This picture I rescued from obscurity: it was a negative. Corel can convert negatives, which is good news, because a few months ago I spent 80 dollars getting 10 negatives from the 1950′s professionally developed. (I was told I was lucky the negatives were a standard size or even they could not have developed them!)
Anyway, it was popular, among the middle classes, to have ‘nurses’ for newborns. This is likely Marion Nicholson’s daughter Margaret, 1914 or Marion, 1917.(She married a Mr. Blair, which I will write about in Flo in the City, my novel about a girl coming of age in the 1908-1913 period based on http://www.tighsolas.ca/) It’s an indoor shot and I may have that chair in my house. It’s a peculiar style of chair.
Anyway, this business with nurses. It was probably a bit of a snob thing: the middle class was always trying to imitate the rich. But it was also an offshoot of the 1910′s child-welfare movment.
Remember, Dominion Park had an infant incubator exhibit, with babies and their nurses on display.
All these new technologies were making people, especially young people, believe that the ‘old wisdom’ was no longer applicable. Raising children was no longer about common sense and traditions. It was a science.
As I wrote earlier, parts of Montreal, like St. Henri, had the highest rate of infant mortality in the Western World. It was mostly among the urban poor, among them many recent immigrants from Ireland, etc.
If a nurse was too expensive, a ‘maiden’ sister would do. But in the case of the Nicholsons, the maiden sisters were too busy with their own lives. Flora actually lived with Marion and her family in 1914 in Montreal. But she was teaching in Griffintown.
Of course, if you were a nurse and wanted to practice for real, you could volunteer to go to the Front. In a letter from WWI a soldier in Belgian advises Flora not to volunteer as a nurse. “It is not bonne over here,” he writes.
In my novel in progress, Flo in the City, based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca Flora visits Newton Hospital and steps out with some of the nurses there. So, I’ll get in a bit about the nursing profession.
