Jeannie's Demise

Abortion on Trial in Victorian Toronto

Ian Radforth

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771135146
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

August 1, 1875, Toronto: The naked body of a young woman is discovered in a pine box, half-buried in a ditch along Bloor Street. So begins Jeannie's Demise, a real-life Victorian melodrama that played out in the bustling streets and courtrooms of "Toronto the Good, " cast with all the lurid stock characters of the genre. Historian Ian Radforth brings to life an era in which abortion was illegal, criminal proceedings were a spectator sport, and coded advertisements for back-alley procedures ran in the margins of newspapers.

At the centre of the story is the elusive and doomed Jeannie Gilmour, a minister's daughter whose independent spirit can only be glimpsed through secondhand accounts and courtroom reports. As rumours swirl about her final weeks and her abortionists stand trial for their lives, a riveted public grapples with questions of guilt and justice, innocence and intent. Radforth's intensive research grounds the tragedy of Jeannie's demise in sharp historical analysis, presenting over a dozen case studies of similar trials in Victorian-era Canada.

Part gripping procedural, part meticulous autopsy, Jeannie's Demise opens a rare window into the hidden history of a woman's right to choose.

1. Jeannie and Her Family

Leaving the Old Country

In 1872, Jeannie Gilmour and her family arrived in Toronto. They were, as her father, John Gilmour, put it, Scottish immigrants “without a cent.” The Gilmours’ story mirrored those of thousands of British immigrants who came to Canada in the nineteenth century in hope of a brighter future. British immigrants far outnumbered other arrivals in Victorian Canada, and by the end of the century they had played an enormous role in transforming Ontario into a province of agricultural, commercial, and industrial prosperity. While few of the newcomers left evidence that describes their lives in detail, Jeannie and her family’s emigration and settlement story was told in considerable detail by her father in long statements that appeared in the Toronto Globe in August and September 1875, soon after Jeannie’s untimely death.1 As revealing as these statements are, they were written from a man’s perspective; they reflect his concerns as a father devastated by Jeannie’s demise and as the family patriarch responsible for the family’s economic well-being. Regrettably we learn next to nothing about John Gilmour’s wife or the couple’s other children.

John Gilmour (1826–1895) and his wife, Janet (1824–1897), came from farming backgrounds in the vicinity of Glasgow, Scotland.2 In 1849, in the evangelical tradition, John had a conversion experience and became a committed Christian. During his spare time on the farm, he studied the Bible in preparation for doing evangelistic work that he believed God had called him to do. In 1861, he left farming and, he said, “served the Lord” as a missionary based in Edinburgh. Attached to no particular denomination, he was an itinerant preacher travelling in northern England and Scotland. Unsalaried, he supported himself and his family from donations by people who appreciated his preaching. His wife and children lived in Edinburgh, where he visited them when he could, usually spending four weeks away and one week at home. Given John’s absences, his wife, Janet, must have assumed nearly all responsibility for child-rearing and household management. As the male breadwinner, John Gilmour proudly declared that his income from evangelizing work was enough to maintain the family “respectably.” And when each of the children finished school at age fifteen, they worked until marriage and contributed their earnings to the family coffers, as was customary among workers and others of modest means.

As an evangelical preacher in the nineteenth century, John Gilmour would have seen his role as encouraging his listeners to come to Christ. Evangelicals believed that all people were sinners who were in need of religious arousal and a cathartic conversion, to be pulled out of a fallen world. Passionate preaching was intended to trigger conversion and spiritual regeneration. To preach, neither formal theological training nor ordination were necessary. Any individual could be called by God to spread His word and share the gospel.3

In Scotland, the Gilmour family faced challenges that may have motivated the family’s emigration to Canada. “It pleased God to take to Himself,” wrote Gilmour, “two dear boys.” His eldest two sons, Robert and John, both died young, at sixteen and seventeen years respectively. Emigrating to Canada would have provided a way for the parents to distance themselves from the tragedies and begin life afresh. However, John explained his decision to take the family to Canada by saying that he longed to farm again and expected it would be easier in Ontario to acquire his own rural acreage and combine farming with preaching. Aware that in recent years he had not spent much time with his family, John hoped that he could do so on an Ontario farm.

As a father, John Gilmour was also concerned about his only surviving son, Matthew, who in 1872 had just left school and begun work in a lawyer’s office. In his father’s view, fifteen-year-old Matthew was “delicate looking,” and it was John’s hope that work in agriculture would strengthen him. What young Matthew thought of emigrating and giving up office work for farming, we do not know. In any event, in May 1872, three members of the family left for Canada—John, Matthew, and Jeannie, age twenty—the three most employable members of the family. John’s wife and their daughters Eva, thirteen, and Jessie, seven, joined them in the autumn after the others made preparations for them. Left behind was the eldest daughter, who was married and comfortably settled in Scotland.

Jeannie was a reluctant emigrant. “She didn’t jump at it at all,” wrote her father. One acquaintance would later maintain that “her father brought her from the Old Country against her will.”4 She was happy where she was in Edinburgh. From age sixteen, Jeannie had worked as a saleswoman in an Edinburgh linen shop, where her proud father recalled that she was “a general favourite, and the business was increased very much by her manner and skill.” John admitted that in Scotland, being a good scholar, Jeannie could have become a teacher, or, being skilled with the needle, she might have become a dressmaker. John, however, determined that she must come with the rest of the family to Canada. Once here, Jeannie would have preferred to stay in Toronto, but her parents were uneasy about the idea because it was a strange city where they knew few people. No one was around to watch out for her. John believed that she should learn “farm-housework,” which would best train her for the rural, married future he imagined for her.5 Apparently she told others that when her father brought her to Canada, “he had hired her as a servant at a farm house against her will.”6

In recounting that the family arrived in Toronto “without a cent,” John Gilmour exaggerated a little. The family stayed for five days at a small hotel, the Robinson House at 109 Bay Street, where they prayed for work and scoured newspaper advertisements. Jeannie spotted one that landed her a position for three days sewing for a Mrs. Calloway on Temperance Street. On their fifth day in the city, John and Matthew went to the immigration depot. There, they encountered Gavin Lawrie, who farmed near Woodbridge, to the northwest of the city. The thirty-five-year-old farmer was looking for “a girl,” a young woman to do domestic work and help his wife, Eliza, twenty-nine, with their several young children.7 When they told him about Jeannie, he was very interested. John explained, however, that he did not want to split up the family. He urged Lawrie to hire not just Jeannie but also himself and his son without any bargain as to wages for a few days, and if they gave satisfaction, to keep them on for the season. Holding out his smooth hands for Lawrie to see, John admitted that he hadn’t done farm work in many years and that Matthew had “never held anything but a pen.” But he said they would work hard to earn some money and gain local farming experience so that they could take up land in the Free Grant country that was opening up in the unsettled bush further north. Lawrie was persuaded. He got his wagon, paid John Gilmour’s bill at the Robinson House, collected Jeannie, and they all proceeded to Lawrie’s place near Woodbridge, about twenty-five miles away.

The arrangement worked out for everyone. Lawrie was very satisfied with the work John and Matthew did, and so he paid father and son well for the summer and harvest seasons. Jeannie too fit comfortably into the Lawrie household and proved to be a good worker.

Developing a Bush Farm

Thanks to their work for the Lawries, John and Matthew Gilmour got the Ontario farm experience that was virtually a prerequisite before the province would grant wild lands to newcomers. When the harvest was over in late August, John and Matthew scouted for bush lots in newly opened townships further north. In Parry Sound District, the Ontario government was granting surveyed lots under the terms of the Free Grants and Homestead Act of 1868.8

The Ontario government’s decision to develop this part of Ontario is a disturbing example of colonialism. The Anishinaabe, Algonquins, and Mississaugas had long hunted in the area’s vast forests, fished its many lakes and streams, and lived seasonally in the area. During the nineteenth century, Anishinaabe based along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay travelled inland to hunt.9 When the government began to colonize the region with white settlers in the 1870s, it did not bother to negotiate with the Indigenous bands for a land surrender, in contravention of longstanding official policy and customary practices. (It was not for another half century, in 1923, that the Williams Treaties, covering a vast region from the Ottawa River to Georgian Bay, were finally made with the “Chippewa Nations” who signed at Georgina Island, Christian Island, and Rama.10) Still, in 1870 the Ontario government established the District of Parry Sound along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, surveyed new townships, and opened them for colonization.

Doe Lake, where the Gilmour family developed their farm in Ryerson Township, District of Parry Sound. Author’s photograph.

John Gilmour selected lots in Parry Sound District on beautiful Doe Lake in the Township of Ryerson, named after Egerton Ryerson, the celebrated educator and Methodist minister. (Although the land was in the District of Parry Sound, John referred to it as being in “Muskoka,” the then better-known district just to the south of Ryerson.) On November 20, 1872, the Ontario Crown granted Jo...