And Now for Something Completely the Same

Suffragettes throw flour at Asquith. A different kind of bouquet, I guess.

As I was posting the previous blog about the social activists Emmeline Pankhurst and Jane Addams, my husband came into the room, raving about Rick Mercer’s rant on the Mercer Report, on the CBC, last night.

Mercer railed against the mind-boggling subversion of democractic ideals that took place in Canada last week with the Canadian Senate voting down the Climate Change bill.

A few days earlier, a friend had emailed me a link to the Suzuki Foundation’s Protest page, but I had been too busy with my day trip to New York to check it out.
It goes directly to your MP and other significant politicans.

My husband exclaimed, “Rick Mercer is bang on.” Well, he often is. I blog a lot about Jon Stuart, who features Jason Jones on his show, a graduate of the Mercer school of satire, whose ridiculous, often crude rants are also often ‘bang on.’

Indeed, I watched this particular Mercer rant at this URL and thought, at one point, that he was going to do something rather crude, a la Jason Jones, by pulling down his pants and peeing in an alley, but instead he painted a metaphor in words, invoking Poppies and War Veterans.

Anyway, in the previous post about suffragettes in 1910, I mentioned that I believed democracy wasn’t so much ‘one man, or one woman , one vote’ but was ‘one man, one law’. But these two phrases go together, we ‘elect’ the lawmakers, the legislators, right? Except we don’t elect the Senate. (We also PAY ATTENTION, day trips to New York notwithstanding. That’s our duty, our side of the bargain.)

My God, our democracy appears to be on life-support, thanks to the shenanigans (too nice a word) of a cynical minority government and our own pitiful collective lack of vigilance as Canadian citizens. What would our ancestors have thought about this; the ones born here (who believed the 20th century to be Canada’s Century) or the ones who immigrated here to get away from similar style governments?

I know what they would have thought: as they were very family oriented. They would have thought we were selling out our children and our children’s children.

Lessons from the Past

Stoves from the Eaton’s catalogue 1909. Ranges. An essential for the home, as important as the roof over your head.

The first thing I notice, looking at the cooking stoves above, which provided sustainance and heat, is the price. This household essential cost less than a woman’s fur jacket by a third or a half, and, in one case, just a little over double the cost of the woman’s hat Edith bought at Ogilvys.

And these suckers were made to last, as were the ranges we purchased for a huge chunk of salary, in the 60′s.

Today, ordinary ranges (like everything else) are much cheaper in relation to average middle class salary but they are made to fall apart, with obsolescence built in.

Now, I am about to copy and print out all my installments of Flo in the City, my novel in progress on this blog, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ and edit the first part. I have done this before, the printing part, at least, at the end of 1908, but this is a more natural place to end my chapter, I think.

As I do this, I ponder my previous blog, where I found evidence that women with poor homemaking skills were being blamed for the huge social problems of the day. Due to this, women’s suffrage became an issue for more than just an elite group of agitators. For every woman.

Is anything like this happening today? Well, yes, with global warming. This week yet another poll came out (polls, the scourge of our age) that reveals that the average Canadian feels he or she is not doing enough personally to stop climate change.

It’s very similiar to 1910, in that average Canadians are no more responsible for climate change through their day to day actions than average wives were responsible for the social problems of 1910. (If we stopped buying crap, like appliances designed to crap out in a year, and cheap throw away clothes, that might be something different)

And the actions every day people take in the home in the West will not be able to save the planet, which contains billions of people who crave the cheap crap they can’t have, anymore than a hardworking housewife in 1910 could scrub out ‘the social evil’ in the cities with abrasive powder and a scouring pad. (Old Dutch had an ad campaign in the 1910 era, “Old Dutch believes in women’s rights: the right to a clean home.)

This line of thinking (the three R’s, and that idiotic bag business in grocery stores)in my opinion is all designed to make us feel were are being useful and have some control, but we don’t, that is unless we take more tangible social action, through the avenues democracy still provides in much the same way the suffragists did. Unless we get political.

Of course, in 1908 era, some suffragists became militant, supposedly because they were being thrown in jail anyway, even for peaceful, lawful protest. (They threw rocks and such) and they were reviled by almost everyone, except the Nicholson women, who were all for militant action. Imagine, those well bred Nicholsons, throwing rocks.

The militant suffragists (or suffragettes) were thrown in jail in the UK and the US and when they went on hunger strikes, some were force-fed, through their mouths and their vaginas.

Imagine if suffragettes were around today, how they might be branded and how they might be treated.

Yes, there is a lesson to be learned here, I’m just not exactly sure what. I say this as I look out onto my suburban garden, which is virtually free of snow in mid March. Canada has had a very warm winter, and Montreal a drought. There was more snow this winter in Philadelphia than in Montreal. Fluke or pattern?

Ps. Just an aside, the other day, I decided not to ask the question when shopping “What does this cost?” but to ask “What does this cost the Earth?”

If you asked that question in the modern grocery store, you might well end up taking your reusable canvas grocery bag home empty.