| Last updated at 12:17 AM on 15/12/08 |
Women's work 
Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island, a new book by Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum, sheds light on the female ownership side of P.E.I.’s land question
SALLY COLE
The Guardian
Charlotte Sulivan lived a charmed existence.
After growing up in a magnificent house in Fulham, just west of London in the 1820s, she became a P.E.I. landlord in 1866.
A spinster, she inherited the property from her father, Laurence, who had underpinnings in the East India Company.
But when she arrived on the Island in 1867 to inspect her estate (Lots 9, 16, 22 and 61) the P.E.I. legislature was making moves to end absentee landlordism for good.
In order to protect her interests, she started working with the Prince Edward Island Association, a London-based lobby group that promoted landed interests.
But after P.E.I. became a Canadian province in 1873, the government enacted a Land Purchase Act in 1875 that forced landlords to sell their estates to the provincial commissioner of public lands.
In her quest to hold onto the land that her father had given her, Sulivan took her case to the Supreme Court of Canada.
This is just one of the stories in Lady Landlords of Prince Edward Island, a new book by Rusty Bittermann and Margaret McCallum.
“When we started the project we hoped to find enough information to write an article.
“But after we went to Britain and started digging, we realized that we could write a book,” says Bittermann, a professor of history at Saint Thomas University.
In his research, he became intrigued by the land question — the restrictions on non-resident land ownership on P.E.I. that are rooted in the historical struggle against landlordism.
But there was also a subtext to consider — gender.
“I kept seeing the names of women cropping up in the research that I had been doing, so I noted it, thinking, ‘Boy, I’m going to come back and look at this again,” says Bittermann.
The topic also appealed to McCallum, who had done scholarly research on the subject.
“I had two questions. Why were women so prominent and did they behave differently than men did?
“This (topic) gave us an opportunity to look at women as landowners, too, and rethink the land story from the perspective of the roles that the women had played,” says McCallum, a law professor at the University of New Brunswick.
Besides Sulivan, who lost her court case, they discovered the stories of Anne Saunders, a prudent wife and property manager; Georgina Fane, the independent spinster; and Jane Saunders, the estranged countess who spent a year living on Queen Street in Charlottetown.
“For her, being able to be on the Island as Lady Westmoreland without all the embarrassment of being estranged from her husband, she was able to be the grand lady,” says McCallum.
And she played that role with great fanfare.
“She visited her lots, gave her money out for education and churches. She initially stayed with Lieutenant-Governor Charles Fitzroy and his wife, Lady Mary Lennox, and was an attraction at Government House parties. At the time, people would come just to meet her after hearing how eccentric she was,” says McCallum.
At UPEI, history professor Ed MacDonald is thrilled with the book that puts a face on an important chapter in P.E.I. history.
“The land question must be the single most written-about topic in Island history. Our historical storyline has always pitted heroic, resident tenants versus evil, absentee landlords.
“But, surprisingly little has ever been written about the views, attitudes, and perspectives of those absentee landlords.
“Not only have Margaret and Rusty given them a voice, but in doing so they have zeroed in on lady landlords,”?says MacDonald.
“And so, besides avoiding the traditional stereotypes about those “awful” proprietors, they also give some much needed attention to that other largely absent voice in Island history, the voices of women trying to be heard in a world dominated by men. And I think that’s quite an accomplishment.”
Just the facts
Footnotes on the authors
n Rusty Bittermann is also the author of Rural Protest on Prince Edward Island: From British Colonization to the Escheat Movement, University of Toronto Press, 2006. He has written numerous journal articles and book chapters, including Mi’kmaq Land Claims and the Escheat Movement in P.E.I. (UNB Law Journal 55 (2006); Upholding the Land Legislation of a Communistic and Socialistic Assembly: The Benefits of Confederation for Prince Edward Island (with Margaret McCallum), Canadian Historical Review, March 2006 and Lady Landlords and the Final Defense of Landlordism on Prince Edward Island: The Case of Charlotte Sullivan, Social History 38:76 (November 2005).
n Margaret McCallum is the author of four other books, including Synthesis: Legal Reading, Reasoning and Writing in Canada, second edition and numerous articles and book chapters. Her article The Prince Edward Island Lands Protection Act: The Art of the Possible was published in volume 58 of the University of New Brunswick Law Journal. McCallum is currently collaborating with Bittermann on a research project on the environmental history of P.E.I.
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