The American Family: 100 yrs ago vs. now

[SquirrelySquirrel]

This should be required reading for the fundies.

As the century comes to an end, many observers fear for the future of America's families. Our divorce rate is the highest in the world, and the percentage of unmarried women is significantly higher than in 1960. Educated women are having fewer babies, while immigrant children flood the schools, demanding to be taught in their native language. Harvard University reports that only 4 percent of its applicants can write a proper sentence. There's an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among men. Many streets in urban neighborhoods are littered with cocaine vials. Youths call heroin "happy dust". Even in small towns, people have easy access to addictive drugs, and drug abuse by middle class wives is skyrocketing. Police see 16-year-old killers, 12-year-old prostitutes, and gang members as young as 11. America at the end of the 1990s? No, America at the end of the 1890s.

The rest of the article can be found here.

ETA - I just realized this is from 1999, but still, the points stand.

[fundiefan]

I actually remember reading that, or something very much like it, ten years ago.

[mythoughtis]

And, yet, this is the simpler time that many folks want us to go back to... and that the fundies seem to think they can recreate.

[CanadianHippie]

Just goes to show how ignorant they truly are about what it was like "back in the day".

[bananacat]

Deleted because I misread.

[Wolfie]

Haven't read it yet- but a couple of my great grandparents grew up with divorced parents. (one great-great grandfather remarried, and named his next family with similar names, the daughters were all jewels... Another great grandma went to court to get her inherited property back in her own name, then married a guy 30 years her jr. Her daughter married his widowed father....) Yeah, 1890's were not that different from now in some ways, just that women had less rights and could be legally abused.

[ladypuglover]

In my state, there were killers in prison as young as 11 years old back in the mid 1800's. No boys ranch, no out reach but prison for these boys. The youngest killed a man for his watch and never once felt remorse for killing him for a cheap pocket watch... he just wanted it, didn't need it to support his family. In the women's prison, there were girls who were addicted to drugs and plying the oldest trade for kicks as young as 11 also. Same time period.

One could buy opium and morphene at the corner drug store. Women would over dose their children/babies just to be able to escape motherhood. Buy a little posion and off your dead-beat husband. Stick a hat pin through a baby's soft spot. Someone falsely accused of doing a crime? So, what hang him anyway. All examples found in our local prison museum along with much, much worse.

Good old days filled with child crimes, either by the child or on the child, weren't so good days after all. And those are just the ones who got caught, many more never were. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[formergothardite]

What! Do you mean that in the past all women didn't sit around in pink, floofy dresses sipping tea while the men strolled in the background in black suits and wearing top hats? And didn't spend all day sitting at the feet of their mothers gazing up in adoration?! Say it aint so!

[Feberin]

I love Stephanie Coontz! I used that article for a paper in high school.

[clibbyjo]

MY Grandma was born in 1909,got married at 16 to a man 30 years older than her because he was a friend of her fathers and her father wanted her "settled down" because she was a flapper. Yes, those were the days.

[Wolfie]

MY Grandma was born in 1909,got married at 16 to a man 30 years older than her because he was a friend of her fathers and her father wanted her "settled down" because she was a flapper. Yes, those were the days.

:) My great grandma got married in the 1920's at age 16 (she lied about her age and went across state lines where the legal age was a year younger so she didn't have to get permission.) But her parents didn't care and they drove out to CA together for a honeymoon, with my great grandma and her mother wearing bloomers and helping her dad and husband drive the car.... She too was a flapper- but her parents had lived together for several years before they were married, and she was born in that time, so I don't think they were too worried.

[Hane]

:) My great grandma got married in the 1920's at age 16 (she lied about her age and went across state lines where the legal age was a year younger so she didn't have to get permission.) But her parents didn't care and they drove out to CA together for a honeymoon, with my great grandma and her mother wearing bloomers and helping her dad and husband drive the car.... She too was a flapper- but her parents had lived together for several years before they were married, and she was born in that time, so I don't think they were too worried.

Another flapper's granddaughter here. My grandma was born in 1896. She dropped out of school at 14 and forged her widowed mother's signature on working papers in order to get a job in a shirtwaist factory. We have a picture of Grandma, in her '20s, with bobbed hair and wearing a suit with knickers, sitting on a motorcycle. She didn't get married till she was 28 because she was having so much fun as a single gal. Because of her hard work, she entered marriage with $12,000 in savings. When Grandpa, an architect (the first person in my family to get a college education), lost everything in the Depression, she did piecework at the kitchen table, while raising three kids, to bring the family back from the brink.

Nah--no pink ruffles and tea-sippin' in my family of origin.

[gardenvarietycitizen]

I love Stephanie Coontz! I used that article for a paper in high school.

HA. Hadn't clicked on the original article yet when I saw your post, but I'm not surprised in the least it's her! "The way we never were" is awesome.

There's a similar book more about technology and labor called "The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!" by Otto Bettmann. 15000 dead horses a year on the streets of NYC, for mere starters. Great read, and goes well with "The 1900 House" and similar TV shows.

[dawn9476]

It is crazy that fundies want to go back to the days of the 1800's because like I said in the Laura Ingall's thread, most families faced numerous obstacles back then and the times where they could "relax" and fall into traditional roles were probably not that long. Parents were also extremely lucky if they saw at least one child survive to adulthood. It was not uncommon for a married couple to have lots of kids and only end up seeing one become an adult. Many died in birth, as babies, during childhood, or as a teen.

[jenny_islander]

I've been reading issues of Harper's Bazar from the 1860s and taking a virtual tour of the Merchant House Museum, an upper-class urban home preserved from that era. Do the people who idolize these folks realize that the beautifully dressed wives who had special caps to wear just at the breakfast table in order to look pretty for their husbands also expected to wear heavyweight wool boot-slippers inside the house because it was so cold? That they took it for granted that at least one of their well-dressed children (packed away in the nursery for most of the day and taken out to display to the parents for an hour in the evening) would die?

Harper's Bazar, for all that it is a fashion magazine, reported on a New York City mother--alive about the time the owners of the Merchant House were choosing the gold-veined black marble for their mantelpieces, a couple miles or so away--who decided to poison herself and her children because they were starving anyway.

An issue published within a few weeks of that one reported on a baby who almost died from sucking on a piece of colored string because nobody was regulating what the Victorians put in all those fancy goods they bought so assiduously, so the colorant in the string was poisonous and dissolved quickly in spit.

[fundiefan]

The fundie perception of family and daily life in the past is as accurate as their historical facts. Meaning, they make it what they want it to be while ignoring what it was.

If they want to go back to the 19th century, I'll happily contribute to the creation of a time machine to send them there. A one way ticket with no ability to ever return to the 21st century. But, in order to go they must agree to live there at their existing socio-position and keep their same ideals.

[jenny_islander]

The thing that ticks me off about how perfectly the home is supposed to run is that those 19th-century household manuals all presume that there is at least one servant. Instead of keeping servants, these modern 19th-century lifestyle fantasists make the young teenage girls living in the house do unpaid drudge work. Young teenage girls working in Victorian homes that had no other servants were called tweenies because they spent a lot of time hurrying between upstairs and downstairs to get it all done; they were widely pitied because their lives sucked. Plus, people who made tweenies do all the work when they could afford to pay older, better-trained servants were not exactly regarded favorably.

[Wolfie]

The thing that ticks me off about how perfectly the home is supposed to run is that those 19th-century household manuals all presume that there is at least one servant. Instead of keeping servants, these modern 19th-century lifestyle fantasists make the young teenage girls living in the house do unpaid drudge work. Young teenage girls working in Victorian homes that had no other servants were called tweenies because they spent a lot of time hurrying between upstairs and downstairs to get it all done; they were widely pitied because their lives sucked. Plus, people who made tweenies do all the work when they could afford to pay older, better-trained servants were not exactly regarded favorably.

Actually The American Frugal Housewife, an early Victorian housekeeping manual, strongly stresses putting the kids to work to keep the house going- but not just the girls. You can read copies of it on google books.

Also, because of modern conviences, we have much higher standards of housekeeping than 100 years ago.

[prairiemuffin]

**Edited because I'm too moronic to make sure I'm posting in the right thread** :oops:

[Wolfie]

Ugh. So if you read down a little further, you come across this gem:'

Ummm..

Isn't this usually what gets her going down the drain? Joining 15 million online groups and then (obviously) not being able to keep up?

Really, too, what I think is the saddest is that you never once hear her mention a real, physical friend that she's met in person and actually gets together with to, y'know, DO THINGS. It seems like all of her "friends" are virtual.

um, is this the right thread?

[keeperrox]

Why does it say this:

Our divorce rate is the highest in the world, and the percentage of unmarried women is significantly higher than in 1960.

...if it's supposed to be America at the end of the 1890s?

[Joykins]

What! Do you mean that in the past all women didn't sit around in pink, floofy dresses sipping tea while the men strolled in the background in black suits and wearing top hats? And didn't spend all day sitting at the feet of their mothers gazing up in adoration?! Say it aint so!

That wasn't tea, that was one of those patent medicine for "women's troubles" guaranteed to stop the stomach trouble, bring on your period, and restore your health.

[longskirtlotsakids]

Why does it say this:

...if it's supposed to be America at the end of the 1890s?

That threw me off a bit too, but what it means is that there were more unmarried women in 1890 than in 1960. It is actually poorly worded, you have to read through a few times to ascertain that they are not even in fact comparing divorce rates.

[Wolfie]

That wasn't tea, that was one of those patent medicine for "women's troubles" guaranteed to stop the stomach trouble, bring on your period, and restore your health.

Lots of stuff advertised to stop "blocked menses."

[keeperrox]

That threw me off a bit too, but what it means is that there were more unmarried women in 1890 than in 1960. It is actually poorly worded, you have to read through a few times to ascertain that they are not even in fact comparing divorce rates.

Ahhhh okay, thanks.