Dorothy Nixon

Dorothy Nixon's Blog

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May.08.2013

E-books and Emmeline Pankhurst and the Last English Mayor of Montreal

Pages from my Grandfather's Montreal City Hall File. His post, Director of Services, created in 1921 was intended to streamline services in Montreal. This is an age of too much information and I don't mean only the news media. (Yes, I couldn't help spending some time yesterday reading the...

May.04.2013

How to Make a Militant (Suffragette)

One of two shelves about the Suffragettes in the McGill Library. Why pay 850 for a book when you can spend 10 dollars and a few hours and read it all the same? The only copy of Annie Kenney's Memories of a Militant on Abebooks is for sale for around...

Apr.26.2013

Why has there been no movie made about Emmeline Pankhurst, famous suffragette?

Emmeline Pankhurst, from her 1914 Autobiography. I wonder why no one has ever made a movie about British Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst? She's got a stamp and statue in England. A mini-series, Shoulder to Shoulder, was produced in the 1970's but that's it. Meryl Streep could do her....

Apr.16.2013

Bestsellers, e-books and Classic Lit

Magazine-style cover of Polly and the Circus, Margaret Mayo, published 1908, the same year as Anne of Green Gables. Mayo was a playwright and the Polly and the Circus play was very popular. The Nicholson women go to see it in 1912, at His Majesty's in Montreal. Flora Nicholson of Threshold...

Apr.15.2013

What would the Suffragists have thought of Mrs. Thatcher?

I see that someone came to this blog looking up information on Mrs. Philip Snowden's May 6 1913 speech. Lucky for them, I've done all the research! I imagine it is a scholar, probably from the UK, but part of me hopes it is a Canadian TV News Journalist. Journalists are...

Apr.07.2013

Of Suffragettes and Man-hating

Suffragettes march. The Montreal Suffragists didn't want to be accused of being man-haters, so they claimed their only goal was to 'protect the home and children.' "What's the word for man-hater?" a young man asked me yesterday. "There is none," I said. "There's misanthrope, the...

Apr.03.2013

Museum Adventure

A Suzor-Cote Masterpiece at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts This is the Old Museum on the North Side of Sherbrooke at Drummond. You can't enter by that side. I'm in the entrance - and am happy to be there. Boy, what a biting wind! And in April. With six inches of snow on the ground in my...

Mar.31.2013

If I can't say it in 1000 words, I don't want to say it

My husband and Veronica in Salinas County or close by last year. Better late than never? I don't think that adage is true anymore. By the time I've cottoned on to a new technology it's passe. (My 4 year old laptop might as well be a museum relic, my cell-phone is so dumb.. How dumb is it?? well,...

Mar.31.2013

Our Schitzo Consumer Age Values

My 20 dollar haul from Bulk Barn, wheat germ, Scottish oats, spelt spaghetti and millet. Far be it for me to poop on the Easter Bunny, that dentine-detesting harbinger of Spring. But hey. This morning, I drove to the nearest Bulk Barn , hoping that their spelt spaghetti was less...

Mar.31.2013

Picking a Lemon in the Garden of Love

We all have 'our thing'. This is my thing, or more to the point, WAS my thing as a tweenager. Glimmerick make-up by Yardley. In shades that resembled nothing found in nature, altough Yardley's 1960's advertising was all about transforming us Tweenagers into Earth Goddesses. The design of this...

Mar.31.2013

Mantel, Middleton and Moi

Threshold Girl by me on Kindle about 1910 Canada I bought Hillary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety to read on my Kindle... I'm enjoying it, a great history lesson. Her style is not elegant, rather choppy, but oddly effective and perhaps good for the subject matter ( choppy times,...

Mar.08.2013

My SAD SAD Forecast

The view I wanted (well, with March snow) Lake Placid. Library archives are dreary places to hang out, but this awful dreary spring it's 'six of one half a dozen of the other,' a line I have a character use a lot in my story Milk and Water, about corruption in Montreal in 1927. In my story...

Mar.04.2013

Beautiful Bronze women and suffragettes

The inscription under the statue of Edward VII in Phillip's Square, Montreal. Here's a video of the place. Funny, we don't really look at statues or monuments. They are a kind of 3-D wallpaper. And we only read the inscriptions when we are tourists...

Feb.25.2013

Ebooks and Changing the World

The cover of my ebook Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, an era when City Hall was beset by scandals and corruption.....Helloooooo. Technology changes us, but in ways we can't usually predict. Today, CBC news online has an article about e-books and...

Feb.23.2013

The Seriously-silly Roots of the silly Pastagate Business.

A scene from Everywoman a popular morality play of 1910 that used beautiful young actresses in sensual clothing to say women shouldn't be preoccupied with beauty and clothes! Sort of like today's anti-war movies that are full of exciting battle scenes! No Pasta or Rigatoni? Hamburgois instead of...

I appreciate you wit, wisdom and miraculous turn around time.”

—A Certain Editor

About Dorothy

I've worked in radio, television, advertising and P.R. and studied communications at McGill University, so it's no wonder that "the media" is always a character in my writing. I've published many essays and Op-Eds over the years on women's issues....

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Dorothy’s Favorite Books

Poisonwood Bible; the Taxi Queue; the English Patient; Alias Grace; Nella Last's War etc.