Mary Boyd and the female gaze
I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed listening to Dr. Jane McGaughey bringing Mary Boyd to life in UCL’s Senate Hall last week. Mary Boyd died in Toronto in 1868, ostensibly at her own hand, but, as McGaughey reveals, much more likely to have been at the hand of her employer and physician. Mary’s story was being told by Dr. Jane McCaughey, a noted Canadian historian, the Johnson Chair of Quebec and Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University, and the recipient of the Canada-UK Foundation Eccles Centre Fellowship at the British Library. The occasion was the annual conference of the British Association of Canadian Studies, chaired by Dr. Tony McCulloch and colleagues. Jane, and Mary, are definitely the most interesting Canadians we’ve met this month.
Dr McGaughey examined the Canadian papers archived at the British Library’s Eccles Centre as part of her work on Gender and Migration between Canada and the United Kingdom. Her findings are both fascinating and affirming in their interpretation of Mary’s life, and death, through the female gaze and through the lens of equality….or inequality as the case may be here.
There is much mystery surrounding the death of Mary Boyd, an Irish Quebecker. House maid to the prominent Campbell family in Toronto, after two suicide attempts she ultimately died from self-inflicted injuries according to the investigating coroner. A significant media storm followed, causing a scandal surrounding the issues of sex, virginity, pregnancy, medical experimentation, mental illness, and above all, power imbalance between genders in 1868.
As reported in the lecture and in the podcast available on Apple, Mary’s employer, prominent physician Dr. Duncan Campbell, treated her with “galvanic excitement”, in other words electrodes, attached to her breasts and cervix, without her permission. He reported that this was to restore her menstrual cycles and that he had not conducted any gynecological examination….and was thus completely unaware that she was pregnant. He also claimed to be unaware Mary had reported being in love with the family’s son, Posie Campbell, and having had sexual relations with him.
To understand how the scandal was ignited, Dr McGaughey created context by connecting the Boyd case with other significant events in Canada at the same time (April 1868), including the assassination in Ottawa of the Irish-Canadian Thomas Darcy McGee (a Father of Canadian confederation), the attempted assassination in Australia of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred, and at the same time, “Canada’s most notorious abortion trial” had begun in Montreal, ending in 10 year sentence for the defendant. The presiding judge asked why the defendant had not, in a “society with no class distinctions” married the young maid instead? Dr. McGaughey illustrated how these events created both a panic about Fenianism, and an enormous pressure to conceal the possible purpose of the treatment Mary received.
Dr. McGaughey’s research continues, and will be the subject of her next book. We won’t be in the least surprised to see Mary Boyd’s story in a film in the future. For more information on this research, Dr. McGaughey can be reached here. More information about the Canadian archives in the Eccles Collection is available from Jean Petrovic, Bibliographic Editor and Lead for Canada at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at The British Library, email here. We are delighted that the support of the Canada-UK Foundation Eccles Fellowship has made these important historic and fascinating contributions possible.