Boris Badenuv and the Presbyterians (not a rock group)

A man in Montmartre in 1910, The French dealt with prostitution differently than the English.

Last night I read chapter on the white slavery panic, in the Age of Light, Soap and Water by Mariana Valverde.

Apparently, there existed an overblown but institutionalized fear about white slavery in ‘the Tighsolas era’ 1909-1914, which became a symbolic fear of sorts, for the all the anxiety aroused in parents by all the social changes happening; children moving to the city, immigrants pouring into the country, women’s changing social role.

You know the kind of fear “YOUR kids are in danger..from unknowns, ‘others’ who lurk in dark places.” (These days, just exchange ‘city’ for ‘internet’.)

At the same time, some people recognized that women of all races were involved in prostitution, so they preferred to use the term traffic in women, the term used today.

(In 1967, during Expo year I was 12 and in sixth grade. A policeman came around to our classroom to warn us about dangers of Expo 67, especially bad people who might stick a hyperdermic needle in your arm in a bathroom, and sell you into white slavery. I had no idea what white slavery was (and no one explained.) I imagine I had to look our for nasty Boris Badenuv types behind the Russian Pavillion who would send me to Siberia and force me to wield a pick axe. Remember, in those days, The Russians and Communists were the bad guys. Well, I went to Expo 50 times, and sometimes all alone and only had the time of my life.)

In 1910, it was the fear of those swarthy-types, especially Chinese, that fueled this white slavery panic. At the same time, the “social evil” as it was called was also blamed on parents (for lax child-rearing) and on the girls themselves, for wanting nice clothes and a comfortable life! Also on the textile factories and shops, for paying their female workers so little. And on the entertainment industry, cabarets and motion pictures for their iffy fare and iffier patrons. And also on ‘feeble-mindedness’ for it was believed by some that most of these prostitutes were feeble-minded and that they bred feeble-minded children. Some social activitists, including Carrie Derick, suggested that these women should be sterilized.

Of course, out West and in French Montreal they tolerated prostitution up to a point. When the citizens of Rosemont created an outcry in their community, an alderman suggests that a red light district be created.

I found only one mention of ‘white-slavery’ in the Gazette of the era from 1913. (Only a portion are on-line.) Two negroes and three white girls were arrested (the negroes for vagrancy) on St. Alexandre and the police were trumpeting this arrest as putting a major dent in the white slave trade in Canada and the US – as the people involved were Americans. (It’s the kind of hyperbole that sounds all too familiar today.) The ‘slaves’ in question, both in their mid-twenties, admitted nothing.

The fact was, there were procurers of all skin colours in those days, including respectable looking middle-aged matrons.

I don’t know where I’ll put this in Flo in the City: It certainly puts Marion’s difficulties finding a flat of her own to rent in perspective. (It shows what a determined lady she was.)

And maybe this explains, quite simply, why the Presbyterian church ladies of Richmond shunned mother Margaret. She was bringing up her daughters too wild… Yet, it was her son, Herb, who turned out to be something of a criminal (although the Nicholsons would never admit it to themselves, that would have shaken their beliefs to the core.)

Hey, I like my title, Boris Badenuv and the Presbyterians. Sounds like a rock group.

Where Morality and Consumerism Collide

Marion, a drawing by a Buzzell. 1910 era

I’m composing the next scene in my head, when I recall that I have a copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal under the coffee table, the May 1906 issue. I had opened it to a Page for Girls, titled The Popular Girl. I thought I might use a passage from it in my book.

I scanned that article (the articles are long, the fonts tiny)and highlighted a few passages, then started flipping through the other pages.

An editorial caught my eye: Are girls overdoing athletics? The article claimed that, although exercise is good for both sexes, “muscular efforts emulating a male athlete’s can injure a woman beyond repair. ” Both physically and mentally, as women have a different mental make-up from men. Silken Laumann, would you care to comment?

This might be useful for Flo in the City, my story based on the Tighsolas www.tighsolas.ca letters.

Then I read the next editorial and it intrigued me even more: apparently the Ladies’ Home Journal had been running a literary series by an anonymous author called My Brother’s Letters, that frankly discussed the issue of men and their needs…and had scenes where a young man visited a prostitute.

They received an avalanche of angry letters from readers.

In this editorial, the editors were not apologizing for including this feature in their magazine. It is their duty to push the envelope, they wrote. (My words.)In some matters they were more informed than their readers, who seldom leave the house. BURN!

They are so unapologetic,in the editorial, they include a letter from the author in this issue, which directly addresses the double-standard around sex.

The double standard is hypocritical, a correspondent suggests. (my words). Men should be as pure at marriage as women

In 1910, young men are expected to have had some sex (using prostitutes) before marriage while women are expected to remain virtuous, except for the poor prostitute who helps the young man ‘become a man’ for she is a lost woman anyway. Something like that.

They called prostitution in those days “the social evil” and much of the hypocrisy surrounding the so called world’s oldest profession (how I hate that phrase) still lingers and is the subject of an occasional newspaper article when people suggest prostitution should be legalized.

My problem for Flo In the City. How do I stick all this into the next scene, or do I? It’s an old magazine, 1906. Do I pretend it is the latest magazine and have Marion carrying it when she arrives in Richmond.

Do I keep it the May 1906 issue and have Marion carrying it because it contains an article on Making School Yards Fun? Or do I introduce it later in the scene, or later in the book.. as the last issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal that the Nicholsons got in the mail – as they ran out of money.

This high and mighty attitude toward the gender and sex question in the editorial is all very ironic, as the Ladies’ Home Journal was extremely conservative.

(It was also the first women’s fashion magazine to be sustained by advertising (the other ones sold patterns) and many of the products advertised in its pages (produced largely by the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency) at that time became household names during the century.

“Old Dutch: We’re all for women’s rights. The right to a clean home.” Tsk.

Borden’s Milk:their logo, a cow with a woman’s hourglass figure. (I could write an entire novel about the era around the issue of ‘milk’.

In February 1909, they ran three editorials that are against women’s suffrage, which I will use for Flo in the City.