Women in the 19th Century: Crash Course US History

[lilah]

Interesting video about Women in the 19th century and how the industrial revolution created both the cult of domesticity and the nascent reform movements that included the suffragettes. This is of course the era that Lydia, Stinking lousewife and others fantasize about a cultural return to.

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[debrand]

I really enjoyed that Lilah

[lilah]

I highly recomend the entire series. They have several series about biology and chemistry as well as world history. The US one is still in progress.

[Claddagh]

Thanks for sharing.

A lot of these fundies who want to go back to that time period also think that all they will do is lounge around in pretty clothes and sip tea all day.

[Loveday]

Thanks for sharing.

A lot of these fundies who want to go back to that time period also think that all they will do is lounge around in pretty clothes and sip tea all day.

Hell, even Margaret Mitchell made it clear in Gone With The Wind that women of that time period didn't do that. Ellen O'Hara, who by all standards of the time was the very definition of a 'great lady,' worked from before sun-up til long after sundown; Scarlett couldn't recall a time when her mother just sat still and sipped tea. Even when she was sitting, she was mending something, only working on fine embroidery when there was company.

[debrand]

Thanks for sharing.

A lot of these fundies who want to go back to that time period also think that all they will do is lounge around in pretty clothes and sip tea all day.

They also imagine that they would be among the wealthy. They never picture themselves as the maid or factory person struggling to just keep their family alive.

edited: Imagine not image. I really need to double check my post

[Loveday]

They also image that they would be among the wealthy. They never picture themselves as the maid or factory person struggling to just keep their family alive.

Or the careworn wife of a subsistence farmer scratching out the bare necessities from poor, rocky soil up in the hills somewhere. :?

[lizziesmom]

Thanks for sharing.

A lot of these fundies who want to go back to that time period also think that all they will do is lounge around in pretty clothes and sip tea all day.

If they could go back and time and be reborn they mind end up with different color skin, owned by someone, and expected to work from sun up to sundown, never talk back, and have no say in their own lives or the lives of any children they might have.

[Anny Nym]

If one looks at the background of many of those SAHMs, it´s pretty clear they would have been along the subsistence farmers, factory workers, labourers at landsides, mines,... (there were actually QUITE a lot female ones, this often goes unmentioned in school history classes) or lower reputation trades like washing clothes for other people, selling used goods, etc... AT BEST they would have been a maid, cook or a "shop girl". AT BEST, as said.

Also alot of child labour would occur in this families (Well, okay, it already does...).

"Lady" Lydia, imo, would not be able to do better than a labourer due to her poor background. I also defnitely can see her as an occasional, at least, "Lady of the night" (which was quite common with poverty-ridden girls and women, out of sheer struggle for survival).

Not to forget, many of them would have already died of tuberculosis or in child-bed.

[danvillebelle]

Thanks for sharing.

A lot of these fundies who want to go back to that time period also think that all they will do is lounge around in pretty clothes and sip tea all day.

Makes me think of Almanzo Wilder's mother in Farmer Boy...his memory of her was that he NEVER saw her still...she was always moving, working, even when she was sitting down. She wove the cloth for the men's clothes, for crying out loud...with wool she spun from their own sheep. Yeah, that's a leisurely life all right.

Or let's think about the SMELLS from that time. People wore clothes over and over again. No AC, no deodorant. They bathed maybe once a week. Everyone was quite ripe. Even as late as the early 20's...I remember my grandmother telling me that her hair would get washed once a week and had hair oil put in it to tame it in between; by the end of the week it was an oily, dirty mess.

I'd love to see one of these fundies longing for that time do the weekly laundry for a family of 6 or 8, with nothing but an iron kettle over a fire and a paddle. And don't forget the diapers and the menstrual cloths.

Today is my great-grandmother's birthday; she would be 127. She lived from 1886-1984. She was positively GIDDY about every new cleaning or housekeeping upgrade through the decades and certainly didn't pine for the days when she had to cook everything on a wood stove.

[Arete]

Sounds like my paternal grandmother. She never met an embryonic appliance she wasn't going to put through its paces, so she wound up having one of the first model washing machines in 1938, got a fridge in 1949 which was almost unheard of for a merely middleclass woman in post WW2 Athens, pulled her saved money out of her mattress to get a linoleum floor in the kitchen in 1955 (much easier to clean), and those were just the purchases she still spoke of with love and pride when she was 90. If it made running the house easier, that woman was on it like white on rice.

She always had nothing but contempt for Luddites.