A Kids’ Eye View of The Cotton Industry 1902

Picture from 1902 Royal Crown Reader. Book 4. These were used in Quebec Schools too. These are cotton workers, but wearing sarongs. The only workers mentioned in the book are American Negroes..so kids would have assumed these are American Negroes..even slaves.

I have been meditating on the cotton industry in 1910, and how I can weave this social welfare theme into Flo in the City.

In short, I wondered how much Marion, Edith and Flo knew about the cotton industry. I know they loved clothes and as women who made their own clothes, they knew a bit about fabric.

But did they know enough about the industry to care about the textile workers and their trials and strikes.

Well, I just re-discovered that the 1902 Royal Crown Reader I have on hand (purchased off Ebay) has two articles on cotton!

Quote:

1) The Cotton Plant:

We do not know when cotton was first used for clothing. People learned to cultivate useful plants long before they learned to write, so none of our books are old enough to tell us who were the first farmers, or bakers, or weavers. But it is only about a hundred years since cotton cloth was woven in this country. (UK).

Indian muslins have long been famed for their beauty. A traveller, writing more than two hundred years ago, mentions some muslins that are so exceedingly fine that when laid on grass and dew has fallen on it, it is no longer visible.

These delicate materials were woven on looms of the coarsest and simplest kind, and now when the machinery has been made better, the natives seem to have lost much of their former skill (sic), so that the new fabrics are by no means as fine as the old.

When America was discovered by Columbus, about four hundred years ago, cotton was found growing there, and the natives showed some skill in weaving it into cloth. The United States of America has long held the first place among the cotton growing countries of the world, and from it we get most of our raw cotton.

For many years, indeed until about thirty years ago, the work in the cotton fields was performed by negro slaves; but after a long war, all the slaves were freed in 1885.

(Another page describes how the cotton plant grows, how the bolls are harvested and how the plant is woven into fibres at the factory.)

The following article is called Samuel Crompton and the Cotton-Spinner.

It is due to the invention of these new machines that the cotton manufacture has grown to such a very great extent in England. Manchester, Liverpool, and other towns in Lancashire, have become vast hives of busy workers and population of the country is five times what it was at the beginning of the century.The cotton spinners and weavers were at first very much against the new machines…

(It goes on to describe the life of Samuel Compton)

A recent In Our Time about the Industrial Revolution (on BBC Radio Four) debated this issue, whether innovation sparked the Revolution or whether economics did.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1910 New York Dramatic Mirror. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the most popular books of its era and it spawned many early motion pictures. There’s an In Our Time about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, too, on BBC Radio Four website.

How to Be Good (Consumer-wise)

Flo in her home-made dress, 1908 era.

Years ago, I decided I didn’t want to drink coffee made from beans picked by exploited Third World workers, so I went to my local grocery store, looked up the brands and went to the Net (in it’s earlierst days) for more info.

What I discovered was that, despite appearances, all the brands of coffee in the store were produced by the same company.

So, I gave up.

Since then, many establishments featuring free trade coffee have popped up. And I buy it, but not all the time, despite the fact Colin Firth is a firm supporter of the cause:)

A few blogs ago, I discussed a recent Huffington Post article that listed the 10 items most likely to be made by child or forced labour. Cocoa was one of them, as was sugar cane. Coffee too. Rice, too.

It’s hard to be a responsible consumer. I’m more a looney-toons consumer, getting mad at the cashiers in the grocery store for charging me for a plastic bag, when every product they are passing by the scanner is grossly overwrapped (and under-sized)- because that’s how the store makes its profits.

Yesterday, I read more of Angels in the Workplace, to better understand the textile industy in 1900, so as to better understand how Flora and Edith and Marion’s love of fashion was a function of much more complicated issues of trade and even suffrage.

It is claimed in the book that middle-class families purchased dresses in the 1910 era and that only working class still made their own dresses. But I don’t think that is right, that the Nicholsons were an exception to the rule.

Melvyn Bragg on BBC Four just featured a show on the Industrial Revolution that provided me with more insight into the evolution of the cotton trade.

Today, I fell upon the website of Transfair Canada, a fair-trade group out of Ottawa that is trying to demystify the Fair Trade issue and help Canadians buy Fair Trade products more easily.

You can enter your postal code and find stores that sell fair trade products. For my area, the SAQ shows up, so I guess wine is fair trade. Phew! At least I don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying that particular product.

The TransFair search engine listed my little store in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Co-op du Grand Orme, where I buy chemical free cosmetics and the Heath Tree, a sprawling store in Pointe-Claire where I buy my de-tox greens and Pzorzema Cremes from Derma C.

Although the Health Tree is thriving (from what I can see)the Grand Orme is on life support, or so the cashier told me.

Walmart is not on their list. No surprise there. Although my Provigo in Vaudreuil is on the list – and it’s no longer a Provigo, but a Loblaw’s. Weird. And it’s the store that really is BIG into LITTLE convenience sizes.

Anyway, this Transfair Canada site also features some articles on the issue and one of them, on How the West is elbowing West Africa out of the Cotton Trade, claims that China is now the world’s biggest supplier of that product.

My goal, in writing Flo in the City, is not only to shine a light on women’s lives in the 1910 era, but to show women readers how a woman’s love of fashion is not just a personal statement, it’s a social responsibility too.

I want to make the Nicholson story relevant to today, in that way.