Marie Blanchet is a fictitious character but her life and experiences are very real. She is typical of many young cotton workers at the turn of the century. The mill at Valleyfield, though not the only cotton mill in Canada at the time, was the largest. Cotton processing was the only significant industry in Valleyfield, and dominated the entire economic life of the immediate region. Valleyfield lies on the St. Lawrence River thirty-five miles southwest of Montréal. In 1908, the Montréal Cotton Company at Valleyfield employed some 2,500 workers, most of whom were French Canadians, to process raw cotton imported from the southern United States into yarn and then into fabric. Our story takes place in 1908, by which time the cotton mill had been operating for thirty years. Marie Blanchet belonged to the second generation of workers the parents of whom had come mostly from the surrounding rural areas. Marie and her friends had grown up in the shadow of the mill's crenellated towers, and because women formed forty percent of the mill's labourers, Marie's experiences are typical of a large segment of the work force.
Marie at Work
In June, 1908 Marie Blanchet was seventeen years old and had been working in the weaving shop at the cotton mill for three years. As a child she brought her father his lunch and became acquainted with his job at the mill. Marie left school at the age of eleven to help her mother with the house work and the younger children. Of her nine brothers and sisters, two are married; in all, six members of the Blanchet family work at the mill. When she was just fourteen, Marie's parents managed to get her a job at the mill so that she could supplement the family income. Marie was happy to leave the household for work in the cotton mill which she thought would be more exciting. After several months, however, Marie began to feel the strain of the work, and, now, each day at the machines seems longer than the one before.
Up at five o'clock, Marie has breakfast and then walks for fifteen minutes to the mill where her day starts at six-fifteen. If she is even one minute late, Marie will lose the equivalent of one half-hour's pay. At twelve-fifteen, after working for six hours without pause, a bell signals time for lunch. Like her fellow workers, Marie eats quickly near her machines since she has only a half-hour for lunch. After lunch, the looms are set in motion and do not stop until five-thirty. Except for Saturdays when she works until noon, Marie spends almost eleven hours a day at her machines, a total of sixty hours a week. From November to March, she enters the mill before dawn and leaves after dark. At home Marie has supper at six-thirty and then helps her mother with various household chores. By about nine o'clock, she is ready for a good night's sleep.
At the mill, Marie is responsible for seeing that the looms operate properly. She spends the entire day going from one loom to another to be sure that the shuttle which interlaces the threads as it moves back and forth does not become tangled. Though her work does not require physical exertion, the concentration it demands results in nervous strain. The things that bother Marie most are the noise, the heat, and the humidity. Weaving requires a high degree of humidity so that the various operations can be carried out smoothly and the threads will not be brittle. The heat and the noise are the result of poor ventilation and the hundred or so looms running in the shop. When Marie returns home from the mill, she is often too exhausted to eat. In fact, many of her fellow workers suffer from anaemia due to poor nutrition caused by loss of appetite.
There are fewer children in the area where Marie works than in the spinning department, where a considerable number help their parents and, at the same time, learn the spinning trade. Of the 2,500 workers employed at the mill, three hundred and seventy-five (fifteen per cent) are under sixteen, and one hundred and fifty of these are fourteen years of age or less although a provincial law passed in 1907 made it illegal for children under fourteen to work. Workers between the ages of fourteen and sixteen must know how to read and write. Those who do not must take evening courses provided by the government for the workers in Valleyfield. The absentee rate is understandably high since few workers are able to spend an hour and a half in a classroom after eleven hours of exhausting work. Even though parents might be reluctant to send their children to the factory, one person alone could not feed and house a family. And so entire families, like the Blanchets, work at the cotton mill.
Like most workers at the time, Marie is paid a piece rate; her wages, therefore, vary from week to week. This year she will earn approximately seven dollars for sixty hours of work a week. This is less than last year since the company has reduced the wages of all its employees by ten percent. Marie's father, a machine repairman, earns about twelve dollars a week while her young brother earns a mere $4.50. Like her brothers and sisters, Marie gives her parents all of her earnings.
Family life
Marie's mother manages the family's finances. With the children's wages supplementing the family income, the Blanchets' financial situation is quite good. The family is even able to pay back the money borrowed during the years when Marie's father, alone, had supported them. Mrs. Blanchet gave up her job when she married since very few married women, even those without children, work at the cotton mill.
The Blanchet family lives in area known as Bellerive, situated west of the cotton mill. Valleyfield has no distinct working class area since virtually everyone in the town works at the mill. The Blanchets own a small two-storey frame house with a living room and large kitchen on the first floor and four bedrooms on the second. Marie shares a room with two of her younger sisters, and although space is limited, she does not complain for she has never known better living conditions.
Leisure time
With her work for the week over at noon Saturday, Marie has Saturday afternoon and Sunday to devote to other activities. On Saturdays, she usually accompanies her father to the market. She finds the bustling activity of the marketplace very exciting with local farmers selling fruit, vegetables, and meat to the townspeople. Mr. Blanchet shops primarily for meat since the family grows vegetables in a small garden behind the house. He purchases various other small items from the merchants on Victoria Street. A favourite Saturday activity for many townspeople is a winter skate on the canal, but the Blanchets cannot afford to buy skates.
Sunday begins with Mass at the small Catholic church in Bellerive. The family never misses religious services. Sunday afternoons Marie knits or sews, visits relatives and friends, or goes downtown with her brothers and sisters. It is a festive occasion when relatives come to visit the Blanchets on a Sunday, and there are sometimes twenty-five or thirty people in the house. These family get togethers do not last late into the evening, however, since everyone has to be at work early the next morning.
The union
Like her fellow workers, Marie belongs to the local unit of the Canadian Federation of Textile Workers which is made up of workers from several Québec industrial centres such as Montréal, Magog, and Montmorency. Founded in 1906, the Federation reached a peak in 1907 with a membership of some 7,000, including most of the workers in the Valleyfield cotton mill. As far as Marie is concerned, it was the union that brought about wage increases and considerably improved working conditions. CFTW pressure on the company between 1906 and 1908 had, in fact, resulted in a twenty-five percent average increase in weekly wages ($6.50 to $8.00). In addition, the union prevailed upon foremen to treat their workers with more respect. When Marie began work at the mill, she lived in constant fear of a reprimand from the foreman who supervised her work. The workers are still awaiting the government's reply to their demand for a reduction in the work week from sixty to fifty-five hours, with the work day to begin at seven o'clock. Marie, like many fellow-workers, does not enjoy getting up at five o'clock in the morning.
Unfortunately, this year is not a good one for the union or the workers. An unsuccessful strike severely weakened their union. When the Montréal Cotton Company decided to reduce the wages of all workers by ten percent, they decided to strike. The work stoppage lasted four weeks without any defections in the strikers' ranks. But when the company refused to back down from its decision, the workers, who were not far from the breaking point, returned to their machines. Marie's father, who had had to borrow money in order to support his family during the strike, lost confidence in the union. By the end of the year, with the support of the membership lost, the union had all but disintegrated.
To make up for her lost wages, Marie has agreed to supervise two additional looms. Because of difficult conditions in the cotton industry in 1908, the workers fear a reduction in work hours or even a total shutdown of the cotton mill for several weeks. This would mean, of course, that Marie's already meagre earnings would be reduced or lost altogether.
We might wonder why Marie did not rebel against what we might think are intolerable conditions and against a life which offered little avenue for change. Some of Marie's friends might have done just that, but Marie and most of the girls she worked with knew little of any other world. Her parents and her parents' friends, most of the members of her parish in fact, worked in the mill and were grateful to have work. Marie was proud of her skill as a weaver; certainly her life was not without satisfaction. She could leave the mill when she married and would one day encourage her own children to help each other learn a skill just as her brothers had taught her the rudiments of weaving.
For every rebel whose name is recorded in history, there are thousands of workers like Marie who live out their lives accepting what comes and doing the best they can to maintain a sense of personal accomplishment and dignity. Marie's story, while perhaps unexceptional and unremarkable, is a common one and, therefore, an essential chapter in Canadian labour history.
