... having been breathed out

A few more passages from Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Chapter 7: "'Bitterly Disappointed' at the Spread of 'Colour-Bar Tactics': Viola Desmond's Challenge to Racial Segregation, Nova Scotia, 1946"), which I am TRYING to finish so that I will no longer have eight books on the go at the same time.

Although both Viola's parents had both Black and white forebears, her father was much darker-skinned than her mother, which created the perception of a mixed-race marriage:

Viola [Desmond]'s parents married in 1908, creating what was perceived to be a mixed-race family within a culture that rarely welcomed interracial marriage. It was not the actual fact of racial mixing that provoked such concern, for there was undeniable evidence that interracial reproduction had occurred extensively throughout North American history [ed: often as a result of the rapes of Black women by white men]. It was the formalized recognition of such unions that created such unease within a culture based on white supremacy. The tensions posed within a racist society by an apparently mixed-race family often came home to roost on the children born to James and Gwendolin Davis. Viola's younger sister recalls children taunting them in the schoolyard, jeering: 'They may think you're white because they saw your mother at Parents' Day, but they haven't seen your father.' Viola self-identified both as 'mixed-race' and as 'coloured,' the latter being a term of preference during the 1930s and 1940s.

As Viola grew up, she became an ambitious entrepreneur, traveling to Montreal, New York, and Atlantic City to train as a beautician since the available beauty schools in Halifax barred Black women from admission. Returning to Halifax, she went on to found Vi's Studio of Beauty Culture, not only offering beauty services to her clients but developing her own self-branded line of Black beauty powders and creams, which she sold through her shop, and traveling throughout the province to make her products and services available to people outside of Halifax. Backhouse writes:

Although [Viola's husband] Jack was initially supportive of his wife's choice of career, her ambitious business plans began to cause him some distress. He became concerned that all of the travel required was inappropriate for a married woman. Both spouses in Black families frequently held down jobs in the paid labour force, contrary to the pattern in white middle-class households. But middle-class Black women who sought work outside the home often faced bitter tensions within their marriages. Their careers tended to clash with society's prevailing ideals of gender, which required that men be masters in their own homes, ruling over dependent women and children. Even women who remained childless, such as Viola Desmond, found themselves subject to pressure to retire from the paid workforce.

At odds with her husband on this point, Viola Desmond held firm convictions that Black women ought to have greater access to employment opportunities outside their traditionally segregated sphere of domestic service. A few years after she set up her own studio, she opened the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, which drew Black female students from across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec.