Holiday Musings

I posted a draft of my ebook Biology and Ambition a few days ago and within minutes the Googlebot came around and it was available on Google, second when a person enters Biology and Ambition.

Pretty fast.

Biology and Ambition is the follow up to Threshhold Girl and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, to make the omnibus School Marms and Suffragettes.

About 3 young women in 1910 Canadian, their hopes, dreams, disappointments. Middle Class Women. Pretty much like Middle Class Women today.

I’m watching the Djokavic Nadal final in the Spanish Open or something and just missed Nadal winning the second set.. Gotta pay attention.

My husband asks why I watching in French. I like the French commentary, that’s why.

The colour commentator whoever she is uses eloquent language, much different from hockey commentators.

Something to do on a nice Monday holiday, Victoria Day but not here in Quebec, where my husband is so bored he is cleaning out the BBQ.

The bugs get you outside and if we put the mosquito netting around our little shelter the idiot dogs run through it every time they hear a noise – and they don’t learn.

We live in a suburb and suburbs now are dead quiet, except on Saturday morning when the neighbourhood men (yes, men) do the lawn.

Two days ago we went Costco and bought an instant garden, a few ready made pots for next to nothing, 10 to 15 dollars.

I usually buy the flats, but this spring I am injured, I can’t use my arm.

Instant garden, like instant pudding or instant mashed potatoes. I usually don’t like instant things, but in this case, why not.

My magnolia. Just blooming now. Last year I rolled these potted trees out into the family room and they blossomed inside in April. But the aroma was disgusting!! The thought the cat had peed on the carpet.

Love Letters and the Epistolary Form

 

I’ve posted my first draft of Biology and Ambition, the follow up to Threshold Girl and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, which is finished but not yet posted as this book requires a lot of typing and I’m injured.

 

Biology and Ambition is about Marion Nicholson, a teacher in 1910 and is in epistolary form. Sort of cut and paste for me. Easier on the hands, but not on the brain. It is HARD to edit letters! Very hard. Even if you know your subject backwards and forwards like I do.

 

Threshold Girl is in narrative prose form and is about Marion’s young sister Flora, a college girl in 1911/12.  Diary of a Confirmed Spinster is about her older sister Edith and is a murder/mystery. I play with history here, filling in blanks, missing information with the most audacious explanation.

 

All stories in the School Marms and Suffragettes series are based on the letters of Tighsolas.

 

The ebooks complement each other and are meant to be read together, with Flora’s story first, Edith’s second and Marion’s third.

 

My stories are about teachers in the Edwardian Era, or the Laurier Era in Canada.  But, these letters cover the issues that are relevant to all middle class women, but I add  eugenics, child welfare, suffragettes, etc.

 

The story of the Edwardian or Laurier Middle Class has not been especially well told. Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey etc. like to contrast the rich and the poor and leave out the middle class.  Not enough drama.

 

But the Nicholson family saga is a story that resonates today. The Middle Class never really changes. It’s a class full of people who aspire to be high class but fear falling into the lower class, a much much MUCH easier thing to do, especially in a bad economy. Hence, it’s a nervous class. An antsy class. And as GB Shaw said, it’s a moral class, I mean sanctimonious. The Nicholsons, who are experiencing financial problems, are all these things. They are also terribly fun loving. They want to eek the most out of existence.

 

 

 

 

Teacher’s Little Helpers

Well, as I write Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl I wonder if I am being too harsh on Edith Nicholson, the heroine of  the Spinster story, as I make her an opium addict.

My husband’s great Aunt Edie was a prim and proper Presbyterian, after all, a tee-totaller, in her youth at least.

But then I have a 1911 Na-Dru-Co Atlas to prove my point.

Na-Dru-Co was the National Drug Company of Canada and they sent around a thick promotional brochure in 1911, the time of both my ebooks. I found this brochure in the Nicholson collection.

Most of the products they are pushing remind me of medicines “Granny Clampett” used, sarsaparilla, or parilleeee as she said.

The cough syrup contains licorice, linseed and chlorodyne. I looked up chlorodyne to see that it contained opium and cannabis. Bull’s Eye!

Oddly on a testimonials page someone claims they give it to a baby of 8 months. Another person says she knows someone who got cured of a cough and only used one bottle.

Edith had tonnes of colds and she was always on some medicine. Everyone was afraid of dying from pneumonia or TB!

And then came the horrible tragedy that took the life of her fiance and the Principal of the School where she worked, who was also a medical doctor, fixed her up with ‘heart medicine.’

There’s a product called Nervozone advertised in this brochure with the following blurb:“In the strenuous rush of commerce, the severe strains of depressing social conditions, overstudy, changes of female life, or impending attacks of disease, the nerves become impaired. Irritability, brain worry, Sleeplessness ensue, accompanied by lack of Energy, Emissions, Impotency, Nervous Dyspepsia, Partial paralysis, palpitations of the heart,incontinence…NA-DRU-CO nervozone is specially prepared to cover all such cases…”

I wonder what this concoction contained?

Another blurb about it in the book says “Teachers and especially women teachers are the most fit subject for rest and vacation than any other workers in the country.  One day of worry in the school room is more trying than  a month of hard labour… The best advice we can give teachers is to keep a box of Nervozone in their desks…Tsk Tsk.

I have to have Edith read this..

Ironically, in a 1909 letter, Edith says the doctor has told her – once again – to give up tea. LOL

Who was this Miss Barbara Wiley?

Miss Wiley under arrest, from a puzzle.

Who is this Miss Barbara Wiley, who took a tour of Canada in 1912, on behalf of Emmeline Pankhurt’s WSPU and who converted Edith Nicholson, my husband’s great aunt, to the cause of militantism?

She’s not a prominent Suffragette. Indeed, she doesn’t warrant a Wikipedia page.

But Edith Nicholson cut a report out of the November Witness upon her arrival in Montreal to give a speech for the Montreal Council of Women:

“Miss Barbara Wylie, the English suffragist, whose visit to Canada has aroused so much interest and speculation as to what it may eventually lead to, arrived at Place Viger Station at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon, but looked so unlike one who had twice been in prison and was willing to fight again for ‘the cause’ that the small group of newspapermen waiting at the gate had a hard time finding her, and actually let her walk past. Miss Wylie (it turns out) is a tall really beautiful looking woman with every appearance of refinement and intelligence above the ordinary. She spoke intelligently of the suffrage movement, explaining the larger significance of the demand for votes for women and what she called ‘the absolutely unjust, cruel and disgraceful conduct and trickery of the Asquith government. She spoke as a highly intelligent woman burning with the conviction that her cause was right. She also showed plainly a spirit of resolute intention not to give up the fight for minute until the battle had been won.”

I have no proof Edith attended her speech, but since she attended the May 1913 speech of Mrs. Snowden, also promoted by the Montreal Council of Women, I assume she did. I certainly will make it so in my novel, or play, Flo in the City.

The Montreal Gazette gives a blow by blow account of Wiley’s speech. “The address given by Miss Barbara Wiley at the YMCA on Drummond Street (Why not the Women’s Y)under the auspices of the local council of women on the subject of women suffrage called up such unexpected warmth from the audience, for and against militant methods, that only the decision of the President, Mrs. D. Richie England, prevented the two parties from locking horns and deciding the question then and there.”

According to a brief bio I discovered, Wiley joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1909, worked in the Glasgow arm (this might have impressed Edith) and then came to Canada in 1912. She was injured protecting Pankhurst at a Glasgow rally in 1913 and arrested in front of His Majesty’s Theatre during a rally, at a function for the Czar with King and Queen attending.

According to another snippet I dug up, Pankhurst sent her to Canada to convert the Canadians to militantism, but it failed for the reasons I’ve blogged about earlier. This is because Wiley had a brother who was an MLA in Saskatchewan. She visited him at Christmas and gave some talks and met Nellie McClung, for McClung mentions her in her bio.

Barbara Wiley was very militant. Alluding to a ‘raid’ on Buckingham Palace she said this would encourage women to ‘cast off their chains.’

In the speech in Montreal she counselled women to go see Mr. Borden, but use all constitutional methods first. (She likely had to say this, or be deported.)

Wiley had already seen Mr. Borden earlier in the year in England. The suffragettes had met with him and asked him about the vote in Canada. From the reports in the paper he was quite, well, politician-like. He said it was a matter for the provinces to decide, as the Federal Government was bound by the constitution to conduct government as the provinces did. (Something like that.)

The Toronto arm of the WSPU put out a press release saying that they would not endorse her militant ways.

I wonder if Miss Wiley knew Gertrude Harding, the New Brunswick woman who went to England to join the Suffragettes.