White Wedding Dresses?

Here’s the ‘iconic’ pic from my website TIGHSOLAS, www.tighsolas.ca that contains the Nicholson family letters from the 1910 era. It is a detail of a ‘tea party’ on the grass in front of their comfortable brick-encased Queen Anne style home in Richmond, Quebec.
I like the picture because it is pretty, but it really does embody the hopes and dreams of the middle class in Canada in 1910.

I watched the show Sunday Morning, yesterday, taped and the comedic editorialist (I don’t know her name) talked about her upcoming marriage and the high cost of weddings and wedding gowns. She setttled on a off white number, floor model.

She mentioned that white wedding dresses didn’t originally signify purity; that Queen Victoria got married in white to promote the lace industry in her country

I suspect white came to signify purity around 1910, as we had the Purity Movement, which I have written about extensively on this blog.

The comedienne also mentioned that white was worn by some women because white cloth was more expensive, and hard to wear (stains) and hard to wash, hence wearing it was a sign of prosperity. Bingo!

That’s what these white dresses meant to the Nicholson Women, who did their own clothes washing most of the time, despite aspring to a genteen lifestyle. In 1911, it takes Flora Nicholson, 19, TWO days to wash and iron her white dresses on a weekend she returns from Macdonald Teaching College.

So this all underscores the points I want to make with my ebook Threshold Girl, about Flora at School in 1911/12 and based on the Nicholson letters.

Threshold Girl is about a lot of things pertaining to Laurier Era History, but it’s mostly about women and clothes and what these clothes mean to them and what their clothes lust means to other less fortunate working women in the textile trade.

http://www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

The picture above is deceptive. It is of Marion Nicholson, my husband’s grandmother, who went on to lead the Teachers’ Union in Montreal. She was no slacker: she had tonnes of energy and directed it in many useful ways. I will write about her later, in another book, which will deal with the Jewish question in Montreal schools.. Edith Nicholson, the subject of my next novellette was more of a dreamer, although she could could be a woman of action, if necessary. I’m turning her into an opium addict for in my next book, The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

1913 Orgy of Undressing

Well, I thought that the 1920′s shake your booty fashions were an outcome of WWI: With few marriageable men left, women had to flaunt what they had in a frenzied competition for sperm donors.

I also thought that the new lighter fashions were a result of women donating their corsets to the war effort or something.

I knew that Coco Chanel started her fashion house before the war, moving to the South of France in 1914.

Anyway, I found a 1913 article in the Gazette archives (special to the Montreal Gazette and the New York Times (We were something in those days, we were a contender

This article is so entertaining I wish I could just transcribe it here. It has a tongue in cheek tone, too.

As it were, the militant suffragists were being blamed for yet something else subversive, the ‘undress craze’ where women were wearing ‘almost nothing’ under their gowns, and where the dresses were so sheer you could see the leg muscles through the material (just like with the Nike taking off her sandals in the Acropolis Museum) and slit so that you could see the leg HALF WAY to the KNEE!!!!

This craze, more pronounced in North American than England was scaring people, who wondered how far it could go. (Let me tell you…)

An expert explains the craze: women in their quest for equality with men had so turned men off (my words, of course) that women had to undress to get men’s attention back. Another expert has another take, that only woman who oppose the movement dress provocatively, so as to differentiate themselves from the militants who like to dress like men.

Of course, another explanation might be that women were working and to negotiate the CRAZY traffic is the city (take a look at era films on YouTube) a woman had to be freed up a bit. And then they liked the feeling. I have an article posted on my website, showing what women in 1910 had to wear under their dresses. Many layers. In Flo in the City, my book in progress, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ I have Flora dressing in the morning. (Chanel explained the success of her looser clothing in this way.)

And more unmarried middle class women were working and buying clothes or material for clothes and they could now influence the fashion of the day and not leave that to the matrons. And young women like to attract men…militant suffragist or not. Just take Edith Nicholson of Tighsolas as a real life example of someone who wanted it all, her emancipation, nice clothes (and a job to buy the clothes) and a man to love.

But hindsight is 20 20, as they say.

In this article they mention ‘the pneumonia blouse’ which must have been someone’s nickname for a low cut blouse. I guess health was a reason given for covering women up.

It’s all so COMPLEX!

Shirtwaists 1910 Eaton’s catalogue.

I have started to read Nan Enstad’s paper, Fashioning Political Identities, and because it is an academic paper, written in academic style and not as easily digested as the two Juliet Nicolson histories I have been blogging about, it’s going to take me a few readings to figure out exactly what this paper has to do with Tighsolas. An awful lot, actually, I can see that already.

The Nicholsons, middle class women, sewed their own waists. But the Enstad paper claims that the Italian and Jewish working class women (we’re talking the US here, but Montreal was not unlike New York) who worked in the clothing factories, paradoxically purchased their clothes as they didn’t have time to sew. Not from the Sears catalogue however, but from carts pushed around in their neighbours. And sometimes they dressed up like ‘ladies’ which upset the apple cart of class distinction.

And Enstad talks of the Shirtwaist Union Protests that I have talked about and mentions the fact that observors were confused, because these women were all gussied up. How could pretty girls be serious political activists? (I just blogged about a report on a suffrage parade where the women’s colourful fashions were described in detail: a similar thing, except this was usually done in support of the women: See, these suffragettes aren’t all manly women. They aren’t so frightening after all.

And there it is: the first connection I can make with http://www.tighsolas.ca/. The Nicholson women loved fashion, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t politically aware. Or that they didn’t want romance in their life. That’s a central point of Tighsolas.

Indeed, during the Second World War, Marion became a Teacher’s Union Leader and Edith became Commandant of the Red Cross in Quebec.

And still they cared about fashion. And they were quite vain. And they were quite girly.

And it’s all very complex… so that’s why I’m spending SO MUCH TIME getting background to the Tighsolas letters before I continue writing Flo in the City, my story about a girl coming of age in 1910.

A Catalogue is worth a thousand letters?

Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue, first item. 1909

I have 1000 letters left behind by the Nicholsons. Of these 1000 letters, I have posted about 300 from the 1908-1913 era on http://www.tighsolas.ca/, my social studies website.

I am now using these letters to write a novel, Flo in the City, on this blog.

Flo in the City, is about a young girl, Flora Nicholson, coming of age in the era. Flora is 16, a student in ‘high school’ or academy as it was called back then. Flora has two older sisters (Marion and Edith, both teachers) and an older brother, working in a bank.

The Nicholson letters tell an important story, about a pivotal time in Canadian and world history. The same story can be told in pictures from the Eaton’s catalogues of the era.

This morning I perused the 1909 Eaton’s catalogue available on Archive.org and snipped some pictures. I know if I compare this catalogue with the 1913 one, I will see some major differences. And I plan to do just that.

For right now, I’ve taken some snapshots from 1909, which I will post on the website as I write the installments of Flo in the City for the rest of 1909 and for 1910.

The advertisement above, for winter jackets, is the first picture in the 1909 Eaton’s fall and winter catalogue. This says a lot. Just like in modern department stores, as you ‘enter’ the catalogue you are met with women’s fashions. This says something, too.

Simply put, it suggests that women’s lust for clothing drove the consumer age, which makes the story of Flo in the City extremely relevant. The study of fashion history has always been considered a frivolous aspect of turn of the century history, say, compared to automobile history, but it clearly is not.

A person can learn an awful lot about women’s social history and ‘consumer age’ values, by examining fashion, and an awful lot about the 1910 era, by studying the Eaton’s catalogues.

Ironically, Edith mentions in a letter than she desires a pony jacket. No coincidence that ‘pony coats’ are the first item in the 1909 catalogues.

But at 37.00 such a coat is out of the question for Edith, who makes about 200. a year. That doesn’t stop her from purchasing a 7.50 hat from Ogilvy’s in 1909, a more stylish and expensive hat than would be found in the Eaton’s catalogue: a woman’s gotta have fun.

I grew up in the 60′s and ‘the residue’ of this era remained: for instance, my mother thought Persian Lamb the epitome of chic. I thought it was for old blue-haired ladies. On the other hand, those peignor sets, with silver comb, brush and little box, for something or other, simply enchanted me. They seemed the epitome of feminine to me. “Comb your hair 100 strokes each night, ” my mother would say. And in movies, that’s just what the beautiful actresses did, as they sat at their dressing tables.