Threshold Girls and Lost Magazines

My new mantle.. Harper’s Bazar 1913, Ladies’ Home Journal 1906 covers. And ‘The Girls’.. or my Anna of the Five Towns vases.

Well, yesterday, I tried to find that July 1911 Food and Cookery Magazine I purchased off eBay five years ago, with the awesomely illustrative article on the Healthful Home.

I need it for the detailing of my Flora in the City Novel in Progress.

I found my 1906 Ladies’ Home Journal and the cover of the Harper’s Bazar and spontaneously decided to frame them before they fall to scraps. I took the posters of La Dulce Vida and Ladro di Bicyclette (spelling?) out of two cheap Walmart frames and put the covers in and then removed the tall framed details of Van Gogh’s Irises and Sunflowers which graced my living room mantle and replaced them with these smaller frames.

They go good with “The Girls” I think: my art nouveau Thomas Forester vases. Right era, right theme. Pretty girls. Girls as decoration.

A theme I’m fiddling with in Flo in the City.

I’m thinking of changing the the title (which really doesn’t work as she doesn’t get to the city until the end) to Threshold Girl. That’s a term used by author Gertrude Atherton in an Article in a 1909 Delineator I have somewhere, but can’t find.

It’s probably with my Food and Cookery, in the garage.

A “Threshold Girl’ is a girl between 17 and 19, who is all muddled and has not yet learned that a woman must pretend to be what she is not, at least according to Atherton.

Threshold Girls are even more confused in 1909, as they have so many more options than did their grandmothers, says Atherton. That’s another theme I’m fiddling with in Flo in the City. I’m not sure I agree with Atherton, who is saying what most everyone was saying in 1910: that a woman could have it all. That all doors were open to her.

Threshold Girl is a perfect title for my novel, because the term has two meanings in my story. It refers to Flora’s age and also to the times she lives in. The Birth of Now.

The push-pull of biology and ambition -2

Notman was the most famous photographer of wealthy Montreal. Clearly in 1900, his business also had middle-class clients. Marion being one of them.

No woman anywhere, in my opinion, suffered more from the push-pull of biology and ambition than Marion Annie Nicholson. And, she got all she wanted, at a price. Here’s an excerpt (final paragraphs) from a 1909 article, from that Delineator I have on hand, written by Gertrude Atherton, a writer who hung around, I believe, with Oscar Wilde and his cronies in France, which accounts for its haughty tone.

The article is called The President Unrest Among Women and it is remarkable for both its style and substance but it also reflects a common belief of the day, that women ‘have made it.’ I have posted the entire article on my website at www.tighsolas.ca/page295.html . I think I will use that line “today the most limited abilities can find renumeration in any of a thousand fields of industry” in Flo in the City, my novel about a woman coming of age in 1908-1913. This line proves that even brilliant people can spout nonsense -or be taken in by modern mythologies.

(And I have an answer to her main question: Why is love still the main theme of the novel for women? Because it is the main theme for men as well. Once we’ve acknowledged that then we can see that men can marry biology and ambition (in order to mate well) indeed, they must, and women have to make a choice, or compromise, between the two even today, even 100 years later. Sermon over.)

“It is now many a long day since women began to support herself in one way or another, but at first it was either a question of a talent or of limited demand regulating supply. Before this extraordinary and widespread impulse which is coincident with the opportunities of modern life, women forced to earn their bread took to school teaching, the stage, cooked or made beds according to their tastes and powers. Today, the most limited abilities can find renumeration in one of a thousand fields of industry. Personally, the hate the sight and the sound of a suffragete, but I would remind myself and others that such great women as Susan B. Anthony were thought quite as pestiferous in their day; and yet it is such women who with courage and an intelligence far in advance of their time, forged the priceless tools of liberty which have freed women from the shackles of he centuries. They were held up to ridicule, reviled, persecuted, but so have been the martyrs of every revolution since the world began. Who shall say that the day will not come when the suffragette, inflicted with a very rabies of reform as she is, and as ridiculous as extremists usually are, will have her turn at canonization? Who shalls say what new era she is preparing?

It may be asked why woman, having so pointedly emancipated herself, does love continue to be the main theme of the novel? The time is not yet for the elimination of sex, and love still feeds the soul of every man and woman under the sun. And no matter how violently a pendulum swings, it always regains its equilibrium in time; in life the new is constantly adjusting itself to the old. People that oppose so violently this whole modern movement of women should stop and reflect that progress was not invented by the twentieth century, but it as old as the world and no doubt has a planetary history which even our imaginations do not compass. Personally, I have no reason to care whether women get the vote or not, but I have no more doubt that they will win this particular battle than that we are on the eve of many other changes, including religion that will keep pace with the advance of intellect. It is also likely that man himself, in a generation hence, will demand in woman all that he now fears and resents.”