Catherine O’Donnell Canadian Actress 1910.
I just received that book Light Soap and Water by Mariana Valverde, 1991, that is a scholarly look at Canada’s purity movement in the 1900 era, and which covers Tighsolas topics. It’s an academic tome, so it will take me time to read and digest. As I finish the first chapter, I get the feeling that North America’s religious right is living in the past, 100 years in the past, with a few modern tweaks. Consumerism is a virtue now, not a vice.
Valverde mentions that a 1895 book, Light in Dark Corners was the ‘sex hygiene’ book of choice in the era. So I went to archive. org and downloaded it. This isn’t quite the Joy of Sex. Here’s a snippet… Hmm… The author of this book couldn’t foresee the future, with run-away consumerism and the motion picture medium making the pursuit of female physical perfection a 20th centurey pastime that has reached dizzying levels these days, what with Botox and 60 year olds with Barbie bodies. (There’s a lot of good things on TV lately, but one thing you don’t see, a woman who doesn’t have a ’10′ body. That’s taboo, I guess. So no wonder women are desperate. Plenty of plain, even ugly men, though. And this all while the average woman ‘on the street’ explodes in girth. In Portia de Rossi’s memoir she describes herself recoiling at the horror of having an average woman’s body. I found that amusing. )
“To be a woman in the truest and highest sense of the word is to be the best thing beneath the skies. To be a woman is something more than to live eighteen or twenty years; something more than to wear flounces, exhibit dry goods, sport jewelry, catch the gaze of lewd-eyed men. something more than to be a belle, a wife or a mother. Put all of these qualifications together and they do but little towards making a true woman.
Beauty and style are not the surest passports toward womenhood – some of the noblest specimens that the world has ever seen have presented the plainest and most unprepossessing appearance. A woman’s worth is to be judged by the real goodness of her heart, the greatness of her soul and the purity and sweetness of her character. And a woman with a kindly disposition and well balanced temper, ever so plain and her figure ever so homely. she makes the best wife and the truest of mothers.
Beauty is a dangerous gift. Like wealth it has ruined its thousands. Thousands of the most beautiful women are destitute of common sense and common humanity. No gift from heaven is so widely abused of as the gift of beauty. In about nine cases in ten it makes her silly, senseless, thoughtless, giddy,vain, proud, frivolous, thoughtless, low and mean. I think I have seen more girls spoiled by beauty than by anything else.
(Hmm. This sounds like sour grapes. The author is a guy.)
Beware of beautiful women. These facts have long since taught sensible men to be wary of beautiful women. To sound them carefully before they give them confidenece. Beauty is shallow, only skin deep, fleeting. Dazzling often to bewilder, reigning only to ruin.”
As I write Flo in the City, this is all good background. Flo was indeed rather plain. Her sisters were not.
