The Dionne Quintuplets: More Than an Ontario Showpiece — Five Franco-Ontarian Children

The story of the Dionne Quintuplets has been told many times over the past 50 years. Writers have told us about the way they lived, the food they ate, their relationships with their family and the provincial guardians they had and, perhaps most often, the interaction they had with Dr. Roy Dafoe. What most of these stories have failed to do, except in a passing fashion, has been to place the Quintuplets in the context of their own evolving ethnocultural community -- French - Canadian or Franco - Ontarian society in the Ontario of the 1930s and 1940s.(f.1)This article seeks, first of all, to study the Quintuplets as members of a specific community with its own history and contradictions. It is hoped that, by placing the community at the centre of the story and within its own history, we can better understand how the family interacted with the larger French - Canadian community and how the community in turn responded to the reality of the Quints.(f.2) Second, I hope to demonstrate that the Franco - Ontarian community was not monolithic in its reaction to the birth of the Quints. Not only did conditions and opinions affecting the family continually change, but the community was fragmented along class, gender and regional lines. This led to important differences in community responses.The purpose here is not to consider the many events in the struggle of the Dionne family to regain custody of the Quints. Rather, the focus will be on four examples that illuminate the forms of interaction between the Dionne family and the French - Canadian community. First, the role and motivation of the local parish priest in encouraging Oliva Dionne to "exhibit" the Quints in Chicago soon after their birth in 1934 will be discussed. Second, the greater involvement of the French - Canadian community, especially women's groups, after the Dionne Quintuplets' Guardianship Act was passed in March 1935, will be studied. Third, and in far greater detail, the active involvement of the Franco - Ontarian leadership, both male and female, in the events surrounding the firing of the French - Canadian nurse and teacher in early 1938 will be studied. Finally, we will show how, in 1941, the Dionne Quintuplets ceased to be merely objects, and began instead to affirm their own sense of their French - Canadian identity -- a development that led to a backlash in English - speaking communities in both Canada and the United StatesThe context and events surrounding the Quints will be studied principally from a French - Canadian viewpoint. The English - Canadian viewpoint on the various questions will be de - emphasized, since that perspective has tended to dominate discusssions regarding the Dionne Quintuplets over the past years, with French - Canadians being portrayed primarily as passive players simply reacting to various situations.Turn - of - the - Century Northeastern OntarioIt was the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1882 - 83 through northeastern Ontario that permitted the opening of the area between Mattawa and Sudbury to white settlement. Thousands of French - Canadians from the Ottawa Valley and Quebec, who were looking for enough cash to buy land, worked on the railway construction gangs, mainly as timber cutters. Encouraged by the CPR, which needed cash to continue building, as well as by the Catholic Church attempting to keep the population on the land, hundreds of railway workers bought up cheap land on either side of the railway right of way. In turn, "the railway stimulated the growth of logging operations by creating a market for timber, by providing an experienced workforce and by opening up new forest areas."(f.3) Frequently, the men worked in lumber camps during the winter and farmed the land with their families the rest of the year. In northeastern Ontario, French - Canadian families found that, to a large extent, they could reproduce the socio - economic forms that they had known previously in the Ottawa Valley and in Quebec. …