1912 in Boston, via the Nicholsons

Well,  a final piece to the puzzle that will be my ebook Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl - about a college girl in 1911/12, the Titanic Era.

Threshold Girl tells the story of Flora Nicholson, of Richmond Quebec and her year at Macdonald Teachers College and Diary of a Confirmed Spinster will tell the story of her older sister, Edith, already a teacher in Montreal, who loses her ‘great love’ in 1910 in an infamous hotel fire in Cornwall. The two stories overlap – and there`s the trick.

As it happens, Edith and Marion Nicholson, both older sisters of Flora, visit cousin Henry Watters in Newton Center Massachusetts in August 1912.

They visit Norumbega Park and go to a ball game on August 14. I found an ad for the same ball game in a now defunct Boston newspaper, placed under an ad for a Burlesque House.

Baseball wasn’t classy in 1910! Indeed, this newspaper,the Evening Transcript doesn’t cover the games. The sports page has news about tennis, sailing and even lawn bowling.

Now this April 14 newspaper is a real find for me. Because within its pages is a long article on a eugenics conference in London England.

Henry`s House, I think so. Today.

At the end of Threshold Girl I have Edith take Flora to a suffragette meeting in Montreal, where Carrie Derick, suffragist and biologist, is presiding. It’s a meeting of the Montreal Council of Women.

Edith points Derick out and tells Flora “She has many strange ideas.”

You see, Derick, a botanist, was a supporter of the eugenics movement.

So, here I can have Edith read the article and then ask her cousin, Dr. Henry Watters, his opinion.

It’s a great article. Ironically, it begins by saying that the most vocal opponents of this new fad, eugenics, are the Germans.  The Americans aren’t too keen either, (although their President was all for it, I believe.) Anyway there is some wonderfully weird stuff in this article, some of it pertinent to today, I mean with respect to how people view  scientific inquiry. (We have NOT come a long way, Baby!)

And better, right beside is an article about Canada: Our Up and Coming Neighbour: How Canada is Becoming a World Power. (Yea, right.)

The same edition has an advertisement for prime real estate in Montreal, on Ste. Catherine. So it is clear, the border is not as defined as it is today. The Nicholsons had many Massachusetts relations.

The reason the US is more skeptical about the eugenics movement, it is claimed, is because Americans marry for love, while Britons still marry for money and status. (The story of the Nicholson women (a true story based on real letters) reveals that money played a  BIG part in all middle class marriages. In fact, money and marriage is a key theme in my Spinster Story, for Edith`s beau is murdered trying to make enough money to marry her.

All so weird. Henry, if he likes baseball, wasn`t for eugenics. (or at least he won`t be for the purposes of my story).

Hmm. I will have to place them in a box seat though. I can`t imagine Edith sitting with the mob.

Funny, back then (and through the century) poor people went to baseball games. Now only the wealthy can afford to go and pay 10.00 for a hot dog, etc.)

It`s been years since I went to a game. To see the Expos, in the late 80`s I think. The roof was up and we were boiling. I had kids then and it cost a fortune, all the drinks. As a teen I went to Jarry Park and spent about 2.00 max!

I think I will have Edith ask Henry how much baseball players earn. He`will say Ì think they work for the  beer.

Now, I MUST get to writing the new outline of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.  I still want the book to end when Edith faints in front of a painting of a woman breastfeeding mumbling to herself, I will never marry. I will never have children.

And that takes place on May 6, 1910, the day King Edward dies, (I think) so I am going to go back and forth in time.

Maternity, Mary Riter Hamilton. On exhibit in Montreal in 1912, but I`m making it 1910.

Titanic, Period Pieces and Gambit to get your hubby to watch TV with you.

Colette in her cutting edge fashion hat from Marie Claire Magazine 1937.

My husband and I watched the new 2012 Titanic miniseries last night,well, the first two episodes, anyway.

 It was on the History Channel (in Canada) and that channel had just played a programme with ‘new evidence’ about the Titanic’s sinking (due to mirage/glare, a researcher says) which clashed with some of the old theories put forth in the mini-series.

But this Titanic miniseries was just Upstairs Downstairs on a big boat, a soap opera, so it didn’t matter. Julian Fellowes of Downtown Abbey fame penned this miniseries, which has a kind of Groundhog Day style of plot development, so the first episode seems weird.

Anyway, he clearly had lots of money so the hats were right on, with the first class women wearing Huge Merry Widow style hats and the French mistress of one rich guy wearing a smaller style more like Colette’s up there.

(In 1912, Coco Chanel was making her smaller hats for her boyfriend’s rich friends.)

Gee, you have to wonder if people are going to get tired of 1912, just I get my story Threshold Girl up on the Internet (it’s a free ebook) and I start writing the follow up Diary of a Confirmed Spinster.

But my story is about the middle class in Canada, and even though it has suffragettes, I’m going to paint a more complex picture of the movement, from a Canadian Point of View.

This 2012 Titanic miniseries starts with a rich girl being released from jail for breaking windows or something with the suffragettes. (Played by Perdita Weeks, the girl who played Lydia in Lost in Austen but super thin now.) Yesterday I posted a first person testimony from the WSPU magazine,  suggesting something just like that happened. In April 1912.

Anyway, the science documentary Titanic: Case Closed featuring Tim Maltin’s theory (he apparently has an ebook or e-book out called “A Very Deceiving Night”).. supplied the new evidence that centers around the icebergs in Labrador in 1912. As it happens I’ve already posted an article from the Canadian Magazine, published in April 1912!  about those very icebergs. They were so numerous and splendiferous,they were almost becoming a tourist attraction. Hmm. Although the article was called Iceberg: Floating Menace.

Ironic, the date of that article. The History Channel Documentary revealed that the ocean liners of the time ran a gauntlet of icebergs, but it was especially bad in 1912.

It was interesting, but I thought there were some contradictions in Maltin’s theory or his presentation of same.. He goes to Hamburg to look at old boat logs from Germany. He says they’ve never been looked at before. That’s why it took until the  80′s to find Titanic’s ruins. But, a German boat that sailed shortly after Titanic apparently ran into debris and floating bodies. So the Germans knew where the boat was (around anyway) but never told because war broke out? Please explain. This documentary then recites the testimony of someone on that very German boat that clearly was published somewhere else a long time ago. Case not closed?

Anyway, this same Titanic investigator says the Titanic was very well built and very manoeverable for its size.

That contradicts James Cameron who supplied an interesting and daunting metaphor on a Titanic program aired just previous: that the Titanic is like modern man, powering along in one direction, but about to crash, (Global warming) because it is too big can’t turn fast enough, and no one is paying attention,or the wrong people are at the helm of the world, ie industrialists.

I guess the irony is icebergs play a  big part in this 2012 tragedy in the making.

Anyway, back to the Titanic Miniseries, I see that Julian Fellowes name isn’t on the IMDB entry for the series. Hmm.

Anyway, this Titanic miniseries shows why Cameron’s Titanic movie worked. It had a simple plot! I’ll still watch the other two episodes.

I found one of the miniseries’ subplots especially perplexing, a French mistress is snubbed by an upper class woman. I mean from what I’ve read of the era, the Upper Classes were all fooling around. It was what they did. Prudery was a middle class thing. Alas! (You just have to read the Nicholson Letters, upon which I based Threshold Girl.)

I noticed a while back that for the upcoming movie Gambit, Colin Firth isn’t listed as a star on IMDB.

Alan Rickman is. And yet in all the publicity around the shooting of Gambit, Colin Firth was showcased.

Speaking of Gambit, I watched Get Carter on Turner Classics last week. I recorded it thinking it was an In Like Flint movie, but it’s about a hood and pretty gritty, even for today. Not my kind of movie. But I stayed with it, as it is stylish and Michael Caine is terrific. He was very good looking, wasn’t he? Never really thought about it. I was 13 in 1968 and David McCallum was more my type

And then I watched a bit of Withnail and I,  liked it and saved it for Saturday (Titanic Night) with my husband – but my husband doesn’t get British comedy. That’s why we watched Titanic the miniseries, although my husband doesn’t get period pieces either.

I said “Wait a while and there’ll be some pretty naked people” just like your Throne of Kings. (I knew it wasn’t gonna happen, though.) He said “Game of Thrones, not Throne of Kings.”

Marion Nicholson of Threshold Girl in her big hat for 1912. I think she’s on the Charles in Boston. I will have to write about that trip in Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, as she went to visit Dr. Henry Watters with her sister Edith, August 1912. Relations were trying to fix her up with another man, Chester Coy, who later went to war and lost his mind. Henry Watters never married, although very well off and about as nice a man as you could find. Hmm. He is buried in Melbourne. He died in 1937, a decade before Marion.

A hat like that could sink a boat, and I wouldn’t be writing these books.

To All Women All Over the World

As I write Diary of A Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, (a free ebook about a college girl in 1911/12, the Titanic era) I am reading Votes for Women, the magazine of the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, and one issue in particular, the issue for April 19, 1912, published a few days after the Titanic sank. I will have this issue drop into Edith Nicholson’s hands, and that will partly explain why she takes Flora to a suffrage meeting in early May 1912. It’s described in Threshold Girl.

This issue is perfect for my needs. It has an article on Teachers and Suffrage and a letter to the editor from an Alberta Minister, defending St. Paul – but in a pro-suffrage way. And it also has some first hand accounts of the Suffragettes being Tortured in Jail… for breaking windows and going on a hunger strike.

In May 1912, Edith is also organizing her fellow teachers at Westmount Methodist, in a mass strike – or exodus. This following article will be her inspiration.  I’m going to have her read it out to her fellow teachers.

(I have written a play about my grandmother’s trials as a Prison of War in Changi Prison during WWII. She was tortured in an infamous incident called the Double Tenth. All true, she wrote it in a diary. Looking for Mrs. Peel. I wonder if reading accounts like this, as a teenage girl, inspired. But she did not believe in female solidarity, as her prison diary shows.)

Here’s the testimony of one Dr. Ede. Just like in Changi, doctors were given special status.

I was put straight into a ‘room’ which remained mine thenceforward. This room had a many-paned iron-framed window, and four panes open, given about eight inches by eight inches for ventilation. These cells are a little larger, and much superior to those in Holloway, where I had just previously been roomed for twelve days. Arriving late, most formalities were left till next day, when the doctor listened to my chest (with my consent0 and the Governor told me that we were just ordinary prisoners, without the privilege under Rule 243a (Mr. Winston Churchill’s vaunted clemency), but we were allowed to wear our own clothes.

The pillow I had brought (a most essential comfort, not a mere luxury) was taken away, all books, knitting, even one’s brush and comb and many small possessions we taken and I began ‘to do time.’ But I was thankful for the sight of real country, fields and looked out of the window, the fresh country air which we all revelled in at exercise time and the songs of the birds. The food was ample in quantity, and the vegetarian diet, which I had, was in quality and variety sufficient, though not quite satisfactory for a healthy person. Whether I should have said the same after four months, I do not know. We ten exercised by ourselves at first, but were soon allowed exercise in common with those who had arrived before and came in after us. Chapel was also common ground. Associated labour was deferred for several days till we had settled in and knew better what was allowed and what forbidden. Then it was for two hours every afternoon. We did coarse needlework, each in her cell, in the mornings after chapel and exercise. During this time our doors stood open and the Governor and Doctor went their rounds.

Once or twice a week a Lady Visitor paid us a very welcome short visit, and once to local Justices came and asked if we had complaints to make. They were not red-tape officials, but seemed quite human. We all, I believe, sent up the formal humble petition for the privileges Mr. Winston Churchill had given and Mr. McKenna had withdrawn, but the earlier arrivals had done this without success and we did not get an answer up to the time we were released. After allowing the Home Secretary a week and carefully deliberately discussing matters, twenty five out of the twenty eight suffragette prisoners decided to begin a Hunger Strike as a means of getting these privileges. Thursday’s supper was to be the last meal: With Good Friday we began. We had thought out how to keep it quiet for a few days , and about the usual amount of waste bread, fragments and so forth appeared on our plates which we always washed ourselves. We drank an amount of water that might have drawn attention, but apparently it did not. Chapel, exercise work, associated labour, all went as usual. We showed cheerful faces, hid up the pangs of hunger, endured sleepless nights, various forms of pain, and we shrank daily visibly in face and body. It was curious to note the marked contrast in the step of one (for adequate reasons) was not striking, and any of us walking with her. The spring was quite gone out of our step. Our clothes became loos, then began to slip down around us. Still nothing seemed to be noticed by the Governor or the Doctor in her daily rounds.

We expected the weakest to faint in chapel, but though the Chaplain, as it happened, hold forth on the duty as well as the pleasure of man that it is to protect women, he also seemed oblivious of what was going on. On Easter Monday, I thought matters had become so serious that with some of us it was medically wrong to allow it to go on unobserved. Several had become so utterly exhausted that I feared grave permanent injury and their condition at this time would have, in my opinion, justified anyone in asserting that their offence had been dearly paid for. However, there seems to be absolutely no bottom to the supply of courage and endurance in our women, and they refused consent. I had often admired the pluck of our members, but I now saw such heroism in frail and tottering bodies, such forgetfulness of self in the interests of the Cause, as amazed me once more.

Suffragettes 1912 from Pankhurst’s 1913 bio.

Next morning I took the responsibility of telling the Governor and we were thenceforward confined each to her cell and kept strictly apart, chapel and exercise being stopped.Those who had not struck, and one or two who absolutely could not keep on any longer, were exercised together. The relief of having these trying meals off our hands was great, and the feeling that we need no longer keep up. But when Tuesday’s dinner had been refused by us, and the tea, we became anxious as to what the next step would be, and when it would be taken. About five o’clock we began to hear sounds of struggling in cell after cell, pleadings and remonstrances, sounds of choking and gasping, moans and distressful cries. I have never head, in all my professional experience, anything so agonising.

And we had to hear this, recognising which our comrades was being tortured and waiting for our own turn to come. Let no one pretend that to be fed forcibly is either safe or free from suffering; it is neither, and it is inexpressibly revolting. Many were fed by tube through the nose and one at least by tube through the mouth, and others by feeding cup forced between teeth , the mouth pulled about, the nose held nearly to suffocation. The Suffragettes throw Flour at Asquith’s car My turn came. Some half dozen wardresses, in a body, came quickly into my cell. But I had thought out how best to resist, and I was standing on a table with my arms out of two upon panes, elbows bent and hands well up the sleeves of my coat. I refused to come down so a wardress on each side of me tried through the other two open panes to get at my hands. The small openings made this impossible and they had to give it up, and went away. I remained on my table, for a frequent eye at the spy slit in the door shoed that once I drew in my arms, I was done for. I had put a strap round my body and up both sleeves, buckling it outside the window, and I got some rest by leaning back on it.

After two hours of this they came in again, tried as before, in vain, and said men were coming with ladders to undo my hands from outside. My cell was on the first floor. Two men and two ladders appeared, my sleeves were with difficulty pushed up so that my wrists could be grasped, the strap was cut and I was seized, lifted down into a chair , bound down with towels and a sheet and firmly held. I then saw the Governor and the doctor waiting to feed me. I was by this time gasping deeply for breath and was allowed a minute in which to recover it and then, refusing to accept food from a cup, I had the rubber tube passed through my nose and on and on until the loathing and feeling of insult injury and foul wrong was inexpressible.

When it was over, withdrawal of the tube was nearly as distressing, and one felt as if a bruised and degraded body had been in the hands of fiends. I do not think the wardresses had used unreasonable force, and one even pitied them for having to do such hateful work. But one could not feel that a man who could inflict such horrible cruelty at the bidding of any human authority, our offence being merely that we claimed our political rights, must be wholly blind to divine law and justice. Indeed, I could not help asking the doctor, “Are the thirty pieces of silver worth it?” I was very sore in mind and body next morning and for reasons not told me, the tube was not used on me again, but wardresses tried their best, morning and evening, to force food down from a feeding cup. I think they got down about a tablespoonful in an hour, and they were nearly as tired as I was. On Wednesday evening a special Medical Inspector of Prisons came round to five of us; asked questions and made observations.

After his visit, all water was taken away from our cells and a mug of milk left instead, fresh means of breaking down the strike, for we were very thirsty. The milk went promptly out of the window, and I heard a voice say, “This is the last straw.” After this they may grind me to powder and I won’t give in. “ In the morning, we had access to water as usual. On Thursday afternoon, ostensibly for reasons of health, five of us were sent out of the prison. How were the five selected? Two were really seriously ill, but it struck me as remarkable that the other three were sound, strong, medical women, who of course, knew too much and were too determined for easy victimization. A woman about whose identity and relationships they had shown themselves puzzled and curious- neither of those having reached the limits of their strength, and a nurse.

There were others in greater need of release, in my opinion. And the whole of this suffering could have been stopped instantly by restoring to use the privileges under Rule 243a, and giving us the status of political prisoners instead of that of ordinary criminals. Frances Edes M.D.

Religion and Politics and Power: 1912, 2012

Margaret Nicholson and Norman Nicholson in the garden at Tighsolas in Richmond Quebec. Norman in Masonic regalia (I have the sword!). The Presbyterians did not approve of the Masons, because they kept secrets from their wives. But not to be a Mason was social and business suicide for Norman.

Well, in a letter from 1909,Norman writes this to his wife Margaret:

You must have hit Uncle Alec hard when you mentioned about ‘milking cows and making fires’ and when you said St-Paul has been dead a long time and there have been many changes in the world since St. Paul’s time. I think women’s suffrage is one of the changes that will happen in the near future. Too absurd to think that a woman cannot exercise her franchise with as much intelligence as some of the male sex. And that they are making this so hard is so many countries when you have to drag some of these supposedly intelligent men to the polls as you would cattle. I think ladies taking an interest in politics could study out which side to take. I am giving you this speech as an extra.

It shows that Norman supported his wife (and vice versa as it happens) during hard times, even from his lonely post on the Canadian Transcontinental Railway in Northern Ontario.  But it also shows something else, that in those days,  religion was used as a tool to argue both for and against women getting the vote.

The sword. It is in my living room. (The family got it back through a strange coincidence.)

Last week I turned on the TV to a discussion on Meet the Press about religion’s place in politics. This is now an ongoing debate in the US, where once the establishment, at least, believed in the separation of church and state.

The American Right Wing is recognized as the “Religious” faction, although it appears a somewhat unholy alliance between Big Business and Evangelicals. And they are as anxious to change the social agenda as much as the political one.

As usual, it was argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a religious movement, “so if mixing religion and politics  was ‘good’ in that case, (everyone, left and right agrees) why can’t it be a good thing now?

( I think Salon had an article last year with the same argument. But I wish someone would bring up the Suffragette Movement, in this debate, because I think that movement better reflects what is going on today than the Civil Rights Movement. The Suffragette movement was an unholy alliance, too, between factions, business and social and political. And the Pankhurst’s et al handled these disparate parts with some savvy

Corset advert in April 19 Votes for Women Magazine.

Anyway, as it happens, the April 19, 1912 edition of Votes for Women has a rousing report on the debate by the National Union of Teachers, with the unfortunate acronym of NUT. For my book Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl, I will have Edith get her hands on a copy.

In Threshold Girl Edith takes sister Flora to hear a British suffragette speak, that’s  in early May.  As it also happens, right beside the article on the Teachers is a letter to the editor, from an Alberta Minister!! So perfect. Edith is thinking of quitting her job at her missionary school. The school is run by a man, Paul Villard.

Even though the Alberta Minister is living ‘near the Klondyke Trail’ he is definitely the working man’s proselytizer.

In Threshold Girl I show that some business people didn’t want women to get the vote because it was thought they’d vote for the removal of tarifs on cotton, so they could cheaper clothing. The Nicholsons were staunch Liberals, in large part because they felt their livelihood depended on it. They were sort of right.

Dear Editors of Votes for Women,

Last year, when I was working in London and occasionally had the privilege of speaking at Suffrge meetings held by the various societies, I frequently came across the view that the Bible strongly taught the subordinate position of women. St. Paul especially came in for a great deal of censure, and, as I would suggest, quite undeservedly. I always feel myself that the imperfections we notice in the Old Testament, which was written all the way through by men considerably in advance of their respective generations, show us more clearly than anything else the need for the higher conceptions in the New, and the careful student of the Bible may notice that the higher the revelation man received of God’s character the higher the honor paid to women hood.

In Christ people recognise that the ideal was reached in the matter, but it is often felt that St. Paul was somewhat retrograde. This is probably due to the fact that some of his letters to definite communities, written in reply to certain particular questions from those communities, contain advice which he thought suited to the particular occasions. To say that these statements that he sanctioned the subordinate position of women is scarcely fair. Another test I have often heard quoted against St. Paul is 1 Cor. Xi.2: “The head of a woman is the man.” I confess that at first sight these words seem to have hav only one possibly  significance, but ‘authority’ is beginning at the present time to have a meaning which our grandfathers were not familiar, but meaning which Christ and St. Paul both understood very clearly.

To our grandfathers, the word ‘authority’ almost implied the arbitrary right of one individual to treat another as he pleased. To Christ, to St. Paul, to some in authority in the governments of the present time, and to all, it can be hoped, in governments of the future, the word implies the obligation and privilege of one individual to do all in his power for those over whom he may be placed.

The difference is enormous.

I would now point out that the words ‘the head of the women is the man’ immediately follow the words “the head of every man is Christ.”

If these two sentences are taken together in this context, it would be clear, that Man in his attitude to women is to emulate Christ’s attitude to Man. Surely this is no base ideal.

I suppose it is gradually becoming recognised, that the three things that hinder the human race are race and colour prejudice, the inequality of sex and the differences between capital and labour.

In St. Paul’s day the prejudices between Jew and Gentile correspond with colour and race prejudices of the day,the struggle between bond and force correspond to our struggles between capital and labour.

The question of male and female has never come up asa practical question, but St. Paul was idealist enough to see that these prejudices and inequalities were never part of the divine scheme for the world.

And at the end of Galatiana number 3, he made this statement,which one could not but admire if it had been  made in the 20^th century, but when we realise that it was written about 48 AD we cannot but be astounded. The words are these: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

To remove these artificial divisions is the object of those who are now working for International Peace and for the Emancipation of Womanhood and for the welfare of all the labouring classes – St Paul’s Programme.

I have been today reading a little book which has just reached me in my log shack a few miles fro the Klondyke Trail. It is entitled Christ and Labour and in it eleven Labour members, whose speeches were delivered in Browning Hall during the second Labour Week, all avow that they intend to use their ‘authority: to give statutory effect to principles  of Christ’s teaching; and I believe it would be fair to St. Paul to say he has sketched out the lines of which this may be effective than to regard him as one who would lend his sanction to old customs out of which are rapidly growing, such as the subordinate position of women.

(Rev) W. L Seymour Dallas MA. Paddle River, Alberta, N.W. Canada.

(I checked. He doesn’t appear to have gone down in history.)

Suffrage and Quebec and Temperance

A temperance pledge signed by Herbert Nicholson, around 1910, when he was in his early twenties, to please his parents no doubt. He moved out West and was always in debt, so they feared he had fallen into bad habits. Since he roomed with a bartender and, yikes, a young woman stenographer, he probably did!

“I hereby promise with the help of God to abstain from the consumption of intoxicating liquor including wine beer and cider.”

Anyway, here’s another quote from Anna Howard Shaw, US Suffragette that reveals the close ties between women suffrage and the temperance moviement.  Herbert’s sister Edith clipped a picture of this famous woman from a newspaper for posterity, but Edith wanted women to get the vote for more personal reasons: they wanted more from life. She wanted more opportunities for women and security outside of marriage.

“We do not fear that little band of professional anti-women going around the country advocating home, heaven and mother. The only purpose they serve is that by holding out their skirts they act as a screen for the liquor traffic, the gamblers, the vicious, and those interested in dance halls, and places where young girls are ruined.”

As I write my play, Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, and as I read the report of the 1925 Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption and, more to the point, incompetence, where my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services,  was implicated, personally. The charge of corruption centered around the cops turning a blind eye to dance halls and taverns  breaking by-laws by staying open after 1 am, thereby allowing prostitution and gambling to flourish. (Because after midnight is when all the bad stuff begins.)

Quebec didn’t give women the vote until the 40′s and that seems backwards. We have always been told it is the Catholic Church’s fault. But, frankly, maybe Quebec was wary of this link between the Presybterian Social Reformers and Women’s Suffrage. Maybe the didn’t want their fun curtailed. (Winston Churchill hated the suffragettes for that reason: he thought it appalling that anyone might keep him from drinking.)

(My grandfather’s relation, Therese Forget Casgrain, fought for suffrage for women in Quebec. Indeed, my grandfather always told my mother women could do anything they wanted.)

Anyway, I just happen to have a blow- by -blow account of a Town Hall in 1921, during the election campaign, in Richmond Quebec, where the Nicholson’s neighbor asked an indiscreet question about that very question: Why doesn’t the Province of Quebec give women the vote.

It embarrasses the politicians. And the crowd.

Wednesday, November 23, 1921 Dear Edith and Flora and Marion, I thought I must jot a few things down while they are fresh in my mind. We had the Tobin meeting last night and Tobin was first speaker. . He made a very fine speech and said he wanted to thank his friend Mr. Crombie who opposed him in 1917 that he did it convincingly and after the war returned to his party. “The Applause hearty and long.” Then the Honorable Mitchell. His speech was grand. He was speaking about the conservatives claiming they gave women the franchise. He said how Dougherty in the House argued that women were not persons. Said he had always been in favour of it. Just then Mrs. Montgomery who was in the center of the hall said the Quebec government thought they were not persons. Mitchell stopped and asked her what she meant. As she repeated he said, I will explain that Madam. Mr Ginn and myself were in favour of it but we did not want a minority to force anything in a majority that did not want it. Said Roman Catholic church did not want it. We were all disgusted at hearing her voice; I’m sure he did not like it. It was the only interruption at the meetings. I asked Mrs. Fraser to go. We were on the elevated. Father went with Mr. Ginn. I do hope the Liberals will win out. Mrs. Farquharson takes no interest, but I will make sure she gets to the polls and votes for Tobin. Take care of the little ones. I am anxious to see them but must stay here until after the election. I may be so sorry I will need a change. Mother

Pageants and Webpages.

 

My wix website at www.wix.com/dottynixon/frontpage

leading to Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

and to my Flo in the City blog at

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.com/

and I hope to put a page on Red Room the author’s site.

 

All very complicated.

As I write The 1912 Diary of Edith Nicholson,

a first bit posted at www.tighsolas.ca/page11.pdf.pdf

I’m not in a very focused or creative mood. So, I just plug away. I described the 1908 Tercentenary today, in Edith’s Diary.

 

A huge pageant, a military show of force, on the Plains of Abrahama, totally forgotten for some reason, probably WWI, the event that likely was anticipated what with the Prince of Wales coming in on the battleship Indomitable…

 

 

 

Connecting Fashion, Politics, Suffrage.. Again

Emmeline Pankhurst beings whisked away at a suffrage demonstration in the UK.

In 1909, Miss. Hurlbatt addressed a women’s club in Montreal. Edith Nicholson may have attended. She certainly will in my book Flo in the City. Miss Hurlbatt was warden of Victoria College, Toronto. Edith would eventually become Assistant Warden, or Warden at Royal Victoria College, McGill. Can’t recall. Hurlbatt says she is against the militants, yet she certainly appears sympathetic. Edith, as I have written, was for the militants. And once again, the Cotton Mills are mentioned, British Cotton Mills, as a reason why women wanted the vote. This is definitely going to be a theme in my book. It’s a perfect way to connect fashion with politics…This is from the Montreal Gazette, 1909

“If I might make a suggestion as to the work in Montreal, I would advise a revival of interest in the Canadian organization, but I would also work by other means than these. I would recommend the formation of women’s suffrage discussion circles in various societies throughout the city, let us say in connection with various churches and clubs. By this means we should be educating women to an understanding of the whole question in a way and upon a scale which could not be achieved by the action of the Women’s suffragette society, because you would be reaching those who have not already expressed themselves in favour of the movement. What we need today is to educate opinion. Those who act noisily in Great Britain are doing so because the work upon women’s suffrage lines has not been wide enough. The lesson for Canada is to awake in time and work for your needs. Do this before here is put upon Canada a condition of change in which women suffer in the labour market the intolerable grievance of the need of dependence upon themselves. Let us on this side of the Atlantic be forewarned and forearmed; begin our education early, and pursue it constantly, so that we may win by constitutional methods which need no turbulent influence behind them.

This expression of opinion was uttered by Miss Hurlbatt, warden of Victoria College at the close of an address she delivered yesterday on Women’s Suffrage before the Social Department of the Montreal Women’s Club, which was very largely attended, those present including ladies representing all lines of thought in the city. Mrs. S. C. Marsan, President of the Department, was in the chair.

Miss Hurlbatt commenced by motioning the fact that the press gave full reports of matters connected with woman’s suffrage, and that the magazines also printed articles on the same subject. It seemed, therefore, that the women of Montreal should be in possession of a very fair knowledge of the general lines of the subject. Nevertheless, there was no very widespread or organized movement in Montreal, but there was a national society, the Dominion Women’s Society, headquartered at Toronto. It could not be said, however, that much active work was carried on in Montreal or in Canada as a whole. But some of the women in Montreal were turning their attention to the subject, for the reason that it had become a matter of practical politics in the Dominion, and that it was believed that it would inevitably advance, because it was a result of better education and greater liberty of action which had been accorded women in the nineteenth and twenties centuries, and it could not be logically opposed, in view of the changed conditions under which women lived. “

Speaking of the militant suffragette movement in England, Miss Hurlbatt expressed the hope that there was no one in her audience who did not lament the noisy and violent proceedings of the last two years, but who did not likewise more truly lament the circumstances which had driven women to adopt these violent measures. It could not be thought Mrs. Pankhurst any of her followers really rejoiced in any of these noisy methods; they must feel it to be a waste of energy and a marring of women’s development. The lesson to be learned from the militant movement was not to condemn or despise the women who, at great sacrifice of feeling and inclination, took part in these demonstrations, but so to labour that these things might not be forced on other countries. Miss Hurlbatt then briefly referred to what had led to this form of propaganda, and said that within the last four years women had been the victims of violence. It was not until deputation after deputation had been refused a hearing and hundreds of women had been sent to prison on trumped up charges; not until they were excluded even from the street by the erections of barricades and not until every other way was barred that women in the early stages of this campaign had to resort to stone-throwing and the means use by men on the slightest pretext. It must be remembered that these women had not the means of commanding a hearing which men had and they looked upon the struggle as vital..

Touching on some of the grounds which women’s suffrage had been defended, Miss Hurlbatt contended that women had for all time been workers, creating and supporting the home by their domestic industry. These industries had been removed into the factory and the workshop and women followed their labour. Women had always been essentially concerned in politics as consumers, as well as producers. When a woman entered a factory she became more conscious of the influence of politics as it affected her labour. And she was affected by changed conditions of the state. The cotton spinning and weaving industries were now mainly in the hands of women, and they thought they would suffer if tariff reform were introduced in England.They desired to express themselves in this matter and protect their industry, and they believed that no action on their part without the vote would protect their action.”

THE RICH AND THE POOR 29th installment

Old Brewery Mission of Montreal 1910. Fundraising poster.

Yesterday, the press carried a story about how the U.K. government is set to apologize to the Home Children, those children of the slums, orphans and such, sent out of England in the 19th and 20th centuries to, mostly, work on farms. Of course, child labour, was common in those days.

This fits nicely into my next installment of Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ because I will have Marion talk about the children she is teaching in her inner city school.

It is unlikely that any of these children were Home Children (although some may have been). Her students were empoverished students of immigrants, whose parents worked in the factories along the canal, in the “City Below the Hill.”

As I have written before, Montreal, in 1910, had the highest infant mortality rate of any place in the world outside of Calcutta. This was also an era of incredible immigration.

The reason Flo got a job in the city, (when she was given a free education specifically so that she would return to her rural roots and teach) was because teachers were needed in the city to accomodate this huge tide of immigration.

Flo, wrapped into her warm lambskin coat, which had seen two previous incarnations in the Watters household, tossed snowballs to Floss as the two proceeded along College Street. Mother was at church, or more precisely, at a Missionary Society meeting where they were tabulating the receipts from their Christmas Bazaar.

Mother’s feud with the ladies of the Missionary Society had been all the talk at Christmas. “Mrs. Leaman told me about St. Paul’s admonition and I said, “We don’t live in St. Paul’s time, or we’d all be out in the fields shepherding cows and sheep. Well, that sent her sulking.”

And then Edith had livened things up with stories about the French Canadian family she was living with. How they ate a large meal after Mass on Christmas eve called a Reveillon and how they gave gifts at New Years, which was a bigger celebration than Christmas. “The Crepeaus are like the Hills,” Edith had said.”The house is always filled with visitors.” She purposely did not mention the priests who were a fixture in the four storey greystone on Sherbrooke, near St. Laurent, where East met West in Montreal.

Alice, Edith’s student, was 8, a high strung but beautiful girl, with emerald green eyes and Titian hair and a soft, creamy complexion.

The family’s attention had been riveted by Marion’s description of her city school. When in the mood to talk about her life, which was not that often, had a knack for finding the funny side of any story, however sad.

“My first day at school, I had 50 students and each parent came up to me with some advice about her child and after they were gone, I didn’t remember one piece of advice from the other,” she said, with a loud chuckle.

I guess parents are the same everywhere, Flora thought. But then Marion told her a story about a sad little girl to came to class each day with her face and hands absolutely filthy.

“I am supposed to send such children home, to be washed,” Marion said, but that makes no sense to me. Chances are the only one at home is an older sister, charged with taking care of her younger siblings, for the mother is at work. I see no point in humilating the child by sending her out of the room to wash, either. So I just march all the children to the bathroom and make them all clean up. I build an arthmetic lesson around hand-washing and hygiene.”

It was just like sister Marion to make the best of any situation. She was turning out to be a fine teacher. Flo wondered what she would have done, likely she would have just followed the rules and sent the girl home and felt terrible about it. What hard lives these children lived, she thought.

Why was the missionary society raising money to help children in other lands, she had wondered, when there was so much suffering right here in Canada, in Montreal.

And truth be told, her family’s money problems (always looming large in the background) seemed somewhat trivial at the moment.

Flo found herself standing still on the corner of Main street, looking out at the Salmon River which was frozen over, with a half formed snowball in her mittened hands. Floss barked to get her to throw the ball.

Well, Richmond, at least, had few very poor people. Or was that true?

She patted the snow into a nice round shape and flung it towards Floss, who leapt into the air and caught it in her mouth, obliterating it with her sharp white teeth.

The push-pull of biology and ambition -2

Notman was the most famous photographer of wealthy Montreal. Clearly in 1900, his business also had middle-class clients. Marion being one of them.

No woman anywhere, in my opinion, suffered more from the push-pull of biology and ambition than Marion Annie Nicholson. And, she got all she wanted, at a price. Here’s an excerpt (final paragraphs) from a 1909 article, from that Delineator I have on hand, written by Gertrude Atherton, a writer who hung around, I believe, with Oscar Wilde and his cronies in France, which accounts for its haughty tone.

The article is called The President Unrest Among Women and it is remarkable for both its style and substance but it also reflects a common belief of the day, that women ‘have made it.’ I have posted the entire article on my website at www.tighsolas.ca/page295.html . I think I will use that line “today the most limited abilities can find renumeration in any of a thousand fields of industry” in Flo in the City, my novel about a woman coming of age in 1908-1913. This line proves that even brilliant people can spout nonsense -or be taken in by modern mythologies.

(And I have an answer to her main question: Why is love still the main theme of the novel for women? Because it is the main theme for men as well. Once we’ve acknowledged that then we can see that men can marry biology and ambition (in order to mate well) indeed, they must, and women have to make a choice, or compromise, between the two even today, even 100 years later. Sermon over.)

“It is now many a long day since women began to support herself in one way or another, but at first it was either a question of a talent or of limited demand regulating supply. Before this extraordinary and widespread impulse which is coincident with the opportunities of modern life, women forced to earn their bread took to school teaching, the stage, cooked or made beds according to their tastes and powers. Today, the most limited abilities can find renumeration in one of a thousand fields of industry. Personally, the hate the sight and the sound of a suffragete, but I would remind myself and others that such great women as Susan B. Anthony were thought quite as pestiferous in their day; and yet it is such women who with courage and an intelligence far in advance of their time, forged the priceless tools of liberty which have freed women from the shackles of he centuries. They were held up to ridicule, reviled, persecuted, but so have been the martyrs of every revolution since the world began. Who shall say that the day will not come when the suffragette, inflicted with a very rabies of reform as she is, and as ridiculous as extremists usually are, will have her turn at canonization? Who shalls say what new era she is preparing?

It may be asked why woman, having so pointedly emancipated herself, does love continue to be the main theme of the novel? The time is not yet for the elimination of sex, and love still feeds the soul of every man and woman under the sun. And no matter how violently a pendulum swings, it always regains its equilibrium in time; in life the new is constantly adjusting itself to the old. People that oppose so violently this whole modern movement of women should stop and reflect that progress was not invented by the twentieth century, but it as old as the world and no doubt has a planetary history which even our imaginations do not compass. Personally, I have no reason to care whether women get the vote or not, but I have no more doubt that they will win this particular battle than that we are on the eve of many other changes, including religion that will keep pace with the advance of intellect. It is also likely that man himself, in a generation hence, will demand in woman all that he now fears and resents.”