Child Labour in Cotton: Then and Now

1911 Census Page: Everyone worked 60 hours at the Dominion Textile Plant in 1911 in Magog. Even Occasional Jobbers. That’s because the Quebec Factor Act said no factory employee could work more than 60 hours…Someone fixed up the salaries too.

Well, as I write Flora in the City, about Flora Nicholson in 1911/12 where she gets a chance to learn about the human cost of her clothing, but really does nothing about it, just like most of us, I have decided to give Miss Gouin, the milliner’s apprentice ,another scene.

Flora will see her in Richmond, possibly sitting on bench in front of the Post Office. She will be reading a book. An English Book. The Handbook for Department Stores: Linen and Cotton Department. This will be to show how smart and ambitious she is. She will tell Flora she wants to go work for Dupuis Freres, in Montreal, or even one the big American Department Stores, where they sometimes like a girl with a French accent (she will say) as long as the girl says she is from Paris. That’s where Flora will hear that Milliners can make as much as 1,000 a year.

I’ll have Miss Gouin turn the tables on Flora and ask for help reading a portion.. How can Flora decline? A relevant bit.. which one? The book thoroughly describes all the kinds of cotton. Maybe I’ll just have her read it out, and ask Flora if the pronounciation is good.

I found a paper online about child labour in the cotton industry, TODAY. I am reading it carefully, of course, so that I am able to make my 1910 story relevant. I have to find some points that overlap. I am sure there are many.

The paper is by Alejandro Plastina and is called Child Labour in the Cotton Sectors and was written for the International Cotton Advisory Board in Washington DC.

According to the introduction, there are 300 million children, aged 5-17 working worldwide. Of those 200 million are child labourers.

Here’s a quote from the paper defining child labour. “Schematically, child labor includes all types of work conducted by children 5-11 years old, non-hazardous work conducted by children 12-14 years for more than 14 hours but less than 43 hours per week, and all worst forms of child labor conducted by children 5-17 years (including hazardous work in specified industries and occupations and work for more than 43 hours per week in other industries and occupations). In essence, child labor is work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity and is considered a violation of fundamental human rights (ILO 2008b).”

I’ll have someone in Flora in the City use the same rationale for child labour, that it’s the parents’ fault. That it is better for the kids to work than to starve… or be forced into worse kinds of work or sexual slavery, which is a big concern in 1911, and called the “the social evil”. Even people who could care less about the well-being of children were interested in eradicating prostitution.

And as for the older women workers, during my scene at the Montreal Council of Women, where Lady Drummond discusses the Eaton’s strikes, someone will yell out “It is lucky they are getting paid for what most women do for free.”

Mrs. Drummond won’t agree, but that line is an important one.

Textile Research 1910.

Well, I’ve finished the outline of Flo in the City, the one with the plot involving garment workers. And it works. I just need to keep on working on it and hope that I have a few creative brainstorms. I used to have them on command, but, alas, my brain is old.

I had the major brainstorm to revisit the 1911 Census, to see what garment workers in Magog did. I know from another source, that the plant produced print materials for Dominion Textile.

Well, sure enough, there are many many people working at the the plant, and most are Tisserands.. weavers.

The most common other job says “journalier d’oc” occasional worker. Oddly, everyone has put 60 hours work a week down. (That must have come down from the company, to do so. Otherwise it makes no sense.)

The pay lines are all messed up, for the workers. One amount superimposed over another. Anyway 218 a year over 400 a year. Makes no sense either. Were they deliberately made obscure, because they all are!

I found one 12 year old working there (admitting to working there) and a 14 year old, which was legal, I think.

In 1909 Dominion Textile’s union went on strike and asked that child labour not be used, so.. there you go.

It’s hard to read, as the enumerator scribbled, and I’ve only looked at a few pages, but “carder” is another job…or cardeuse.

Useful and I’ll look at the other pages. 1000 people worked for that place at one time back then.

I also found out that the Milliner in Richmond was Vitaline Goyette, 27, whose father was also a merchant. She calls herself a modiste de chapeaux. No income entered for her.

There are also a number of dressmakers in Richmond. One woman, Esther Proulx, 25 ish, calls herself a couturier de robes and she made 108 dollars in 1910. Whoopie Do.

Well, lots of fodder for my story. It seems that’s why the Nicholsons could afford to hire a seamstress, on occasion. These poor women made next to nothing. But then again, Edith Nicholson made only 250 a year teaching at Westmount Methodiste Missionary School.

A Kids’ Eye View of The Cotton Industry 1902

Picture from 1902 Royal Crown Reader. Book 4. These were used in Quebec Schools too. These are cotton workers, but wearing sarongs. The only workers mentioned in the book are American Negroes..so kids would have assumed these are American Negroes..even slaves.

I have been meditating on the cotton industry in 1910, and how I can weave this social welfare theme into Flo in the City.

In short, I wondered how much Marion, Edith and Flo knew about the cotton industry. I know they loved clothes and as women who made their own clothes, they knew a bit about fabric.

But did they know enough about the industry to care about the textile workers and their trials and strikes.

Well, I just re-discovered that the 1902 Royal Crown Reader I have on hand (purchased off Ebay) has two articles on cotton!

Quote:

1) The Cotton Plant:

We do not know when cotton was first used for clothing. People learned to cultivate useful plants long before they learned to write, so none of our books are old enough to tell us who were the first farmers, or bakers, or weavers. But it is only about a hundred years since cotton cloth was woven in this country. (UK).

Indian muslins have long been famed for their beauty. A traveller, writing more than two hundred years ago, mentions some muslins that are so exceedingly fine that when laid on grass and dew has fallen on it, it is no longer visible.

These delicate materials were woven on looms of the coarsest and simplest kind, and now when the machinery has been made better, the natives seem to have lost much of their former skill (sic), so that the new fabrics are by no means as fine as the old.

When America was discovered by Columbus, about four hundred years ago, cotton was found growing there, and the natives showed some skill in weaving it into cloth. The United States of America has long held the first place among the cotton growing countries of the world, and from it we get most of our raw cotton.

For many years, indeed until about thirty years ago, the work in the cotton fields was performed by negro slaves; but after a long war, all the slaves were freed in 1885.

(Another page describes how the cotton plant grows, how the bolls are harvested and how the plant is woven into fibres at the factory.)

The following article is called Samuel Crompton and the Cotton-Spinner.

It is due to the invention of these new machines that the cotton manufacture has grown to such a very great extent in England. Manchester, Liverpool, and other towns in Lancashire, have become vast hives of busy workers and population of the country is five times what it was at the beginning of the century.The cotton spinners and weavers were at first very much against the new machines…

(It goes on to describe the life of Samuel Compton)

A recent In Our Time about the Industrial Revolution (on BBC Radio Four) debated this issue, whether innovation sparked the Revolution or whether economics did.)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1910 New York Dramatic Mirror. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the most popular books of its era and it spawned many early motion pictures. There’s an In Our Time about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, too, on BBC Radio Four website.

Spinning a Yarn, Weaving a Tale

Many many women worked in the textile factories in Montreal in 1910.

Some of these girls were very young and accidents happened.

I buy and wear clothing, like everyone else, but what I know about textiles and sewing and such you could fit into a thimble, if I had one.

I’ve been reading technical school manuals about the textile industry from 1910 and I don’t undertand a thing.

A handbook for department stores, cottons and linens department is more my speed. It starts at the very beginning. Where cotton comes from: Egypt, India, Peru mostly in 1910. The American South. How it is spun by huge machines. And then woven. And then finished, which includes dying.

Cotton spinning machine 1910

“Weaving is the making of cloth by the interlacing of two sets of threads crossing each other at right angles. Of these the lengthwise threads are called the warp (I know that, from sewing class in high school) while the crosswise threads are called the woof, weft or filling.

The art of weaving can be traced to the very earliest people. The women of savage tribes used any materials, such as grasses or reeds, that might be at hand, lacing the fibres in a crude manner to make mats and baskets.

(Funny, basketweaving is a euphemism for a stupid and easy pastime..) At first the strips were put over and under one at a time, but soon the women learned to fasten pieces together to make longer strips.

In the next stage, the long strips of the grasses or other material to be woven were stretched and fastened on the ground and the cross material was carried over and under these long pieces.

Next a stick was fastened to every alternate thread so that these threads
could be raised to allow the crossthreads to go through.

In an upright loom the warp threads were held in a upright position on two beams
one at the top and one at the bottom and fastening the top beam to a tree. This method is used the Navaho to make rugs.”

Then the book discuss the hand loom and THE FLYING SHUTTLE. I remember that from the theory part of sewing class in 1969. Miss Nagel was the teacher: she was not very enthusiastic, I remember. I passed the theory part and failed the practice part, a calico apron. Pink, my favourite colour, then and now.

My Boomer Era Home Ec class was a carry-over from the 1910 era Homemaking and Housekeeping courses recommended by the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education. Technical education (textile schools for instance) was only for men.

The Montreal Council of Women objected to this: they felt some young women should be allowed into the trades and not be forced into domestic work where there were no days off and no nights to themselves. (The Royal Commission felt domestic work to be dignified work (or so they said) and felt that it was a danger for young women to go out in the evening and mix with riff-raff, anyway.)

Hand weaving laboratory at a Philadelphia Technical School.
What goes around comes around: Much of the clothing we wear today is made by child labour in the so called Third World.

In one article from the 1910 era, it is claimed that the Textile Interests are against women’s suffrage, as movers and shakers in this industry are afraid women will vote to change the tariffs on textiles.

The politics of the textile industry were very complicated in 1910. Laurier lost the Free Trade election in 1911. I wonder how textiles figured in all this. The Textile industry with the iron industry was key to the UK’s economy back then. And Free Trade was to be with the U.S….

The UK was sadly lagging behind the US and France and Germany with respect to innovation.

No autos, no victrolas.

Cotton Picking US South.

From Sweatshop to Loft, in 100 easy years.

Former Dominion Textile plant, Montreal.

On my way to school,
I used to pass,
Baptist Church
And fields of grass.

Jesus Saves, upon the gate
Would comfort me if I were late.

Now the church is gone,
The field is razed,
And the Home Bank thrives
Where Jesus Saved.

I think this is e.e. cummings.

You know I was reminded of this poem today.

I double-checked and the old Dominion Textile plant is on St. Ambroise near the Lachine Canal and yes, it’s not far from where Royal Arthur School was, on Workman.

It’s now a huge condo project, Chateau St-Ambroise, with lofts for sale, a fancy French Restaurant, and other delights, like a huge pool hall and antique era auto on display. So I will go there and take pictures.

It seems the Lachine Canal, 100 years ago a kind of sewer for various industries, is now deemed ‘waterfront’. It is pretty down there.

The Chateau site is a heritage site and their website declares that the factory employed 3,000 at one time. No mention of young employees being abused and beaten, as I just read in Bettina Gregory’s Industrializing Montreal.

I don’t often venture into that area, even though it is adjacent downtown. (I travel above it, however, all the time on the 20 highway, on my way to Montreal.)

The Atwater Market is not far away either.

Cottoning on, Slowly, to the Politics of Clothes

Marion 1910.

The Huffington Post had an article listing the 13 products : most likely made by children and forced labour and except for diamonds and carpets, and tobacco and maybe coal (directly) well, they are products I use: coffee (I only sometimes buy free trade) and garments, cocoa, rice, sugarcane, cotton and No. 1 Gold. (Well, I don’t use gold either.)

I’m a pearl kind of gal and my husband buys me freshwater pearls for special occasions. So I have many chains which I wear, sometimes singly, sometimes en masse. With basic black usually.

As it happens, I just read another chapter of the Paul Thompson book The Edwardians, where he explains the UK economy in 1900-1914.

In 19oo, half the cotton textiles in the world were produced by England, and not a hell of a lot of anything else. (Luckily, their rubber plantations in Malaya were going to prove fruitful – and that’s the story of my own father’s family.)

Cotton could be produced cheaply because women mostly worked in the factories. Just like in Montreal. Thompson explains that paying men good wages was counterproductive to business, because, then their womenfolk didn’t have to work, so that their cheap labour wasn’t available. Kind of a Catch 22. So this push to have women stay at home, well, there’s more to it than meets the eye, which is to say, it has an economic side and isn’t just about keeping women powerless.

And that is why this cotton business is front and central to the Flo in the City and I really don’t quite understand it. Maybe once I’ve read Angels in the Workplace I’ll fully understand.

One thing I have figured out is that most the materials the Nicholson women used in their dresses was one form of cotton or another.

1909 Textile Union Demands Montreal

Well, it didn’t take me long. I found an article in the 1909 Montreal Gazetteon a Union Protest with respect to the textile industry in Montreal (and Magog in the Eastern Townships) in 1909, the year I am writing about right now in my book Flo in the City, about a young girl coming of age in the 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/

The demands were by the union at Dominion Textile. (I remember that their head offices were somewhere near the Montreal Forum.)

They wanted a 10 percent increase in wages, as the workers’ wages hard recently been cut by 10 percent despite the fact the company’s stock was doing well. Hmm.

They wanted more humane hours for women and children. No start before 7.am. No more than 55 hours a week.

They wanted the company to respect the laws of the land with respect to child labour, which suggests they were employing illegally.

They wanted the men in the factory to be forced to respect the women and children who worked there, which must mean they abused their powers.

And they wanted an end to ‘blacklisting’,a practice where anyone who complained couldn’t get another job with the company and even with another company.

I will have Marion read this out loud to Flo, or Margaret, because she taught in a school near St. Henri and according to the article, blacklisting is having a terrible effect on the standard of living in St. Henri. So no doubt many of her young female students were doomed to leave school and go work for Dominion Textiles at 12 or 13 or 14. And many of the mothers of her students already worked in this particulary factory. I think I’ll have Flo fingering the cotton in her blouse, as Marion reads it. “But at least they have work?” she’ll say, “that is better than the other.” Something like that. I’ll have her recite the same arguments we give today for our cheap clothes.

Traduction Google

Eh bien, il ne m’a pas pris longtemps. J’ai trouvé un article sur une manifestation syndicale à l’égard de l’industrie textile à Montréal (et de Magog dans les Cantons de l’Est) en 1909, l’année où je vous écris au sujet en ce moment dans ma Flo livre dans la ville, d’une jeune fille venue de l’âge à l’ère de 1910 sur la base des lettres de http://www.tighsolas.ca/

Les demandes ont été par le syndicat à la Dominion Textile. (Je me souviens que leur siège social ont été à peu près au Forum de Montréal.)

Ils voulaient une augmentation de 10 pour cent dans les salaires, les salaires des travailleurs dur récemment été réduits de 10 pour cent, malgré le fait capital de la société se portait bien. Hmm.

Ils voulaient heures de plus humain pour les femmes et les enfants. Aucun départ avant 7.am. Pas plus de 55 heures par semaine.

Ils voulaient de l’entreprise à respecter les lois du pays en ce qui concerne le travail des enfants, ce qui suggère qu’ils ont été employant illégalement.

Ils voulaient que les hommes dans l’usine d’être forcé de respecter les femmes et les enfants qui y ont travaillé, qui doit vouloir dire qu’ils abusaient de leurs pouvoirs.

Et ils voulaient la fin de «liste noire», une pratique selon laquelle toute personne qui se plaignait ne pouvait pas trouver un autre emploi avec la société et même avec une autre société.

Je vais devoir lire ce Marion à haute voix pour Flo, ou Margaret, car elle a enseigné dans une école près de Saint-Henri et selon l’article, une liste noire a un effet terrible sur le niveau de vie dans Saint-Henri. Donc, sans aucun doute beaucoup de ses jeunes élèves de sexe féminin ont été condamnés à quitter l’école et aller travailler pour la Dominion Textile à 12 ou 13 ou 14. Et la plupart des mères de ses élèves déjà travaillé dans cette usine particulièrement. Je pense que je vais avoir Flo doigté du coton dans son corsage, comme Marion il lit. “Mais au moins ils ont du travail?” elle dira, «c’est mieux que l’autre.” Quelque chose comme ça. Je l’ai réciter les mêmes arguments que nous donnons aujourd’hui pour nos vêtements bon marché.

History Repeats Itself -Clothing

Summer Suits 1905 Eaton’s Catalogue

I started out this morning wanting to write a blog on the Nicholson camera. The house account says that they purchased a Kodak for 5.00 in 1904. Thanks to the web, I can see what Kodak cameras were available then. a 5.00 camera would have been the very cheapest. Which means they either purchased a camera second hand or they got the least expensive camera available.

Which is why the average Canadian family does not have snapshots from 1910. Cameras were luxuries. Further proving this, the 1904 Eaton’s catalogue doesn’t carry cameras.

So I merely flipped through the pages of the catalogue on archive.org and then downloaded a Kindle version to amuse me on a trip I taking on Friday to Greece.

A statement from the Nan Enstad paper I downloaded last night haunted me. She wrote that the women working in the textile factories in the US in 1900 were well aware that the clothes they were making were more important than they were. (After all, they worked in horrible conditions, for little money.)

This Eaton’s catalogue is full of clothing made by women in the textile industry, I assume in Canada. According to another paper I found, on the Canadian textile industry, 7,500 people worked in the industry in Ontario, and 9,000 in Montreal. 80 percent were women, all working in the lower jobs. Bossed around big time by men. Or treated more benignly like ‘little sisters’.

Some women worked from home, at piece work, others in the factories.

The Nicholson women, no doubt, flipped through this very catalogue (they did buy things from Eaton’s, I have the bills) and dreamed about being able to buy more of these glorious things Things THINGS it showcased. (After all, that’s what I did as a child, when I looked at catalogues. I practically salivated over the toy section.)

(Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought these clothes low-brow and that they desired the fantasy outfits in the Delineator or Harper’s Bazar. When they purchased a women’s suit in the 1908-1913 era, they paid around 12.00 and the suits in this catalogue cost between 8 and 15, so Eaton’s was in their price-range.)

Were the politically-aware Nicholson women aware of the connection between the women’s rights movement, city poverty, and the clothes they lusted after.

To some extent certainly. I have some of their clippings. One clipping “Away from Nature” is about how factory work hurts people, especially young girls. I have another clipping: A letter to the Editor in answer to another letter complaining about women’s expensive clothes habit. The writer says, men only look at women who are dressed up, so women have no choice in the matter. And if women could work at good jobs, the could afford to buy their own clothing.

Yes, they were aware, up to a point. (I mean the city slums scared them silly and the suffrage movement’s raison d’etre was to decrease poverty in the cities.) They also sent out some sewing to a local woman who, no doubt, was not living in their elegant neighbourhood in Richmond, Quebec. There were class distinctions in Richmond, too.

The Nicholson women were aware of the social and political repercussions of their clothes-lust in much the same way I am. I sit here typing, wearing a top that I bought in a store in Burlington, Vermont a few weeks ago. I think it cost 3.00. Probably made in Mexico or Vietnam or… I know this cheap item comes with other costs, to humanity – and the environment. I know that history repeats itself.

But it’s all so complex.