2012 Gender Gaps and 1912 Suffragettes

In my ebook Threshold Girl I have Flora and Edith Nicholson visit St. James Methodist Church in Montreal in early May 1912, a few days after the Titanic sinks, to see a ‘real British Suffragette’. The suffragette is Barbara Wiley, one that has been forgotten by Herstory and History.   Wiley had a brother who was an MP out West and she visited Montreal and Canada  in 1912 and probably said more than she should have. (I guess she was a bit of a rogue suffragette.) You see, the militant suffragettes had to be careful what they said in their speeches in Canada, as ‘militants’ were not looked well upon.

Barbara Wiley

Most suffragettes visiting Canada began their speeches by saying “I am not militant”. Not this Wiley, who told reporters in Montreal that British Prime Minister Asquith deserved getting an axe hurled at him.” I quote her in my Threshold Girl book, for the Nicholson women cut out an account of her arrival in Montreal in September 1912. From the Montreal Standard. The Suffragettes were careful about many things, including the way they dressed. They were media savvy, that’s for sure. (Read my book for more.) Anyway, as we all know, women got the vote in Canada (some during and all after the First World War).  But despite the high hopes of the suffragettes, who believed that women would change the world because ‘all men cared about was making money’,  did anything really change? Many have argued “NO.” Women vote like men. For the most part.

But there’s an interesting article in Salon today.  According to an ABC New Washington Post statistic, if only men had the vote, Romney the Republican Nominee would win handily over President Obama.

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/10/the_biggest_gender_gap_ever/singleton/

So today, almost 100 years, later the suffragettes appear vindicated. All men do care about is money. And women do care about more than money. Maybe.

Except it’s more complicated than that:  the suffragettes were right wing when it came to some social policy (as I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog.) The Woman Suffrage Movement was strongly aligned with the Temperance Movement, especially in the States and Canada. And here in Canada, Miss Carrie Derick, a suffrage leader, was a proponent of eugenics.

 

As I wrote on another post on this blog, Christabel Pankhurst believed that prostitution would end if women got the vote, but it didn’t. Indeed, brothels are now legal in Ontario. (Sort of.)

http://flointhecity-aworkinprogress.blogspot.ca/2010/11/votes-for-women-chastity-for-men.html

Emily Davison throws herself under the Kings Horse, by mistake, maybe. The ‘first suffragette martyr” claims the press.

Here’s a clipping from the 1910 Montreal Witness, a letter to the Editor that one of the Nicholson women, probably Edith, clipped. “There is no suffragette movement in Canada, but there is an movement for the enfranchisement of women.” You see, ‘suffragette’ meant militant, and many women, even those who wanted the vote, distanced themselves from the militants. Edith Nicholson did not. She liked the militant suffragettes. http://www.tighsolas.ca/page27.html

Titanic Fashion, so to speak. A fashion advert from Votes for Women, the magazine of the WSPU, in the UK, April 1912. Hmm. Sunshine Girl.

Fashion and Female Freedom

Camping in 1908 era: Some Eastern Townships young people. Probably from Richmond area. Marion at bottom holding fish (?). Her mom, Margaret, likely sewed her dress.

I saw the movie An Education last night, scripted by one of my favorite authors, Nick Hornby, who is famous for being a ‘lad lit’ writer, but who seems to understand the female experience. How to be Good, his book about a middle-aged married mother of two really hit home with me. (It’s as if he had a camera in my bedroom!)

This movie, which is in a very European style, and beautifully-crafted, is about a 16 year old middle class English girl of substance and intellect choosing between being ‘glamorous’ or ‘scholarly’.

This is a key theme of Tighsolas and my book Flo in the City, which I am writing on this blog.

It’s central to women’s experience, period.

The Nicholson women, born in the 1883, 86 and 1892 respectively, were met with a similar dilemma.

As “new women’ in an exciting age of galloping change, they wanted it all. Love, fashion, fun, and intellectual stimulation. Especially Edith Nicholson.

Edith loved to go to ‘lectures’ – a popular pastime in 1910, as much as she loved going hat-shopping at trendy Ogilvy Department Store. But as a woman she couldn’t go to these lectures alone – she had to find a like-minded friend, and this really bothered her. Women out alone in the evening, back then, were seen as floozies.

Single women didn’t have much freedom in the 1910 era. Even when in their mid 20′s they had to be escorted almost everywhere, except, maybe, to church.

But have things really changed that much in 100 years? Can a single woman go out alone in today’s world?

By 1910 definitions, we are all floozies. And we have won equal rights. We can vote, too, if we want to.

But every time a woman (the younger, the whiter the better) goes missing anywhere in North America the news media gives it wall to wall coverage. The message: it’s dangerous out there for women, especially middle class women.

And even if most of us don’t have to wear a veil over our face in public, we do have to wear something else or face derision: make-up. In the Consumer Age, being frugal and looking frumpy constitutes scandalous behavior.

There’s this reality show where two host fashionistas ambush dowdy-looking women on the street to give them a make-over, whether they want one or not.

If the woman resists, all the better, the hosts enlist the woman’s friends in some kind of ‘intervention’ to convince her she needs their help.

Then the hosts give her $5.000 to go shopping.

A friend of mine simply loves this show. I found the episodes I watched rather distressing. One young woman, a teacher, was weeping when forced to give up her comfy clothes.

She didn’t want to change her style.

But, like an inductee in a cult (the cult of consumerism?) she eventually came around.

“Now, you can get yourself a better class of man,” one of the hosts told her. “She better find a better class of man,” I thought. “She can’t afford dressing like that on a teacher’s salary.”

Ugh.

Back in the 1910 era, Marion, Edith (and later Flo) all teachers, loved fashion and clothes. Like most middle-class women, they mostly made their own shirtwaists and princess skirts, or had mother Margaret, a talented seamstress, make them. They had no choice but to be frugal.

The Tighsolas letters are filled of talk of fashion.

Hats were especially big in that era, in both senses of the word.

D.W. Griffith, the pioneering American director, made a famous film about the issue called The New York Hat which starred Canadian Mary Pickford.

In the film, Pickford’s character, a small town girl, sees a ten dollar hat in a store, and wants it. The local Minister, who has been left money in trust for her, buys the hat for her. This causes a real scandal! The townsfolk assume she is being ‘kept’ by the minister.

In 1909, Edith Nicholson, who is making a paltry $200 dollars a year as a teacher without diploma buys a hat, “a big black shape with velvet ribbon and feathers” at Ogilvy’s for $7.50. Life imitating art.