Three Steps Forward, One Back

A picture of Edith with very possibly staff from Westmount Methodist Institut. Myabe Yvonne Villard is there.

Well, five steps forward, one step back.

I wasn’t finding much online about Westmount Methodist, so lucky, I thought, for the Preparing the Way document by Paul Villard. Only a few copies of this little pamphlett remain in existence, one supposedly at McGill and one copy at Westmount Library. And his other book, Up to the Light, contains only a bit on the Institut -because I found a French webpage that said as much.

I decided to check the Gazette archives and didn’t find much either, just a few graduation notices… and a strange article from 1960′s, about the actress Madeleine Sherwood, the Mother Superior, I think, in the television show The Flying Nun and also that very bitchy pitch-perfect Sister Woman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of the movies that should have won Best Picture but didn’t. (Did she play the same character on Broadway?)

It seems this Montreal-born actress’s grandfather was a certain McGill Prof, Paul Villard, who was also an MD and a preacher.

Could it be the same Paul Villard. I couldn’t be sure, until I found an article in the 1911 (YES) Westmount News about The Institut that claimed this Paul Villard was a doctor, too.

Too much of a coincidence. I couldn’t be 100 percent sure, until I found a bio for Ms. Sherwood that claimed her Mom was named Yvonne.

Well, that nailed it.

The Westmount News was so useful. I discovered a great deal of useful information for my first draft of Threshold Girl, the new title for Flo in the City.

The Horse Show was in early May at THE ARENA in Westmount. So I have to fix that. Westmount Park wasn’t referred to as Victoria Jubilee Park anymore, but The Westmount Park. So there, I have to change it back to what I had.

And there wasn’t a tram on Sherbrooke,not until 1913, like I had supposed. The St Catherine tram was cramped and crowded.

And the Merry Widow wasn’t playing (well, I knew that ) but Brewster’s Millions was. The Westmount News goes into great detail about What’ s On at the Orpheum and Princess… And in 1911, Sir Wilfrid bought some land in Westmount for his wife. And there wasn’t much crime in the city, (well, I saw that from the Yearbook) but a lot of ‘car’ accidents. The trouble is, ‘cars’ could be motorcars or tramcars.

And they were showing Kinecoloured films of the Coronation at the Princess.. with realistic colours.. so they wrote. So maybe I will have Marion go to this, instead of the same Somner Park show that Edith went to.

And one tidbit I will put in my story: a Laurentian Water horse ran amok in Westmount. Well, I write about runaway horses, in my story and Laurentian water was owned by my husband’s relations on the other side. I think I will have Flo and Edith witness this!! I want to put a bit about Laurentian in Marion’s story anyway. (Here’s a quote about the need for a children’s library in Westmount: “Pure water, effective drainage, fine sidewalks,beautiful parks, and the annexation of profitable lands are material things worth striving for, but the things of the mind, things that build charcter should not be overlooked,these build for time and eternity. It was a wise Jesuit who said, “Give me the first 7 years of a child’s life, and you can take the rest.” (This quote is similar to my “healthy home” quote at the beginning of Threshold Girl.”) Intellectual, physical and MORAL health were considered ONE AND THE SAME THING in 1910.)

But I also discovered something that messes me up a bit. In the article about Westmount Methodiste, Villard writes that Academy I graduates can enter the Model Course at Macdonald. Hmm. So that means Flora wasn’t in Academy III but Academy II, as she just took one year of the course.

I guess I have to change that. I wonder why Edith didn’t take the course, money I guess. Just like so many people, she didn’t have enough money to take off a year and to go school.

Oh, and another thing I read, wedding announcements in Westmount tended to describe the weddings as ‘quiet.’ Many of them. I figure this is to appease those who were not invited..

Paris 1910 Diary – Part 1

Elizabeth Hardy Fair wedding gown, 1912 or 13. She married Frank Tofield, a Montreal banker, and moved into the Linton Apartments on Sherbrooke Street. She mentions him in her 1910 travel diary. No wonder she married him, she loved Paris so much and Montreal was a bit like Paris.

August 17: France is reached. Landed at 6:30 at Havre. Spent a very comfortable night. Had stateroom to myself. Ate breakfast aboard ship. Had baggage inspected and departed.

Mr and Mrs. Suinon met me and we took a taxi to the Balzac, a very fine Hotel. Everything exceedingly nice.

Had lunch (what did you eat?) then visited the Luxenbourg Galleries, very very interesting.

In the evening after dinner we went out on the Champs Elysees and walked the Arc de Triomphe.

Paris is WONDERFUL. Much grander and everything more delightful than London!

Went to bed early. I was nearly dead. Had tea at a lovely little shoppe.

August 18th.

Very warm. Ate breakfast and then went shopping with the Seuris. Stores quite bewildering. Returned to the hotel for lunch and went out again as soon as we changed our gowns. Went to see Miss Boyd of Washington at the Contremartre (?) and then the stores again.

We had tea at Fullers and then went back to the Balzac. I ate dinner alone as the Sieuris we out. Very tired. Am going to bed.

August 19th.

Had breakfast at nine thirty and Mrs. S. and I drove Mr S to the station. He deposited his bags and then spent an hour shopping with us. We visited the Madeleine before returning to the hotel and it was well worth the trip.

In the afternoon we called for Miss Alice Boyd and took a taxi and I sailed down the Champs Elysees in great style. Had tea, visited several stores, then returned for dinner.

Dressed and then took in the Opera, Sigurd. And no good at all. The opera house was indeed grand and I was glad to have seen it notwithstanding the opera was so poor. Returned to hotel with no adventures to relate. Paris does not appear to me so wicked as pictured. (Editor’s note: Go to Montmarte for a bit of wickedness! While you are there, buy some pictures from a short stalky guy called Picasso. Bring them home and leave them to your nephew in your will. )

Will soon start sightseeing in earnest

Preserving Women’s Purity

A Roll in the Hay.. Flo and someone and friends.

I am reading The Age of Light, Soap and Water by Mariana Valverde, 1991, which encompasses many of the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ and Flo in the City themes. (I learned that the 1906 Lord’s Day Act, which I mention in Flo in the City, was pushed through by Radical Presbyterians. Interesting.)

And, as I blogged earlier, I have figured out a lot of what Valverde writes for myself, using the materials now available online.

I also ordered two other books in this Canadian Social History Series: Angels in the Workplace about Women in the Canadian Garment Industry and Working Families, Age Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal, which I tried to find five years ago at the Atwater Library, but had no luck.

Light, Soap and Water is Toronto-centric, being about “ANGLO-Canada” – and it’s theory-based, but there are some parts which relate directly to some of the Nicholson experiences.

For instance, Valverde describes the YWCA. Marion roomed at the Y in 1905, when at McGill Normal School and hated it. TOO MANY RULES. Well, Valverde mentions that the Y’s mission was to keep good girls pure. The roomers were ‘subject to a thorough system of surveillance.’

Edith complains in a letter that she wishes she could go to a ‘lecture’ but she has no one to go with. She must stay in her room alone. According to Valverde, a woman walking alone at night could be stopped by police and she would have “to give a good account of herself.”

Women really couldn’t go out alone at night!!

If prostitution, the so called social evil didn’t exist, they would have had to invent it, in order to CONTROL WOMEN.

In NY it was illegal for a woman to eat alone, at any time, and women’s groups wanted that changed in light of the new realities. (I’m not sure about Montreal but I’m guessing laws were similar. When Marion is searching for a room, she hears of one available, but she must get her meals out and Margaret doesn’t like that idea. I think I saw an ad in the Gazette for a woman only restaurant.) And it was illegal is many (most!) jurisdictions for women to wear pants. The new harem skirt fashion in the 1910 era confused people. (We call them harem pants today.) A daring beauty wore a pair right out in the open, on the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped traffic.

Feminists were often racist, because this “Purity Movement” was a mishmash of objectives and metaphors, involving fear of the city (with its prostitution) an essentially anti-female sentiment; fear of racial impurity or race suicide, which was a fear of immigrants; fear of intemperance (an essentially anti-male sentiment), etc. But Marion goes to see the graduation of the first ever Chinese graduate from McGill and writes about it. The Chinese were singled out as the most likely to lure women into white slavery. No wonder the community has never been comfortable in Montreal.

And when Marion and Flora and two others find their own place to live in 1912-1913, where they entertain their beaus, well, I knew this was unconventional, even daring, but I never realized how daring.

And you know, in the letters of the era, Margaret, the Mom does not seem upset about this arrangement, and she worries about just about everything else. In fact, she enjoys visiting the girls that year. Indeed, her main concern is that Marion will ‘run the show’ which probably happened, as Marion was a take charge kind of girl.

Threshold Girl

Flora in a formal ‘school picture’ either from St. Francis College or Macdonald Teacher’s College,

Yesterday, I re-read the article “the Present Unrest Among Women” by Gertrude Atherton from the 1909 Delineator Magazine, which I had posted on my http://www.tighsolas.ca/ website a few years ago. Someone had found it interesting and put in on Twitter.

This paragraph stood out to me this time. “We are all familiar with the selfishness, the slyness, the lack of real frankness it what might be called the Threshold Girl, anywhere between seventeen and nineteen. This is nothing worse than the mating instinct driving her blindly until she has learned to play her part with taste and tact. During that period she gropes about in her still childish brain for those qualities that will enable her to hold at least her own in the great game, and she is the more befuddled because of that curious tradition, that a girl must be seen other than she is.”

I want to portray Flora, the heroine of Flo in the City, my novel in progress being written on this blog, as someone on the threshold, but also someone who refuses to give up who she is, either.”

And here’s another paragraph which sums up what I am trying to show with Flora and Edith and Marion.

“And the girl of today , with her mind full of the furniture of modern life, and a hundred new windows in her mental house of which her grandmothers never dreamed, with her manifold opportunities for independence and liberty, has sought and found antidotes to the old humiliating canons. If she can not pursue a man as a man pursues a woman when he wants her; if she has not the supreme attractions which bring a man to a woman’s feet with a flash of the eye, she can at least avoid the mean subterfuges of the husband-hunters, and lead a life in which man as a love-factor is practically eliminated. She can also enjoy much the same privileges as men, until, perhaps, who knows? – one day she may meet in this larger, fuller life a congenial, many-sided creature who wants something more than the reproduction of his grandmother.”

Funny, but in their letters, Marion jokes a lot about being ‘an old maid’ and about finding a husband. Flora does too, in a more indirect and gentle way and Edith never does.

But what I want to show than ever, that despite the rhetoric (as above) there were not that many opportunities for women -or men – in society. If there were, why do the statistics show that most women worked as domestics, teachers, shop-keepers or factory workers, depending on their social standing. Yes, new jobs were opening up, but they evolved into the ‘pink’ ghetto of the 20th century.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, when I graduated from university in the 70′s and was interviewed at an Advertising Agency, the one of Peel, between Sherbrooke and St Catharine, the person interviewing me said I would have to work 2 years as a receptionist and then 2 years as a secretary and the MAYBE I could get a job as a copywriter. (Like in the series Mad Men which won best drama at the Golden Globes last night. I have watched it but couldn’t get into it.) What would she have told me were I a male?

You think things are better now for women, take a look at this CBC article.
A female freelance writer, in Montreal, like myself, created a blog where she ‘suggested’ she was a man and ‘instant respect’ and much more work. Makes me want to cry a bit, but then that’s so girly.

PERFECT MEN 19th installment

Edith posing with men. I have no idea who the men are. If this picture is taken in Richmond, then it is possibly men from St. Francis College. (Their body language suggests they are important.) Edith taught at the college in 1914, after leaving Ecole Methodiste Westmount. Now, if this is Westmont, and that school, this would be Villard. To me, the building in the back suggest Richmond and not Westmount. How can I tell. Just a hunch from the style, which look Richmond-like.

..The next day the three sisters visited A.J. Hudon’s general store to see if he had any serge, in dark blue. If not, tennis flannel would do. But they had the blue serge in plenty.

As his man measured out 2 1/4 yards from the giant spool, at 35 cents a yard, he asked about Mrs. Nicholson, one of his best and most knowledgeable customers, he claimed. It seems he had sold her the cream crepe de chine material for the dress she had sewed up for her trip.

She talked me down 5 cents a yard, he joked. She claimed it was a bit frayed at the borders. I had just received it from the factory.

It seems half of Richmond is visiting Quebec City this week. His sales have slowed to almost nothing.

Marion took off for home with the material pressed under her arm to get started on Flora’s bathing suit, the difficult bloomers (her wrinkled brow revealed she was already working out the problem in her head) and Edith and Flora strolled in lazy zigzags to the post office.

Edith confided in Flora, much to her surprise. “I’m not begrudging Mother her trip. I know she loves to travel. But I would have loved to go to Quebec City, for the pageantry. The show.The dignitaries’ wives in their best outfits. History was my best subject at school. They have local people dressed as King Henry IV and his queen and all the courtiers and ladies in waiting.

Flora winced at the talk of ‘best subject’ for she didn’t have any. Well, art perhaps.

I fear I won’t even get to Kingsbury this summer, I am so poor.

But Boston I could do without, Edith added tactfully. Except for dear Henry, that side of the family annoys me. The woman are such incorrigible flirts.

The postmaster passed them their letters, just one. From a cousin they hardly new, Esther Briggs.

To the Nicholsons. So they could open it.

Would they wait? Why bother. It was sunny -with a welcome breeze , and the bench in front of the Post Office empty for a change. Flora tore a corner of the envelope

and carefully pried it open. Dear Aunt Margaret, It has been along time since you heard from me. B and pulled out the letter. I am writing you with some good news. I am getting married. His name is R.L Whitman, he is from Shawville and he is a fine young man, clever, good position, I think good looking, a perfect gentleman, and so kind.”

I am so relieved. I always feared that I would be left on Father’s hands.

As these last words were spilling from her mouth, Flora wished she could snatch them up like so many peppermint candies and stuff them back in.

Sister Edith, to her relief, was unperturbed. Shawville, she snickered. So that’s where all the ideal husbands are located. Who could have guessed? It amazes me that some of my peers are so unresourceful, she continued. There are so many ways, today, for women to earn their own living. There’s no excuse for anyone to be a burden on their parents.

There’s more said Flora. He has yet to meet Mrs. Briggs. She writes “We are going to meet mother in Ottawa as the curious eyes of the Shawvilleites will not be on him to see how he likes his mother in law.

I wonder if they are truly engaged or they have an understanding, Edith says.

If Edith’s funk seemed to have elapsed – and she was now her old even-tempered self, Flora’s heart was beating a mile a minute.

What did Edith mean by so many ways to earn a living? Teaching was all Flora could see and you couldn’t get into teaching school if you failed Academy.

But Edith had more to say on the subject of their cousin’s engagement: “Another happy couple. Oh, Flora, did you hear? Ben Gross, who married the Stillwell girl have separated. Broken up housekeeping and sold everything off. He went back to his Mother’s and she to her Father’s. She blames his family for interfering.”

Yes, Edith was back to her old self all right.

“I’m sure she thought he was perfect at one time.”