Of Ngrams and Ontario Laws

Titanic Fashion. A 1910 cover of the Delineator.  Even “good girls” liked luxury.

Two thirds of Canadians believe brothels should be legal, according to a very recent Reid poll, conducted after a top court in Ontario ‘swept aside’ (Ottawa Citizen) their anti-prostitution laws, deeming them unconstitutional. What? Ontario the Good?

According to this poll, older folk are more inclined to favour legalizing brothels. (According to the National Post article, this is ‘counter-intuitive.’ Many more men than women are in favour. (That’s not so counter-intuitive, is it?)

Years ago, when I was in college, a male friend of mine suggested prostitution should be legalized (to protect the prostitute from harm and the client from STD’s) and I didn’t agree. I remember my argument, that if they legalized it, soon they’ll be advertising for women to enter to the profession. (Sort of what’s happened with lotteries.) Back then I believed, as I still do, that there was all kinds of prostitution. The kind I deplored the most: where average women shopped around for the richest husband. To me that was no different than spreading your legs for 5.00.

Well, I sure have gained perspective, if only of the historical and theoretical kind. I’ve become an historical writer. My story Threshold Girl (available here on pdf for FREE)is about a college girl, Flora Nicholson, in 1910, a nice Presbyterian Girl. Flora had two older sisters and I learned through research that every aspect of their PURE and PROPER lives was informed by the Social Evil, that would be prostitution.

For instance, these girls were teachers in the city and as if teaching 50 kids wasn’t hard enough, it was next to impossible for a young woman to find a place to live. They had to find a respectable boarding house and they had to do this through connections. Women could not live alone (brothel!). Boarding house matrons had to be careful, lest they be accused of running a bawdy house. All it would take is one of their boarders to have a man in their room.

(But Marion Nicholson, fed up with being bossed around at 26 by her boarding house matron, actually did manage to rent a house for herself, on Hutchison, Flora and two friends, in 1913. It was an ill fated experiment.)

Ngram. The term “social evil” referring to prostitution peaked in the 1910 decade.

Indeed in 1910, Proper young women  walking in the street did not stop, even to talk to a good friend, male or female. That would make them look like hookers.

My story Milk and Water is about City Hall Politics in Montreal in 1927 and has my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, as a main character. He was Director of City Services.

Brothels, or ‘disorderly’ houses, as they are called, figure largely.

In 1921, I believe, a Dr. Atherton, social activist, described the sorry state of some Montreal prostitutes in a speech to the Canadian Club. He especially described their drug addictions- and from his informed medical point of view, ie as a ‘man of science’ and not a moralizer. This set off a wave of indignation among the beau monde. A Group of 16 (Social Activists) was set up and they petitioned City Hall to set up an Inquiry into the Police, who, they believed, were looking the other way or even profiting from such activity.

This inquiry took place in 1924. It was called the Coderre Commission and included 100s of witnesses. In his final 10,000 page report in 1925, Juge Coderre specifically fingered my grandfather for iffy behavior. But not with respect to brothels, with respect to motion picture houses. You see, ALL THE (perceived) VICES got all mixed up during the commission: drinking, gambling, prostitution. It came down to this, I think: ALL VICE hurts our children, especially our precious female children.

In his report Coderre decried the de Bullion Street prostitute, the bedraggled drug-addled one – as well as the high price courtesan ‘who dined in Princely Houses’ as he put it. All the same to him. The poor prostitute was a warning to all parents, of what might happen to their kids should procurers get a hold of them. (No one really cared about the children of the poor. They still don’t.)

The rich courtesans, well, they were a bigger danger. They broke through class lines. How dare they?

These women fell into prostitution due to their love of luxury, Coderre claimed.  This was a still common belief among morality types: but that idea got swept away with the new consumerism, where women’s vanity began propelling the economy, so it became a ‘good’ thing.  This  was already starting to happen in 1910.

Anyway, this Coderre Report (as reported in the Montreal Star) made it to the US, and was read out as testimony during their 1926 hearings on Prohibition.

A W E Raney (former Ontario Attorney General) told the Senate Hearings that Quebeckers were different, they didn’t mind brothels. In fact, he said, Premier Tachereau would like to legalize and control gambling and prostitution as he does liquor. (Quebec had a Liquor Control Board in 1925.)

Oh, and one last comment on Prostitution. In WWI apparently, prostitution was a public service. Some poor girls went to the front and lay on the ground and serviced soldier after soldier (lined up in front) until worn out and someone replaced her. Homosexuality was deeply frowned upon, you see. So this was a way around that. Lesser of two evils.

Homelife in 1910

Using electric appliances, 1910, from Technical World Magazine article. The Electric Home.

Macdonald College had a electricity in 1910, I read it in an era article. (The curator at the museum in Ste. Anne wasn’t sure; he believed that electricity came to Ste. Anne in 1915.)

So I guess I will have to have Flo comment on that. (Tighsolas gets electrified in 1913.)

Another thing I learned from the same article (an unnamed document from archive.org describing McGill facilities in 1909) is that the food for the students at Macdonald came from the agricultural school. Pork, beef and mutton, with animals slaughtered on site. The farm also provided milk to the school,which is interesting. Remember, it was the age of tainted milk.

They also raised chickens and veggies so I assume the same, that the girls dined on this fare. That, I find very interesting, from a modern point of view.

Now, in the July 1911 issue of a magazine called Food and Cookery, there’s an article by a Dr. Carr, about the Healthy Home. I posted it years ago, on http://www.tighsolas.ca/ because it is a perfect illustration of the ideology of the era. PURITY. It’s the sun that is pure here, and I have a lot of sunshine and sunbeams and sunlight in my novel…. I use it as a symbol of ‘enlightenment.’

Now I feel I must somehow stick it in the story. Maybe I will have that magazine available in the library at Macdonald..It will only be a few months old.

“Give us a healthy home full of intellectual activity where the homely virtues prevail. Where complete honesty and frankness have free expression. Where the lungs expand with pure air, and the brain quivers with wholesome aspiration and sincere inquiry. Where souls bask in contentment and the sunshine of purity and peace.

It is not necessary that the home be a grand mansion provided with expensive luxuries. A home should be a place where there is plenty of air and sun. Too much shade is bad and yet some shade, especially on the west side of the house, is very comfortable and healthful. The home should stand separate from other buildings so that light and air can enter from all sides. There should be under the home a well kept clean and well ventilated basement.

A two story house is preferable to a one story cottage. The second story is better in every respect for sleeping rooms. They are further from the emanations of the ground where dampness and fog settle. A home that is comfortable and yet not too nice, a home where there is a perfect freedom with no unoccupied rooms, a home where family and neighbours frequently gather together. A dirty cellar is bad, a dusty slovenly attic also bad. But worse than either of these is that dark and gloomy room called a parlor, where elegant furnishings and expensive hangings rarely see the light of day, and still more rarely are renovated by a healthy influx of fresh air.

No man or woman can be enthusiastic without some degree of mental training. Those who do little or no reading except to pore over a novel or lazily scan the daily newspaper, such people will sooner or later become the victims of melancholia or hypochondria. There is nothing in life to enthuse them. Such people stagnate. The heart takes on a rhythm corresponding to the low ebb of their mental life.

…Immorality, wicked sin, these may enter a well appointed home. As soon as anything has occurred to a member of the family necessitating concealment, compelling averted glances, provoking blushing or shame, just so soon the house has been invaded by an enemy more dangerous than disease germs, vastly more likely to destroy the home in the end than a dirty cesspool or leaky roof. ”

Details, details. All about Soap!

Well, I’m writing Flora in the City and I have Edith and Margaret doing the laundry in June 1911. (True!) Of course, in the letters they mention the doing of it, but don’t describe how they do it. Too obvious. I can see by the Eaton’s Catalogue what a washing tub looks like and a wringer.

But the soap.. What soap do they use. (I have an image of Granny Clampett stirring her laundry in big smelly pots of lye soap by the swimming pool).

This was the age of Light Soap and Water. The Ivory Soap add above says ordinary washing powders and labour saving soaps are good for ordinary laundry, but only Ivory is good for fancy work.

The ad for Lux, uses the P word twice in the ad. Purifying, Snowy white and purity.

The Nicholson store books show they bought bars of soap and sometimes bars of fancy soap.

Hmm.

I’m guessing they bought bars of some soap, an ordinary one, and grated it. (I’m assuming, because soaps in flakes were available, and they wouldn’t have put out that product if flakes were not wanted by women. Labour saving, see. Not strong lye of course.

Guessing.

Maybe I’ll have someone remark, somewhere, that Mrs. Montgomery thinks they should use Ivory. Maybe when Flora comes back in November and spends two days washing her white dresses.

Lux went on to sponsor Radio shows. Lux Theatre….I’ve heard some of their stuff on the BBC Radio 4. Or I heard a play based on the Lux Theatre. Big name actors were used.

I’ve Figured it Out: 20 years later.

St. Catherine Street, 1910. McCord Museum photo.

Guess what? I am not a ground-breaker. Maybe researching a novel online is a newish thing, but all the ‘revelations’ I have been having, about life for women in the 1910′s is not new.

In fact, I just discovered that in 1991, a Canadian criminologist Mariana Valverde wrote a book called the Age of Light, Soap and Water, Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925 and from the blurbs on the web, she came to the same conclusion I am coming to about purity, women, immigrants, the big bad city,etc.

I just ordered the book.

Of course, as a scholar, she had access twenty years ago to material that now is available on the Net.

And I found a blog that discussed her book and suggested there might be a correlation between NOW and THEN (really!) with respect to our fear of bad people on the Internet. And all this tough on crime legislation to protect our children, all Net related. The Internet is like the big bad city was in 1910. I’ve seen the Internet repeatedly likened to the Wild West, something that must be tamed. Well, what happened in 1910 out West? The Feminists and the Right Wing Religious Types made an alliance against men (especially non-white men) and their whoring and drinking as well as greedy, money-lusting ways.

In the 1990′s, the Powers That Be, led by David Johnston, our new Governor General, told us parents that we had to get wired or our children would be left behind. (I was a parent back then. Many of my fellow parents were wary, fearful or skeptical about the Net and they saw no use for computers either.) But that changed quickly because middle class parents desperately want their kids to have the competitive edge in a world that is changing so fast nothing is certain anymore. Now, we parents are being told the web is a terrible and dangerous place for our kids, and in order to protect ourselves we must give up some of our freedoms and virtually all of our privacy. (Remember, Marion, at 25 years of age, had to answer to her Rooming House Matron. A woman’s purity was more important than an adult’s independence. Of course, the matron could have gotten into trouble if any of her boarders brought men home. She could have been accused of keeping a bawdy house.)

Hmm. (Why don’t we just ban the web in the home, give it up. Go back to square one. Whoops, can’t. We are hooked, lined and sinkered to it. We can’t decide which movie to see without it. We can’t even pay our bills without it.)

Yes, maybe there is a correlation.