Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

[ailbhe]

Wait - all those maids and hired hands described as French are actually black, aren't they?

I think I preferred the books before I realised that.

Comments

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying re-reading the Enid Blyton St Claire's books, but ...

... why do none of the stay at home mothers drive? Why are some of them too busy to have their children home from boarding school in the holidays?

I could go on about how the girls look down on those less fortunate than themselves, but I shan't.

I still enjoyed the books over all again though.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Why are some of them too busy to have their children home from boarding school in the holidays?

Odd 1930s childrearing ideology? In The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which was written by a middle-class woman in the 1930s and 1940s, the mother's constant anguish is that she is un-PC for wanting to be affectionate towards her children and see more of them. The dominant ideology she's operating within seems to be that it is pure maternal selfishness to want to be with your children; the child-centred thing to do is to give them as much autonomy as possible once they have left home for boarding school.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

I know it was different then, but I didn't pick up on any of that when I read them as a child in the '70s. My husband went to boarding school & hated it & my ex FIL went at aged 7 :/ That's a bit boggling as my eldest is now 7 & I can't even imagine sending her away from me.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Where I grew up, only orphans went to boarding school. I've always found English kids' literature really, really weird for that reason. Like the Pevensie kids - why are they constantly on exile from their house? No wonder they get abducted by witches and lions, with such neglectful parents! =)

[sfred]

To be fair to Mr and Mrs Pevensie, when the kids are away in the holidays, it's because they're being evacuated because there's a war on. When they're away at school, they're at school, but I imagine there would have been a lot of social pressure on middle-class parents to send their kids away to school, in the same way that there's social pressure against home-educating now.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, but then they gallivant off to America for six weeks, take only the pretty Susan with them, and pack of the youngsters to stay with the hottible Uncle and Aunt Scrubb! Bad parents! No cookie! =)

[sfred]

Oh, I'd forgotten that bit. :/
I'd rather go to the end of the world on the Dawn Treader than go to America, though!

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Natch. But it's still nice to be able to blame one's parents for any psychological trauma incurred while doing it! =)

[jenett]

The driving, there's a good explanation for, so my mother (born in the mid-30s) once pointed out to me. Cars of that era often didn't have automatic steering, so it took a rather major amount of physical upper body strength to get the steering wheel to turn.

And since most women weren't encouraged to develop that kind of physical strength, most of them didn't drive.

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense, I was putting it down to a "keep the little woman reliant on a man" kind of thing. Though, these mothers travel by taxi a lot.

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Not totally sure what you mean by "automatic steering" - do you mean "power steering"? If so, I've driven a car without that regularly and it really doesn't require much strength. I have very little upper body strength and never really struggled with it.

[barakta]

I think there's also issues that cars in the 30s needed an Awful lot of maintenance, they needed winding to start, they often needed by modern standards a lot of ad hoc engineering etc.

Reading James Herriot's books lately, he discusses the foibles of the cars he was given to drive and mentions changing the wheel somewhere random in the Dales was a regular occurrence.

Also power steering is one thing, modern non-poowered steering another but I suspect 30s cars did take a fair amount more welly than that to drive. They were bigger and had fewer mechanical assistance devices like modern non-power-assisted cars.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

You're having a laugh, right? Cause early washing machines and vacuum cleaners also had fewer mechanical assistance devices, but somehow, what with not offering women mobility outside of the home, were never deemed too complex for the poor little female brain to handle, or the delicate little female hands to maneuvre.

Not to mention the fact that laundry the old fashioned way - by hand - took a great deal of upper body strength, but that for some reason was not transferable to turning the wheel of a car? Give me a break.

[barakta]

All of those tasks would have been done by maids and not by the mothers of "nice posh children what went to boarding school in the 30s"...

I'm not saying women "couldn't" do these things I am saying that nice women were perceived as not needing to, or shouldn't need to do those things cos that's what you had "help" for...

Individual women did drive in the 30s but I am sure it was radical and slightly shocking a bit like wearing trousers... And not what "Nice" St. Clares/Mallory Towers/Topsy & Tim mummies did.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Doing something raical and shocking is a bit different to doing something you're physicaly incapable of doing, though. If what you're saying is that these women didn't drive because the social perception was that they oughtn't/couldn't, fair enough - but I read what you said as "they didn't drive because cars back then required physical and mental skills beyond the female ken".

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Driving = independence. You don't want middle-class women being too independent! Plus, the "women can't drive and make a big mess of it" starts early: I've seen it in 1920s films.

(I never feel less independent than when I've got to drive somewhere, personally, and much prefer to be on public transport or on a bike. But that doesn't mean it wasn't independence for middle-class women.)

Diary of a Provincial Lady is great for how ladies of a certain class actually lived in teh 30s.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Or upper class women, or *any* women. Hence the moral panic about bicycles. Bet you didn't know that they will corrupt your character and harm your fertility, did ya? =)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

And these middle-class women would have been doing their own washing by hand? I don't think so.
Seriously, I don't like power steering, and Aunt Vera, who was a factory worker, never had a car with it, *and* she knows more about maintaining a car than my Dad who was a lorry driver for years. She still wouldn't drive her husband's Rover because the steering was too heavy for her and she didn't feel safe because of it. She also sometimes tells a story about how awful it was having to drive her cousin's big heavy car home from holiday when he'd broken his wrist. At a time when not that many people had cars *anyway* not driving just wouldn't have been as big a deal then as it is nowadays. My gran never learned to drive, my Mum still hasn't, and I'm only just learning *now* having moved out of London.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

I suppose that depends on your definition of "middle class". I'm from eastern European stock, so am proudly middle class at least five generations back, if you use the definition that was current in the pre-war period: professional, educated people with a certain degree of economic freedom and geographic mobility. My family tree is littered with doctors, teachers, professors and musicians, all of whose educated wives did their laundry by hand (up to and including my mother, in Seventies USSR), because money to hire servants wasn't something that automatically came with the class distinction back then.

If you use our modern definition of "people who own their own homes and have money for private schools and foreign holidays", though, then yeah - but then those moneyed moms should really be described us upper, not middle, class.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Eastern European Jewish stock, that should have been. Not a lot of farmers in that lineage.

[jenett]

I do mean power steering, sorry - brain somewhat fried by other stuff in my life right now.

Her description was that - at the time her family got their first car, which was early 30s, it was a lot of work even for the young men in the family. (I seem to remember her saying it was a different kind of strength, too - because it's twisting, not lifting or pulling, etc.)

There is also the question - yes, you have that strength, and I do, and so on. But we also have decades of practice building that strength, in all sorts of ways. If you spend your life not being encouraged to develop the strength, the muscles don't just appear magically when you get a car.

You can look at this with some vintage clothes: the arm holes are *tiny* compared to what we're used to in some cases, and it's not because the overall size is that different - just very different amounts of developed muscle.

(The thing that's currently eating my brain is providing coordination and support for a friend who just had hip replacement surgery. Her hip was injured when she was 5, so there's 40+ years of *not* using certain muscles going on, on top of everything else.

We keep having to remind her physical therapists that it's not a matter of getting 'back' to where she was pre-surgery, but that she was adapting around it for so long that the muscles most people have there don't work. They might sometime in the future, with more time to develop, but right now, focusing on other ways to do the needed stuff - getting into and out of bed, for example - is probably more use. Likewise, if driving is hard work, messy, and complicated, maybe you take taxis or trains or all sorts of other options instead.)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I bloody *hate* power steering, neither of my cars have had it, and Auntie Vera never drove a car with power steering... but we've always had small cars. She *did* comment on the fact that the Rover her husband bought in the early 60s to replace a string of motorbikes was *very* heavy - and she was a factory worker. So, yeah, that, I think, is where the women=bad drivers thing *comes* from - it *was* bloody difficult to steer old cars.

[velcro-kitten.livejournal.com]

Also there was "clutch, declutch" to change gear and stuff, never mind actually starting the thing.

BTW on the subject of the Canadian "underclass" did Creoles and Arcadians feature at all?

And can I borrow Anne at all, it's been a lonnngg time (are we forgiven for Swine flu?)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I re-read them recently too and came to a conclusion that like most blatantly rubbish excuses* of the time, "too busy" is probably something medical (poss. mental health related) and/or reproductive, like caring for an ill relative, depression, or the menopause - things that make the mothers "less" than their usual sparkling socialite selves and therefore embarrassed to be seen by their future sparkling socialite daughters in case they get the message that women of their class can get by for a while without wearing makeup, silk stockings and a perfect hairdo and twinkling around the place all day. That's a bit of a guess though.

*there is a better word for this but I am too dizzy to remember it

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

another thing that spoilt a lot of enid blyton rereads for me is how the "bad" kids are almost always ugly. also damn, but that woman has some *awfully* sanctimonious protagonists. still, loads of fun when i was in the target audience, so i can't complain :)