Reading Log number four, this wasn’t some of my best writing for my reading logs. I found the articles that we read a bit uninteresting, and therefore I struggled quite a bit when trying to understand the articles I read and reflect on them. Although I thought this particular article wasn’t very interesting, I do think the women’s roles in New France are very important to understand.

Reading log #4

The main argument of this reading is for readers to understand the importance and the roles that women played in New France. This article was written in hopes of people understanding how important women were in the era, and how the fur trade relied on them to succeed. Although there is not a lot of information on the women of this time, this article does shed light on the roles that women played, and the number of women entrepreneurs at this time. I found this article convincing in the fact that women were very important in this era, and I think its common for women’s roles to be overlooked or diminished as not very important. The author mentions that it was discovered that at some point in time the women and the girls of this era, started building canoes. I believe the men thought about women as the centre of the home, taking care of their children. When they discovered the women were good for more than just reproducing, this must have made the men at this time, see women in a bit of a different light. This provided evidence in the article of the importance of the women not only for the men, in a reproduction sense, but also for the fur trade. I think its very interesting learning about all the different women entrepreneurs in this time frame, and also how women weren’t defined by the men’s perceptions of what a woman “should be”, but they proved to everyone that they were capable of helping the men during this time.