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

[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.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Tangential - I too come (partly) of Eastern European Jewish origin, but my branch of the family was the only embourgeoised one. The rest of the family continued as farmers in the shtetl, and I think even in 1939 a very large proportion of Eastern European Jews still led rural lives, particularly in Poland and Ukraine.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Interesting - in my family at least, there are no farming roots as far as I know. There are *rural* roots; e.g. my dad's paternal grandmother comes from a tiny village somewhere on the Ukraine-Poland border. But her father was the town apothecary. Likewise my mom's paternal great-grandfather was from a proper shtetl near Minsk, but he was a Hassidic scholar and so didn't have any occupation.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's a nationality thing? Upper-class really only refers to titled aristocracy in the UK. I wouldn't say being middle-classmeans affording private schools or having servants in modern day UK - if it does, only 7% of the population or so is middle-class, and I'm not, as the daughter of a university lecturer!

But in the thirties, my grandma was only just in the lower-middle-class (husband was a state primary school teacher, owned their own home, had lodgers sometimes), and she did her own housework with the help of a girl who came in and did. My mum and uncle, their children, were state-school educated all the way through. Nowhere near the class that would send their children to boarding school.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Naturally, different cultures are different - but Marxism is the same everywhere (especialy in the USSR!), so I think we're dealing more with definition drift than cultural disparities here.

Having a cleaner, even today, isn't really the same as having a servant, economically *or* socially. Doing one's own housework with the aid of another person who you pay and doing it with the aid of appliances that you pay for is of course very different ethicaly, but economically the two positions are roughly equivalent. It basically means that while you are not actually rich enough to treat cleaning as something that happens to other people, you are nevertheless able to offset some of your own time/effort with money.

Is it really only 7% of the population that sends their children to private schools? Not rhetorical - really surprised. I mean, what about the Diane Abbotts of this world and that - woul you consider her upper class? I think definition drift is at work here again, because not every private school (esp. faith ones) is an Eton or Rugby.

Plus of course let's not forget that yeah, the middle class *has* been steadily growing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, so if more people can afford the same things today (cars, schools) that only a few could afford in the interwar period, that's not actually that strange.

[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?)