Authors: Charlotte Gray
Not all reformers shared Clark’s assumption that working girls drifted voluntarily into prostitution through the casual bartering of sexuality. Toronto’s Local Council of Women had a different, although equally prurient, fear: the so-called white-slave trade. One organization reported in 1912 that Canada was losing 1,500 girls per annum to the international traffic in girls for brothels, and that many of the girls disappeared into the dens of American red-light districts. Pamphlets inveighing against this sex trade whipped up a moral panic. The Reverend Dr. John Shearer, a Presbyterian watchdog, talked of respectable girls being lured across the border like “innocent lambs go[ing] blindly to slaughter.” According to George J. Kneeland of New York’s American Social Hygiene Association, an unnamed “king” of the slave trade controlled three hundred men who procured thousands of young women who had been drawn to the bright lights of the city. (Kneeland made the preposterous assertion that schoolteachers were particularly inclined to accept the “yoke of slavery” because they resented the restraints put upon them as public servants.)
White-slave trade propaganda was as full of fantasies as Clark’s sensational claims about Toronto’s sex-ridden streets. The salacious appeal of such scenarios had made encounters between working-class
heroines and evil slave traders a staple of early silent films. The irony was that young women were often the main audience for such movies: if they could scrape together the ticket price, domestics like Carrie Davies and Mary Rooney spent their weekday afternoons off in movie houses, watching films like
Traffic in Souls
, thrilled by the flickering images of themselves transformed into vivacious and brave urban survivors. The popularity of these films with the so-called victims reinforced dark suspicions of working girls’ moral laxity.
The truth was that it was neither liberation from Victorian roles nor organized gangs that propelled women into prostitution. It was poverty, and the complete absence of a social safety net. Women’s wages were so low that they barely covered the cost of housing, food, and clothing. If a single woman lost her job, there was often nowhere to turn. Her downward fall could be rapid. If she “ruined” her reputation, she was transformed into a despised “fallen woman” rather than a pitiable figure more sinned against than sinning. A woman who bore a child out of wedlock, or wandered about the streets at night the worse for alcohol, was described in police or court records as “hardened” or vicious. Both contraception and abortion were against the law, so infanticide was a cruel but common occurrence, with as many as thirty dead infants a year turning up in the city’s privies, rubbish heaps, and vacant lots.
Carrie had lined up alongside several “fallen women” when she appeared in the Women’s Court, in front of Colonel Denison, the previous Tuesday. Her only shock would have been to find herself among them. Reports of women accused of infanticide, men acquitted of the rape of their servants, or girls lured into prostitution appeared regularly in Toronto’s evening papers. While Carrie was in jail, the
Star
featured a photograph of Lena Nisnevitz, aged nineteen, who had committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid. No reason was given for her painful suicide—readers like Carrie could fill in the missing details for themselves.
For two years, Carrie had also seen evidence of urban poverty on her afternoons off, when she left Walmer Road to catch an eastbound streetcar for a visit to Morley Avenue. With the rapid expansion of Toronto in the previous decade, and the arrival of thousands of immigrants, levels of destitution and street crime had shot up. Since the late nineteenth century, Toronto mayors had tried to control the public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, begging, and prostitution that characterized North American cities during these years. Carrie likely avoided the red-light district around Adelaide Street, but she couldn’t avoid crossing Yonge Street, where men brawled, barefoot children begged, and girls her own age openly solicited.
The most notorious area in Toronto was the Ward, which British-born girls like Carrie rarely entered. This was a warren of lanes and streets bounded by Queen Street to the south, College Street to the north, University Avenue to the west, and Yonge Street to the east. From the 1890s onwards, this area had gradually been taken over by waves of Jews from Eastern Europe. Living side by side with them, but in smaller numbers, were groups of Chinese, Poles, Finns, Italians, Slavs, and West Indians. Over twelve thousand foreigners were cooped up in the Ward’s mean streets in 1915. Unlike Montreal or New York, where poverty-stricken immigrants crowded vertically into multi-storey tenements, the Toronto immigrant quarter was a horizontal sprawl of roughly built single-storey homes that often housed several families. Window sashes sagged; roofs leaked; drinking water came from backstreet wells; Jewish and Italian ragpickers blocked the laneways with their merchandise; filthy backyard outhouses stank. Grocery shops displayed fly-ridden sides of beef, unfamiliar sweetmeats, and big dishes of melting fat in their windows. Rats scurried along the edges of buildings and clods of horse dung fuelled smoky fires. In spring, when the snow melted, a vile slop of dog shit, sodden newsprint, and discarded bones filled the potholes and puddles.
Few residents of the Ward had the time or inclination to notice the wretched conditions and pungent smells. They were too busy scraping together the money to bring to Canada the relatives they had left facing poverty or pogroms in the Old Country. Yet the Ward was not a relentlessly dark place. Its unpaved streets were lively with entertainers, local preachers, and small stores selling fresh vegetables. Women wearing brightly coloured shawls over their heads haggled in unfamiliar languages over prices. Today, we would describe the neighbourhood as “exotic.” But in the Toronto of 1915, it was “foreign.” Eighty-five percent of the city’s population still came from British backgrounds, and the terms “multiculturalism” or “melting pot” had yet to be introduced. The Ward, literally in the shadow of City Hall, was perceived as a both a physical and a moral scar on the city’s landscape.
Four years earlier, Dr. Charles Hastings, the city’s energetic medical health officer, published a report in which he described its overcrowding, unsanitary water closets, contaminated water, windowless rooms, filthy lanes and alleys, and cesspools rising up through the back lots. In one building, he had discovered seven men sleeping in a single room measuring seven feet by twelve, and in another house he found nineteen men crammed together in three equally small rooms. An insidious assumption underlay Dr. Hasting’s report—an assumption that the Ward bred not only dirt and disease but also sin. “A child born and reared amid such surroundings has about the same chance of escaping a life of shame or crime as an un-vaccinated baby confined in a pest-house would have of escaping small-pox,” he wrote. Moreover, the report suggested that it was the foreigners’ fault that conditions were appalling: Dr. Hastings did not even consider the possibility that the fault might lie with landlords’ refusal to upgrade their properties, or the city’s failure to provide services. He urged the obliteration of the Ward for health reasons.
The gulf between old and new Torontonians was already wide, and Dr. Hastings’ report widened it. A fearful, uneducated eighteen-year-old like Carrie might be defenceless and invisible, but on this divide, she was on the “right” side. Why? Because she was British. Nevertheless, she must have felt so vulnerable, and scared of ending up in some rat-infested hovel in the Ward. The appalling double standard of the day dictated that if she were branded as “ruined,” it would be seen as her fault, not her employer’s—even if he had forced himself on her. With her character besmirched and no reference letter from Mrs. Massey, she had little chance of finding another job. As a result of this Victorian hypocrisy, the prurient fantasies of filmmakers, journalists, and preachers were the stuff of nightmares for Carrie. She could be swept up by the white-slave trade. She could be forced to earn her living on the streets and find herself pregnant. Granted, Carrie Davies had a sister and brother-in-law to whom she might turn—but hadn’t they encouraged her to return to Walmer Road despite her employer’s fumbling attempts to kiss her? Maud Fairchild herself told Archie Fisher that Carrie “used to say she didn’t want to be a burden on anyone.” Carrie could see that the Fairchild household already had enough financial pressures without an extra mouth to feed. And her family back in England could not help: her mother counted on Carrie to send some of her earnings home.
Almost a century later, it is easy to brush away such fears. With women already shedding the cap-and-apron life of domestics and enjoying the regular wages and hours of office work, why didn’t Carrie learn how to become a “hello girl” (as telephone operators were then known) or an assembly-line worker in a factory? When the boys marched off to war in 1914, employment opportunities for women expanded still further. Jobs previously restricted to men were now opened to women: new jobs in military uniform factories were available. Within a few months, the Munitions Department in Ottawa would announce that women would now be permitted to work in
munitions factories, as long as they had a doctor’s certificate attesting they could bear the burden. Four thousand women across Canada, 2,500 in Toronto alone, immediately signed up. With her customary self-assurance and commitment to progress, Florence Huestis, from the Local Council of Women, rallied opinion behind the campaign to get women to come forward and temporarily take over men’s jobs, to allow the latter to fight for King and Empire. If Mrs. Huestis endorsed the cause, many felt that it must be the right thing to do. Women were elbowing their way into public life.
But not Carrie. She was not the kind of girl to grab the future in both hands; she was too timid, too conventional. Nevertheless, she had been swept up in the patriotic fervour that the war had sparked—recruitment drives, military parades, route marches through city streets, public drill sessions. The previous August, huge crowds had gathered in driving rain to see Toronto’s soldiers off to war. Military bands had played martial music on August 20 at Cherry Street Station as the first contingent left; by the end of the month, over four thousand men had gone. In her brief off-duty hours, Carrie had even managed to acquire the anonymous male admirer—a young man about to depart to the battlefront. Perhaps he was a friend of her brother-in-law. Or perhaps she had met him the previous summer, when she had accompanied the Masseys to their “cottage” on Toronto Island. While wealthy cottagers took tea on the verandah of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club clubhouse, their servants could spend their off-duty hours at Dotty’s Hippodrome, riding the switchback railway or taking a spin on the carousel. Or they could hang around the shooting gallery, hoping that one of the newest recruits to the Queen’s Own Rifles or the 48th Highlanders might hit a bull’s eye, win a kewpie doll or ice-cream cone, and look around for a pretty girl to give it to.
Carrie’s anonymous beau in Europe may not have realized that there was a shy eighteen-year-old in Toronto treasuring the memory of
a casual encounter the previous summer. There were many stolen kisses and impetuous promises in the summer of 1914, as young men, irresistibly macho in their new khaki uniforms, flirted with female admirers. Carrie always refused to disclose her boyfriend’s name, suggesting perhaps she knew she exaggerated the romance. Maud Fairchild was aware of her little sister’s soldier. But she was sure that Carrie was a good girl who would never do anything to bring shame to her family. As she sat in her kitchen in February 1915, with two small children clinging to her, she wondered what on earth her sister had been thinking. Archie Fisher exuded sympathy as Maud answered his questions and confided her fears to him. Carrie Davies’s sister gave the reporter all the ammunition he needed for his tear-jerking article about the vulnerable youngster from an impoverished British family.
Close to the article headlined “Family of Dead Man Explain the Tragedy” in the
Evening Telegram
ran Archie Fisher’s piece entitled “Mother Waits Carrie’s Letter, Sister Will Miss Her Letters.” It began with a poignant image. “In a hamlet in Bedfordshire, England—’Sandy Beds’ the villagers call it—a widowed mother and five young children look every week for a letter from a missing daughter and sister—Carrie Davies, the eighteen-year-old girl held for the death of C.A. Massey.” No matter that Sandy was never known as “Sandy Beds,” or that it was and is a grubby railway town in Bedfordshire rather than a picturesque “hamlet,” or that Carrie was charged with murder rather than passively “held for the death” of Bert Massey.
An equally poignant image ended Archie’s account of his interview with Maud Fairchild: “The tears that had been kept back so bravely came in a bitter flood of weeping—weeping that was not for herself.”
What a contrast with hoity-toity Mary Ethel Massey.
S
ATURDAY
, F
EBRUARY 13 TO
S
UNDAY
, F
EBRUARY 14
There was quite a stir at the [Halifax] steamship terminals today when the C.P.R. liner Missanabie docked from Liverpool, and fourteen “alien suspects” from the first Canadian contingent at Salisbury Plain disembarked under a strong guard, with each man handcuffed to a guard, and taken to Citadel
.
—Globe
, Monday, February 15, 1915
Mrs. C.A. Massey is bearing up bravely under the sudden blow. She was well enough to go out for a while today … The family still express the belief that the unfortunate girl will be adjudged insane
.
—Toronto Daily Star
, Saturday, February 13, 1915
T
he enforced passivity of the women’s hospital ward felt strange to Carrie Davies, whose days in service began before 6 a.m. with fire-laying and breakfast preparations. A handful of visitors relieved the prison tedium. News of Carrie’s whereabouts spread rapidly within the Fairchilds’ East Toronto neighbourhood, which led to a prison visit from the Reverend Robert Gay, minister at St. Monica’s Church. Next, Mr. Maw appeared; he introduced himself as her lawyer and explained the legal process she faced. He told her that both the initial hearing in the Women’s Court and the coroner’s inquest had been held over until she was in a fit state to attend and the police court magistrate and the chief coroner had established the facts of the case. She was a lucky young woman, he informed her. His partner Hartley Dewart had agreed to represent her in court. Dewart was one of Toronto’s most eminent courtroom lawyers—a King’s Counsel, an honorary title that denoted seniority and merit (and, frequently, good political connections) within the legal profession.