Beauty Beware!

 

August 1911 Delineator, clothes for school girls. Caption: the long vacation should help school girls grow tall and rosy. Pretty dresses and trim outing costumes help towards the fun and exercises which they need. The dress on the right is a semi-princess for a small woman. “The model looks extremely well-developed in a foulard, round or sailor collar and cuffs. A feature of the waist (blouse) is the kimono sleeve.

In Threshold Girl  I have Flora Nicholson peruse this very edition of the Delineator magazine. (Indeed, the cover is the cover of my ebook.) I have lots of nice colour plates in the book from various era Delineators.

This is the page that would have caught her attention: She was 18 in 1911, but a small,thin 18. In those days they tried to make thin 18 year olds look bigger. Today, the ideal woman (see Kate Middleton) is so thin she can blow away.

The ideal woman. She is a problem!

A couple of days ago my husband, on vacation, was watching Dr. Oz. He likes the show. But Oz was promoting some silly sounding method to instantly reprogram people (ie, women, his audience) out of their bad habits.

He brought a young woman out. Her problem, she wasn’t happy with her looks, her nose, her mouth, her skin, whatever. She was a plain woman.

I turned to my husband, “This woman isn’t happy with her looks because she has been bombarded with media images since birth saying her features are NOT the ideal! That’s NOT gonna go a way in five minutes. If if did, the stock market would crash. More than it has, anyway.”

I write this because the picture above features ‘models’ all with a certain round type of face. A few months later, Flora, who is not a pretty girl, writes home from college about a girl at school who is ‘one of those dolly face girls who pretends to be “so terribly nervous.” Dolly-faced girls were ‘in’ I guess.

This woman is popular and has stolen Flora’s roommate’s affections.

The Nicholson women were not brought up to be nervous, although they were somewhat  vain. Even the Mom, who was a beauty in her day from the early picture I have of her, but in the 1860′s and 70′s, young women were not bombarded with consumer-age images. That was only starting in 1900, for the middle class and only in these fashion magazines.

Beauty was considered dangerous by some people, mostly religious types.  ”Beware Beauty” advises the 1896 sex hygiene book, Light in Dark Corners.

I put that bit about Beauty in Biology and Ambition about Flora’s sister Marion, who was very popular with boys and girls, although not a classic beauty, just a charismatic girl. No shrinking violet she….no nervous Nellie.  I guess women in the era were taught that men liked ‘frail’ women but all evidence in Marion’s diaries proves quite the opposite. No one was more boffo than Marion Nicholson, who rose to be a Union Leader. (And even after that the men liked her.)

All this brings to mind an incident I heard of a few months ago. I was visiting a relation whose daughter was away at college in California. Her daughter was checking out sororities. She phoned her mother to say she was introduced, or whatever, at a certain sorority but she knew she wouldn’t get in. All the girls were beautiful.

“And your daughter isn’t beautiful? ” I asked.

“Not in the right way, ” my relation answered. Not tall, skinny and blond.

You see her daughter is a classic Egyptian or Middle eastern beauty. Indeed, when they visited the Louvre a year or so earlier, the Mom and Daughter went around comparing her to the statues there.

A goddess. But not the right kind of goddess!

Take about Dolly type of beauties. Barbie really has become the ideal. And Barbie doesn’t exist outside of Copenhagen. Not even in the suburbs of Copenhagen, because there you get Danish peasant stock, or so my sister in law (a Dane) told me.  Well, actually the modern ideal is not Danish, because most of  the modern (American) actresses and Kate Middleton are flat chested, pencil thin, modern day garconnes.

I recall a line from the bizarre satire 30 Rock, where most of the women except the protagonist are ideal women, blond pencil thin.  What’s her name, Jenna Maroney, the crazy blond lead actress with the preteen body, asks Liz Lemon if they can hire a big woman to stand behind her so she looks more tiny and vulnerable.

30 Rock satirizes society’s ideal woman while featuring loads of said woman – along with a lot of homely fat men. Kind of cake and eat it too…Like the very popular stage play Everywoman, Flora and sisters go to see in 1911, that proselytizes against female narcissism using gorgeous young actresses in pretty form fitting costumes.

Ok, to the other dresses. The first one on the right anyway: The top is a waist for a small women, resembling a Norfolk jacket . Applied straps, simulating box plaits, conceal the side seams front and back. The waist closes in double breasted style and is particularly smart when worn over a skirt with a patent leather belt. Linen, poplin, duck and serge are used extensively for the design and the cuffs and broad sailor collar are generally made of a contrasting material.

A neckband for wear with different high collars is rather better for the regular shirt waist style, that is usually made with full length sleeves.

If you are going to read any of my three books about the Nicholsons in 1911, you had better get it in your head what a ‘waist’ is. The women are always writing about them. Waists or shirtwaists are blouses or blouses in a male shirt style.

In the 1910 era, as young women went off to work in the big city, they adopted male dress habits (on top, not below, which was illegal…hence harem pants, ah, skirts) like shirts and ties!! and then they fancied them up!! Below, from the same magazine a ‘mannish’ shirtwaist.  I have no pictures of Marion or Flora in working women garb, but I do have a couple of Edith, so that’s good enough.

Edith, second top. In her Mannish Shirtwaist, 1911 era. Right in style, because she liked to be fashionable to her dying days. The Nicholsons made their own waists.. and wrote about it a lot.

Lupins and Ideology

A high school class in the 1910 era.

It’s hard to find pictures of elementary school classes.

Anyway, as I write Biology and Ambition, about Montreal teacher Marion Nicholson in 1910, the follow up to Threshold Girl about her sister Flora;s year at Macdonald Teaching College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about her older sister’s life and loves at Westmount Methodist Institute, I have decided to look over some textbooks from the era to see what she was teaching her 3rd and 4th grade students.

It’s not that hard to find. Years ago I found a document at Mcgill  revealing the curriculum of the Montreal Board.

I have a list of recommended text books, from Flora’s Mac portfolio and see they used Ontario Public School texts in their courses.

These texts are online at archive.org

The Hygiene Text is most interesting. Hygiene was a subject taught, although I read that it was basically a ‘free marks’ class – which means it wasn’t really about knowledge but about something else.

Ideology, perhaps. Remember with the age of Purity and the Hygienist movement was quite racist and classist.

The book I have must have been for older classes, middle school perhaps. It has typical topics (see below) and one not so typical. Family Stock. The final chapter is on eugenics! And amazingly it uses the same case study Jukes/Edwards by a Mr. Winslip that Carrie Derick used in her speech to the Montreal Literacy Society in 1910 and that I put in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

Now, imagine a child of poverty who just happened to be a good scholar and who got himself or herself through to Middle School or High School on scholarship or something. There he would meet with an official text that says he was ‘inferior’ and destined to remain so, due to genes. He might also be confused by the chapter on housing, that claims that a family home at minimum  should have 1000 sq foot per family member, since he might well live in a two room flat with 8 siblings with no windows or running water.

Now, people might ask what does it serve to bring up these ‘embarrassing’ bits from history. I think it provides a great service.

Because one thing doesn’t change and hasn’t changed over the century: human nature. No doubt, there’s a lot of ‘official blah blah’ today that passes for ‘truth’  that is nothing but ideology. Well, as Homer S says “DUH.”

Well, take Finance Minister Flaherty’s remark the other day ‘that there are no bad jobs.’  If you interpret bad to mean ‘beneath human dignity’ well, then it’s debatable, I guess. Although a question best left to philosophers and kept out of the hands of conniving politicians. If you interpret bad to mean undesirable, dirty, unsafe, disgusting, soul-crushing, stressful, tiring,  stultifyingly boring, not respectable or not respected, or merely not paying enough to raise a family in this day and age, then there’s no debate. The statement is patronizing ideological bunk, coming out of the mouth of a privileged patriarch who thinks he knows best but who is way way WAY out of touch, but who controls the country’s money, our money! You know that Monty Python Sketch. Dennis Moore. Takes from the poor, gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch. I love that skit. What more Lupins?

Also one of my favorite 1909 excerpts. A college undergraduate degree ain’t worth much these days (although it may put a student from a poorer background  in great debt.)  And Flaherty seems to want to help turn the middle class into the working poor, wage slaves by cutting UI which helps people with good jobs keep their good jobs in uncertain times…like today.

 

 

From Educational Foundations June 1909

(A.S. Barnes and Company)

 

Opening to Essay Education-The Economic Side by Will Scott.

 

The state would educate the young in order to make them better citizens; in order to advance civilization. It being desirable that all of its people be good citizens, the state strives to educate the children of all.

 

The theory held by the state is also the theory of the individual – so far as other people’s children are concerned. They are to be educated so they will not violate the law – not cross swords with society.  But as to their own children, that is quite a different matter. They should be educated not only to make them good citizens, and not chiefly for that purpose, but to give them an advantage in the struggle for existence.  The object of education for one’s own children is not so much to live better but to get a better living; not so much to do better work but to get better pay….Education gives the individual an advantage in the struggle for existence only when he has more of it than his fellows…From an industrial viewpoint, education is a labor-saving machine, enabling one man to do what ten did before. Like other improvements, it tends to decrease the number of jobs, and thus to sharpen competition and decrease wages.

 

….

Excerpt from School Power: A Pressing Necessity (Frank Tate, Australian Director of Education).

 

We must recognize, that in the struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as to individuals, and that in this struggle for existence there is not only the struggle that results in the open shock of war, but the less obtrusive but no less intense struggle of peace, the struggle for trade supremacy. We must realize too how different modern conditions are from those that obtained even fifty years ago. The history of the past thirty years yields ample evidence that command of markets is to be won by the nation that brings knowledge and training to bear upon the operations of producing and marketing commodities which the world wants.

 

 

Sir Wilfrid in Richmond Wolfe 1891

Sir Wilfrid and wife at the 1908 Quebec Tercentenary. Margaret Nicholson attended the celebrations.

As I write Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to the ebook Threshold Girl I am finding out new information.

I’ve got the story plotted out, and I’ve written key scenes longhand, and I only need for my cervical disks to heal so I can type away. The story is based on the letters of Tighsolas, the letters of middle class Canadian family in Richmond Quebec in 1908-1913.

Now, in Threshold Girl I wrote a line for Flora, the heroine (a college student in 1911/12). She is being teased by a local shopkeeper about her father.  The shopkeeper asks, “Has Monsieur Laurier given your father his job back.” (Her father, Norman, worked on  Laurier’s Transcontinental Railway from 1907-1912, but was fired in 1910 for reasons explained in my ebooks.)

Flora thinks, “As if my father knows Prime Minister Laurier personally.”

But then yesterday I find out this: That Wilfrid Laurier ran as the Liberal Candidate in Richmond Wolfe in 1891! Yikes. He lost by a few votes. He also ran in Quebec East, where he won and became leader of the Opposition, lent his name to a pivotal era in History, and created a vision for Canada that lasted for a century (and my just be dying right now.)

From wikipedia.

Norman was active in Politics at the local level from 1900 to 1910, but did he vote for Laurier in 1891? I doubt it. He probably voted for Local Man Cleveland.

As you can see, J.N. Greenshields ran for the Liberals in the election before and lost. In 1911, he supports the Tories, not liking Reciprocity, which is Free Trade. He is President of a Textile company by then.

A voting list for the 1904 Canadian Federal Election. Norman kept it so he likely was the invigilator.

A little voting promo. The story of this election is told in Threshold Girl

Those Titanic Odors (strong but delicate )

Twiggy Eyes! Circa 1967.

I’m not much of a make=up user, too lazy, and at 57, who cares anyway.  Although it probably didn’t help me in my career. (One must play the game, you see.) But back in 1966, they almost got me!

It was the Yardley ads, mostly placed in the Monkees TV Show and in luscious magazines such as Seventeen. (VEEERRRRRY appealing to a 11 year old pubescent girl.)

My favorite ad, (let’s see if I can find it anywhere) is Yardley Opens Your Eyes. What a mystical message, “Wear make-up, be a wise-woman, at 11.” Yes, here it is, on Flickr. SugerPie Honeybunch’s pictures.

The Yardley ads  were sheer genius.  It was the age of the Flower Child and just about every fruit and flower  figured in their product line. It was sensual in a very innocent way!

Yes, they almost hooked me back then.

I write this because today I read an article online (Toronto Metro) magazine, one of those fillers in those free newspapers they give away on the subways across the country.

“Eastern Quebec has plenty for the flower lover.” It’s a competent piece that feels as if it was edited down. Likely (I can’t be sure) the author was paid to write this. (It’s kind of an advertorial.) Maybe he was paid by Tourism Eastern Townships.

You see, if enter the search term “Eastern Townships” into Google news, their website, www.easterntownships. org is the first to pop up, although that site is NOT A NEWS ITEM.

Today (on March 24) the second item to pop up is this “advertorial” piece on flowers in the Eastern Townships.

Anyway, this article talks about a E.T. Tourist attraction called Bleu Lavande, lavender fields planted by one Pierre Pellerin south of Magog.

I love LAVENDER, so I know where to go next time I head out to the E.T. to check out Richmond, (and pay my respects at the Nicholson gravesite in Melbourne.)

I love Lavender despite the fact that aroma wasn’t popular in 1960. It was “old fashioned.” It had that Edwardian tinge.

Here’s the Google ngram to prove my point:

The use of the word lavender peaks in 1920 and 30! So it’s more a roaring twenties smell.

In my ebook Threshold Girl (about Flora Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec and her year at College in 1911/12) I have Marion Nicholson trailing the smell of sweat and lavender water as she returns to her home in the E.T.  from Montreal in the summer of 1911, the year of a serious heatwave, in Canada and the U.K.

So, what else did women smell of in the Titanic Era? I wonder.  Rose water of course. (And I have Flora smell the rosewater on the neck of a girl on the tramway in Westmount as she travels with sister Edith to see a British Suffragette at St. James Methodist downtown.)

The 1913 Eaton’s catalogues sells all kinds of perfumes.

There’s an ad for an non-alcoholic floral concentrate, rose, lilac and lily of the valley. (All my favorite smells. I AM a throwback!) “These floral concentrates are of the highest order being very strong, yet delicate.”

Eaton’s has its own brand of toilet water:”Refreshing  and cooling when added to the bath.  In the odors of violet, helitrope, jockey club (horse manure! Another of my favorite aromas), lily of the valley, a few others, no LAVENDER.

Maybe Marion should be trailing the smell of lily of the valley. No, I like Lavender.

Over the years, I myself have tried to grow lavender in pots in the backyard, without much luck. Maybe Mr. Pellerin  of Magog can give me tips. When I go visit this spring or summer.(I want to visit Magog this summer as I write about the Dominion Textile Plant in my story, Threshold Girl. I want to see the old plant.)

Which brings me to my main point. For five years now, thousands upon thousands of people have been coming to my Tighsolas website,looking up all manner of things about 1910 – and learning about a family in the Eastern Townships, the Nicholsons. And now it’s speeding up because of the upcoming Titanic anniversary on April 15.

Most students who drop on my site are from BC or the Catholic side of the Ontario Schools for some reason, probably due to curriculum. Hardly any are from Quebec. Alas.

And now my Threshold Girl ebook is being read around the world: It is popular in Germany, for some reason. And the US. And Radcliffe has a copy in their library.

Maybe I should contact “Canada Economic Development” and “BonjourQuebec” about funding. They underwrite this Tourism Eastern Townships  site.  I’m surprised it isn’t receiving funding from Heritage Canada. That department seems to fund all the E.T. non-profits.

But my story is too political, I suspect. Once again, as with make-up, I’m a maverick. I refuse to play the game.

The Female Product

My aunt Alice. I’ve put her in Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca as a student for Edith Nicholson in 1910. Why not? Alice had green eyes, Titian hair and buttermilk skin. I inherited the eyes and brows, 100 percent. But I have hazel eyes.

Women had nicer hair in the old days. As I may have already written on this blog, it was recommended that women wash their hair no more than once every three weeks. And they brushed it 100 times a night.

Consumerism is about creating new needs where none existed. The other day I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour piece on the Female Eunuch. A guest was mentioned how women today are more ‘objectified’than ever. I suspect this has to do with our hyper-consumerism. In a consumer society, women’s bodies are just another product. They have always been such, to some degree, but it only gets worse it a hyper consumer society, for obvious reasons that would take ten blogs to deconstruct.

You almost have to go back to early consumer days to figure out what happens. To the beginning of ‘now’ which is 1910. Maybe I’ll try to do that.

My Aunt Alice was beautiful but it didn’t make her life a good one, not by any measure.

Now, I have to get to editing that first draft. I am watching Lost in Austen now, because it calms me down. (I’m going through a stressful period in my life.)

The Devil is in the Details

Above: Sailing in 1910 era, likely in Eastern Townships. There’s a chance this is in Hudson area, where Marion went visiting and boating in 1911.

Well, since detail is everything, I pulled out this CD of the 1906 Sears catalogue I bought a while back to get a feel for how people lived in those days. Lots of stuff in that catalogue, mostly for middle class consumption. It’s slow to download, so I’m actually going to print out the entire thing, all 430 pages, and flip through it.

I have pretty well plotted out my next bit. It’ll provide background, or back story. 1908 was a crisis year for the Nicholsons. Well, it all started in 1907, when a rich spinster aunt rewrote her will, in January, disinheriting them.

This woman, Marion McLean, died in March. As Norman took care of her finances, she was illiterate, I know she left a lot of money for those days, $2,500 in cash, stocks and equities and a house. I’m guessing around 6,000 or more.

In two different letters, relatives advise the Nicholsons to sue. (Marion McLean spoke only Gaelic so some suggest she was tricked into changing her will.) Upon hearing this information, son Herb writes, typically, that his hopes and dreams are dashed.

Marion is working at Sherbrooke Academy but will soon take a higher paying job in Montreal and start helping out her family financially. Marion is made of sterner stuff than Herb.

Edith, bites the bullet, for she had hoped to go to Boston, to a Symons Business College to take a secretarial course, for stenographers make a small fortune in salary, and she goes to work in tiny Radnor Falls, near Three Rivers, Quebec as a low-paid country teacher.

Ao Flo, our heroine, is left to flounder a bit. No protective older sisters or father home to guide her through hard times.

In my story, she escapes a bit into fantasy. She dreams she becomes a great public speaker, a suffragette.

So in June of 1907, with 33 dollars in his bank account and a massive mortgage on his only asset, Tighsolas, “house of light” in Gaelic, Norman petitions his friend, M.P. E.W. Tobin for a job on the railroad as a timber inspector.

A letter from that place showed that Tobin made numerous personal calls at the railway office, but there were no jobs open. But in the spring of the next year, after the collapse of the Quebec Bridge, Norman is offered a job as inspector.

As I open the next scene, Margaret is going to see daughter Edith at Radnor Falls. She will meet up with Norman there and will convince Edith to quit her job. (I will find a reason. Maybe they are afraid for her, of a certain persistent suitor who isn’t in her league, so to speak.)

Edith will go home to Richmond, only to get offered a job in Montreal for September 1908. So she will join her sister Marion in the big city. They will live and work in the same general area, except Edith will be in a toney four storey greystone on Sherbrooke, right at the crossroads of East and West (French and English) at St. Laurent and Marion in Little Burgundy, a nearby slum.