Les Filles du Roi (The King’s Girls) were well brought-up, young French women who were transported by ship to Quebec between 1663 and 1673. They were destined to be the brides of strange colonists and to populate a continent. Can we judge them by today’s standards of feminism? Were they used crassly by King Louis XIV or were they simply keen to begin anew life overseas?

We will never know how Les Filles du Roi felt about their passage and rapid marriages. We can only look at the records and writings of the period to try and imagine their life in the New World.

Government records indicate that the first few girls, who came before 1663, were contracted or indentured. After that the French bureaucracy began recruiting suitable females. They were carefully chosen peasants, largely from farming communities in the north of France. Often they were orphans or the younger daughters of large families.

Education was not a prerequisite as much as a good attitude toward physical labour. Parish priests had to swear for their character. Most were examined and characterized as virgins.

A report from Jean Talon, who was King Louis’ representative in Quebec, asked the authorities back in France to send out "strong, intelligent and beautiful girls of robust health, habituated to farm work." Girls from the cities were not prime candidates because they were thought to be prettier, but finicky.

Obviously these young women were expected to be partners in the work of setting out farms where wilderness had been. They were warned that until draft animals were bred in large enough numbers, they would be expected to pull plows while their husbands pushed and carried a musket for safety.

The girls were promised a dowry from the King if they were selected to make the journey. Each one who married a soldier or habitant (farmer) received 50 livres. Those who wed officers were awarded 100 livres.

Unfortunately, Governor Frontenac records that the money for dowries ran out at the end of the female immigration period. Those who arrived in 1673 were out of luck. Did they question their fate or simply get down to work?

Those who were poor (and many were) were given a new costume before leaving France. The girls received their passage, a small hope chest, sewing needles, thread, scissors, two knives, one thousand pins and one bonnet.

Sister Marie de l"incarnation wrote, "Madam Bourdon was made responsible in France for one hundred and fifty girls that the king sent to this country in vessels from Normandy. They gave her plenty of exercise during such a long voyage, since they were very badly brought up and very difficult to handle. There were others who were more well bred and who gave her more satisfaction."

Carefully supervised on the way over, once in the New World the women were placed in three halls for inspection - a practice today’s women would fin abhorrent. They were objects of interest. The men who came to view them could pick and chose. Apparently they, in turn, asked very pointed questions about the quality of life they could expect should they wed a given male.

The plumpest women were always offered marriage proposals first because they were thought to be the healthiest (hardest working). Bad skin, crossed eyes or buckteeth were not a problem as long as the girl in question had a good figure.

Les filles du Roi came to marry and most did almost immediately. Business was business. These couples were not looking for love at first sight. They wed right away if they reached an agreement. A priest was always ready and a notary to make out the necessary documents.

Once the marriage was consummated, the bride and groom were given an ox, a cow, two pigs, a pair of chickens, two barrels of salted meat and eleven crowns in cash. The men had already received plots of land along the St. Lawrence, so the couple departed to begin farming. No courting and no honeymoons for these folks.

The transport of French women provided 17 per cent of the population of New France by 1673. The entire colony numbered roughly 5,000 people at the time. Naturally there were men who married Indian girls, but the Huron and Montagnais were matriarchal societies and their women were not as pliant and submissive as the French females.

A patriarchal church and chauvinistic society in the old country determined that women could be dominated by their fathers and husbands. Two means of dealing with uppity females were witch trials and the imprisonment of prostitutes.

"Tens of thousands of women were executed in France as witches during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the same period repressive measures were introduced against prostitutes." Women were even prohibited from making contracts.

The character Phillipe Rigault in Erika Ritter’s play "Winter 1671" points out that the French attitudes toward are very different from those of the natives. "Champlain went to the chiefs and said, ‘we’ll give money to your women to breed with our men. But the squaws shook their heads and said, ‘who’d take money to marry a stranger/’ Well, they are savages after all. It was left to the French women to prove it could be done."

In France or in Quebec in those days, women were regarded by law much like a piece of property. Even infidelity on the part of a husband was not grounds to seek freedom.

A husband only erred if he beat his wife seriously and atrociously. He could not leave because he was jealous or because he wrongly suspected her of adultery. In the centuries before social welfare, marriage presented French women with a firm sense of security. The birth of children added to that sense, and they were very fertile women.

By as early as 1671 nearly 700 children had been born to marriages of les Filles du Roi. Most girls were pregnant before they had been in Quebec a year.

Some of the women married more than once as husbands died off. Barbe Baron, for example, married in 1667, 1672, and 1691. We have no way of knowing how her first two husbands died.

Ironically the colonists thought that Canada’s harsh climate was better for women than men. Dollier de Casbon wrote, "though the cold is very wholesome to both sexes, it is incomparably advantageous to the female, who is almost immortal here."

By our standards, les Filles du Roi lived harsh, emotionally deprived lives, but they had set out only seeking opportunity. They knew hard work was expected and, if they laboured, there would be rewards.

No doubt in some of those quickly set up marriages love blossomed, just as it can in arranged marriages the world over. It happened that the priorities of the colonists, male and female, coincided with the master plan of King Louis.