When the going gets tough, the tough get going: and life was very tough for some people back in 1910, especially in the cities, especially in the slums and, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this web site, the slums of Montreal, Griffintown and St. Henri and Pointe St. Charles were second to none with respect to hardship, in North America at that time.

As Louise Black wrote in her article The New Woman (for the History of the 20^th Century serial, BCP publishing 1969), "The feminist struggle was intimately linked with the problems of the industrial revolution. It did not effect the peasant woman toiling in the fields. Nor did it effect the aristocrat of independent means. Nor did it effect the iconoclast, like Sarah Bernhardt, Colette or Isadora Duncan, who in any given society escapes the net of convention. The feminists were concerned with two classes of women, the industrial poor and the wives and daughters of the middle class. (In this case, Marion, Edith and Flora and the families of the children they taught at Royal Arthur in St. Henri and William Lunn in Griffintown.)

Of course, you can't dive into one end of a swimming pool without causing some ripples at the other. In 1910, the role of the society woman was also being challenged. The society woman who moved only within her social sphere, and lived only for her pleasure, was deemed a parasite. There was big work to be done out in the wider world and since men (rich or poor) were only concerned with making money, it was up to women to do it. And what better woman to set the example than the society woman, who had the money, the time and the connections to make things happen!

Here are some excerpts from an article "Is the Society Woman a Useless Person?" by Mrs. J. Borden Harriman.  Harper's Bazar, March 1913.

"It may be said of the society woman of today that she is a distinct factor for good because she cannot possibly be moved by any impulse for personal gain. The element of self-advancement is eliminated from her work. She does not wish public position. She works generally for others and not herself. She is a voluntary public servant and the public is fast awakening to the unselfishness of her position… The political arena today has witnessed the first effect of woman's interest in governmental affairs in a national campaign. Far more important than this field, is the direct work of women in their communities. From one end of the land to the other there is endless work to be done:

The sanitation of congested districts is a thing of importance. Why should not 'the city' have a woman housekeeper? How much longer is the world to wait for an intelligent organization of women, auxiliary to the city's board of health, which will police and inspect sanitation in homes of the poor as only women can?

There are so many things that are peculiarly women's province in the care of civic affairs: Take as example the question of women delinquents.

The question of housing working girls and women in cities is a big one. Up to the present time little      has been done.  (Read all about Marion's struggle to live independently in 1912 in the letters.)

Supervision of public amusements for the young is purely and distinctly women's problem, because women is the mother of the race.

The milk problem is another example. It is impossible to comprehend the suffering of tenements until it is seen at first hand. The concentration of human beings into such small quarters is incomprehensible until one has actually seen 8 living in a single room. The immigrant population, which is used to less constricted habitation suffers for want of air. Whatever hardships they endured in Europe, at least they had air!

In the slums, just as soon as a child is large enough to toddle down the rickety dark stairs of the tenement it finds its way among the pushcarts and the ash cans. Congestion of the population, poor sanitation, merciless heat, impure milk, a relentless army of evils, solidly array themselves against infant life. Woman's Proper Sphere 1910: What is women's place in society?