Many Icelanders emigrated to North America in the last decades of the 19th century and came to know societies very different from the Icelandic one. They met new customs and a public debate that had grown out of the gender and class struggles of an industrial society that had not yet taken firm root in Iceland. Writing and energetic publishing have long gone with Icelanders, and there was a great deal of it among those who moved to Canada. From there came newspapers, journals and books in Icelandic, which played an important part in shaping Icelanders’ social awareness in those years and indeed into the 20th century. Well-known journals include Baldur, Freyja, Heimskringla, Lögberg, Lísing and various Christian periodicals. The Icelandic Socialist Society in Winnipeg published Edward Bellamy’s Vatnsþróin (The Water Tank) in 1902, and the writings of Gestur Pálsson were published there in the West, as were many other good books.
The Western Icelanders were socially aware and active in politics. Dr Catherine Lyle Cleverdon makes an interesting point about the beginnings of the women’s rights movement in Canada in her book The Women Suffrage Movement in Canada, where she says: “The movement in Manitoba began early; its origins go back to the early 1890s, when a few Icelandic women founded the first women’s suffrage society in the province of Manitoba, and indeed the first in all of western Canada.” Margrét Jónsdóttir Benedictsson was among these pioneers of women’s liberation in Canada; she was editor of the feminist journal Freyja, published 1898–1910. Freyja was the only feminist journal in Canada at that time. Margrét wrote many feminist articles, wrote poems and translated stories for the journal. She also published her translations in Almanak, published in Selkirk, which printed her translations of feminist short stories and an article on anarchism that is among the first articles in Icelandic on that political movement. The article can be found below, on p. 47 of January’s Highlight of the month.
A biography of Margrét J. Benedictsson, Fyrsti vestur-íslenski femínistinn (The first Western Icelandic feminist), by Björn Jónsson, was published in 2007.
Click the picture to view January’s Highlight of the month on the website Tímarit.is:
