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.

Material World – Material Shopgirls

Damask Weaving

Hmm. I need to take a break from ‘the dark side’ of the 1910′s and I found just the document to cheer me up.

The document in question is one in a series of Department Store Manuals published in 1917, the volume for cotton goods and linen.

Now, we all know about the demise of the department store. I bought a dress in Sears (Liz Clairborne tunic 40.00 only) a couple of weeks ago but I had to wait ‘an eternity’ in line as only one cash was open. (I bought it for my trip to New York next week.) And yesterday, in Winners (not really a department store) I had to go check the price of a Calvin Klein hat and glove set myself. But I did find all the (cheap)stuff I needed to accessorize my new tunic.

Flashback to the 1970′s. I had a part time job in the lingerie department of the Bay when I was in Jr. College. How boring. No customers. I just stood there all day fiddling with hangers to ‘look busy.” Of course, I could have cared less about the products I was selling. I didn’t even wear a bra in those days.

In 1972, the department store was already in decline.

But in the 191o’s the department store was a rising concern – and fairly new in Canada. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction of the manual:

“A knowledge of textiles is necessary for anyone who sells textile materials. The sales people in the cotton goods department should know how cotton is grown and picked, how it is manufactured into cloth, and especially should understand the finishing processes which make one cotton material different from another. Otherwise they cannot judge qualities and values.”

Hmm. But no mention of needing to learn about the social and socio-economic impact of the cotton industry. What a surprise! The book does mention that ‘cotton is picked by negroes, or families of negroes.”

And what a great resource it is, thorough and easy to understand, because it is aimed at shopgirls. Crepe de Chine, muslin, chambray, calico. Who was to know? These are cottons and these are all mentioned in the Nicholson letters. Now I can read up on it all.

I think I will begin each chapter of my book with a definition of one type of cotton: sort of like the knot thing in Shipping News.

I think I will have Flora explore the prospect of being a shop girl. Or someone she knows.

Cottoning on to the The Ripple Effect

Dominion Textile Cotton Plant Montreal 1909. McCord Museum .

The day after I visited Costco and purchased a few inexpensive sweaters I listened to a three part Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, called Severed Threads. It was written by John Dryden and was produced in England, the US and India. It was about child labour in the clothing industry.

Afternoon Plays tend to be brilliant and this one was no exception.

And somehow I know that this issue has to figure prominently in Flo in the City. Dominion Textile had a plant in Magog and it employed women and children and it is likely that some of these girls were underage.

I found some article in the Gazette re: cotton mills.

From 1909: The existing scale of wages is in the pursuit of competition amongst the operatives and the most important elements in this competition are female and child labour. It has been shown that of the operatives employed in the Quebec cotton mills, 42.3 percent are female and 26.6 are persons under the age of 18. As to the horus of labour of these two classes, it was asserted that in normal times under normal conditions work would begin on week days at 6:15 AM continue until 12 noon, resume at a quarter to one and continue until 6, with the exception of Saturday, when there was work only in the morning… The Quebec Factory Act calls for a work week not exceeding 60 hours for women and minors…

The article goes on to say some children employed were under 14, but that the company chiefs were surprised to find this to be the case..

From an Gazette editorial from 1911:

The fabrics of which the civilized man and woman uses extensively, certain processes in the making of which are attended to with grave risk of health and even to life. Apart from those that call for constant vigilance to escape injury to life and limb, there are processes which involve exposure to poison or irritating gases, extreme heat and other perils. Hmm.

All good stuff: I can have Edith read this.

I’m starting to figure out what Flo and the City is REALLY about, how all those white dresses they liked to wear impacted on the world. One of the archive.org magazines, either Maclean’s or The Canadian Magazine has an article called “The Romance of Cotton.” I have a book on hand from my research into my grandmother’s life in Colonial Malaya called The Romance of Rubber. I guess that’s how industries that exploited people and planetary resources, liked to be seen as: Romantic.