Stinking Housewife Fails History

[emmiedahl]

thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2011/11/pyle-and-childhood/

Lawrence Auster likes to blather on about some guy named Howard Pyle (which sounds like a HeeHaw character) who was some kind of illustrator. Apparently he illustrated children's books. Anyway, Lawrence feels that the world has changed for children in the last century. While he acknowledges that medical care and living conditions have improved, he bemoans the loss of innocence.

the atmosphere of childhood has changed so much that it is reasonable to say that childhood no longer exists as a distinct cultural institution. Children no longer inhabit a mentally separate realm as they did in the nineteenth century.

Children did not inhabit a "separate realm" 100 years ago. They were dressed much like adults and expected to behave much like them as well. They worked long hours and were silent witnesses to the poverty and inequality of their era.

Childhood is a form of higher awareness, which is not to say that children are perfectible or angelic. “What a distressing contrast there is,†said Sigmund Freud, “between the radiant intelligence of a child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.†Children know things adults can no longer fully grasp. The adult world once protected that knowledge and melded it gradually with reason, information, practical ability and wisdom. Technological change and spiritual decline have abolished that protection.

I agree that children are in general much brighter than adults, and that is why I'm glad they now are in school as opposed to working in coal mines and factories. Of course, TH does not note that child abuse 100 years ago could only be prosecuted under animal cruelty charges.

I am getting weary of revisionist history. Why is it so horrible to acknowledge that the world is better now? There were no Good Old Days. They were brutal times when innocent people (including children) suffered immensely.

[starfish]

The Stinker has bemoaned the end of child labor. She sees no problem with it. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about her. She likes child labor and thinks laws against it should be repealed. Good gawd.

She also recently wrote that you never see feminists discuss the end of childhood in our society. Like she spends any time whatsoever with feminists.

Like she reads any feminist literature. I'm convinced that feminists are the only political force that are concerned with children's welfare. (as opposed to the welfare of the pre-born).

[O Latin]

I am getting weary of revisionist history. Why is it so horrible to acknowledge that the world is better now? There were no Good Old Days. They were brutal times when innocent people (including children) suffered immensely.

I think it's fine to acknowledge that the world is better now and the "good old days" are a myth, but I don't think it's a good idea to stop there. To quote a book I'm reading for class, "rebuking the past from the different moral standpoint of the present does not advance historical understanding."

I was thinking about this the other day because I don't understand why people get so upset by someone saying, "The world was better X years ago." If they want to think that, that's their problem. And we're stuck here no matter what so it doesn't really make sense to argue over which era of history was best. But I think those kinds of arguments come from people who see a problem in the current world and they don't know how to express it, so they compare the present to the past, in which that problem did not exist. I think we do this with our own lives, too. A couple of weeks ago, I was moaning about how crappy my life is and how everything was so much better last year. Then I went and got out my old diary and read what I was writing a year ago. Guess what? I was just as miserable last year as I am now. But that wasn't really the point. The point is that I'm not happy right now.

Anyway, I didn't say this as clearly as I wanted to, but my point is that I think "the past was better" is just a roundabout, subconscious way of saying, "I see a problem with XYZ."

[emmiedahl]

The problem is that so many people hold up past eras as an idyllic time to which we need to return. Take, for instance, a poster on another thread who wants social services to return to the way they were 100 years ago. As long as we continue to idolize history and smooth out the rough edges, we will be very likely to repeat it.

[Hane]

One of the advantages of getting older is that you can put things into perspective. It helps if your childhood wasn't particularly idyllic and you weren't brainwashed.

Yes, there was less pop-cultural sexualization of female children. But there were also far fewer opportunities for girls.

For some women, the June Cleaver lifestyle was just fine. For others, it came at a significant price.

When I was ten or so (early '60s), in my small New England city, half a dozen of us neighborhood kids used to walk two miles each way, without adults, to the city park and spend the day swimming at the public pool (yes, there were lifeguards). I know no parent who'd allow such a thing now. So it makes me wonder whether parents then had rocks in their heads, or parents now are overprotective.

[O Latin]

Right, but that poster obviously sees a problem with the way social services work, or they wouldn't feel the need to make the comparison in the first place. Obviously nothing is perfect and everything is going to have problems, which is why it would be so much better if we could just say, "I really hate the way X works." If the person in the original quotes you posted had said something like, "I really see a problem with how quickly our culture wants to do away with childhood innocence," there would be more opportunity for productive conversation that didn't involve arguing about why the past was terrible. I don't know why people don't think like this. Maybe it's just human nature to want to compare something "bad" to something "better."

I will also say that I think the past looks worse than it really was to us because we have the present to compare it to. Kind of like how you couldn't pay me to go back to junior high now, but I was happy as a clam while I was there.

And before everybody bombards me with stories of their great-grandmothers who raised umpteen kids in terrible conditions and worked their fingers to the bone so their children could have better lives, I know I'm generalizing. There were miserable people 100 years ago, I understand. There are miserable people in 2011. There is no time in history that was all good or all bad. It's always some of both.

[Wolfie]

Children did not inhabit a "separate realm" 100 years ago. They were dressed much like adults and expected to behave much like them as well. They worked long hours and were silent witnesses to the poverty and inequality of their era.

This is not entirely true- they were dressed different, not something that we might notice, but something that their society would notice. (Like short sleeves or a slightly shorter skirt, as well as short hair on a teen girl. Yeah, the idea that little girls always wore long hair was not true in Victorian times.) However, this was only to show that they didn't have the legal standing that adults had. Not at all to say that they didn't have to work as hard as the adults. (of course,they seem to ignore everybody but the wealthy...)

And innocent? Often even middle class children had to share a bedroom with their parents.... Yeah, they weren't always asleep. :roll:

[emmiedahl]

This is not entirely true- they were dressed different, not something that we might notice, but something that their society would notice. (Like short sleeves or a slightly shorter skirt, as well as short hair on a teen girl. Yeah, the idea that little girls always wore long hair was not true in Victorian times.) However, this was only to show that they didn't have the legal standing that adults had. Not at all to say that they didn't have to work as hard as the adults. (of course,they seem to ignore everybody but the wealthy...)

And innocent? Often even middle class children had to share a bedroom with their parents.... Yeah, they weren't always asleep. :roll:

About the dressing like adults, I feel that they dressed more similarly to adults than children do now. I mean, my daughter is wearing pink tights with white hearts and a blue plaid skirt with endless flounces and ruffles (I take no responsibility for this combination, btw). That could not be construed as "adult" dress even if you lengthened it. Victorian children's clothing was somewhat derivative of adult clothing, certainly no less than now.

TH also commented a while back that Amish people (who dress children identically to the adults) are superior parents because they dress children like children. I share TH's apparent love of smocking and peter pan collars on little girls, but nonetheless children dress in more distinctively childish ways now than they did 100 years ago. I didn't have any footie jammies with little turtles last time I checked.

[Rosa]

don't let Fishwife turn you off Howard Pyle, though, some of the books he illustrated are delightful. There's one story about a donut machine that won't turn off that was one of my favorites as a kid.

I'm also a big fan of Henry Huggins, which iirc was written in 1950 (maybe released 1950? I should look it up). Anyway, it is the opposite of fundie - Henry rides the bus by himself, goes to public school, helps his mom around the house, etc. My son LOVES it and it's pretty close to his actual life (though he's not allowed at our Y by himself til he's 14, and Henry is on his own at the Y at 8 or so.)

[emmiedahl]

We have that book! I'll have to dig it out.

[Wolfie]

About the dressing like adults, I feel that they dressed more similarly to adults than children do now. I mean, my daughter is wearing pink tights with white hearts and a blue plaid skirt with endless flounces and ruffles (I take no responsibility for this combination, btw). That could not be construed as "adult" dress even if you lengthened it. Victorian children's clothing was somewhat derivative of adult clothing, certainly no less than now.

TH also commented a while back that Amish people (who dress children identically to the adults) are superior parents because they dress children like children. I share TH's apparent love of smocking and peter pan collars on little girls, but nonetheless children dress in more distinctively childish ways now than they did 100 years ago. I didn't have any footie jammies with little turtles last time I checked.

lol, I know adults who would dress like that.... I actually often wear printed cotton interlock skirts that I make with stockings from Sock Dreams, myself.

I still maintain that it is a cultural thing. What we look at and see as the same, actually had differences in their eyes. (yes, they had colors and prints that an adult would never wear, too) They might look at our clothing and not see what was adult approprate and child approprate.

I think that the bigger thing there is that she's got it all mixed up in what childhood was like then vs. now.

OOOOHHH, and Henry Huggins- I remember that it had guppies that bred out of control. (ETA author- it is Beverly Cleary, the same author as the Ramona books.

[YPestis]

Children had less of a childhood 100 years ago than now. I don't understand how anyone could think that kids had it better in the past?!

We now have mandatory education for kids through age 16 and most people continue to attend school for years beyond that. In 1901, at the end of the Victorian Era, you could see kids as young as 10 working 12 hour days in factories to help support families. Only a certain class of kids had what modern society would construed as a true childhood. For most kids, they spent their younger years helping to care for siblings and doing hours of chores on the farm or home. They spent their teen years working as adults helping to support their family.

Education wasn't mandatory. Child labor laws didn't exist. Kids could be used and abused by their employers, their parents, their guardians. For poor children, they spent even their youngest years working to bring in pennies....

Oh yeah, and many children DIED before they were able to grow up. If kids seeing sexually explicit images is suppose to rob them of their innocence in today's society, what that say about societies in days when most children saw their siblings and parents die before they themselves became adults?

[Confused_by_religion]

Childhood as a sort of idyllic "separate sphere" was limited to children from wealthy families who didn't need them to generate some income. So a very, very small number, actually.

I don't know why fundies find it so hard to take a realistic look on history. Life was only easy for a wealthy few, and even those didn't have the standard of living and comforts we enjoy (and who knows for how long). And even their options were limited by class and culture, especially if they were girls and women. It makes me want to beat my head against the wall when fundie women glorify Jane Austen's days - as if Jane Austen was happy about being broke and dependent most of her life. :doh:

[CanadianHippie]

About the dressing like adults, I feel that they dressed more similarly to adults than children do now. I mean, my daughter is wearing pink tights with white hearts and a blue plaid skirt with endless flounces and ruffles (I take no responsibility for this combination, btw). That could not be construed as "adult" dress even if you lengthened it. Victorian children's clothing was somewhat derivative of adult clothing, certainly no less than now.

On the same topic of dressing children like adults. I remember on time, home from school, I caught an episode of Leave it to Beaver. In one scene Beaver was talk to a female class mate and I said to my dad "she looks like a miniature adult!" My dad's response was "that's how girls dressed back then."

[O Latin]

About the dressing like adults, I feel that they dressed more similarly to adults than children do now. I mean, my daughter is wearing pink tights with white hearts and a blue plaid skirt with endless flounces and ruffles (I take no responsibility for this combination, btw). That could not be construed as "adult" dress even if you lengthened it. Victorian children's clothing was somewhat derivative of adult clothing, certainly no less than now.

TH also commented a while back that Amish people (who dress children identically to the adults) are superior parents because they dress children like children. I share TH's apparent love of smocking and peter pan collars on little girls, but nonetheless children dress in more distinctively childish ways now than they did 100 years ago. I didn't have any footie jammies with little turtles last time I checked.

The other thing is that clothing for ordinary people was much more uniform. Today, a teenager or adult can adopt any of a variety of different "styles" because there is a huge array of different kinds of clothes available. I don't think there was nearly this kind of variety 100 years ago, unless you were among the very wealthy, and even then there still wasn't as much. So dressing children in miniature, slightly modified versions of adult clothes would have made sense.

[Nomorearrows]

I am getting weary of revisionist history. Why is it so horrible to acknowledge that the world is better now? There were no Good Old Days.

Seriously. Especially because those Old Days weren't good for women at all. Why do fundie women glorify those days? They didn't have any rights. I can't understand the fascination with those days. It's like they are disregarding the struggles that many of the women endured until they could achieve the rights they take for granted today.

[VeraAnne]

Ok, here's my rant. The whole "men goes out to make money while the woman stays home" is a fairly modern arrangement. Men and women used to work side by side on the farm, especially those who were not members of the elite class. Hell, even my grandparents grew up with parents who were farmers. Their mothers were out picking cotton with the rest of the crew.

However, once we started moving away from the family farm, things started to change. Women were a big part of modern factory work, especially during the time that most men were at war. However, when those men came home from war, they took back most of the jobs being done by women, and women went home. The image of the 50's middleclass homemaker is literally one never before seen in history.

What were these women to do, exactly? Their children were mostly in school, and they didn't have farm to manage. They weren't part of some high society class that involved planning lavish getaways. When fundies idealize the 50's they are trying to form an entire society around a strange, transient time in history.

[LucySnowe]

Childhood as a sort of idyllic "separate sphere" was limited to children from wealthy families who didn't need them to generate some income. So a very, very small number, actually.

This. One of my major issues with the whole There Once Was A Prelapsarian Era Of Joy attitude is that so often, class gets swept under the rug. First example that comes into my head: a friend's stepdaughter was once taught in school (in the UK) that everyone in the Victorian period had servants. Friend had to point out to her stepdaughter that, well, did the servants have servants? And who exactly WERE those servants, anyway?

My dad recently visited and he's getting quite The World Is An Awful Place These Days (though thankfully not so much Back In My Day Everything Was Better), so I gently tried to offer some counter-arguments. Medicine, if nothing else. Most parents in first-world countries do not have to worry that all of their children will die of some horrible, painful disease before the age of five, for instance. (And yet so many Fundies yearn for Jane Austen's time. Would they prefer their precious little ones to die of smallpox, TB, or cholera?)

[Confused_by_religion]

My dad recently visited and he's getting quite The World Is An Awful Place These Days (though thankfully not so much Back In My Day Everything Was Better), so I gently tried to offer some counter-arguments. Medicine, if nothing else. Most parents in first-world countries do not have to worry that all of their children will die of some horrible, painful disease before the age of five, for instance. (And yet so many Fundies yearn for Jane Austen's time. Would they prefer their precious little ones to die of smallpox, TB, or cholera?)

True. And on the supposed joys of marriage in the Good Old Golden Days (after courtship and father's consent and the whole shebang!) you could quote Queen Victoria, who was not only married to a man she loved but also wealthy and privileged:

“I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.â€

[Cran]

The idea of childhood as a seperate period in life with own aims, goals and rules is, in the broader picture, very new. Came from the late 18th century.

Breastfeeding your own children, giving them room and time to play and develop themselves etc. in conjunction with the enjoyment of nature (an idealised version of it) where made big - for the children of the upperclass, of course! Marie Antoinette was very into it, and it was heavily promoted by Rousseau and influenced the picture of the ideal in the next century heavily. Again, for those who could afford leisure at all. So not many people.

Btw, Rousseau, who was so into the romantic family, left his own and locked himself up alone in another house to write. Doesn't seem to me like he was very fond of his own "blessings".

I do not need to point out to Freejingers how gruesome the living conditions of people of lower classes, the majority, was back then, but I'd like to point out that the "innocence" of children was only so important to well-to-do Victorians, and never before in history. Death was regarded as a normal part of life, not as a taboo children where to kept away from, and the same for sexuality. Just look at the manners of the renaissance to get an idea...

In my opinion, this phase as in many ways come to an end, but not to return to the previous model, to see children as small adults, who had to lean a trade at an age we leniently consider to be "difficult" and cut them much slack, but to converge adulthood to childhood. Behavior, toys and clothes. No other century before would have afforded me the freedom to be still relatively undecided about my station and plans in life at 30 (!), but in the western countries, this is not to unusual. I can still change careers, get married and raise a relatively sizeable family, or join an religious order. For many of these things, I would have been considered far too old, and not only because of shorter life spans, but because of personal attitude (for example: to set in my own ways to adapt to religious life).

Conclusion: I call bullshit on Non-Thinking-Wifey.

[2xx1xy1JD]

Fuzzy nostalgia becomes a bad thing when people go on to make conscious efforts to turn back the clock, in ways that are likely to reproduce the actual bad conditions of yesteryear. A prime example would be thinking that the 1950s were perfect, and wanting to repeal all civil rights legislation...which of course takes you back to the era where whites and colored had their own drinking fountains.

If Stinking Wife likes Victorian children's literature and won't read Dickens, try Frances Hodgson Burnett. In her book "A Little Princess"

I don't remember my great-grandparents talking about the Good Ole Days. Instead, they talked about the olden days, when Jews in Russia and Romania would be attacked when they weren't just starving, and my great-grandfather mentioned that he was basically used as slave labor on a farm when he got to Canada. My grandparents grew up during the Depression so we got stories of them dropping out of school at 13 because there was no money to allow them to continue. My other grandmother pointed out siblings who died in early childhood, and complained that for years, she was fed nothing all week but cornmeal mush.

OTOH, my grandmother tells some great stories about the late 1940s and early 1950s. That's when she was a Communist.

[tanksmom]

When people talk about a time long ago when children were allowed to be children they usually don't understand what that meant. They have the vision in their mind that children were free to run in the meadows picking flowers while the menfolk protected the homefront & the womanfolk made it pretty.

In my spare time I volunteer for a local historical homestead in my area circa 1763. And at that time yes small children were allowed to play & be children. But that meant they got to play at the feet of their mothers, not run around & have fun. So she is slightly right that in some periods of history the only thing that children worried about was playing.

However....this only lasted until the child was about 4 years old when they were considered old enough to start acting as a grown up. Children that age were expected to bring water from the spring and the jars weighed approx 60 pounds. They were expected to help with the cooking, hunting and farm work. And if your home didn't have a smoke house they were expected to climb up onto the roof and hang the meat into the chimney to cure for the winter. Many children were seriously hurt or killed during this time period for doing things we wouldn't even want a full grown adult doing now. So yes there was a time period where children only worried about being children but they didn't get to act that way for long. And I would rather slit my wrists then go back to that time!

[docmom]

One summer in college, I was working in a lab. While experiments incubated I would run down to the medical school library, deep in the stacks, and read some of the earliest childcare manuals (mostly from the late 1800s early 1900s). For a real, on the spot, description of childhood in the late Victorian era, these texts can't be beaten. As has been mentioned many times before, children died regularly of things that are unheard of nowadays and poverty and malnutrition were rampant. But, what surprised me the most was the advice to avoid having your daughter share a bed with her uncles or other grown up male relatives as many young girls had been known to catch gonorrhea "from the bedclothes". You cannot catch gonorrhea from sheets. You can only catch it from sexual contact. So much for the sexually innocent olden days.

[emmiedahl]

From what I have read, pediatrics as a medical specialty did not come about until the early twentieth century, when women began to enter medicine.

Those Victorians did not give a damn about real children, unless the child was their personal accessory or able to provide labor.

[sage]

Fuzzy nostalgia becomes a bad thing when people go on to make conscious efforts to turn back the clock, in ways that are likely to reproduce the actual bad conditions of yesteryear. A prime example would be thinking that the 1950s were perfect, and wanting to repeal all civil rights legislation...which of course takes you back to the era where whites and colored had their own drinking fountains.

QFT

I am consistently surprised by the whitewashed, idyllic images that are presented on a gilded platter as the norm from the 1950's in the US. Television and movies haven't done the US much good when it comes to that era. We all are led to believe it was nothing but sock hops, home cooked meals and a mom that was home making seven course dinners from scratch while vacuuming the house in her heels and pearls every day of the week.

The truth is, the 1950's planted the seeds for the 1960's, that decade of major change for the US. In the 50's, Truman backed colonial France in Indochina (eventually leading to the Vietnam War), we went into Korea to flex our military muscles (Oh noes! The Commies!). Let us also not forget HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities), where you neighbor could turn you in for behavior unbecoming an American (suspected communism, not going to church, being suspected of being gay...), the post office opened and read mail to turn people in to HUAC, McCarthyism. Conformity was the rule of the day; in school: no jeans for boys and girls must wear skirts, "don't rock the boat" became a way of life.

Sure, there was a level of rampant consumerism that made life so much... better... for everyone.

Unless you were a female, a minority, gay, or anything that danced outside of the white, middle-class heteronormative state. :roll:

This a seriously condensed view from the introductory chapter of this book:

Anderson, Terry H. "Cold War America: Seedbed of the 1960's." The Sixties. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. 1-18. Print.