A book that was woven out of lost Depression Letters, A Secret Gift, by Ted Gup was showcased this weekend on CBS’s Sunday Morning, a show my husband tapes.
When I saw the intro, I didn’t feel like watching the actual show, because I knew I’d feel bad. I’ve been working on this book about the Nicholson letters for too long.
(This show had yet another interview with Colin Firth for the King’s Speech, so I didn’t erase it.)
This book, a Secret Gift, from what I read on the Web, was written because an OP Ed in the NYT about the same subject got a huge response.
When I found the Nicholson letters, I publicized them, too, but there’s been no huge response. Maybe I am pitching them wrong. Maybe it’s the taint of too much Anglo-cism.
The Sunday Morning host said that Ted Gup’s letters were ‘a window on the Depression.’
My letters at http://www.tighsolas.ca/ are certainly a window on the 1910 period.
Well, the picture above is of a baby nurse. I suspect it is either from 1914 or 17 when Marion had her first two children.
Reading a 1913 Montreal Witness, the Nicholson paper of choice, I found a want ad for a nurse maid and a maid to take care of two children and do light housekeeping. The ad was for a home on Grey Avenue in Westmount.
Grey Avenue is a middle class area around where Marion and her husband Hugh and Flora lived the next year.
So ordinary (well off) middle class families, with young children, hired help. I imagine the heavy housekeeping, like washing, was sent out.
Funny, in the same paper, there’s an ad for a ‘washing machine’ that a child can use and that cleans anything in 3 minutes. It’s a ‘vacuum washer’ that looks like a plunger in a tub. Technology would eventually take care of the servant problem.
As I have written before, The Royal Commission on Industrial Education and Technical Education came out with recommendations in 1913 and one was to train women for homemaking and housekeeping. I now suspect that the homemaking part wasn’t only for the unwashed masses, the poor. I suspect they wanted to train middle class women to be more efficient homemakers so that they didn’t need maids and so that what the rich could have them all to themselves. Just a guess.
As it happens, someone in the Nicholson family clipped this in 1913 from the Montreal Standard:
“The servant problem, why did not women solve it before asking to be permitted to regulate the affairs of the nation?
To that effect spoke Mrs. William Forse Scott, when addressing a women’s club in New York the other day.
“If women want to prove their ability to handle great public problems, let them solve their own first,” she said.
“The modern women are pushing into the market place, offering to help the men solve the tremendous problems of labour, transportation, the social evil or national destiny, and their own problem is left unsolved in their kitchens. They cry to assist the downtrodden woman in labour and 40 percent of those women are labouring in private kitchens. Why legislate for the factory girl when the parlour maid needs you?
This has drawn forth a number of replies from prominent suffragists of New York. One, Mrs. John Rogers claims the servant problem is not a domestic problem. “It is a municipal problem,” he says. “Take the question of nights out. I would be willing for my maid to have every night off if she wanted it, but I am helpless. Suppose I order dinner at 6 o’clock. Nobody would be there then. It is late before we dine so the maid’s evening is spoiled. It is the transportation – the rush hour problem, business hours, that keeps women worried about servants.”
There’s so much in the Nicholson letters to address this servant issue! Well, it’s all timing. Depression Era stories are ‘in’ right now as the US feels it is in one. Almost 10 percent unemployment. Canadian-style figures.
Canada’s employment figures are not much better.
