Husband hunting 1910

Sophia Nicholson, Norman’s niece gets married in October 1912.

I don’t know her story, but she visited Richmond area in July 1911 before going out West. She visited Tighsolas twice, ‘but did not take off her hat’ despite being asked to spend the night.

(Interesting! She must have stayed a while, not a few minutes I gather. So if in those days you came for say, tea,you kept your hat on. Was this because putting on a hat was not an easy thing? Or fixing up the hair once the hat was taken off was not an easy thing.)

Her Father Gilbert and Brother were in Edmonton already. Gilbert is widowed, so likely Sophia was raised with someone else and just then rejoined the family.

And then she goes out West and within a year is married.

This is not an invitation,only an announcement. Maybe Gilbert was afraid the Nicholsons, who were having money issues, would descend on him and stay. His brother Norman often asked him to if he should go West and Gilbert said NO, This is Young Man’s Country.

 

Marion Watters marriage announcement, 1914. She is often mentioned my books, especially Threshold Girl but also in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster (about to be posted) and Biology and Ambition, Marion Nicholson’s story, being written.

In 1912/13, Mae lives with Flora and Marion on Hutchison in the great experiment. She has another boyfriend named Minty. Edith calls her ‘a great flirt.’ Well, it worked and Edith never married.

All this goes to show is that the two years Marion and Hugh waited to get married was a long period.

There were reasons. Firstly, Hugh was seeing another woman in May 1911, when he meet Marion. I know because he blew her off in a letter in September. He told her they had ‘no understanding’ and he only thought of her as ‘a very good friend.’

 

Letter from Donald Nicholson of Lingwick to Norman Nicholson “Bark Dealer” in 1893. “Sorry they are so poorly at Gilbert’s.” May be when wife died.  Beautiful handwriting for a man.

Edwardian Oxymoron.

 

An Edwardian club chair.  Marion Nicholson Blair used this chair.

 

(You can read all about her early life at the Tighsolas website that showcases her family letters from the 1908-1913 era.  I am writing a digital trilogy based on the letters. The first ebook is Threshold Girl, about her sister Flora, a college girl in 1911/12.)

 

Well, today, someone came to my Tighsolas website looking up “Dorothy Nixon” Gone with the Windows Video.

 

Gone With the Windows is an essay I wrote a few years ago that is now in a couple of ESL (English as a Second Language) textbooks and also is posted on my website.

 

Occasionally an ESL  student will come to my website trying to find an answer to a question about the essay.

 

This time (I am assuming) a student was looking for a real shortcut, a video. It’s a visual day and age, that’s for sure. And this search engine request reminds me of that.

 

Of course there is no video for my essay, but I am beginning to think I must someone make my essays more visual. And I don’t mean by merely painting pictures with words as in ‘show’ don’t ‘tell’.  That’s old hat.

 

Many thousands of students have come to my Tighsolas website looking up this and that and they usually find what they want. Titanic Fashion, Women’s rights, Suffrage movement in Canada, Laurier Era cost of living, women in 1910….

 

But just this week I had to laugh: someone came to my website looking up “Edwardian Ikea.”

 

Lord Bellamy: Hudson, Lady Lindamere  has just sat on that new chair my parlour and crushed it to pieces.  Where did you get it?”

 

Hudson: At a new furniture store on the Kensington High Street. Ikea.

 

I say this because I just saw a program where some craftsman recreated the main parlour of the Titanic and they created a leather club chair from scratch using 100 year old methods. It took a number of highly-skilled craftsman many days to make this chair and a total of (I think) 60 man hours or more of labour. The chair was filled with horsehair.

 

The chair pictured above  is also from the Edwardian era and, I can tell you,  it weighs a tonne.  Solid piece of work. It’s been re-upholstered many times, but maybe originally it contained horsehair.

 

That’s why I had to laugh: The words “Ikea” and “Edwardian” seem to be rather oxymoronic (is that a word?) contradiction in terms.

 

I am thinking of going through my archives and making  a list of the ridiculous requests. 1800 automobile is one I remember. But then the search may have been just a high school student and to a 14 year old 1900 and 1800 are no different.  (Actually, the first auto, a kind of wheel chair with a boiler behind it, was invented in 1820, so maybe not so ridiculous.)

 

I just checked, Ikea was founded in 1943, closer to 1910 than 2010!!

HAIR and SEX

A collage of Nicholson documents. 1910 era.

Hmm. I’m perusing a 1894 book on sex and gender relations, one that was sold outside the publishing industry, and although it is full of fascinating ‘facts’ I am going to focus on hair. Why? Well, a few nights ago I attended Mamma Mia at Place des Arts and as I waited for the show to start I noticed that the women in the audience, young and middle age and old, mostly had dyed hair, and the colours were all over the spectrum. (Well, the mostly found in nature spectrum.) I remarked upon this to my husband and said, “If this were 100 years ago, everyone’s hair would be done up and we’d have our view totally obscured by ladies’ hats.”

Funny, because just a few years ago, when my son was in 11th grade (well, 6 years ago) I attended a parent’s meeting and noticed that all the women, except for me and one other, had dyed hair, and dyed in the same way, with blond streaks. Like some kind of suburban uniform.

Just last year, I succumbed and dyed my dark brown hair (with a little grey) with streaks in two tones, red and blond. Right now, it’s only half dyed, I just HATE sitting for hours in the hair salon.

Anyway, as I’ve written before, hats are no longer ‘in style’ because ‘hair styling’ is the new ‘hats’ and hair colour the new ‘trimming.’ The hair industry is a HUGE industry, as huge, I dare say, as the millinery industry was in 1910.

Back then, women wore their hair up and washed it rarely, once in three weeks was recommended. They brushed it a lot and from all I have heard, hair was beautiful back then, luxuriant.

Anyway, here’s a bit from this 1894 ‘sex manual’ about hair colour and character. It sounds ridiculous today, and a form of racial profiling, but, before you scoff, it is important to recognize how this kind of thinking permeates our own. We have our own prejudices about blonds, redheads and brunettes that still exist, despite the hair dying hodgepodge of today.

We know that a tall, skinny blond with big breasts is a ‘trophy’ today and when a rich and famous man has such a woman on his arm we understand why. Back then, in 1910, it was a plump, big hipped woman with big breasts and small feet and hands that was the trophy. In those days, artificially enhancing one’s appearance to fit the ideal (except with corsets, which promoted morality and with elixers and with a simple toilet regimen)was considered tawdy and tarty. (So women like Flora, who didn’t fit the bill, appearance-wise, had very little room to manoever. ) Today, of course, anything artificial goes, because it promotes consumerism and, in our society, whatever is good for business in ‘good’.

Theses have been written about the allure of the Monroe/Harlow blond bombshell, half goddess, (for her hair is like light) and half whore (for her platinum blond colour is cleary subterfuge) ergo, the quintessential woman.

THE DISPOSITION AND CHARACTER BY THE COLOR OF THE HAIR.

1. DIFFERENT COLORS.–Coarseness and fineness of texture in nature indicate coarse and fine-grained feelings and characters, and since black signifies power, and red ardor, therefore coarse black hair and skin signify great power of character of some kind, along with considerable tendency to the sensual; yet fine black hair and skin indicate strength of character, along with purity and goodness.

2. COARSE HAIR.–Coarse black hair and skin, and coarse red hair and whiskers, indicate powerful animal passions, together with corresponding strength of character; while fine or light, or auburn hair indicates quick susceptibilities, together with refinement and good taste.

3. FINE HAIR.–Fine dark or brown hair indicates the combination of exquisite susceptibilities with great strength of character, while auburn hair, with a florid countenance, indicates the highest order of sentiment and intensity of feeling, along with corresponding purity of character,combined with the highest capacities for enjoyment and suffering. {478}

4. CURLY HAIR.–Curly hair or beard indicates a crisp, excitable, and variable disposition, and much diversity of character–now blowing hot, now cold–along with intense love and hate, gushing, glowing emotions, brilliancy, and variety of talent. So look out for ringlets; they betoken April weather–treat them gently, lovingly, and you will have the brightest, clearest sunshine, and the sweetest, balmiest breezes.

5. STRAIGHT HAIR.–Straight, even, smooth, and glossy hair indicate strength, harmony, and evenness of character, and hearty, whole-souled affections, as well as a clear head and superior talents; while straight, stiff, black hair and beard indicate a coarse, strong, rigid, straight-forward character.

6. ABUNDANCE OF HAIR.–Abundance of hair and beard signifies virility and a
great amount of character; while a thin beard signifies sterility and a thinly settled upper story, with rooms to let, so that the beard is very significant of character.

7. FIERY RED HAIR indicates a quick and fiery disposition. Persons with such hair generally have intense feelings–love and hate intensely–yet treat them kindly, and you have the warmest friends, but ruffle them, and you raise a hurricane on short notice. This is doubly true of auburn curls.

It takes but little kindness, however, to produce a calm and render them as fair as a Summer morning. Red-headed people in general are not given to hold a grudge. They are generally of a very forgiving disposition.

Now, in my next installment of Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the true life letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/, I am going to have Edith find a job as a private English tutor with a French Canadian family in Montreal. (She lived in Montreal in 1909, but I have no indication of what she was doing, so I decided to make her a tutor in my grandparent’s home…It fits, because the next year Edith worked at Ecole Methodiste Westmount, a private school that ‘converted’ Roman Catholics to Methodism.) Anyway, she will be tutoring my Aunt Alice, was was a Titian-haired beauty, whose character, as I have had it described to me, pretty well fits the description above for auburn haired women.

I’ve done some research about my family for a future book and, luckily, talked about them with my mother before she died a few months ago. In many ways, the Nicholson and Crepeau families were similar: highly religious, with a very competent housekeeper mother who could cook up a storm and clean and who didn’t have or want a maid. But they were different, too, in many ways. The Crepeau family was on the way up socially in 1910, the Nicholsons on the way down.