Education Correspondent
She decided on her future early. Alice Freeman was a schoolteacher in Toronto in 1874, inspiring youngsters to learn their lessons when Freeman herself was only 18 years old. “She was in Toronto, which was part of her dream, and she was embarking on a career that would lead her – however winding the highway – to the most important part of that dream: being a writer,” said Jill Downie in A Passionate Pen: The Life and Times of Faith Fenton (Random House of Canada Ltd., Toronto 1996).
Third in a family of twelve children, Alice Matilda Freeman was one of several daughters of William Henry and Mary Ann Freeman of Bowmanville, Ontario. Moving to the town of Barrie, the family fell on hard times in about 1867 and ten-year-old Alice Freeman was sent to live with Reverend Thomas Reikie and his wife Margaret back in Bowmanville. Completing her elementary schooling, the independent Freeman moved to a boarding house in Toronto when a teenager to attend higher education. At Model School, she studied a full range of subjects from geography and physics to history, maths, art and religion; she also learned the skills of teaching. Freeman also told her friends and family that writing was her passion.
Journalism Not a Job for Women
While teaching wee children at several schools, including 11 years at Ryerson School, Freeman wrote several articles under her own initials and under the pseudonym of Stella, for the Northern Advance. (Women teachers earned 1/3 of the wages men earned.) Writing under one’s own name was not something a proper woman would do. In the 1880s, “journalism was not quite as suspect as the theatre but, for a woman especially, mixing with ink-stained hacks in office where dubious views that questioned the status quo might be expressed, and in improper language, was unthinkable,” Downie noted. Temporarily dropping the name of Stella, Alice Freeman was about to write under a new nom de plume, Faith Fenton.
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