EXACTLY 100 years ago Today…

Here’s a plate from the August 1911 Delineator Magazine, which I purchased off eBay.

So, exactly 100 years ago, this picture made its appearance… And exactly 100 years ago, Flora Nicholson learned that she was accepted at Macdonald Teachers College.

I have finished the first draft of Threshold Girl, (the new name for Flo in the City, after all she only gets to the city at the end.)

I am going to put in more fashion items from the August Delineator in the later chapters… as August is the month they sew Flo up for school. So it’s all very synchroni..synchrynos..appropriate.

And I’m going to start working on Edith’s story…. Where she gets involved with the Montreal Council of Women, the murky eugenics side, and the social reform people, who Julia Parker Drummond rebukes…I think.. and where she meets a woman who is travelling to New York…Elizabeth Arden, Florence Nightingale Something is her real name. She is exactly the same age as Edith Nicholson.

Elizabeth Arden will tell her about all the stenographer jobs in New York City, etc.

But I don’t have to make things up to make Edith’s story compelling: she taught at a Missionary School, where French Canadians were converted to Protestantism.. and I have read a number of accounts of ‘testimonials’ at the Wednesday prayer meeting which are very freaky in themselves!

And I have to figure out why she is so mad at Villard. I think I will have her upset that the youngest children are being converted…She will feel that they are too young…

I know that Edith knew Carrie Derick at McGill, I have a 1917 letter where she is stepping out with her… So I can have her know her earlier..

I already hinted at it in Threshold Girl.

www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

Edith Nicholson and Elizabeth Arden Meet!!

My bottle of Fifth Avenue. I got it at Christmas but gave it away as my husband is allergic to perfume.

As I plot out Edith’s Story (tentatively called Edith in the City) and as I try to figure out why Edith got so mad at Dr. Villard at French Methodist, I have already decided to include a chance encounter with Florence Nightingale Graham, the Canadian from Woodbridge, Ontario who moved to New York in around 1908 (must check) to become Elizabeth Arden.

She was born in 1884, the same year as Edith. And she started out as a nurse. I’ll have her joke that you don’t have to become a nurse just because you are named after one.. and she’ll tell Edith that it’s not only about choosing the right job at the right time, it’s also about choosing the right place. She’ll talk about New York and all the jobs for women opening up there. (I have a list of statistics about stenographers in the city from 1910.)

Edith will be looking for work as a stenographer (it will be a flashback) as she took a typing course at St. Francis… So it works out well.

Elizabeth Arden will represent a woman as focused as Marion Nicholson, but with more options, for some reason… because she is willing to take risks.

I have to go find her biographies …

Christmas Message – Tighsolas Style

Elizabeth Arden’s Fifth Avenue cologne bottle, sitting like a New York skyscraper on top of granite made of Lush soap. Not the Chanel bottle, but still deco. I wonder when it was designed. Chanel’s was in 1927. (Hmm. It’s a 1996 brand.)

A weird coincidence this Christmas. As I waited for the goose to cook, I opened my Christmas presents. The first one de-papered was from my eldest son and it was a boxed collection of hand cream, body lotion, perfume and cologne. The Fifth Avenue brand. I said “Thanks” as I reached for the next gift and remember thinking, at least with one part of my brain. “Hmm. That’s a blast from the past.”

Most of my gifts were bath oils and soaps, but trendy brands in bright boxes. The fruity, ecological style stuff so popular with the young. Lush has taken over from the Body Shop. My husband got me a selection of Clarins spa products, which made me feel guilty, as they are so expensive.

This Fifth Avenue gift made me feel a tad middle-aged (sic). Or it seemed more like something I might have given my mother – were she not into Chanel No. 5 right up until her death.

And then I opened another non-cosmetic gift, a large book about Women in History, that I mentioned in my last blog. My other son and his girlfriend gave me that gift along with some Fruits and Passion creams and bath products. And then I went back into the kitchen to get the feast on the table, hoping not to forget any dish. (As it was, I left the prune apple stuffing in the microwave.)

The next day I started reading the book, in my living room surrounded by unclaimed gifts, and read that part from the 1900-1910 era and read that passage about Elizabeth Arden, and how she opened her first salon in 1909 and how she soon after visited France and brought make-up techniques back to the US and how she was a pioneer in the industry, making make-up a good thing for good working girls, so to speak.

I tracked down a little more about her. She was born in a Toronto suburb and she didn’t go to high school (as it cost money, as my story Flo in the City reveals). She worked as a shop girl, cashier and a stenographer (good money in that) before going to New York and eventually becoming the richest woman in the world.

Her obit in Time Magazine says she was a petite 5 foot 2 and a half and that in 1910, when she started her business, “hissing ‘she paints’was the vilest thing a woman could say about another. I think I will use that line in Flo in the City. Maybe I’ll have Edith meet her in passing in 1908 on the train.

I’ve written a lot about Coco Chanel, on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website. She opened a hat shop in Paris at the same time.

Coco was an example of the right woman in the right place in the right time. But so was Elizabeth Arden, who was A CANADIAN. And she was born in 1884, the same year as Edith Nicholson!! And her Dad was a Scotchman.

How amazing! And what a coincidence, because now I feel I really have to get going, writing Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era. I have everything, with this bit about Elizabeth Arden the cherry on top of the cake.

As I write this, her scent Fifth Avenue, is wafting around the living room. Vaguely familiar fruity smell. A genuine blast from the past. But, wait, I do some research on Google and see that Fifth Avenue is a newish perfume, released in 1996. (So it’s all in my mind, this idea that Fifth Avenue is a ‘classic’ perfume. But then that’s the true essence of the cosmetics industry: illusion, all-in-the-mindness. I imagine the EA people were trying to evoke a bit of Chanel’s aura or at least, staying power, with this effort. The EA Brand, according to Wikipedia, was the most sophisticated brand in the 30′s to 60′s used by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Royalty, like Queen E and her Mom..so I was half-right, anyway. I guess the Chanel No.5 brand was resurrected with those wildly popular and widely-mocked (SNL) Catherine Deneuve ads in the (?) early 70′s.)

As it is, my chapter where Flo and Mae visit Sutherland’s drug store and discuss “rouge de theatre’ is the most popular page on this website.. I have Mae say that in Boston, the big stores sell rouge de theatre, right out in the open. (I made this up.) Yesterday, I learned that Selfridges in London opened in 1909 and sold make-up right out in the open!! (fashionera.com)

Well, my instincts are good.. I just took a guess.

Smoke and Pompadours

Marion and her friends passing around a cigarette. Had there been Facebook in 1910 this picture might have proved detrimental to her career.

I got a book for Christmas, an encyclopedia really, called Historica’s Women: 100 years of women in history, first published in 2007. It’s chronological.

I went straight to the 1900 -1910 time period and found the usual suspects, the suffragettes etc but two entries were more side-bars to history- and very interesting to me.

The first was about a woman, Miss Katie Mulcahey, got arrested for smoking in New York City. Women couldn’t smoke, although children could.

There was a kind of prohibition movement for tobacco. A few states had banned it, a few others were trying. But the tobacco lobby was too strong.

Edith and Marion Nicholson both were heavy smokers all their lives. Edith lived to 92, Marion died of a heart attack at 60. Edith lived long enough to see those ads for Virginia Slims, “You’ve come a long way, Baby!”

The other story is about a Canadian-born business woman called Florence Nightingale Graham, who changed her name to Elizabeth Arden and opened her first beauty salon in 1909 on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

How interesting!

Wikipedia says that she was born in Ontario and that she followed her brother to New York and that she travelled to Paris in 1912 to learn the make-up secrets of the French and brought them back to the US. (Wow! In one of my first chapters of Flo in the City, I have Flo and Mae at Sutherland’s talking about ‘rouge de theatre.’

As I have written on this blog, money spent for ‘hair-dressing’ was by the men. Women did their own hair.

I had seen an advertisement for a ‘hair sculpting parlour’ somewhere in a Toronto Magazine of the Era.

And I’ve written in my essay about why women no longer wear hats (in a consumer society gone ballistic) because HAIR is the new HATS.

HAIR styling, today, is a huge huge huge industry.

And the tobacco industry won’t die either.