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.
