Cleanliness is an Attitude

Attitude Floor and Wood cleaner.

I just found a product I’ve been looking for. Something to polish wood that isn’t toxic. Lately, I inherited some antique furniture but I am loathe to clean it, as I do not like furniture polishes.

Now, admittedly, my job as a child was to polish the furniture, using Pledge (oil and aerosol) and also to clean the bathtub, using Old Dutch Powder. All this crap going into my young lungs,mixing with the ubiquitous clouds of second hand smoke.

But parents didn’t worry about such things back then. They didn’t worry much. It was good times, stable times for the middle class, give or take a Cuban Missile Crisis or two.

I guess the threat of nuclear war looming over the planet made every other worry pale in comparison.

Well, the prosperity helped, too.

Pledge, Old Dutch, DDT and all the sweet smelling lead emanating fromm the tail pipes of those bright pink TBirds with the big fancy tailfins.

And the 60′s air pollution in the city. Legend. Any person who lived in the suburbs or country knew that  visit to the city meant smelly hair and even smokey underwear.

OK. All that and I’ve had only one serious lung disease, pneumonia, when my own kids were about 10, caused by being run down and by being prescribed too many anti-biotics for little things like sore throat and then this mighty bug swept through our household and I didn’t have the resistance to fight it.

Anyway, if the 60′s were bad, the crap in our food has only gotten worse. So I do buy organic veggies when I can and ‘artisanal’ meats like chicken, which, our course actually have texture and taste.

But the other day I had to laugh or cry. I was visiting my sister in law, in her beautiful home with the cathedral windows and she found ants in the kitchen and began spraying all over with Raid.

I turned to my husband and said, “There go all the benefits from eating organic for the past 10 years.”

The woman, a product of the 50′s, is intrepid when it comes to dirt and bugs and such. The stronger the cleaner the better.

And I only use these Attitude Products. Which are fine. For cleanliness. For that 50′s pristine look, well go elsewhere.

Now, my story Threshold Girl at www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf is about the 1910 era, the era of Pure Soap, Pure Water and Pure Women.

The Soap-Industrial Complex got a toehold in that era. In large part because dirty homes (and the mostly immigrant women who kept them) were being blamed for all the problems of industrialization. All the bodily illnesses and all the ‘moral’ ones too.

The adage “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” was not a mere metaphor,back then, it was to be taken LITERALLY. And it gave the moral high ground automatically to the elite and upper middle class who could afford servants. And it kept other middle class women from getting ‘restless woman syndrome’ and picking up a placard to protest their second class status.

And this ideology filtered down through the century, reaching a kind of apex in the 1950′s, for it was used to drive women back into the home after the war.

And these cleaning product companies, that promoted PURITY above all, because GIANTS over the century and now many of them make anti-cancer and asthma drugs too. And pesticides too. Kind of weird, I’d say. Kind of weird, but good for business and as well all now know WHATEVER IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS “GOOD.”

Family and Home, one and the same thing.

The Nicholsons on the porch of Tighsolas, circa 1912.

In the 1914 book The Family and Society by a Dr. John Gillette, it is written that the second key purpose of the family unit is to tie people to the land. (The first is to procreate and to prevent promiscuity.) Property and family are one and the same, in the mind of this man, it seems. (Then it follows that poor people in cities and transient people were considered ‘lacking in family values’ just because they owned no home, no land. Hmm.)

So no wonder the Nicholsons held onto Tighsolas, their charming home in Richmond, despite the fact it was a brick albatross around their necks, preventing them for being nimble enough to ‘get ahead’ in changing times.

This 1914 book does not pretend to be treading new territory; indeed, the author says he is summarizing previous material, in ‘scientific’ fashion, laying out the facts. It was published, in the UK, one year after the Royal Commission on Technical Training and Industrial Education published their findings, and, frankly, it feels as if the Commissioners and Gillette were of one mind.

Although he briefly mentions other kinds of antropological and biologic units, Gillette dismisses them as primitive, inefficient, or promoting ‘promiscuity’ (incest, venereal disease) and not as viable alternatives to the traditional family unit.

Dr. Gillette sees the family unit as being the ‘original social unit’ and claims that the larger society grew out of this smaller one. Of course, this belief isn’t so much scientific as biblical. This belief is child-like and primitive, but, hey, plenty of people still adhere to it today.

However, the good professor does make one modern-sounding concession, that the family unit should “realize the maximum satisfaction of the individual members, without injuring the interests of the greater community.” That is hard to argue with, even for liberals like me. When I think of this phrase, the recent movie The Kids are Alright comes to mind.

Anyway, here’s a relevant excerpt with respect to Flo in the City, my novel in progress about a girl coming of age in the 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ :

“That there may be no doubt that the family is the incubator of social members, it is expedient to pass in review its early institutional features. First it possesses a division of labour which is necessary to its existence and which trains the young for that of the larger community.

Between man and wife, this obtains principally. The husband is the bread-winner, the wife the home-maker. As the offspring develop they are introduced to certain duties in the household economy.

The boys build fires, get fuel, bring water (Editor: sic..since in most societies the girls did this) and care for certain smaller matters that the father formerly looked after. If the family is on the farm, certain kind of light work fall to the boy, caring for cattle, hogs and poultry are essential features. Unfortunately, in the cities there is little for the boy to do and he consequently misses an important part of his training and development. But in many cases the boys gravitate toward the father’s occupation and begin to work for him early in life.

The girls likewise assist the mother in the household occupation as they get old enough and the technique of housekeeping and child care is acquired through them.

Not only do the children get an idea of the division of labour, but learn to cooperate, to bear and share responsibilty (Editor: seems like a contradiction) and what is of greater importance, they get a discipline, a habit for industry which is necessary for productive citizenship..”

Writing in 1914, this author seems to be suffering from the same nostalgia ‘for the rural life’ as were so many influential people, like the Royal Commissioners. But from what I have read, the farmers in Edwardian times actually had the MOST egalitarian homes, with men doing women’s duties and women doing men’s, whatever worked. Children were allowed their say at table, too, because they actively contributed to the well-being of the family.

It was industrialization that bred this harsh division of labour thing: Still, you can see where modern ideas about the sanctity of the family unit have come from. In the intro to this book, the family is said to be self-sufficing, ie. able to take care of itself, if it’s a good God-fearing one.

But the Nicholsons were this kind of family – in spades, and STILL, they relied on ‘connections’ to survive. Without their connections they would have been lost. That’s why Norman paid a fortune in Masonic dues, even if he couldn’t really afford the layout. Their close family, in 1910, did not help them that much. They feuded with them. Friends or distant family were more helpful.