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.

Mom the Engineer -1910

Picture from a a book for houswives on how to properly fire a range, 1912.

If memory serves, and it probably doesn’t, the only time I ever saw an old fashioned wood stove, in my childhood, was when on vacation.

Summer cottages in the 196o’s were often still equipped with wood burning ranges (and outdoor privies).

I think we went to Magog once, (which is coincidental) and we had a woodstove which my brother found fascinating, more than I did. He played with the burners for hours.

My mother (who grew up rich in the city) probably found it a pain and my father probably stoked it.

Yesterday, watching the BBC Program the 1900 House on YouTube, I was struck with how the person who ran the range, (in this case the mom, like at Tighsolas) was an engineer…. she really had to know her stuff: it was critical to the happiness of the home.

Then I track down this book ont the topic on archive.org where it says this: “Modern stoves are machines used to convert any of the fuels mentioned into heat. The stove being a machine must be operated by an engineer, whether it be a man or a woman, housekeeper, cook, maid or servant.”

The book is written for American women and claims that coal is the best fuel as wood is running out.

Wood was running out in 1912 in the ET (that was settled in large part because of the lumber industry). The Nicholson letters reveal they fret over firewood all the time.

And keeping the house hot was an issue: Not so much the stove as Margaret was an expert engineer.

I conducted a search through the letters, for the ‘word’ fire yesterday and it confirmed what I already knew, that they always talked about ‘lighting fires” FIRES, in the plural.

Even during the great heatwave of July 1911, Margaret tells Norman that Edith and Flora are getting up to light the fires, giving her a break.

What FIRES. Is is this a figure of speech?

They had no fireplaces, it seems. There was a furnaces in the cellar (and the pictures of the place shows a large chimney going up the middle of the house and a smaller one on the side of the kitchen for the stove.

Yesterday, in my quest for veracity in my novel, I also found a book on Plumbing 1910 style and realize that they probably had a range boiler, a tank heated by the range, and hot water came from there…There probably was a tank in the attic, too.

So they did not heat water on the stove, except for tea. They used hot water from the taps.

And the letters mention nothing about heating hot water… so that’s fine too.

Anyway, in the 1900 House, the 1999 children hate the food, but the Mom does not know how to cook on a range and she has a small one.

The narrator says people in those days ate cheap cuts of meat and bland veggies. But this is where country people like the Nicholsons had an advantage. They still had the skills of their mothers, who knew how to cook well.

It was only the next generation, Marion’s generation, where the skills were lost, and the next, well, it was the beginning of the plastic food movement. My husband, Margaret’s great grandson, barely ate a fresh veggie in his childhood, despite being comfortably middle class. He says they even ate canned potatoes.

Cottoning on to the The Ripple Effect

Dominion Textile Cotton Plant Montreal 1909. McCord Museum .

The day after I visited Costco and purchased a few inexpensive sweaters I listened to a three part Afternoon Play on BBC Radio 4, called Severed Threads. It was written by John Dryden and was produced in England, the US and India. It was about child labour in the clothing industry.

Afternoon Plays tend to be brilliant and this one was no exception.

And somehow I know that this issue has to figure prominently in Flo in the City. Dominion Textile had a plant in Magog and it employed women and children and it is likely that some of these girls were underage.

I found some article in the Gazette re: cotton mills.

From 1909: The existing scale of wages is in the pursuit of competition amongst the operatives and the most important elements in this competition are female and child labour. It has been shown that of the operatives employed in the Quebec cotton mills, 42.3 percent are female and 26.6 are persons under the age of 18. As to the horus of labour of these two classes, it was asserted that in normal times under normal conditions work would begin on week days at 6:15 AM continue until 12 noon, resume at a quarter to one and continue until 6, with the exception of Saturday, when there was work only in the morning… The Quebec Factory Act calls for a work week not exceeding 60 hours for women and minors…

The article goes on to say some children employed were under 14, but that the company chiefs were surprised to find this to be the case..

From an Gazette editorial from 1911:

The fabrics of which the civilized man and woman uses extensively, certain processes in the making of which are attended to with grave risk of health and even to life. Apart from those that call for constant vigilance to escape injury to life and limb, there are processes which involve exposure to poison or irritating gases, extreme heat and other perils. Hmm.

All good stuff: I can have Edith read this.

I’m starting to figure out what Flo and the City is REALLY about, how all those white dresses they liked to wear impacted on the world. One of the archive.org magazines, either Maclean’s or The Canadian Magazine has an article called “The Romance of Cotton.” I have a book on hand from my research into my grandmother’s life in Colonial Malaya called The Romance of Rubber. I guess that’s how industries that exploited people and planetary resources, liked to be seen as: Romantic.

People who need people 1910

Impressionist Painting, sans couleurs? No, Dominion Park 1910. If I could figure out how to use Paint Shop Pro.

The Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec may have been cash poor, but they were connection rich.

And in 1910 Canada, connections were everything, especially for a gal who wanted a life, because women, even women in their twenties could not go out alone to many places. Edith Nicholson complains in letters about lonely nights cooped up in her room in the city, when she could be at a lecture.

(Eureka moment: It seems to be the the so-called social evil, the prostitution problem, was used against ALL women, as a method of control, for any woman out doing anything alone was a suspect. And any group of women wanting to live together was doubly suspect.)

Marion, Edith and Flora Nicholson had each other when working in Montreal, but more importantly, they had friends.

The Clevelands, (Dr. was a dentist) and the McCoys. When Marion was teaching in Sherbrooke in 1906-07, she stayed at Mrs. Wyatts.

The Nicholson women’s options were extremely limited, despite their education, or perhaps because of it. Teaching was essentially the only respectable profession they could enter, although Edith went to secretarial school. But without these connections in town, it would have been next to impossible for Marion to attend McGill Normal School. As explained in Flo in the City, my book about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/,

Marion had a hard time finding a rooming house, when first in the city. And later on, when she was determined to find her own apartment (quite scandalous) because she hated the way the rooming house matrons “lorded it over her” well, the McCoys were of help. She landed an apartment near them, no doubt with their help. Landlords in those days would not rent to a group of women.

Well, I just found out that that the Clevelands, Wyatts and McCoys were three of the founding families of Richmond and area. I just found and read “A Sketch of the Early Settlement and History of Shipton” by Reverend Edward Cleveland. No date, but I suspect it was published around 1860. (I found it on archives.org, but it has no publication date.)

In this book, which has been referred to for many subsequent histories of Quebec, he talks about the first settlers, the industries, the tradesman and about the hardships.

There are no Scots here yet. The McLeods, Margaret’s people, came in 1838 and 41 and the Nicholsons in 1951.

In his introduction, Rev Cleveland writes: The study of history is always interesting and important, inasmuch as curiosity is gratified by recital of facts and the experience of the past is spread out for our instruction in reference for the future. We learn thus to appreciate the present time and the advantages of which we must avail ourselves in the improvement of it. This is true, not merely on the great scale, but even when we descend to a humbler sphere and apply ourselves to the history of our own immediate vicinity. (You take also apply this to people. The great personages of history are interesting to learn about, the Lauriers and Royalty, but also ‘the lesser’ people, like the Nicholsons.)

Not that the Nicholsons were average. Just by virtue of having lived in Richmond, they had an advantage. The first Protestant School in Quebec was established in Richmond, as Cleveland’s book points out. Education was very important to the people of the area. (So no surprise that Sutherland became Superintendant of Schools in 1911.)

Indeed, Cleveland writes this: “The Library Associations recently established in Richmond and Danville with their various means of promoting intelligence and the best interests of the community, should not be overlooked. Our newspapers, periodicals and postal arrangements also have an important bearing on the interests of education.”

As I wrote in my last blog, libraries were never a priority in Quebec. It’s odd, newspapers were considered educative in 1860 or whenever this book was published (I just looked it up, 1858. Good guess!) In the 1910 era some people lamented the fact that the ONLY thing people read these days is newspapers.

Everything is Point of View

Left: Flo on the beach near Boston in 1908.

I posted this picture in an earlier blog, stylized a bit, but now I’ve re-scanned it and posted a clearer version. This is probably the clearest picture I have in the Tighsolas Photo Album of young Flora Nicholson.

The next clearest photo would be a studio shot for McGill Normal School – and that’s three years on in my story of Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 period in Canada.

As I write the first chapter Just a Change of Colour right here on this blog, and as I work out the fourth installment, I have come to a realization: I have to write this from Flora’s Point of View.

I have known this from the beginning of my project, but now I FEEL it. I am starting to put myself plunk in Flora’s place to write this. I am starting to inhabit her, which means she will become a bit like me. And that’s odd as I am more like her older sister Edith, I think.

This is a bit of a trick, as most of the Tighsolas letters are written by Margaret, Norman and Edith.

In 1908, there exists only one letter by Flora. She doesn’t write home, for she is at home. From what her correspondents say, she isn’t big on writing letters period, and I will ascribe this to her lack of self esteem.

She is often spoken about in the letters, of course. This was a close family.

Still, it is only when she is at teaching school that she writes home regularly, that would be in 1911. And, to be honest, I have to draw on letters written in 1914 and beyond, to steal some of her figures of speech.

So, in this next scene, I have Margaret going to Three Rivers, but I can’t write about that event: I have to write about the girls at home.

I will have Marion coming from Montreal to take care of Flora and cousin Mae Watters. Mae will have ‘teaching’ on her mind, as this is her last year at school and her sister asked her if she wanted to go into that profession in the letter in the last installment.

So here I can get in some descriptions of McGill Normal School and what it is like to teach in a country and city school. (This was a key issue in the era, the problem of rural schools and of city schools.)

I will use Marion’s diary from the previous year to reveal what she does in her spare time in Richmond. I will reveal Marion’s formidable take-charge character. (She became a union leader later on.)

All from Flo’s Point of View. Flo, who is failing at school. Flo who is the only one at home now, with her mother. Flo who is sheltered from problems, but who knows that the Nicholson’s fortunes have fallen dramatically, if not irreversibly, in the past year…and that nothing will be easy for any of the girls from now on. That is unless one of them marries well – and how likely is that?

In the scene where Marion advises Mae about a career in teaching, Mae will innocently turn to Flo and ask: Where do you see yourself five years from now? The question Flo has been avoiding. Flo, frazzled to be met with such a blunt question, will answer, “I will take up public speaking and become a suffragette, a militant brick throwing one, I will live in London.”

Marion: Well, Mother will be pleased, that’s for certain. But how will you eat?

Flo: Edith will support me, as she will marry that boy, what is his name, that friend of Gordon’s, who dropped in at Easter, the one who is studying dentistry at McGill

Marion: And we all know there is money in dentistry.

Flo: And you, well, by that time you will be principal of Royal Arthur. No better, principal of that brand new school in Westmount, Roslyn.

Mae: A much better class of student.

Flo: Yes. And Marion will meet a well-off widower, the father of one of her pupils, and marry him and move into a mansion on the Boulevard.

Marion: This conversation started out sensible enought, but it certainly has taken a turn for the silly. Let’s see about tea.