Authors: Charlotte Gray
The Davies’s poverty was not unusual in the area, which until recently had been a largely agricultural district. Families at the bottom of Sandy’s social scale (and there were only three thousand residents) relied on small holdings, where they grew their own vegetables and
kept a few chickens and a pig. Children slept head to foot, several in one bed. No one could afford a doctor, so mothers relied on traditional remedies such as applying brown paper coated in goose grease to bronchial chests, or soaking toes swollen with chilblains in urine. A little girl like Carrie could earn extra pennies by collecting acorns for the pigs, picking mushrooms, blackberrying, and catching sparrows for sparrow pie. Mrs. Davies took in sewing, and probably participated in the local cottage industry of lacemaking.
But when Carrie reached her twelfth birthday, there was no money to keep her in school or feed her in the crowded Davies cottage. Moreover, the demands of sewing in an ill-lit cottage had ruined Mrs. Davies’s eyes—”the doctor told her to leave off as she was going blind,” Carrie would later explain. It was time for the thin, probably undernourished child to leave home: as Charles Dickens wrote, “the poor have no childhood; it must be bought and paid for.” Carrie was sent to an aunt in London to learn the skills required for “service,” as domestic work was known. As a domestic servant, Carrie might be able to put aside a little money to send home. And “service” was more respectable than the limited other options for young girls such as fieldwork, or (in the north) work in textile mills. Her aunt was apparently very strict: Maud Fairchild said Carrie “went out little, but always to Sunday school.”
When she was a skinny thirteen-year-old, Carrie was eligible for her first job. Small for her age and easily intimidated, she bravely packed up her few possessions into a small trunk and set off for Aldershot, on the other side of London from her mother in Sandy, to work as a maid in the home of an army officer who had known her father. In his article, Archie Fisher didn’t include details of Carrie’s employment history before she left England three years later. Did she stay with the Aldershot family, or switch to another house? Was she treated well or badly? Was she ever allowed a night off, and could she afford the third-class rail ticket she would need to visit her mother? We don’t know.
Servants are everywhere and nowhere in history. Carrie and women like her worked too hard to have any energy left for writing diaries or letters, and if any of them did manage to scribble down something, it has probably been lost. When a youngster like Carrie went into service, she walked into the shadows. The underclass of servants in middle- and upper-class homes was expected to be “seen and not heard,” exhibiting deference and modesty. In
Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, published in 1861, the famous guru of Victorian domesticity wrote, “A servant is not to be seated, or wear a hat in the house, in his master’s or mistress’s presence; nor offer any opinion, unless asked for it; nor even to say ‘goodnight’ or ‘good morning,’ except in reply to that salutation.” It was a hard, hard life. In novels set in city homes, writers of the period—from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf—rarely mentioned the women who kept their characters’ gowns ironed, brass shined, and chamber pots emptied. The only exception to this rule is Charles Dickens—but too often, in novels like
The Pickwick Papers
or
David Copperfield
, the servants provide one-dimensional pathos or comic relief.
Yet at least until the Second World War, middle-class households throughout the British Empire ran on servants, and most women expected either to be servants or to keep them. Without electricity or many labour-saving devices, domestic labour was strenuous and time-consuming. And being “in service” differed dramatically from other forms of employment, because the live-in status of household staff required personal relationships with their employers. Today, if we try and imagine the lives of servants, we are most likely to think about armies of well-treated staff in an aristocratic establishment like TV’s
Upstairs, Downstairs
or
Downton Abbey
, where the population below stairs is as comfortable and self-sustaining as the one upstairs. But most female servants were drudges—maids-of-all-work like Carrie, expected to work alone for sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, for paltry wages. Their
skin glistened from steam and sweat, and their hands were raw and red from being dipped in cold water and dried on coarse aprons. If any man in the household deigned to notice the “slavey,” as such domestics were known, and was tempted into careless sexual exploitation, it was the maid’s job that was at risk, not the employer’s reputation.
Nevertheless, even girls as young and naive as Carrie knew more about their employers’ personal tastes and habits, marital relations, and family conflicts than anyone outside their homes. When there were only one or two servants, the lives of employers and employees were intertwined. As she scoured grease and hair from the bathtub, or laundered soiled underwear, or prepared meals, a servant in a middle-class home, however vulnerable, wielded a precarious power. But a girl like Carrie was unlikely to use it.
While Carrie learned in Aldershot how to scrub floors, dust pelmets, carry loaded trays, polish silver, starch linen, cook a decent leg of lamb, and lay fires, two older sisters had achieved what was still universally regarded as the most desirable destiny for a woman: marriage and children. With their husbands, they had also managed to flee Britain’s class-ridden society. One sailed off to Australia, the other to Canada.
Arriving in Toronto in 1908, Carrie’s sister Maud Fairchild had quickly found her feet. Her husband, Ed, had a skill much in demand in the rapidly growing city: he was a bricklayer. New stores and offices, working-class cottages and row houses, and whole neighbourhoods of solid-brick middle-class homes were springing up. Ed got a job in the thriving construction industry as a foreman with Jas. R. Wickett, Ltd., a building firm, and the Fairchilds rented a home in the working-class neighbourhood of Leslieville, at the very end of the Toronto Railway Company streetcar line, where there were several brick factories. Soon there were two more Fairchilds: first a son, Bobby, and then a little girl, Joyce. Maud stayed at home on Morley Avenue with the children, and
on Sundays (Ed’s only day off) the little family crossed Gerrard Street and attended St. Monica’s Anglican Church.
As Toronto expanded, Maud could see that its emerging professional class was eager for the same creature comforts as its British counterpart. The papers were filled with articles about “the servant girl problem,” as the chronic shortage of domestic servants was called. The Canadian government paid agents to recruit young women in the British Isles for domestic service on the other side of the Atlantic. An agent who brought a servant girl to Canada could earn more than $15 (around $1,400 in today’s terms, given the rise in the value of wages since then): a $5 bonus from both the federal and the provincial governments, a $2 commission from Ottawa for finding her a job, and a finder’s fee from the girl’s employer. Youngsters who arrived by themselves, with no relatives or friends in the New World, often faced loneliness and exploitation. But Carrie would have a sister here. And Maud decided that Carrie, who was four years younger than her, could find a much better job in Canada than in England, where the supply of trained household servants outstripped demand. So Maud sent her younger sister $45 for her passage.
As soon as sixteen-year-old Carrie arrived in Ontario, she went to work for Mr. and Mrs. Charles Albert Massey on Walmer Road. The wide-eyed young immigrant, with her stick-thin limbs and hunched shoulders, was their only live-in servant, on call twenty-four hours a day, with Thursday and Sunday afternoons off to visit her sister. Carrie carried her suitcase up to the stuffy attic bedroom, where she found her new uniform laid out on the thin straw mattress—a black cotton ankle-length skirt, plain dark blouse with long sleeves and detachable white collar, white cotton apron, and white cap. Eaton’s sold such self-effacing uniforms on the third floor of their Yonge Street store for about $2.50. Employers insisted on uniforms because they reflected their own genteel status. Moreover, it meant that their maids were not
dressed in their mistresses’ cast-offs, leading to the embarrassment of the employee being mistaken at the door for her employer. Carrie was paid $14 a month plus room and board for her first four months, $15 a month for the next four months, and $16 a month after that. But Mrs. Massey took the cost of Carrie’s uniform out of her first few weeks’ meagre wages, and when that was paid off, Carrie started to pay her sister back for her transatlantic ticket. Once that debt was settled, her thoughts turned to her widowed mother in England, and her needs.
“Only last week,” Maud Fairchild told the
Evening Telegram
’s Archie Fisher, “she had $30 ready to send home.” At Christmas for the past two years, Carrie had sent presents to each of the siblings who remained in Sandy with her mother, “down to little three-year-old Marjie, the youngest, of whom she was very fond.”
Carrie Davies was one of thousands of young women drawn to Toronto to work “below stairs” for Toronto society. Canada’s largest English-speaking city attracted youngsters with little schooling from farms and villages throughout Ontario and the Maritime provinces, as well as those like Carrie from England. New arrivals scanned the “Help Wanted, female” advertisements in the newspapers for cooks, kitchen maids, parlour maids, ladies’ maids, and maids-of-all-work. According to the 1911 census, there were nearly twelve thousand women in domestic service in Toronto—about one-quarter of the total number of single “working girls” in the city. Their hours were unregulated and their wages pathetic.
At Walmer Road, Carrie was plunged into the demanding but inflexible routine followed in middle-class homes across Canada. Lily Reid, a young Ontario woman who went to work in a small-town rectory in 1912, would later recall the monotonous weekly schedule
of “washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, Wednesday for baking and extras, Thursday for upstairs cleaning, Friday for downstairs, and Saturday to make all preparations for Sunday.” With coal or wood fires as a main source of heating, soot and cinders coated furniture, floors, and drapes. Washing was done manually, wet clothes were dried on an outside line no matter how cold the weather, and women like Lily and Carrie ironed the garments with heavy steam irons on a kitchen table padded with blankets.
In addition, Carrie was expected to prepare the family meals, using ingredients with unfamiliar brand names (Five Roses Flour instead of Spillers, Redpath sugar instead of Tate and Lyle), strange new vegetables (corn, squash), and even confusing new names for products she had used in Aldershot (lard was called shortening in Canada; biscuits were cookies; scones were biscuits). On Thursday afternoons she might go to the local YWCA to meet her friend Mary Rooney. On Sunday afternoons she tried to reach the Fairchilds’ house in time to attend the evening service at St. Monica’s Anglican Church nearby. But it was always a scramble to get there on time: as the Masseys’ only live-in servant, she had to prepare supper for the family before she hung up her apron for her afternoon “off.”
However, by the time Carrie arrived in Toronto in 1913, the growing commercial and industrial metropolis was spawning a wider range of jobs for women. While middle- and upper-class women like Florence Huestis were joining clubs, committees, and associations and agitating for social change and the right to vote, working-class women were voting with their feet. They walked away from domestic service in favour of jobs as sales ladies, stenographers, waitresses, switchboard operators, and production-line workers. Toronto’s new sweatshops in the garment district required dressmakers, sewing-machine operators, hat makers, knitting-machine operators, box makers. The workforces in commercial bakeries, paper-bag factories, and book binderies were overwhelmingly
female. And these jobs offered both set hours (ten to twelve hours per weekday, plus a half day on Saturdays) and better wages than domestic service—up to $10 a week (the equivalent to an unskilled wage of $950 a week today). This was still just over half the average male wage in similar jobs, but it was far better than Carrie’s $3 a week ($285 today) from the Masseys, even though office and factory workers had to cover the costs of room and board themselves.
Toronto authorities were profoundly unsettled by the speed with which unmarried women turned their backs on jobs as round-the-clock “slaveys” in dingy basements. These were the days of “Toronto the Good,” where a Morality Department had been established within the police force in 1886. A man employed in a factory or sales job was regarded as a family’s essential breadwinner and an indispensable cog in the wheels of industry. However, a woman employed outside a home was regarded as a potential moral problem. City fathers didn’t like the idea that young single women working in offices and factories were no longer safely lodged in family homes where middle-class matrons would keep a close eye on how they spent their off-hours and whether they went to church.
The city fathers were howling in the wind, completely out of step with what young women wanted: freedom. The women themselves flocked to live in boarding houses or shared apartments and enjoy unsupervised fun. Photographs taken in pre-war Toronto show gangs of “good-time girls” cavorting in the waves on Scarboro Beach during the summer, while in winter they piled into sleighs in High Park (both these activities were forbidden by law on Sundays). Vaudeville houses, nickelodeons, and dance halls actively courted their custom. Their high spirits and easy ways challenged conventions.
Who wouldn’t prefer the camaraderie and chatter of a garment factory, however cramped and noisy, to the grim loneliness of a damp basement? But the women who took jobs in factories, offices, and shops
“lingered in the murky light of sexual suspicion,” as historian Carolyn Strange has put it. In 1898, Toronto journalist C.S. Clark had published a book called
Of Toronto the Good
. A lurid look at the underside of the “Queen City,” it was a deliciously shocking read. Clark painted a picture of rampant sin and corruption, and insisted (with little evidence to support his claim) that the city was “an immense house of ill-fame.” He argued that most girls were lured into prostitution through moral weakness and cupidity, and described how a woman signalled her availability with “a flash from her eyes.” If a woman exchanged glances with a man, she was obviously fair game. How was a decent man supposed to know the difference between flirting and soliciting?