The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Blaðsíða 31

Vol. 62 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
121
“Fight Like Audur”
Gender, ethnicity and dissent in the career of Salome
Halidorson - Manitoba Social Credit MLA, 1936-1941
by Laurie Kristine Bertram, M.A.
This research explores the career of
one of the foremost female leaders in the
Icelandic Canadian community in
Manitoba during the 1930s and 40s, Elin
Salome Halidorson, Social Credit MLA,
1936-41. Known only through the general
biographies that appear occasionally within
popular histories of the community,
Halldorson’s complex political career has
remained largely unexplored. Using
Halldorson’s papers as well as newspaper
coverage of her career, this paper provides
an expansion of her biography as well as an
exploration of the broader implications of
her career namely her navigation of gender,
dissent and Icelandicity in the often inhos-
pitable political climate of the interwar and
early wartime era.
This discussion requires an apprecia-
tion for the restrictive atmosphere in which
Halidorson operated, as well as the politics
within the Social Credit party itself. It also
necessitates a more critical understanding
of the comparatively prominent standing
of Icelandic Canadians within the cultural
framework of this period, one which histo-
rians have generally accepted as inextrica-
bly connected to xenophobia and anti-
migrant sentiment. This research reveals
Halldorson’s negotiation of notions of
gender and Icelandicity in a rapidly chang-
ing political environment, illustrating that
while she enjoyed a good deal of success
within the discourse of Depression-era
economic reform, her more subversive
usages of Icelandic and gender identity in
her wartime pacifist women’s campaigns
failed to undermine persistent notions of
female subservience, the hyper-conformity
of Canadian wartime politics, and the pri-
macy of Canadian nationalism in public
representations of Icelandic Canadian
identity.
Although this paper hopes to assist in
Halldorson’s reinstatement as an important
figure within Icelandic Canadian and
women’s political historiography, it also
explores the origins of her exclusion.
Halidorson carefully crafted a somewhat
simplistic public image in her campaigns,
frequently referring to herself as both the
noble and loyal “pioneer settler from the
land of the Vikings” and the innocuous
“lady school teacher turned politician.”
These references similarly characterise his-
torical references to her life and career par-
ticularly several small community biogra-
phies which emphasize her community ser-
vice and downplay her tumultuous politi-
cal career. While her English writing
appears to embrace the language of both
Canadian nationalism and domestic femi-
ninity, Halidorson deliberately employed
these notions in her attempts to garner
Anglo-Canadian support for the accep-
tance of the Icelandic Canadian communi-
ty, increased in female political participa-
tion and leadership, and eventually for rad-
ical wartime politics. Although
Halldorson's subversive manipulation of
these simplistic, palatable notions of gender
and ethnicity in her political campaigns
challenges existing notions of interwar and
wartime women’s and political and ethnic
history, however, the unsurprising brevity
and seemingly uneventful nature of her
career has helped to push her to the mar-
gins of Canadian history. It was, however,
the barriers Halidorson faced and the frus-
tration she endured which provide crucial
insight into the surprising and uneven para-
meters of interwar and early wartime eth-
nicity, gender and politics.
Halidorson has received scant atten-