Apr
8th
2015
An interesting look in history... · 4:26am Apr 8th, 2015
While I don't like to turn this blog to a full political debate, I found this somewhat interesting...
The video made me open my mind a bit of the middle-to-upper class gender roles of 1910s. While one can argue this isn't the be-all and end-all example of how gender roles were in those times, it's a nice insight of how modern the view of today's was actually a concept and an idea in those times. It's also one of the most practical examples of good manners.
Enjoy.
My queen (female cat) has moved her kittens to under the couch. I can't see them anymore. I am somewhat resentful.
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Demon Eyes Laharl · 573 views
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Yeah there's been a trend recently to overstate how terrible societies treated women in the past. Women were always treated differently to men in societies around the world, which isn't too surprising considering our sexual dimorphism wasn't so easily overcome by technology and schooling back then.
However people claiming they were always treated worse can usually be attributed to plain ignorance. It's a shame history keeps getting painted in a false light. In most societies throughout history I'd prefer having the problems of women than the problems of men.
If you think about it, even back then, it was only really an ignorant idea and perhaps a figure of speech that keeping up a household was a small task. On the contrary, a hundred years ago, keeping a household was a task of titanic proportions. Imagine that 100 years ago - well maybe more like 120 - doing the family laundry was a whole day affair, so large a task that some of the children might've even been kept home from school, just to help with it. There were even some electric companies that would run electricity all day long (as versus only during the dark of night) on only one day of the week - to power electric irons for laundry day.
Having servants only meant that the lady of the house wasn't getting her hands dirty, but she would've still been (even as the guy quoted from the book) never finished with the day's work.
Hell, in these days, keeping a family household is still a whole day job.
If you want a good example of a not-so-typical housewife of yesteryear, read the story of Bertha Benz. She was actually a businesswoman who married the man whom she'd invested in, Karl Benz. In those days though, the husband had full legal control of the wife's money and stuff. But still, she had money invested in this crazy invention of Karl's, the 'automobile.' It's a pity the man never felt like test driving the goddamned contraption. So Bertha did it for him. She took her two oldest sons, snuck out in the early morning before Karl woke up, and, in a time before paved roads, gas stations, tow trucks, cell phones, or telephones at all, hell, not even road maps, she drove an untested prototype car 60 miles to her mother's house. She dealt with several break-downs and design flaws, inventing brake shoes in the process. Then she drove it back the next day, on a different route.
Like a fuckin' boss.
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Gives a new meaning to 'those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it', doesn't it?
Maybe I'm just being looking too deeply into it, or just realizing more of the world's ugly truths, but I'm not happy. People tell me the world is ugly for various of reasons, and I'm inclined to agree now, though on a very different side of the spectrum.
I saw the kittens today, so I got that going for me.
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I like her.
It strikes me that women were and are chattel just as women weren't and aren't- one only needs to imagine that more thasn one group of each gender exists.
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Can you clarify that point?
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The video makes it clear that for the advice to have been deemed necessary somebody would have to have been not following it. Presumably there would have been women getting mistreated just as there are now- places like Russia having less of a taboo when it comes to hitting girls for example.
It just seems that in tackling social problems with broad ideologies we create the sort of disjointed worldview that allows one to imagine the roaring 20s in America were somehow a wasteland of uninterrupted mysogyny.
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Ah, basically, there were bad people before. Okay.
I guess nothing has changed in that regard, eh?