Good old days

[DarkAnts]

I get so annoyed when people talk about the "good old days". The good old days were crappy for most of America. This picture is a good example. It shows a group of girls who have been selling baskets on the streets for 11 hours. The girls look tired, hungry, and sad. They did this to support their family. Wives also worked. Everyone worked because it was the only way to get food on the table. Many worked hard and could not afford to feed their families. So fundi's I say FU the 1900's were not glorious. It was a time of great hardship. Women and daughters did not stay at home and get PhD in homemaking. They worked 12 hours a day and then came home and worked to clean the house and cook dinner.

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For more pictures of child labor go to this link

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Edited to sound more coherent.

[DarkAnts]

Here are some more pictures from the series

6 year old news boy. On the streets by himself selling papers instead of being in school

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4 year old girl shucking oisters. Her mom also shucks them sometimes while holding a baby.

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[uber frau]

I really don't think most fundies would mind. There was a big thread discussing QF families who couldn't afford to feed their kids just last week and we all know of children who miss out on their education (if you can call the SODRT an education) because they are too busy raising their younger siiblings.

Come to think of it, that first photo looks similar to the procession of dead eyed children that appear on Sarah Maxwell's blog. If it were in colour, the children were a little cleaner and there was a crappy caption underneath it ("Sweet sisters" or "Three of the F. children"), it would fit right in. The difference is now days the situation is 99% avoidable, yet fundies choose to put their children in these situations (and rail against ppl who do otherwise).

[DarkAnts]

The conditions for a SAHD and a child labor are different. But, labor laws were different then. Children could do dangerous tasks and die working. SAHD dont run the risk of having their scaled ripped out while working in a textile factory or dyeing due to lack of oxygen from working in a mine. I do not doubt that fundis would be all over this because their arrows become money makers.

[rock_girl]

I don't think fundies truly understand their place in the pecking order. Even fundie royalty, save for the very, very, very, very successful few are generally nothing more than upper-middle class. The 1%? Heck no. Yet they're convinced that the only thing between them and independent wealth is the ebil taxman and his socialist agenda. There was a great article in the New York Times a few months ago that explored this strange disconnect that the teabagged have with their anti-government views, despite taking tax credits and other direct or indirect forms of welfare. What I saw in those profiled was a belief that they were the ones being 'robbed' by Obama and co, that they actually identified with the Mitt Romneys of the world. Bloody bizarre.

That is why fundies can look at images of eight year olds who've worked 12 hours straight and not see their own children in those sad, haggard faces. God's magnificent doctrine of trickle down economics and tax cuts for the wealthy is hardly going to exclude the faithful, is it? Abolish taxes, abolish regulations and it'll be like Christmas every day for all the unvaccinated, toothless fundies with poor diets and ill-fitting shoes. Praise Jesus!

[Cerdwin]

http://www.shorpy.com/

I love this website for historical photos. There are some wonderful photos of families 100 years ago, very poignant.

[Sweetpea1]

My grandpa was born in 1892. He had maybe a 2-3rd grade education. He had to work at a very young age to help FEED his family. My grandma had a bit more education - 8th grade. She also went to work to help provide for her family. There were 10 kids in my grandma's family. When you hit about 16, you were out of the house (very little room.) It was no where near the fundified version of the 1900's.

[shrillharpy]

Thanks, Cerdwin. Now I'm addicted. ;)

The phenomenon of "false nostalgia" is a pet irritation of mine. There's a human tendency to look back on the "good old days" through rose-tinted glasses, but I think it bears remembering that even the richest person in the world in 1920 could have died of something a simple antibiotic can clear up today. It's rational tidbits like these that the fundies don't want to hear.

And like rock_girl mentioned, the fundies clearly don't understand where they would have been in terms of their placement in society. For whatever deluded reason they think they all would have been members of the landed gentry, when in truth they would have had an even tougher time coming by the necessities of daily life than they do today. Also, given the limited income potential and work ethic of most of these "headships," even scratching out a living would have been a much tougher proposition in a world without various "ministries," TLC and the interwebz.

[dawbs]

ooh ooh, can I add a family one?

It's not a 'sad' picture, but, it shatters the whole 'keeping the home' thing

See that woman wearing jeans, pumping gas? Wearing not just pants, but JEANS?

that's grandma in the late 1940's/early 50's

My gramps ran a gas station. My grandma worked there because she said that's what people do...they do the work that needs to be done, regardless of gender.

She was also a baptist Sunday school teacher (she bought into the patriarchy of church more than I'd like to admit), kept an immaculate house, and was a wiz in the kitchen.

In fact, when she was a SAHM for a short while, between jobs, her kid would go out into the neighborhood and would find salesmen and lead them home because 'mommy is bored'. ;)

So, once the gas station closed, they needed the money and grandma needed the stimulation of working.

so this is grandma at her next job in the 50's and into the 60's:

Yep, that gold star is the real thing. (She was assigned more 'female' work, but she still had her badge and gun and was called on to hold her own when things happened...transporting prisoners, jail riots, shootings at the courthouse-those are the stories she told me) .

Still while teaching baptist Sunday school.

They can pretend that 'good girls' didn't ever work, but folks like my grandma told me that you what needs to be done, never-mind whether you wear skirt or pants.

[crassy]

What gets me is that they think that women used to just sit around and look after the kids. Sure, they were usually responsible for the child rearing, cooking, cleaning, but also gardening, looking after any animals, milking, canning, pickling, salting, selling at the market etc. Women were also usually the finance keepers given that husbands (at least agricultural workers) were out in the fields for pretty much all of the daylight hours. Women who were married to merchants also usually worked long hours in whatever shop, as did their children, until those children reached an age where they could work on their own outside of the house. Only the incredibly wealthy would sit around eating bonbons.

Jesus, haven't any of these fucking idiots picked up a Dickens' book?

[lizziesmom]

Jesus, haven't any of these fucking idiots picked up a Dickens' book?

They must at least have read his stories on debters' prison.

[crassy]

They must at least have read his stories on debters' prison.

I think maybe we are too optimistic about their reading abilities. :(

[Claddagh]

My great grandmother was born in 1899 and grew up in a very poor family. The oldest child was the only one who could go to school so when he came home he'd teach the younger children what he learned. When she's asked about the "good ol' days" she'd become angry and say "They're gone! Thank the maker!"

My grandmother was born in 1927. She's talked about stories from her childhood and says "I don't miss the 'good ol' days.'" She had some stories about the Great Depression and WWII that would break your heart.

[2xx1xy1JD]

You mean the good ole days of tenaments with sky-high infant mortality, of TB epidemics, of young girls working in factories where industrial health and safety were ignored so that they would die in fires (google triangle fire new york), of husbands abandoning families and leaving them destitute, of children born out of wedlock being used as virtual slave labor (see http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/specia ... 43895.html).....

Growing up, we got stories about the "olden days", but not the "good ole days".

My grandma does have some good memories of her time with an underground pro-communist group in the 1950s, but somehow I don't think that counts for these people.

[NurseNell]

My Dad was born in 1904. He always said the good old days was just a myth. His parents had both gone to college so he had some advantages when it came to material goods. But his mother had 5 children die in childhood, 3 from diphtheria, one after a fall (I'm guessing a subdural hematoma), and 1 son who had seizures (he had a craniotomy in 1901 though I'm not sure for what). His mother was always sad. My Dad's sister died, as a new mother, from polio at age 21. My Dad said the sidewalks were either boards or just mud paths. The streets weren't paved except for a few major streets. Even well built homes were cold and drafty in the winter. Doing laundry was an all day affair. Cooking took much longer, no convenience foods like cake mixes, etc. He used to get mad when people used the term good old days, he said they were damned hard.

[shrillharpy]

dawbs, can I just say your grandma is adorable? That is all.

[Anxious Girl]

My grandmother was born in the 1940s in Italy; and so was her husband; except in the 1930's. She said that she loved the Amish; because it reminded her of how she lived back home. :shock: This surprised me when I was little; because I thought that all countries at the time had the same living standards as Americans did during those times in the 1940's. Now; I know better. My recent great-grandmother who was born in Italy in the early 1900s'; died in 2009. Her husband was captured in North Africa (Egypt/Libya) during 1 of the wars.

She didn't tell us of life when she was little; and she did so rarely. When she did; my grandmother had to translate the Italian dialect into English. I still remember when my 2nd cousins were trying to persuade her to get a cellphone. It was quite funny. They were like to my great-grandmother; "Nonna (grandmother in Italian) this will help you talk to your family back home!" And she's like in broken English; "What do I need this piece of junks for when I have my regular phone?" Both my grandparents only have a 4th grade Italian education.

I had 3 great-grandparents in the early 2000s.

[Swamptribe]

It saddens me no end when people ignore reality and instead embrace some idiotic fantasy that has no connection to reality. We see this type of mentality in 'fundies' of all sorts. The embrace some fantasy ideal that has no basis in reality or fact. They declare it to be 'the truth', and then become frustrated and angry when the real world does not match their fantasy world.

[jenny_islander]

Oh hell yes. My late MIL worked like a mule every day of her life until her health broke and raised 7 kids. If she hadn't worked, the family would have gone hungry, because my late FIL was already working every hour of the day that wasn't required for basic self-care (such as, you know, sleep) and money was still in short supply. In the halcyon '50s she was working 12-hour nursing shifts. In the prosperous '60s she was the cook at a remote fish processing plant. (The whole family was out there all summer.) She did all the bookkeeping for the family and planned the weekly budget. In the '70s she was helping out at the family sawmill because my late FIL had cancer. Then she raised the last few children at home all by herself. And worked. Because sitting around helplessly waiting for somebody to assign her a new headship would have been as stupid as a turkey sitting out in the rain. (Her words.)

[jenny_islander]

It saddens me no end when people ignore reality and instead embrace some idiotic fantasy that has no connection to reality. We see this type of mentality in 'fundies' of all sorts. The embrace some fantasy ideal that has no basis in reality or fact. They declare it to be 'the truth', and then become frustrated and angry when the real world does not match their fantasy world.

It would just be sad and pathetic if the fundies didn't have any political influence. But they do have political influence. Enough to cause legislators to write laws addressing that imaginary world. Check out Fred Clark's Slacktivist blog for some alarming collections of laws that were proposed and sometimes passed by people who seem to think that Left Behind is a document sent to us from the future. If they're that disconnected from simple rational thought, how many people could they hurt because those people disrupt their elaborate fantasies by, you know, existing?

[Trynn]

Yes, I just got to hear all about that this morning (though the guy talking wasn't fundy, MAYBE fundie lite, but I would classify him as just really conservative.) he said, "things have gotten much worse these days. there are xxxx (don't remember exact numbers) of dropouts today...."

Ummm... does he not realize that this number has actually gone DOWN since the 18/1900s? You know, before there were laws stating that children HAD to go to school, back when kids would get pulled out of school to work because they were so poor? The person who said this does value education (obviously, he's at a college) so I don't get it.

[jaynie]

I made this comment on Libby Anne's blog the other day, but it seems pertinent here. I was recently looking up the Earl of Shaftesbury for unrelated reasons and found out that one of things he is noted for it pushing the Mines and Collieries act in 1842. This act forbade women and children from working in coal mines etc, where previously they had been working 12 hour shifts completely underground (for less money than the mens, obviously). Working in a mine is hardly the picture of dainty femininity, is it? Irritatingly, the reason that the act passed was that polite Victorian society was horrified at the idea of women and girls working in pants and often shirtless, around men and boys. Not because people died or anything. But it does tell us again that the pretty image of the Victorian woman was not true for a lot of people.

My great grandmother was most likely a cockle-woman in wales. When my dad (who is very physically fit and likes outdoorsy sort of work) told me this I said "that was hard work, wasn't it?" and he said "I wouldn't want to do it!" very emphatically. But cockle-picking in that area was the domain of women for centuries, despite being very laborious and occasionally very dangerous (people have died doing it even recently).

[jenny_islander]

It gets worse. The little diggings that went off the sides of the main coal shafts were just big enough to admit a child--crawling on his belly--with barely enough room for him to use his pick. There was no ventilation to speak of. Often there wasn't any light. Little kids worked 12 hours down there, on their bellies and elbows, chipping out the coal from the exposed seam. They died down there. Got maimed. Got black lung. Couldn't take it anymore, ran away, and starved because that was the only work available and there was no support for poor families. Or ended up doing whatever they had begged not to be made to do because it was even worse than digging coal.

There was no engineering reason to make the seam access so tiny. Why did they do it? Because they could always find more children to stuff in there, and children were cheap.

ETA: This wasn't one bad mine or one bad mining corporation. This was all of them. Because in the Good Old Days of unfettered capitalism, the invisible hand of the market determined all.

[Glass Cowcatcher]

Once again I have gems from my stash.

[linnea27]

My grandma was forced into an arranged marriage when she was 12 or 13, to a much older man who regularly beat the crap out of her. I don't know all the details surrounding her parents' decision, but as it was depression-era, I suspect they had too many mouths to feed. Good old days indeed.

Fortunately, when my grandma was 18 or 19, she got a little emotional and financial help from a physician who was sick of seeing her injuries and she found the strength and courage to leave- along with her three kids. She passed herself off as a war widow and managed to support her small family until she met my grandpa years later.