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.”

Work and Play

Edith, Flo, Hugh Blair (Marion’s fiance in 1912) and Norman. 1912. Edith looks as if her corset is killing her. Hugh Blair, my husband’s grandfather, is part Cree and you can see this here.

I decided today, that I would have Flora try on (or contemplate) a number of potential careers. In the 1910 era, the mantra was that women could have any career they wanted (they could even become aeroplane pilots) but, of course, any reasonable woman aimed to be a housewife and mother.

This was nonsense, of course. Statistics Canada figures show that most women worked as domestics or in factories or in shops, or, if they were middle-class, as teachers.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, millinery was a glamourous and sometimes high-paying job.

As middle-class parents, Margaret and Norman would have been appalled had Flora had to work in a shop. (Girls without Academy educations (high school) worked in shops. Factories were out of the question. Poor women worked in factories.

Stenography and office work, which would become the pink collar jobs of the 1900′s, were just opening up to women.

Later on, Edith worked in a secretarial position for Sun Life Insurance, and I believe she took an actuarial course. Eventually, she found a home at McGill as a house mother for the women’s phys-ed dorm and as Assistant Warden at Royal Victoria College and later as Assistant in the Registrar’s Office. She was also high up in the Quebec Red Cross during WWII, perhaps the Commandant.