The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2006, Side 25

Vol. 60 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
1 I 1
In search of Gudrun Goodman
Reflections on gender, “doing history” and memory
by Lesley Biggs with Stella Stephanson
It is a typical hot, July day in
Saskatchewan. Cumulus clouds billow
across the deep blue sky and the wind hur-
tles across the fields. Blooming fields of
canola, flax, oats and wheat race by leaving
a blur of lemon-yellow, lavender blue and
gold carpets floating on verdant stalks. I
am driving with Stella Stephanson, whom
I affectionately refer to as my surrogate
mum, along Highway #16 toward Leslie,
Saskatchewan, in search of the grave site of
Gudrun Goodman.
Gudrun Goodman was a midwife who
practiced from 1887 to 1922 in what is
known as the Vatnabyggd (Lake
Settlement) area in Saskatchewan. I first
learned about Gudrun Gudman from the
1976 book, A Harvest Yet to Reap: A
History of Prairie Women, researched and
compiled by Linda Rasmussen, Lorna
Rasmussen, Candace Savage, and Anne
Wheeler.3 In the section on childbirth, the
authors excerpt a passage from Walter
Lindal’s 1955 book, The Saskatchewan
Icelanders: A Strand of the Canadian
Fabric,4 in which Lindal praises the contri-
butions of Icelandic midwives to the early
pioneer communities in Saskatchewan; but
he singled out Gudrun Goodman:
All the Icelandic midwives deserve
special mention but one of them, Gudrun
Goodman, had one experience, while still a
young woman, which stands out as the
finest example of courage and initiative in
an emergency. A young woman was with
child, expecting in about a week. She was
pumping water for a team of oxen who
were drinking out of a low trough. Both
the oxen had long sharp horns. One of
them suddenly raised its head and one of
the horns caught the woman in the side and
npped it open. Gudrun Goodman was
immediately summoned. She saw that she
could not save the woman but was deter-
mined to save the child. She administered
an anesthetic, choloroform, operated and
got the child while still alive. She brought
it up--Gudbjorg Eyjolfson “sic”, who later
became Mrs. Thomas Halldorson, of
Leslie, Saskatchewan.5
Lindal was right; Goodman does
deserve special attention since performing a
Caesarian section at the turn of the twenti-
eth century was a remarkable feat. That the
baby lived was nothing short of a miracle;
that Goodman raised the baby as her own
was testament to extraordinary kindness
and compassion. When I first encountered
this story, I was struck by the tragedy of
this unnamed woman’s death; but I also
became intrigued because it contradicted
the prevailing trope of the “neighbour mid-
wife’ in the historiography of Canadian
midwifery. Since Goodman clearly had
the skills and the equipment to carry out a
Caesarian section, she simply did not ‘fit’
the model of the neighbour midwife who
learned her skills on the job. Gudrun
Goodman’s story inspired me to rethink
my own historiographic practice, as well as
that of other historians and social scientists
involved in the study of midwives, and
childbirth more generally.6
I found other examples, albeit frag-
mentary, of midwifery practices which also
did not fit the neighbour midwife model.
This research revealed that midwifery prac-
tices varied widely across Canada and over
time, according to class, race, ethnicity,
region, levels of industrialization and colo-
nization. In particular, for our purposes
here, I concluded that historians’ knowl-
edge about midwives depended in part on
having access to linguistic and ethnic com-
munities. But since most Canadian histo-
rians of midwifery were predominantly