REMARKABLE WOMAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 August 1938, Page 10

REMARKABLE WOMAN

MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR NORTH POLE. GREAT COURAGE AND PUBLIC . SPIRIT. Mrs George Black, M.P. for the North Pole, chatelaine of the Yukon, whose constituency is as large in area as Germany, will retire when the present Parliament prorogues. Her constituency has a population of only 7000, including Indians and Eskimos. In 1935, following the resignation due to ill-health of her husband, former Speaker of the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament, Mrs Black was elected to succeed him. She is the second woman to enter the Lower House. Born in 1866, Mrs Black is the daughter of a wealthy Chicagoan, inventor of the wash-ing-machine. He planted a million trees on his estate, and from her home she acquired a knowledge of North American flora, which in later years earned her a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. Mrs Black’s hobby, collecting and mounting wild flowers on a watercolour background, procured her an invitation from the society to deliver a paper on Arctic flora at one of their Christmas lectures —an unusual distinction for a woman. • ? A woman of great courage and public spirit, Mrs Black is acclaimed the “ideal representative of Canadian womanhood.” She is keenly interested in women who seek to develop their gifts, who have progressed in the professions, and who are successful in the universal art of homemaking. During the war, Mrs Black delivered over 400 lectures in the United Kingdom,under the auspices of the Canadian Government, the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. At the outbreak of the war her husband organised the Yukon Company, and went overseas as its commander. With him went Mrs Black and her son, who paid the supreme sacrifice. Her husband was gravely wounded. When she applied for an embarkation permit, the general asked her if she wanted to be the only woman on a transport with three thousand men. She replied that she had been the only woman in Dawson with ten times that number.' She was given the permit. Her narrow escape as a five-year-old from the Chicago fire in 1871 — started by the widow O’Leary’s cow kicking a lamp—was nothing to the hardships she endured in those early years in the Yukon. Lonely, hungry, and cold, she faced the ordeal of the birth of her youngest child, alone in a log cabin in sub-Arctic winter darkness. For three years after 1901 she operated a sawmill and often worked .on a continuous 24-hour shift during the long-light summer days. When the 1937 Parliament session ended, Mrs Black, then 71, returned to the Yukon for the summer. Spurning more modern transportation facilities, she travelled from Whitehorse, Yukon Terri-1 tory, to Dawson —more than 400 miles —by canoe. Asked the reasons for her success, Mrs Black answered lightly: “Cooking good dinners, having plenty to eat and drink, the ability to make sour-dough pancakes, and bake beans.”