Textile Research 1910.

Well, I’ve finished the outline of Flo in the City, the one with the plot involving garment workers. And it works. I just need to keep on working on it and hope that I have a few creative brainstorms. I used to have them on command, but, alas, my brain is old.

I had the major brainstorm to revisit the 1911 Census, to see what garment workers in Magog did. I know from another source, that the plant produced print materials for Dominion Textile.

Well, sure enough, there are many many people working at the the plant, and most are Tisserands.. weavers.

The most common other job says “journalier d’oc” occasional worker. Oddly, everyone has put 60 hours work a week down. (That must have come down from the company, to do so. Otherwise it makes no sense.)

The pay lines are all messed up, for the workers. One amount superimposed over another. Anyway 218 a year over 400 a year. Makes no sense either. Were they deliberately made obscure, because they all are!

I found one 12 year old working there (admitting to working there) and a 14 year old, which was legal, I think.

In 1909 Dominion Textile’s union went on strike and asked that child labour not be used, so.. there you go.

It’s hard to read, as the enumerator scribbled, and I’ve only looked at a few pages, but “carder” is another job…or cardeuse.

Useful and I’ll look at the other pages. 1000 people worked for that place at one time back then.

I also found out that the Milliner in Richmond was Vitaline Goyette, 27, whose father was also a merchant. She calls herself a modiste de chapeaux. No income entered for her.

There are also a number of dressmakers in Richmond. One woman, Esther Proulx, 25 ish, calls herself a couturier de robes and she made 108 dollars in 1910. Whoopie Do.

Well, lots of fodder for my story. It seems that’s why the Nicholsons could afford to hire a seamstress, on occasion. These poor women made next to nothing. But then again, Edith Nicholson made only 250 a year teaching at Westmount Methodiste Missionary School.

Maupassant’s and My Own Ramblings

Dome Centrale 1889 Paris exposition. Italian Modern according to Guy de Maupassant.

I am listening to a travelogue by Guy de Maupassant and it begins with a diatribe about the French Exposition of 1889. He’s fed up, he says, by the sight of the Eiffel Tower, which you can see from anywhere, and which you can see everywhere, made out of every conceivable material in every shop window.

Ah, the modern age. John Berger explains about it in Ways of Seeing.

Maupassant goes on to complain that you can’t get a taxi or a table in a restaurant, because of the crowd that smell of perspiration.

He sees the Exposition as a tribute to the industrial sciences,and a slap in the fact to art, and a sign of a new society, without castes, just the poor and the rich.

He sees the future in the present, like all good artists.

Right now, I am ready to get down to writing the Final Draft of Flo in the City. Thanks to another discovery on the litteratureaudio website, a poem by Victor Hugo about child labourers, I figured out the plot. And I’ve done all the research, too, although yesterday I dug around for examples of health hazards for workers in textile in the era.

My story begins with Flo in her crunch year at High School: she has to read this poem by Hugo and it is difficult. She brings it to the only French girl she knows, an apprentice in the millinery shop, who has trouble reading it herself. But as they decipher the theme of the poem, the girl becomes agitated: for she is French Canadian and many of her relations work in the Dominion Textile factory at Magog. Flo says, “Well, it’s nice that we don’t have such things anymore.”

And then she tells Flora about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, just the week before, about the girls jumping out of windows to their deaths.

And Flora says, what has that got to do with me? Girls in New York. And from foreign parts too. And besides, we at home make our own shirtwaists.

Yes, but do you make the “coton” too, the French girl asks? And then she tells her about the factory at Magog. About the girls who work there. (She would have to work there were it not for the fact her aunt knows the owner of the this millinery shop.. and she can speak English.)

And so Flora is introduced to an aspect of social responsibility not usually reflected on by Presbyterians…who are more concerned with the vanity aspect of women’s dress and not the social costs of this preoccupation.

Ps. Today, I was talking to my brother in law who brought up Flo and said she often spoke of the students at William Lunn. She remarked how the Jewish parents would be upset if their children only got 90′s.

That’s for the final part of Flo in the City, when she is working. She does mention in a 1914 letter that Parent’s Day is a great success, with all the moms and dads coming out wanting to know about Johnny and Sally.

From Sweatshop to Loft, in 100 easy years.

Former Dominion Textile plant, Montreal.

On my way to school,
I used to pass,
Baptist Church
And fields of grass.

Jesus Saves, upon the gate
Would comfort me if I were late.

Now the church is gone,
The field is razed,
And the Home Bank thrives
Where Jesus Saved.

I think this is e.e. cummings.

You know I was reminded of this poem today.

I double-checked and the old Dominion Textile plant is on St. Ambroise near the Lachine Canal and yes, it’s not far from where Royal Arthur School was, on Workman.

It’s now a huge condo project, Chateau St-Ambroise, with lofts for sale, a fancy French Restaurant, and other delights, like a huge pool hall and antique era auto on display. So I will go there and take pictures.

It seems the Lachine Canal, 100 years ago a kind of sewer for various industries, is now deemed ‘waterfront’. It is pretty down there.

The Chateau site is a heritage site and their website declares that the factory employed 3,000 at one time. No mention of young employees being abused and beaten, as I just read in Bettina Gregory’s Industrializing Montreal.

I don’t often venture into that area, even though it is adjacent downtown. (I travel above it, however, all the time on the 20 highway, on my way to Montreal.)

The Atwater Market is not far away either.

The Working Class Connection

Dominon Textile Employees (St. Henri) (biblotheque virtuel)

Well, I received Angels of the Workplace and Working Families today, two days after I ordered them. Someone had thrown the package on the lawn…? Anyway, I read the beginning of Angels in the Workplace, about Female Canadian Garment workers and it’s important material, with respect to Flo in the City.

Best of all, Mercedes Steedman, author of Angels confirms what I have been saying. That there were, in essence, only a few professions open to (most) women in 1910 (and before 1910 and after 1910) Ghettos. In 1891 Canada, women were by rank: servants, dressmakers, teachers; in 1941, they were stenographer or typist, maid, teacher, tailoress or related work. Hmm.

She also confirms what I have inferred from the Nicholson family letters about the middle class and clothing. They bought men’s clothes first, then women’s coats and suits and were slow to buy dresses and shirtwaists and blouses, because they could make these items at home.

Now I know for sure that Dominion Textile will figure large in my story, as that company had a Magog Plant and St Henri Plant. No doubt some of Marion’s students went to work there – and it is very likely some of the students’ parents worked there. Her school was near St. Henri.

And it allows me to explore the Jewish Question too. I read in Mariana Valverde’s book that it was the Presbyterians who were key in pushing through the Lord’s Day Act in 1906 – and that the Toronto Presbyterians, at least, had no sympathy for the Jews whose sabbath was on Saturday. And, in 1909, a Presbyterian Minister on the Montreal School Board didn’t want Jewish people on the Board, calling them heathens and thieves. I’m sure sure what the make up of Royal Arthur was demographically, but Willian Lunn, where Flora taught in 1912 closed down for Jewish Holidays.

These books I mentioned are in the Canadian Social History Series. Funny, social history is often thought of as working class history. Then there’s regular history, of the elite.. but where does the middle class stand? It’s social history, too.

It’s easy to figure out how the middle class lived and thought in the era, because mainstream magazines catered to them… but what’s in magazines doesn’t reflect the reality of their lives, just an ideal or perception. ..Letters do reflect the reality.. but, I was once told (by a expert in the Canadian family) that letters belonging to the middle class are rare. Lucky, I have 1,000 of them. 300 from the 1908-1913 era.

I’m reading about the working class in 1910 Canada for my book about the middle class in 1910 Canada, because, as I said before, the middle class only exits in relation to the working class or upper class. They fear falling into the working class or worse and they aspire to be upper class, with some reservations. Consquently, they are racked with anxiety, especially in hard times. The Nicholsons were exactly this way: nervous wrecks. Stoical nervous wrecks, but all the same. And their struggle to survive in the 1910 era hopefully will lead readers (of my book) to ask, What does it mean to be middle class? What does it mean to be Canadian?