The Other Side of Child Labour

Boys Scouts in 1910. The Community picks up the slack for parents.

There’s a heritage site called Upper Canada Village in Eastern Ontario where you can see learn about village life in 1860 or so.

Each little house/home is a center of production, say a cheese making place or a shoemaker. I recall when I last visited, the guide explained that the home, being a workplace, was a bit dangerous for the children, so the younger kids were taken care of by teenage girls, as both the mom and dad worked.

The piece below is from a 1910 book called The Education of Women and is about the changes that happened to the family group when the home changed from a center of production to a center of consumption. You will see that a lot of the complaints made about modern families were made back then, 100 years ago.

(PS. My mother in law told a story about visiting her firstborn’s kindergarten class in the late 1940′s. There were pictures of MOM AND DAD on the board. Mom was this HUGE figure and Dad a tiny little guy in a buttoned down suit. Fathers didn’t figure large in the life of kids, even in the 50′s, despite what TV shows like Father Knows Best seemed to show. Maybe that’s why they had to create these shows, for fantasy. If you watch today’s sitcoms, you would think people all sit around on couches all day joking with a group of bosom buddies, but that’s just what we’d like to be doing. We’re actually sitting at home, alone, watching the show.)

“The changes in industrial, educational and organized life have greatly modified domestic life, so greatly, indeed, as in the judgment of many observers, to imperil it seriously. The removal of the father and often the mother to the office, shop, or factory during the day results in a lost to the children of association with one or both parents. Ease and cheapness in moving from one place to another are destroying the conception of home as a permanent abiding pace. The crowding of people into narrow quarters, flats, and tenements is resulting in loss of freedom, privacy, and sense of ownership, all of which have been thought essential to the best family life. As has been pointed out: the family has two functions; as a smaller group it affords an opportunity for eliciting the qualities of affection and character which cannot be displayed at all in the larger group and it is a training for future members of the larger groups in those qualities of disposition and character which are essential to citizenship.

Mrs. Gillman has rightly stated that he father and mother must work together for the interests of the family.

When the home was a skilled workshop, when father, mother and children jointly contributed to the making of the house in its material aspect, there was constant opportunity for the parents to train the child in many of his activities. They now have to send the child to the school for the large part of his training, physical, mental, social and religious. With the disappearance of household industries or their relegation to the hands of the unskilled (sic) foreigner, it has become necessary to introduce into the school curriculum matter and methods which will give the child some manner of command over his physical environment, and as yet only a beginning has been made in filling up the gap.

In spite of the satisfaction and comfort which come with the modern house, heated, lighted, drained, furnished with water, food and clothing at cost of little effort, many a parent longs for the ‘chore’ of household industry, as a means of training his child in usefulness and efficiency.

The gymnasium, the dancing school, the Sunday School, the club, and various outside agencies have come to take the place vacated in the child’s life through the changes wrought in the home by the conditions of modern life.

Under the former industrial system, the father shared much more largely than at present in the life of training the child. The part of which he now plays is often so small as to give rise to a series of humourous tales with the child’s ignorance of his father as the central theme. With fathers absent from the home and with the advent of communal control of sanitary and civic matters have gone many opportunities for training children to assume responsibility in matters leading to good citizenship demanded in public affairs. Obedience to law, respect for authority, intelligent interest in personal activities find little opportunity for expression in the modern home.”

What is History, Exactly?

Me in late 1966 or early 1967. I have just turned 12.

I put up a picture of me, myself and I because, well, I just got it in my email. My brother had it, and I never knew it existed. I have just one other picture of me from that era, the era of Expo67, the year my colonial grandmother came to visit. I wrote about that tumultuous time in a play www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html. You can see that I was tall, even then. Well, that fact figures big time in my story.

The play is called Looking for Mrs. Peel because the Avengers television show was big then, and my grandmother had been a spy in WWII. And the play is about youth vs. age. It was a youthful time, back then. For the first time in history? there were more people under 25 than over 25 in North America.

The 60′s were a pivotal era as well, but not as extreme as the 1910 era or, well, right now.

Expo and 1967 is now history, itself, and yet, it doesn’t feel like the past to me.

In 1967, Edith and Flo were still much alive, living in Westmount, or just retired back to Richmond.

They often visited my husband’s home in Hudson, with Wesley, Flo’s kind and good husband.

The 1910 era wasn’t history to them either. They’d lived through it as well as two world wars!

I have letters from a soldier ‘boyfriend’ to Flo from the Belgian Front. He was Herb Tucker, a family friend. He lived, after escaping a bloody battle with only a broken finger, but his brother, Percy died just before armistice. I have all the information in the letters.

History was never a favorite topic of mine. It seemed to be all about treaties and war. (My husband, who is related to General Douglas MacArthur is the authority on war in my family.)

Then I realized EVERYTHING is history, including food, fashion, and how we live and work and feel.

When I first discovered the Tighsolas letters in 2005 and started reading them, I didn’t think of them as history, per se. They were an interesting peek into people’s personal lives, people I recognized, my husband’s people.

I recognized these people even though I had never met them because they shared traits with people I did know, my husband’s mom and sisters and brothers, their descendants.

On top of that, I identified with Margaret, Edith and Flo, myself, which probably accounts for why my husband married me.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I read the letters with good handwriting first. Flo and Marion’s. The letters I read were out of order, but I realized, upon finishing them all, that they told the story of Flora’s year at Macdonald, at McGill Normal School.

Funny, I had no idea back then, what a normal school was… it’s a teaching school. Or what model school was, (middle school). I knew very little period, about the era, except perhaps what had been happening in the artistic circles of England and France…and I had studied a bit about D.W. Griffith at university. Oh, and I’d seen tonnes of Edwardian Era movies and television series, like The Go-Between or Upstairs Downstairs and read many books from the era (it probably was my favorite era, come to think of it).

So, no surprise, after reading all these letters from the 1910 era, I sensed that something ‘big’ was going on in the background. And I was right! The modern world was being invented…my world, the world I grew up in and still live in, even if we’ve pretty well reached the end of this modern era, right now, today, in 2009.

That’s why it is so fitting that I am writing Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the 1908-1913 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ because, coincidentally, 100 years later, the world is going through another great social shift.