Pretty in pink and blue and gingham and galatea

The August 1911 edition of the Delineator has a feature on children’s outfits, so I thought I’d scan them for those who might be interested. In Threshold Girl I weave in a tale about a woman working at Dominion Textile in Magog.
The second dress on the left is a practical school dress, if developed in serge or flannel. Unlike many of the sailor models, the five gored skirt, which is attached to a belt or underbody, is fitted about the waist and left quite plain except for the inverted plait, which is made at the back. The blouse is regular naval style and may be slipped over the head or closed in front.

The dress on right is very simple in construction and it is particularly effective in poplin or pique, when a contrasting colour is used for the collar and trimming bands. A very lovely reproduction of the design, which closes in front, was composed of white linen, with a sailor collar and belt of lilac linen, the edges of the collar, belt and peasant sleeves and and closing were finished with a scallop worked in lilac floss.

Nice writing! I wonder if Theodore Dreiser wrote it. He was editor of this magazine, which also covered many of the social issues of the day, focusing on ‘child rescue’ …adoption. (Nah, his style wasn’t as nice!) He got fired when he, ahem, had an affair with a underage woman… or something.

Well, these clothes were for the Middle Class and higher, I imagine. Marion’s children, students at Royal Arthur in Montreal’s Little Burgundy, were working class and probably dressed more like the above pic of poor kids vacationing at Camp Chapleau.

If any kids in Marion’s board dressed like the magazine kids, it was at the new Roslyn School in Westmount.

In September the schools reopen and you mothers are already beginning to find that the question of pinafores and school dresses is much on your mind. For children who live in the City, where there are steam-heated houses and schoolrooms, the smartest materials for their dresses are the linens, piques, poplins, repps, galateas, percales, ginghams, chambrays and cotton drillings.

Of course, for children who live in country districts where furnaces and radiators are unknown, wash dresses in Winter are out of the question. They should wear pretty little dresses of serge, flannel, or any good woolen material and washable pinafores and aprons.

I haven’t shown a boy, there are only  few pictured, but they are wearing knickerbockers or shorts, not skirts. In Richmond, Quebec, at least in and around 1910, Flora’s nephew, Stanley Hill still wore a skirt. And her brother Herb wore one in 1889 or so.

Not sure who kids at bottom are or when it is taken. The Dalmation may be Floss around 1909, but the Nicholsons may have had an earlier Dalmation. It is possibly Stanley Hill younger, so 1905ish?

The coat: A serviceable box coat for a girl is displayed. The model may be made in full or 7/8ths length with the fronts closed to the neck and rolled open.  Many of these coats for girls are made with striped or plaid weaves and they look very smart when the collars or cuffs are faced in a one tone contrasting material.

In the Laurier era in Canada the vast majority of children lived in poverty. Many of their moms could sew, but they did so in factories, making clothes for the burgeoning middle class.

Margaret Nicholson made her daughters’ clothes, until they got into working suits, then she made just the ‘waists’ or blouses and skirts. However she bought her son’s and husband’s clothes.

Below, Nicholson invoice 1901, sewing notions

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.

 

 

 

 

Freedom 1910 Style

In a 1911 letter home Marion Nicholson describes catching up with the Montgomerys who are in town to buy a new car, their second in two years. This may be a pic from that event. They are at Atwater Street.

I am writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl and I’ve got to the part where Edith Nicholson goes on a 6 hour car trip from Richmond, Quebec to Montreal in June 1911.

In a letter she describes all the places she passed through.

My job is to describe the experience.

Now, today, 6 hours on bumpy hills in a car with no shocks (I don’t think) and in a tight corset would be torture, but for Edith it is euphoric.

That’s the word I’ll use.

The freedom of it! Before long trips were taken by train or by horse carriage. This car, going 14 miles an hour over the hills and dales of the Eastern Townships, must have thrilled the passengers, much like a long long ride at Dominion Park. And there was always the danger of breaking down to add spice to the occasion.

14 miles an hour is the speed limit in the country. 7 miles an hour in the city. (Horse drawn vehicles and autos were beginning here to fight over the road space, a fight which would continue until the late 1920′s, when cars WON.

Ad for Piece Arrow. Car Rides were classy thing! No kidding, cars cost as much as a house.

A recent Salon.com article claims that statistics show that Americans at least are driving much less. The author of the article ascribed this to the Internet, saying young people would rather surf than drive.

(I thought maybe GPS’s had something to do with it. Or Google maps. No getting lost. No spending hours driving all over town looking to buy some item. Etc ete.

Whatever the reason, the thrill is gone. The high price of gasoline doesn’t help either, I’m sure.

In the 60′s I went for a lot of car drives with my dad. It was his recreation. Cheap and he got out of the house. We had a little Austen Cambridge, but my father, a former ferry command pilot, drove fast, 80 miles an hour on the highway.

As his daughter, I wasn’t afraid, although I do distinctly remember almost getting killed by an oncoming 16 wheeler as he passed a car on the highway.

But he swerved in on time, obviously.

Marion sits in her Uncle Clayton’s car.It broke down a lot.

The T Can wasn’t as crowded with trucks as it is today.

I liked looking out the window.  On long distance treks to the US for vacation, my Dad had a game. He had great long distance eyesight (Pilot!) so we called out the state or province of the licence plates ahead,the minute we could guess them. And then there was I Spy..

Today kids don’t look out the window. They are too busy playing or communicating on their iPads, etc. Or watching movies.

We experience the world second hand today. Technology changes us.

Free at Last: In the 1910 era, men drove the cars, but by the 1920′s women went it alone! Here’s Flora second from last. Cars gave women and teens unprecedented freedom.

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

Titanic in Fashion

Titanic Fashion. My Delineator. I cleaned up this photo with Corel and inserted it my ebook, Threshold Girl, along with many other beautiful colour plates from the era. I suspect that I have the only extant copy of this pretty photo.

“Oh, we have missed Miss Wiley’s speech! says Edith. “Did you get a good look at her, at least?”

“Yes,” said Flora, disappointed and excited at the same time.

“Let’s go in anyway,” says Edith. “They usually end their meetings with a tea. And maybe we can learn what she had to say.”

As the women enter, they are asked to sign a book of condolences for prominent Methodist businessman Hudson Allison and his wife Bess and daughter Loraine, who perished on the Titanic three weeks before.

Beside the book is propped a portrait of the couple, framed in a black ribbon.

“We had a service at school, but not just for the important people, for all the 1,500 victims,” says Flora. “I attended the service for Mr. Hays in the American Presbyterian,” says Edith and then she remarks upon Mrs. Allison’s lovely hair of curls. “They are all the rage. The Ladies’ Home Journal says so.”

The assembly hall is only ¼ full, and it can fit 150 bodies or so. There are six somewhat looking confused older women in out of date fashions, seated at a head table. One woman, though, right in the middle, is the picture of elegance and composure.

“Order. Order,” announces this regal lady. “Well, that was most interesting, wasn’t it? Such passion on both sides of this issue. I don’t think we’ve ever had to break up a fist fight before. But, after all the excitement and before our tea, there is still some business to complete.”

This is an excerpt from my ebook Threshold Girl - that takes place in 1911/12 and is based on genuine letters from the era.

Edith and Flora Nicholson have gone to see British Suffragette Barbara Wiley speak, but they just missed her.

Well, I see that a 3D version of the great Hollywood blockbuster Titanic is soon to be released commemorating the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.

I will go to the theatre and see it. I love the movie. I’ll drag my husband. He likes the movie too (it’s one of those movies that appeals to everybody) but he can’t see in 3D. He has a weak eye and can’t triangulate. Many people can’t see in 3D, including many First Nations People, apparently.

The Titanic movie has all the elements, and plays on the class divide. Di Caprio’s character is poor, Winslet’s rich.

Middle class people too liners too, at least well-off middle class. 2nd class!
In the summer of 1912, the McCoys, good friends of Edith and Flora and sister Marion, go to Europe. They ask Marion to come along but she writes in a letter home, “Teachers will have to make much more money before I see Paris.”

The McCoys bring her back a blouse from Paris and Marion writes, “Imagine me, wearing a real Parisienne blouse.”

The McCoys sailed in mid June 1912. Right around that time, a Montreal newspaper ran this story:

“Large ships are still in demand. Olympic sails today with full list. 676 first class passengers.”

“The popularity of the large steamer with the travelling public does not seem to be on the wane, as was feared might be the case in consequence of the accident to the Titanic. White Star Olympic is due to sail from New York today for Cherbourge and Southampton.”

The Olympic sailed every three weeks or more, from what I can see. July 6, July 27, August 17, Sept 18. “All steamers equipped with wireless and submarine signals.”

A Tale of Two Montreal George Drummonds

Three Rivers in 1910

Well, in a letter from Radnor Forges Quebec in 1908, Edith mentions a “George Drummond’ who seems to be boss.. Was this the same George Drummond of Redpath Sugar who married Julia Grace Parker? I wondered… because wouldn’t that be useful for my story about Edith Nicholson, tentatively called the 1912 Diary of a Confirmed Spinster Edith Nicholson and posted at www.tighsolas.ca/page11.pdf.pdf, which is a follow up to Threshold Girl, published at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf.

But no.. George Edward Drummond was an Irish Canadian Business man who owned the Canadian Iron Furnace Company which owned the works at Radnor Forges, where Edith worked in 1908.

George Alexander Drummond was the Scottish Canadian businessman who married a Redpath and then Julia Grace Parker.

George Edward was younger and his original name was Drumm. I wonder if Drummond is Scottish, and that’s why he changed his name.

“At least I know where my  pots and pans come from, ” said Margaret after a visit to Radnor, a sad little company town, on the steep  decline. It would close right after Edith quit.. I guess she wasn’t that impressed. It was a company town. No ‘real’ town, no community, had sprung up around iron works la Mauricie in all the decades they had been in place.

But the Forges at the Mauricie were the first iron ore companies in Canada and they manufactured bog ore.

So they were significant. And there’s a heritage website involved. http://www.pc.gc.ca/fra/lhn-nhs/qc/saintmaurice/index.aspx

For the purposes of this story, they are significant in how Edith’s teaching job reflected how LONESOME it was to be a teacher in a rural place.

Anyway, in 1959, I also lived in a lonesome mining town, called Wabush. My family was among a handful of pioneer families who went out to Wabush Lake Labrador to live. We stayed two years, some families stayed much longer.A community did spring up around the iron ore mines, though.

The Three Rivers Forges were a Crown (Canadian ) concern, but the Wabush mines were owned by Americans.

Spinning a Yarn, Weaving a Tale

Many many women worked in the textile factories in Montreal in 1910.

Some of these girls were very young and accidents happened.

I buy and wear clothing, like everyone else, but what I know about textiles and sewing and such you could fit into a thimble, if I had one.

I’ve been reading technical school manuals about the textile industry from 1910 and I don’t undertand a thing.

A handbook for department stores, cottons and linens department is more my speed. It starts at the very beginning. Where cotton comes from: Egypt, India, Peru mostly in 1910. The American South. How it is spun by huge machines. And then woven. And then finished, which includes dying.

Cotton spinning machine 1910

“Weaving is the making of cloth by the interlacing of two sets of threads crossing each other at right angles. Of these the lengthwise threads are called the warp (I know that, from sewing class in high school) while the crosswise threads are called the woof, weft or filling.

The art of weaving can be traced to the very earliest people. The women of savage tribes used any materials, such as grasses or reeds, that might be at hand, lacing the fibres in a crude manner to make mats and baskets.

(Funny, basketweaving is a euphemism for a stupid and easy pastime..) At first the strips were put over and under one at a time, but soon the women learned to fasten pieces together to make longer strips.

In the next stage, the long strips of the grasses or other material to be woven were stretched and fastened on the ground and the cross material was carried over and under these long pieces.

Next a stick was fastened to every alternate thread so that these threads
could be raised to allow the crossthreads to go through.

In an upright loom the warp threads were held in a upright position on two beams
one at the top and one at the bottom and fastening the top beam to a tree. This method is used the Navaho to make rugs.”

Then the book discuss the hand loom and THE FLYING SHUTTLE. I remember that from the theory part of sewing class in 1969. Miss Nagel was the teacher: she was not very enthusiastic, I remember. I passed the theory part and failed the practice part, a calico apron. Pink, my favourite colour, then and now.

My Boomer Era Home Ec class was a carry-over from the 1910 era Homemaking and Housekeeping courses recommended by the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education. Technical education (textile schools for instance) was only for men.

The Montreal Council of Women objected to this: they felt some young women should be allowed into the trades and not be forced into domestic work where there were no days off and no nights to themselves. (The Royal Commission felt domestic work to be dignified work (or so they said) and felt that it was a danger for young women to go out in the evening and mix with riff-raff, anyway.)

Hand weaving laboratory at a Philadelphia Technical School.
What goes around comes around: Much of the clothing we wear today is made by child labour in the so called Third World.

In one article from the 1910 era, it is claimed that the Textile Interests are against women’s suffrage, as movers and shakers in this industry are afraid women will vote to change the tariffs on textiles.

The politics of the textile industry were very complicated in 1910. Laurier lost the Free Trade election in 1911. I wonder how textiles figured in all this. The Textile industry with the iron industry was key to the UK’s economy back then. And Free Trade was to be with the U.S….

The UK was sadly lagging behind the US and France and Germany with respect to innovation.

No autos, no victrolas.

Cotton Picking US South.

Cottoning on, Slowly, to the Politics of Clothes

Marion 1910.

The Huffington Post had an article listing the 13 products : most likely made by children and forced labour and except for diamonds and carpets, and tobacco and maybe coal (directly) well, they are products I use: coffee (I only sometimes buy free trade) and garments, cocoa, rice, sugarcane, cotton and No. 1 Gold. (Well, I don’t use gold either.)

I’m a pearl kind of gal and my husband buys me freshwater pearls for special occasions. So I have many chains which I wear, sometimes singly, sometimes en masse. With basic black usually.

As it happens, I just read another chapter of the Paul Thompson book The Edwardians, where he explains the UK economy in 1900-1914.

In 19oo, half the cotton textiles in the world were produced by England, and not a hell of a lot of anything else. (Luckily, their rubber plantations in Malaya were going to prove fruitful – and that’s the story of my own father’s family.)

Cotton could be produced cheaply because women mostly worked in the factories. Just like in Montreal. Thompson explains that paying men good wages was counterproductive to business, because, then their womenfolk didn’t have to work, so that their cheap labour wasn’t available. Kind of a Catch 22. So this push to have women stay at home, well, there’s more to it than meets the eye, which is to say, it has an economic side and isn’t just about keeping women powerless.

And that is why this cotton business is front and central to the Flo in the City and I really don’t quite understand it. Maybe once I’ve read Angels in the Workplace I’ll fully understand.

One thing I have figured out is that most the materials the Nicholson women used in their dresses was one form of cotton or another.