Who’s Who in 1910, Woman-Wise in Canada (and US)

Emma LaJeunesse, opera singer, known as Madame Albani. She was French Canadian and world renown.

I found a copy of a 1910 Canadian Who’s Who online and on one of the first pages I saw Madame Albani, the opera star, otherwise known as Emma La Jeunesse so I decided to scan the book to see how many women were included.

I first went to see if Julia Grace Parker Drummond was listed there, and she was! Her husband wasn’t, as he had just died. She had a long entry. “One of the founders and first President of the Canadian Women’s Club of Montreal (Montreal Council of Women.) And then her many leadership positions are listed. Lady Drummond is featured in my story Threshold Girl  www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf
and she will be featured even more in the follow up, “Edith’s Story” tentatively called the 1912 Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, www.tighsolas.ca/page11.pdf.pdf

I then went to look for Carrie Derick, not expecting her to be there : but she was. In 1910, she is listed as Assistant Professor of Botany, McGill. Her many academic accomplishments are listed (Gold Medalist, first female faculty member, McGill 1891), and leaves out her McGill Normal School teaching work. (Now, THAT says something about how low in people’s esteem teaching was held. In fact there are no educators listed in this Who’s Who, despite the fact there were quite a few women in that field.)

Then I went through the entire book, start to finish to see how many other illustrious female figures are listed. NOT MANY.

In fact, it seems any journalistic credentials got a young woman into the Who’s Who. A few articles published, a few poems. Nellie McClung is listed, but only as a minor writer. Lucy Maude Montgomery, who published Anne of Green Gables in 1908, isn’t there.

For an actress to be listed, she has had to won international acclaim, or at least US acclaim. And that pretty well goes for the other females listed. Hence Madame Albani.

And there are not many society women listed, which surprises me. A Society Woman only got listed if she had something to do with good works on her local council of women.

Now, taking a rough guess, there is one woman listed for about every three pages of men listed, with about 10 listings to a page. So 1 in 30 on the 1910 Canadian Who’s Who is a woman. And often it’s a woman of little accomplishment like Mrs. Valance Patriarche, Newspaper articles, magazine stories and a few poems.

Mary Riter Hamilton, the impressionist painters, isn’t there, and only one other woman painter. Mary Ella Dingham. Education Paris, France and Italy. Exhibitor in many European and North American exhibitions. President of the Women’s Art Association of Canada. And, of course, Emily Carr isn’t there either.

One nurse, one professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College near Boston. Miss Eliza Richie, daughter of a Supreme Court Judge in Nova Scotia. One doctor I think and no lawyer, although there was one famous woman lawyer being written about in the era magazines, Mabel French. I’ve a post about her on this blog.

And a missionary, working with her (more famous) husband.

Also a couple of musicians who have performed internationally. Miss Evelyn Street, Second Violinist, American String Quartet of Boston.

And just like today, there are Canadian-born women who have made a mark entirely in the US. Miss Annie Diggs of London, Ontario, worker for temperance, chairman of D.C. People’s Party and a Suffragette in Kansas. Writer of short stories and a lecturer in sociology.

Why is this interesting in the context of my story? Because in 1910, it was widely believed that A YOUNG WOMAN COULD DO ANYTHING when it came to the professions (although most sensible women wanted to be mothers and wives). That all doors were open to women. That no more barriers existed to a woman’s career ambitions.

Magazine articles featured stories about women making, say, 10,ooo a year, when the ‘average’ salary for a man was 1,000 a year.

Actresses were often featured in magazines, but in real life they were both put on pedestals and villifed as one step above a prostitute.

The two women scientists I see here, Carrie Derick and another I can’t recall the name of, were both botanists. I suspect botany was considered a soft science, because of its association with flowers and art.

In Threshold Girl I bring this up…as Flora Nicholson likes to draw so does well in botany.

But Carrie Derick’s botany background gave her credibility in a very iffy area, eugenics. And that situation will be tackled in the continuation of Edith’s Story.

I think I will have Edith peruse this Who’s Who.

The Americanization of Me

I had wanted to write about the Quebec Bridge Collapse, from articles of the day, but there are so many it will take a bit of focus and more reading than I usually do. That ‘disaster’ was covered in all the North American newspapers.

But I spotted a quartet of TV Guides from 1967 under the coffee table and decided to write about them.

(Doesn’t everyone keep such things at hand?)

I bought them off Ebay years ago, when I was researching my play, Looking For Mrs. Peel. I was looking for articles about Emma Peel and found one in the April 28, 1967 TV Guide with Lawrence Welk on the cover.

What a coincidence. That date is the opening day of Expo 67 and my play centers around that event, too.

Anyway, Cleveland Amory, the critic, loved Diana Rigg, but wasn’t so sure about the Avengers show.

Read my play at www.tighsolas.ca/page 745.html to see why.

Yesterday I wrote about early motion pictures and how the young often read the titles (is that what the are called?) to their illiterate parents during the show. (I learned this on BBC Radio Four’s program Going to the Flicks by Barry Norman, now playing.)

I must weave this fact into my Flo in the City book, of course. I’ll have one of Marion’s parents use this as an excuse for letting her son go to the motion pictures on school nights.

“At least ‘e is practicing ‘is letters.” Many or her students would have been new arrivals from England.

I have been on many an education literacy committee in my day. There’s always an ongoing debate over reading and parental responsibility.
The wisdom goes: read to you child, every day from birth, basically.

Now, my parents were highly educated, but they did not read to me from birth. They hardly read to me at all. My dad read me the Peter Rabbit feature out of the Montreal Gazette. My mother joined a few children’s book clubs, but then always failed to pay up so the books stopped coming.

I had a library card. The NDG Library for Boys and Girls on Queen Mary Road.

I read a lot of magazines that were lying around. And these TV Guides, especially the yellow teletype part, were a favourite of mine. “Mildrid Natwick is going to star in a Truman Capote play, Miram, for ABC. Capote is handling the adaptation himself.”

It was my father who subscribed to magazines: Time, Sports Illustrated and this TV Guide. Consumer Reports too. (We lived an Americanized existence.) My mother was not interested in the women’s magazines of the day. (She had no interest in being the perfect wife and homemaker, although she sometimes took recipes out of copies belonging to neighbours.)

My father claimed that Sports Illustrated had the best writing of any magazine.

My brother is three years older than me, and in later years, as a teen he bought all the cutting edge music magazines, like Rolling Stone as well as the Village Voice and other “underground” reviews.

And when I had the money, I bought my own magazines like Tiger Beat, but not often. I would have liked to buy Seventeen (and all the glistening goodies advertised in Seventeen) but I didn’t have the spare cash.

Now, the Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec also were big into magazines,too. Indeed, the 1910 era was the era of BIG magazines, with long long articles on the important social issues of the day.

I’ve bought some of them off Ebay for research into the Nicholson letters on. The old fashion magazines, like Harper’s Bazar, and especially the Delineator, are expensive to ‘win.’ I only have one of each, from around 1912. I have a 1902 and 1913 Ladies Home Journal.

The Nicholsons subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal, which was the most commercial of the ladies magazines, much more modern than the others, with lots of “lifestyle” advertising featuring large fancy graphics and much less print. (See: Modern.)

They also subscribed to the Westminster Magazine, a Presbyterian rag that claimed to be “broadminded in outlook, thoroughly Canadian in sentiment and grounded in practical Christianity.”

At their best the Presbyterians were all these things. And the Nicholson women were all these things,too, at their best. But do I always portray them at their best?

Of course, as I have blogged about, there was a VERY dark side to the Presbyterian ideology in the era. And I have to include that in Flo in the City. That’s a balance I have to strike with respect to Flo in the City.

I have not been able to find Westminster Magazines in the online archives. Too bad.

In short, the Nicholson girls likely read about important social issues when they picked up their mother’s magazines (except for the Ladies’ Home Journal).

I read about narcissistic nonsense if I picked up a women’s magazine in the 60′s.

“Yardley opens your eyes.” No, not really. That’s one of that youth-oriented company’s 60′s slogans and I use it in my Looking for Mrs. Peel story. I was trying to be ironic. Big Twiggy eyes were big back then.

There was one notable exception, Chatelaine Magazine. Under Doris Clarke (I think) that magazine tried to uncover uncomfortable truths about society and women’s lives. My mom did not buy it though. Reading these articles, now, in retrospect, they feel very dark. Not a mood you want to set to sell microwaves, hair dye and cigarettes.

The Nicholsons left behind this brochure.