Abstract

This work centres around the life of my great-grandmother, Ida Hannus, a suffragist who left Finland in 1902 for Sointula, a Finnish utopian commune on Malcolm Island, British Columbia. After the commune dissolved, she and her husband moved to Vancouver, where she ultimately brought up her four children alone (three others having died in infancy). She worked a variety of jobs--housekeeper, maid in a skid row hotel, seamstress, landlady--and was active in the Finnish socialist hall in Vancouver. She died in 1953, when she was struck by a car. Her story is divided into three main sections. The first concentrates on the events and her experiences in the commune, the second examines her life as a wife and mother during the years 1905-1927, and the third focuses on her political involvement during the 30s and 40s. The work uses a number of different styles--interviews, quotes, lyric poems, dramatic monologues, official records, photographs--and is told in three main perspectives--Ida's, mine (as descendant and researcher) and my mother's. These many perspectives and sources redefine and complicate the narrative, and ultimately raise questions about the reliability of history and biography.