Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s

In 1966 I was a typist at Eaton’s College Street in Toronto. My sister Stella did payroll at their downtown location. In those days, if there was no chance of getting a higher education, a girl was told she could be a teacher, a nurse or a typist. We chose the fastest road to a paycheque.

We worked a forty-hour week. It was heads down with little chit-chat among employees. We clocked in and out, lunch and breaks, with a punch card that determined your pay. If you were late to work twice you were fired. Short skirts or tight sweaters and you got sent home to change and then come straight back.

I scrolled through microfiche when customers claimed a return but had no receipt. People tried to shaft the company so I had to find those bills. My eyes burned out on this machine. We got paid once a week, cash in a small brown envelope. The envelope was always crisp and clean, just like the dough inside. It made you feel special the first few times you held it.

We cleared $38 a week, after tax. Stella and I lived in a tiny room with single beds that sagged badly. There was the smell of bug repellent but we never pinned the source. This was in a rooming house on St. George Street, sharing a kitchen and bath with seven guys who stole our food and toothpaste, so after a while we kept that stuff in our room. The men were ghosts who drifted, apparently without work.

Our landlord was well-worn and had a trick eye; he didn’t trust single girls and told us, “I don’t have no truck with any Villagers, so don’t even think about it.” We didn’t know what he meant by that but his tone was ominous so we held our tongues.

We paid $12.50 a week each for the rent so this left $25.50 for everything else: food, makeup, streetcar tickets, clothes, medicines, birthdays, Bell telephone and entertainment. We never had the dollar cover to get into the clubs in Yorkville but the doorman accepted kisses at Chez Monique, so we were able to catch John Kay and the Sparrow and David Clayton Thomas and Rick James fronting the Mynah Birds. Between sets we’d hang out front of El Patio, catching riffs from the Paupers or near the Purple Onion to hear Luke and the Apostles pound out their tunes. 

We stared at the clothes in Eaton’s and dreamt of the day we could afford store-bought dresses. Instead, we took patterns plus three-yards-for-a-dollar cotton home to Mom on weekends. She continued to sew our clothing until we married a few years later. We also bought old men’s pants from the Salvation Army and cut and stitched them to fit us; the boys in the bands would ask us where we got them when we copied styles from Carnaby Street we had found in magazines.

A huge bran muffin cost fifteen cents at the Woman’s Bakery. For supper we would clean out a can of sardines. Bread pretty well got us by for a number of years as it was cheap and easy. We bought Red River cereal and milk. We only knew how to fry eggs and ate Gay Lee yogurt when word came down the pike that it contained vitamins.

On weekends we hiked the mile down Spadina Avenue to Kensington Market, then still known as the Jewish Market, and bought giant butter tarts from Lottman’s Bakery from the half-price tray. At Moishe’s Delicatessen you could get a large bowl of borscht for a dollar and it came with two slices of fresh rye bread. One time we were so hungry that I went to the Scott Mission just below College Street. (Stella didn’t want to be seen with the homeless but I didn’t know the meaning of the word pride.) I can still recall what my bag was filled with—a frozen fish with a broken tail covered in ice, a box of Tang, plus dented cans of broad beans. The bag I brought home for Stella had horse meat but it was rotten. 

One day I asked my boss why girls were paid such a pittance and he said, with a surprised look, “Women don’t need to earn money; they have husbands. That is why we only pay them pin money.” Pin money. I was too embarrassed to ask him what he meant.

Google says: “Originally a small allowance given to a woman in order to purchase clothes etc. for herself. More recently it is used to describe any small amount of money which might be earned by children or the low-paid for some service.” 

“Lay-by” was what we knew if you needed a coat, bed, lamp or chair. When Stella and I moved into the brownstone on Avenue Road we rented our furniture by the month. Winter clothing was an expensive necessity; you worried yourself sick that you would not have enough cash for the birth control pills. You wore your shoes ’til the soles were flapping.

After work we hung out and listened to great thumping live rock, soul, and rhythm and blues filling the air from club doors up and down Cumberland, Avenue Road and Yorkville Avenue.

When Stella and I switched to working at Bell Telephone our salary skyrocketed to $80 a week. We could have rented a small apartment. But I wanted to travel to England and find the Rolling Stones (which I later did, just down the road from my rooming house in Chelsea) so I saved every dollar, making weekly payments for the one-way ticket by ship to England in the spring of 1967.

In London, I worked at Harrod’s Department store and was told to enter “underground, at the back, through the horse stables” so the customers would not see me. The pay in London was a shock; seven pounds a week and it also came in a brown envelope. My shared room cost three pounds and I had Tube fares and food to buy. I was back on the treadmill only this time going faster than before. Workers got luncheon vouchers which kept us alive. For my year in London I lived on bread and rice. A man bought me a lager at the Six Bells pub and I felt like a queen. 

I went to Biba Boutique on Kensington High Street and ogled the wonderful clothes, mesmerized by the sight of young people with money parading up and down in trendy gear. It remained a mystery to me as to how they could buy this stuff. The pop stars walked around Chelsea and nobody molested them. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones would pull up to the Chelsea Potter pub in his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and order a hamburger through the window and everyone pretended not to notice. I ran into him one day at the Battersea Fun Fair dressed in his Satanic Majesties costume and he seemed like a ghost of a man.

I grabbed the chance for a free trip to Spain to work at the first all-inclusive resort for the English. The boss sized us up and chose the seven girls with the strongest legs. We were paid seven dollars a week plus room and meals to work sixteen–hour days, seven days a week. We watched the English working class practise free love and drink ’til they vomited. We heard the Guardia Civil would beat you for holding a boy’s hand in public.

We ended each night in bars soaking up rum and erupting into existential chatter. My co-worker hid and fed her Spanish boyfriend. He derided the young, wasted English boys and they in turn denounced his culture. Then they would slug back more Cuba Libres, slap each other on the back and debate ’til the small hours which was superior: American blues or English rock? It cannot be overemphasized how much the music of those times was our passion, our focus and obsession. 

We thought that life could never get any better than this.