Edith as a school teacher, circa 1910.
“In colonial times, the girl’s opportunities for what we now speak of as ‘an education’ were severely limited. There was not much for a girl to do but stay home and learn and practice home-making. Since that time a great change has taken place in the position of women, due partly to increased educational opportunities, and partly to changed economic and social conditions until today woman stands on an equality with man and practically economically independent from him. She may enter any profession or engage in any trade or occupation that is open to men except those requiring to great physical strength. She may be a doctor, a lawyer, a minister, a teacher, a clerk, a bookkeeper, a stenographer, a factory hand, dentist or farmer – but notwithstanding all those possibilities, what she really does in nine of ten cases is to marry and become a home-maker, just as she did in times when there was nothing else for her to do. ” Helen Day, the New Profession of Homemaking, 1909
The more people believe something, the more it becomes ‘the truth’. That explains religion, war, and sky high sales for expensive anti-aging creams. I know this to be true because the invisible alien from Alpha Centuri sitting beside me just told me.
The post above was from the 1910 era and it is a load of nonsense, but the women’s media of the day repeated this mantra, that any job was now open to women, over and over. Even the 1911 Encylopedia Britannica stated the same in its entry on ‘woman’.
The Nicholson letters and the trials of the Nicholson women, bright, ambitious and all graduates of one of the finest learning institutions in Quebec and Canada, didn’t have much choice, when it came to a career. Teaching was pretty well the only option.
The historical statistics prove the same. According to a 1910 chart from Statistics Canada most women who worked as 1) domestics 2)in shops 3)in factories 3) as teachers. Yes, there were one or two women in every profession, but exceptions don’t make the rule, despite what the modern 24 hour media wants us to think. Exceptions are just that, exceptions, rare events, anomalies.
Of course, some new professions were opening up in 1910, the ‘pink ghetto’ jobs of later in the century for one. Stenography was a highly paid profession in 1912. Even in the 60′s, when we boomer kids also believed we could have it all, there were many professions closed to women and many more with glass ceilings. Just like in the program Mad Men, I was told I couldn’t work as a copywriter in advertising unless I paid my dues as a receptionist and secretary, 4 years minimum, and I had a degree in, um, advertising and English.
If Miss Carrie Derick had been shown the above article, back then, she would have shaken her head. Carrie Derrick was Canada’s first female full professor, at McGill. She rose to that position in 1912. She had already been performing the duties of a full professor of Botany anyway. So she got the title, after a huge fight, but no extra pay.
Carrie Derick was President of the Montreal Council of Women in 1912 and sometime shortly after that she lauched the Montreal Suffrage Association, a militant suffragist organization. This was one women who knew that myths didn’t put food on the table.
In 1900 she reported on the state of teaching in Quebec, saying it was a bleak profession with few positions available, and only young women with connections got those new positions. So even teaching, that ole stand-by for ‘spinsters’ back then, wasn’t a sure thing for most women. (But she said this before the immigration boom, a few years later, which brought so many people to Montreal that many new schools had to be built and furnished with teachers.)
In my novel in progress, Flo in the City, based on the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ letters, I will have Flora meet Miss Derick in 1910. This never really happened, although Edith Nicholson stepped out with Miss Derick later on at McGill.
What did happen in 1911, and I will find a way to weave it into the story, was that the men of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education passed through Montreal and asked the Montreal Council of Women for a report on the state of women’s work in the era -and got an earful. The Commission didn’t hear about women lawyers and doctors, and the ‘limitless’ career opportunities for women; they heard about young girls working long hours in shops and poor women slaving away, in unhealthy conditions, in factories, forcing their eldest children, of 8 or 10, out of school to care for the youngest.
What was the Commission’s solution: to create “a new profession” of homemaking for women, by adding domestic science courses in the schools. Women destined to marry would become better homemakers, and solve all the crushing social problems of the day, one good, clean home at a time, and women who had to work could work as domestics, and solve ‘the servant problem’ for the wealthy. Good help was becoming hard to come by.
PS: I wonder what other total falsehoods (cultural myths) are being promoted in today’s society. (For history tends to repeat itself and human nature remains a constant.) Well, for one, just last week it was reported that Canadians believe crime is getting worse even though statistics prove otherwise, therefore they tend to support the Conservative’s law and order agenda, for stiffer sentences, a more US style for-profit prison system and more invasion of ordinary citizens’ privacy ‘for our protection.’ (People’s perceptions skewed by a toothless, profit oriented news media, which has devolved into one big titillating ‘crime report’ because that’s the cheapest way to get viewers.) This is just one example of how cultural myths became dangerous lies.
