticent to discuss their true feelings and thoughts, Grierson often expressed himself freely. I found the booklet he wrote on the history of the Canadian mission in Korea and Manchuria to be very different from the other missionary literature I read. Upon doing more research I discovered the correspondence between Grierson and R.P. Mackay and A.E. Armstrong. This pricked my curiosity to a great degree because in reading this correspondence I discovered that the booklet was never published. Although I wanted to explore the reasons why the booklet was not published when I was conducting research, I was unable to do so because it would have diverted my attention away from finishing my thesis. Fortunately, I had an opportunity last year to re-read Grierson’s booklet and the correspondence between Grierson and the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. I also had an opportunity to read more secondary works on missionary literature. I decided soon afterward to write the article.  

Your article mentions how most authors choose to focus on the subjects of missionary literature, what drove you to research the missionaries instead?

One primary reason why I concentrated on Robert Grierson and missionary administrators, namely R.P. Mackay, is simply because it felt like a natural thing to do. I first became acquainted with them (as well as their colleagues, both Canadian and Korean) when I began conducting research for my PhD thesis eight years ago, and ever since then, they have been a part of my life. This is perhaps one of the hazards of being a historian – that is the tendency to be in regular communion with the dead. Another reason why I focused on Grierson and Mackay, and to a lesser extent A.E. Armstrong, is because much of the article is concentrated on their correspondence and in this correspondence, they revealed their personalities. I think this was particularly important in the case of Grierson because his letters plainly show his frustration at the reluctance of administrators to be innovative. I would have liked to provide other examples of instances in which he lashed out at the FMB, but it would have diverted me away from my primary task. Ultimately, I think that it was vital to direct my focus on Grierson because it enables the reader to better appreciate why he decided to test the limits of the missionary literature genre.  

Nova Scotia Archives, Helen Fraser MacRae fonds, MG.1 vol. 2297 #3 (Grierson family photos).

Your article makes use of various disciplines like psychology to expand on historical research. How did these disciplines enhance your research process?

I think the most important disciplines that I used to enhance the historical research were missiology and literary criticism. An understanding of the changing of the missiological worldview that was taking place by at least the 1920s was essential for me while doing research. In fact, I could not have hit upon the idea of writing the article without having read about this era in mission history. Much of my motivation for writing the article in the first place was to reveal why few missionaries, missionary reformers, and missionary administrators did not consider making changes to the missionary literature genre while, at the same time, the entire missionary enterprise was being “re-thought.” Delving into literary criticism, namely the work of Northrop Frye, was also pivotal to my research because it helped me to fully appreciate the transgressive nature of Robert Grierson’s booklet. Thanks to reading Frye’s work, I realized that Grierson was truly attempting to do something new, innovative, and, in the minds of missionary administrators, dangerous.  

The article talks at length about the subversive power of comedy and playful mockery. Could you expand this line of thinking towards people power today?

I was first attracted to Robert Grierson’s booklet because of its comedic tone, or at least its attempts to have a comedic tone. I have always been interested in comedy in general, and satire in particular, because of its subversive nature. Comedians and satirists can be extremely dangerous because they are, for want of a better term, “truth tellers.” I believe that we desperately need comedians and satirists because they keep us honest so to speak. They expose much of what we want to keep hidden. They turn the world upside down so that it can be right-side up again. This is why comedians and satirists have routinely found themselves in very serious trouble with the authorities throughout history. This is particularly true when the authorities, namely governments and institutions, base their legitimacy on lies because when these lies are unmasked, in our case by comedians and satirists, the legitimacy of the authorities will inevitably be called into question by large segments of the citizenry. In sum, comedians and satirists may seem playful, but they can produce very serious consequences.  

Have you read anything good lately?

Yes. I am reading Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, written by the theologian David Bosch. It is a massive book so I suspect that it will take me some time to finish it. Bosch provides a history of Christian missions and the theology of missions beginning with the time of Christ. He outlines why and how missions have changed over the past 2000 years. It not only spans huge swaths of time, but it also spans huge geographical areas. I am also reading Prophetic Identities: Indigenous Missionaries on British Colonial Frontiers, 1850 – 75. It was written by the historian Tolly Bradford. It recounts the lives and works of Tiyo Soga, a Xhosa missionary in South Africa and Henry Budd (Sakachuwescum) a Cree missionary from the Red River Colony. It is a comparative history that illuminates the similarities and differences that existed between the various Indigenous communities in the British Empire and the ways in which Indigenous Christians, such as Soga and Budd, were both transformed by the Christian message and transformed the Christian message.