Cleanliness is an Attitude

Attitude Floor and Wood cleaner.

I just found a product I’ve been looking for. Something to polish wood that isn’t toxic. Lately, I inherited some antique furniture but I am loathe to clean it, as I do not like furniture polishes.

Now, admittedly, my job as a child was to polish the furniture, using Pledge (oil and aerosol) and also to clean the bathtub, using Old Dutch Powder. All this crap going into my young lungs,mixing with the ubiquitous clouds of second hand smoke.

But parents didn’t worry about such things back then. They didn’t worry much. It was good times, stable times for the middle class, give or take a Cuban Missile Crisis or two.

I guess the threat of nuclear war looming over the planet made every other worry pale in comparison.

Well, the prosperity helped, too.

Pledge, Old Dutch, DDT and all the sweet smelling lead emanating fromm the tail pipes of those bright pink TBirds with the big fancy tailfins.

And the 60′s air pollution in the city. Legend. Any person who lived in the suburbs or country knew that  visit to the city meant smelly hair and even smokey underwear.

OK. All that and I’ve had only one serious lung disease, pneumonia, when my own kids were about 10, caused by being run down and by being prescribed too many anti-biotics for little things like sore throat and then this mighty bug swept through our household and I didn’t have the resistance to fight it.

Anyway, if the 60′s were bad, the crap in our food has only gotten worse. So I do buy organic veggies when I can and ‘artisanal’ meats like chicken, which, our course actually have texture and taste.

But the other day I had to laugh or cry. I was visiting my sister in law, in her beautiful home with the cathedral windows and she found ants in the kitchen and began spraying all over with Raid.

I turned to my husband and said, “There go all the benefits from eating organic for the past 10 years.”

The woman, a product of the 50′s, is intrepid when it comes to dirt and bugs and such. The stronger the cleaner the better.

And I only use these Attitude Products. Which are fine. For cleanliness. For that 50′s pristine look, well go elsewhere.

Now, my story Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf is about the 1910 era, the era of Pure Soap, Pure Water and Pure Women.

The Soap-Industrial Complex got a toehold in that era. In large part because dirty homes (and the mostly immigrant women who kept them) were being blamed for all the problems of industrialization. All the bodily illnesses and all the ‘moral’ ones too.

The adage “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” was not a mere metaphor,back then, it was to be taken LITERALLY. And it gave the moral high ground automatically to the elite and upper middle class who could afford servants. And it kept other middle class women from getting ‘restless woman syndrome’ and picking up a placard to protest their second class status.

And this ideology filtered down through the century, reaching a kind of apex in the 1950′s, for it was used to drive women back into the home after the war.

And these cleaning product companies, that promoted PURITY above all, because GIANTS over the century and now many of them make anti-cancer and asthma drugs too. And pesticides too. Kind of weird, I’d say. Kind of weird, but good for business and as well all now know WHATEVER IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS “GOOD.”

From Information Age to Dark Age in a few easy steps.

Nadruco Products. 1910 pamphlet. Nadruco was National Drug Company of Canada

With all this controversy around the Cons wanting to drop the long form census I thought I’d blog about the NaDruCo atlas I have from 1911, which is one of the most informative documents I have from the Nicholson stash.

It’s a promotional brochure, for the NadruCo product line and if you ‘read it’ you can get a clear look at “what changes” and “what stays the same.”

Yes, medical science has come a long way, but human gullibility stays the same.

Human beings will believe anything: especially when it comes to ‘their survival’ or other aspects of self-interest, especially protecting their children. That’s why the advertisements made by NaDruCo for its many weird sounding products, sound no different from ads made for similar health products on TV today. In short, the medicine has changed (mostly as fish oil is still considered a must for health) but the pitch hasn’t. OK. ads were more wordy then, although J. Walter Thompson, the legendary ad agency, was creating short lifestyle ads.

Here’s a sample of an ad in the NADRUCO atlas promotional brochure:
“In the strenuous rush of commerce, the severe strains of depressing social conditions, overstudy, changes of female life, or impending attacks of disease, the nerves become impaired. Irritability, brain worry, Sleeplessness ensue, accompanied by lack of Energy, Emissions, Impotency, Nervous Dyspepsia, Partial paralysis, palpitations of the heart,incontinence…NADRUCO nervozone is specially prepared to cover all such cases…”

Hmm. Gee, 100 years ago this company was pitching a tonic as a cure (or a patch or crutch) for the depressing social conditions of the day. Live in windowless room in Griffintown with 10 kids sleeping in the same bed and floodwater coming in each spring, work in a factory 12 hours a day? No problem, take a pill! (Whoops, you can’t afford such pills, too bad. The anxious middle class, who desperately want to stay comfortably middle class, with take them for you.)

Sound familiar? I heard on the BBC that 10 percent of the population of Glasgow was on Prozac, today.

Anyway, we live in an age of ‘information overload’ which makes it doubly important to have ‘the numbers’ about the world, to make sound decisions about public policy and for future reference. Yes, historians need statistics. I have used Stats Cans historical statistics to research the background to the Nicholson letters, http://www.tighsolas.ca/. Besides, I’d rather fill out a long census, on penalty of jail if I don’t, rather than have the government be allowed to look into my computer and trace my every action by having access to my IP on the grounds of public security. Now, THAT is a gross invasion of privacy. But it really isn’t about privacy, it’s about control, and “the truth” as stated by numbers gets in the way of control, or being able to manipulate the population with ‘untruths’ that tweak their ‘fear centers.’ And bubblespeak, such as you are going to fill new prisons with people who have NOT been accused, let alone NOt been convicted, actually resonates with some people because it is nonsense so they just fill in the blanks for themselves and hear what they want to hear.

Ironically, this NaDruCo promotional brochure is also an almanac and it tips its hat to the upcoming 1911 census, by listing the populations of various cities and towns in Canada from the 1901 census and by giving the reader a place to add the 1911 numbers. Here’s a small sample: In 1901, the population of Canada was 5, 371,315. (It rose to over 7 million in 1911.) The population of Halifax in 1901, 40,831, of Fredericton, 7,117, of Montreal 267,730. (As I wrote in an earlier blog, the population of Montreal grew hugely in the next decade, and that is why Flo and Marion got jobs teaching in the city.) Of Westmount, 8,856, of Barrie, Ontario 5,949, of Ottawa, 59, 928, Toronto, 208,040,
North Bay, 2,530, Oshawa, 4, 394; and out West they had a 1906 census, so 1906 Winnipeg, 90, 153, up from 43,340 in 1901 , Moose Jaw, 6, 249, Edmonton, 11, 167 in 06, up frm 2, 626 in 1901. Vancouver in 1906, 26, 133…

Anyway, last night I read over the 1900 household accounts of the Nicholson family. 1900 is just a year, like any other, but it’s the year people consider a kind of benchmark year. (And all because we have 10 fingers.) I am going to transcribe the items in the 1900 accounts in a pdf and complement them with pictures from the Eaton’s catalogue. The list shows that Nicholson parenting was more modern than Edwardian. The kids were paid for ‘work’ and also given lots of pennies to spend, and Herb was even given 25 cents just for ‘passing at school.’

Ah, the middle class….