Historical Facts That Counter Fundie's Romantic Views

[debrand]

I found this article while searching the internet.

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/exhibits/h ... /topic/12/

In the early 1900's there was a push to convince people from the southern United States to wear shoes and clean up their outhouses. Hookworms infected fifty percent of the southern population.

Hookworms thrive in the warm, moist, sandy soil common in the South. They usually enter their victims through the skin. So people who walk barefoot on soil contaminated by waste from infected people or animals can become infected, too. Which is why, in Southern rural homes with unsanitary outhouses, children were especially likely to get the disease. Those who did tended to suffer from retarded growth and intellectual abilities, as well as anemia.

The entire site is fascinating.

http://ncmuseumofhistory.org/exhibits/h ... /topic/19/

Separate and Unequal Medical Care

In the 1930s, when Dr. Milton Quigless was beginning to practice medicine, health care in North Carolina was decidedly a matter of race. If you were African American, you might be admitted to a white hospital for surgical procedures unavailable elsewhere, but you stayed in a segregated ward. If your own doctor was black, as was usually the case, he couldn’t treat you at that hospital. Hospitals and doctors’ offices that did treat patients of both races had separate entrances and waiting rooms marked “For Negroes†or “For Coloreds.†But in many communities, African Americans had to rely on separate clinics, doctors and pharmacists.

Segregation severely limited your chances of receiving regular, scientific medical care. North Carolina averaged one doctor for every 7,600 African Americans in those days. Even by 1950, only 13 hospitals served the needs of the state’s African American population.

The move toward civil rights was hotly debated in medicine. Some hospitals began integrating their staffs in the 1950s, with many members of the medical profession pressing for social equality. The trend increased rapidly in the early ’60s, when receiving federal funds depended on having a desegregated staff. With the sweeping civil rights legislation of the mid-60s, medical care became more equitable. But North Carolina still struggles to provide rural populations of all races with affordable, high-quality care.

Why would you want to live in a time period where so many people suffered inadequate care only because of their race?

[debrand]

I am including an article from wikipedia only because it gives a quick summary of this historical event. Of course, wikipedia is not a good source but you can find the same information on other sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington ... on_of_1898

In the Wilmington Insurrection, Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from an elected government, running officials out of the city, and killing many blacks in widespread attacks. Among their weapons, they used a Gatling gun mounted on a wagon. They took photographs of each other during the events. Although residents appealed for help to Governor Daniel Lindsay Russell and President William McKinley, they did nothing in response

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Riot_of_1874

The Election Riot of 1874 or Coup of 1874 took place on election day, November 3, 1874 near Comer, Alabama. On that day, the White League (comprising white Alabamian Democrats), formed an armed mob and invaded Eufaula, killing at least seven black Republicans, injuring at least 70 more, and driving off over 1,000 defenseless Republicans from the polls.[1] The mob then moved on to Spring Hill, where members stormed the polling place, killing a white Republican judge's son.[2] The White League subsequently perfected its coup d'état by refusing to count any Republican votes cast (Republican voters outnumbered Democratic voters by a margin greater than two to one), declaring themselves (the Democrats) victorious, forcing Republican politicians out of office, and seizing every county office in Barbour County.[3] The Democrats followed up by auctioning off as slaves (for a maximum cost of $2 per month) or otherwise silencing all Republican witnesses to the coup so that they could not testify in federal court about it.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_Massacre

Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.

Although the rioting was widely reported around the country, few official records documented the event. Survivors, their descendants, and the perpetrators remained silent about Rosewood for decades. Sixty years after the rioting, the story of Rosewood was revived in major media when several journalists covered it in the early 1980s. Survivors and their descendants organized to sue the state for having failed to protect them. In 1993, the Florida Legislature commissioned a report on the events. As a result of the findings, Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate survivors and their descendants for damages incurred because of racial violence. The massacre was the subject of a 1997 film directed by John Singleton. In 2004, the state designated the site of Rosewood as a Florida Heritage Landmark.

Again, why would anyone want to live during this time period? There is so much information about slavery and reconstructionism after the Civil War that it amazes me that there are southern apologists.

Do you have any historical fact or event that counters the fundies' romantic view of our past? I concentrated on the southern United States because I am from North Carolina but you can include any time period that you feel that fundies glorify.

It is interesting that instead of identifying with the poor and downtrodden of the past, fundies assume that they would be the ones with power and money. In their mythical past, they would be the slave owners and nobility. The fact that they can ignore how horrible the poor have been treated throughout history says something very negative about their sense of compassion.

Their views are also harmful to nonfundies. Jericho was willing to take our country back to some mythical past where goverment didn't provide a safety net for poor women because he/she glorified the golden age when companies had more control over worker's lives.

So please, post your historical event or fact. Maybe some fundie teen will come here and a little doubt about what they've been taught will be implanted in their minds.

edited because I just like to talk. :oops:

[Muriel]

Fundie's romantic views have always bothered me a lot...

Especially the ones about childbirth and wonderful big families of the past.

My own great grand-mother gave birth to 11 children, 7 of them died during childhood (due to poverty and lack of proper healthcare), she also had some very difficult births which lead to very bad health problem (she had an hysterectomy at age 43 for a prolapsed uterus :( )

I remember, one day I told her how happy I was to be fertile and to be able to get pregnant easily and she told me that I should be happy for easy access to birth control instead because otherwise I would have been constantly pregnant like her...

This happened in the beginning of 20's century in a poor part of rural France.

[holierthanyou]

but, but, but... the women covered their arms and ankles. How could it not be a good time to live?

[tanksmom]

There's an old saying that history is written by the winners and it holds true. So many people like to read first hand accounts of a time period and think that those explain what was going on. Historically speaking though only the upper class white landowners, mostly men, were taught to read and write. So of course if you read an account of pre-Civil war life written by a plantation owner they will talk about how wonderful their life is and how well they took care of their slaves. It wasn't until evil public schooling came into being that those lower on the economic scale learned how to write down what really happened in their lives.

My family is active in a local historical society in my area, circa 1750s. To hear what was considered normal for children to do at that time makes me sick. There is nothing romantic about it. Children routinely did things (such as climbing onto rooftops 2 stories up to hang meat down the chimney to smoke) that I would never dream of making my children do.

[debrand]

Fundie's romantic views have always bothered me a lot...

Especially the ones about childbirth and wonderful big families of the past.

My own great grand-mother gave birth to 11 children, 7 of them died during childhood (due to poverty and lack of proper healthcare), she also had some very difficult births which lead to very bad health problem (she had an hysterectomy at age 43 for a prolapsed uterus :( )

I remember, one day I told her how happy I was to be fertile and to be able to get pregnant easily and she told me that I should be happy for easy access to birth control instead because otherwise I would have been constantly pregnant like her...

This happened in the beginning of 20's century in a poor part of rural France.

I'm weird in that I like old graveyards. One thing that has always struck me as sad, is the number of little grave markers that couples often had by their own graves. It is not uncommon to see the marker for the parents and four or five little markers of very young children beside them.

I remember reading somewhere that in the past, a large percentage of children grew up without their birth mother. My own grandmother's mother and grandmother(my great and great great grandmother) were midwives. My grandmother said that her mother told her that women were "A hairbreadth's from death everytime that they had a child." She wasn't being figurative either.

[Muriel]

I'm weird in that I like old graveyards. One thing that has always struck me as sad, is the number of little grave markers that couples often had by their own graves. It is not uncommon to see the marker for the parents and four or five little markers of very young children beside them.

I remember reading somewhere that in the past, a large percentage of children grew up without their birth mother. My own grandmother's mother and grandmother(my great and great great grandmother) were midwives. My grandmother said that her mother told her that women were "A hairbreadth's from death everytime that they had a child." She wasn't being figurative either.

Yes, until the 50's (at least in France), giving birth was a very dangerous experience and many women didn't survived...

[Artemis]

Do not get me into this one: the appalling knowledge of history displayed by some of these people really gets me annoyed. I remember writing a very long post countering the Botkin girls' glorification of Anne Boleyn here on one occasion - and that's just one example.

And childbirth. The romancing of 'natural' childbirth. It wasn't romantic - it was hard, painful, debilitating, mutilating and ultimately deadly. Those lavender-scented Victorian ladies lying languidly on the chaise longue all day weren't just doing it for effect you know - they were lying down to deal with their prolapsed uteri, their ruined pelvic floor muscles, and their lack of urinary continence. What the lavender water was masking in many cases was the scent of leaking urine.

[Esther]

Fundie's romantic views have always bothered me a lot...

Especially the ones about childbirth and wonderful big families of the past.

My own great grand-mother gave birth to 11 children, 7 of them died during childhood (due to poverty and lack of proper healthcare), she also had some very difficult births which lead to very bad health problem (she had an hysterectomy at age 43 for a prolapsed uterus :( )

I remember, one day I told her how happy I was to be fertile and to be able to get pregnant easily and she told me that I should be happy for easy access to birth control instead because otherwise I would have been constantly pregnant like her...

This happened in the beginning of 20's century in a poor part of rural France.

I'm from a historically poor part of rural Flanders, and same here - my great-great grandmother had thirteen children, only five of whom actually lived until something resembling ripe old age. The others died in childhood or early adulthood. She also ended up raising two grandchildren because one of her daughters and her husband both died of some illness when the children were toddlers. This was the 1910s and 1920s.

In short: THINGS KIND OF SUCKED BACK THEN, FUNDIES.

[easternabeille]

I used to work in social and industrial history museums designing educational outreach programs and had access to a treasure trove of evidence that counters the fundie belief of a romantic and idealistic era where women stayed home in perfect harmony, no one had any health problems and everyone had enough food. I had access to black and white photos of women and children working in the canning and oyster industries, working in the fields or in other dangerous and backbreaking jobs. I read first hand accounts of women and children being horribly injured and sometimes even killed in factory related accidents. Photos and personal accounts, clothing, all told the story of a hard and demanding life where food for many people was hard to come by, hunger was common and everyone in the family had to pull their weight. I honestly cannot understand this instance of a romantic and ideal past that fundies tend to hold.

[deelaem]

My own maternal grandmother died when my mother was two years old from what was called then, "childbirth fever". My mother and her slightly older sister were shuffled around between relatives because no one expected a man to take care of two young daughters back then. At age 7 she was shipped off to live in a convent in Canada for school. Yup, them were the good old days. :roll:

[NjoyingNsanity]

In my area of rural southwest Virginia during the late 1800's and early 1900's there was a lady named Orlean Puckett she was a midwife who delivered thousands of babies in the area yet because she had RH negative blood lost 24 of her own babies and Michelle Duggar acts like a martyr because she lost two imagine losing more kids than her entire enormous brood.

Also it really bothers me when some of these fundie homeschooling moms refuse to vaccinate their kids. It's like they don't realize what a medical miracle those vaccines are. My hometown had an outbreak of Polio back in the day the whole town was under quarintine at one point. Walk through the older parts of the local graveyards and you will see all these little headstones, good ol' days my ass.

[debrand]

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/histor ... dbirth.cfm

Death in childbirth was sufficiently common that many colonial women regarded pregnancy with dread. In their letters, women often referred to childbirth as "the Dreaded apperation," "the greatest of earthly miserys," or "that evel hour I loock forward to with dread." Many, like New England poet Anne Bradstreet, approached childbirth with a fear of impending death. In a poem entitled "Before the Birth of One of Her Children," Bradstreet wrote,

How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,

How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend.

In addition to her anxieties about pregnancy, an expectant mother was filled with apprehensions about the death of her newborn child. The death of a child in infancy was far more common than it is today. In the healthiest seventeenth century communities, one infant in ten died before the age of five. In less healthy environments, three children in ten died before their fifth birthday. Puritan minister Cotton Mather saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching the age of two. "We have our children taken from us," Mather cried out, "the Desire of our Eyes taken away with a stroke."

and

During labor, midwives administered no painkillers, except for alcohol. Pain in childbirth was considered God's punishment for Eve's sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Women were merely advised to "arm themselves with patience" and prayer and to try, during labor, to restrain "those dreadful groans and cries which do so much discourage their friends and relations that are near them."

[Terrie]

Why would you want to live in a time period where so many people suffered inadequate care only because of their race?

Because they're white and so don't have to consider the negatives, because it would never effect them.

[alba]

In my area of rural southwest Virginia during the late 1800's and early 1900's there was a lady named Orlean Puckett she was a midwife who delivered thousands of babies in the area yet because she had RH negative blood lost 24 of her own babies and Michelle Duggar acts like a martyr because she lost two imagine losing more kids than her entire enormous brood.

That reminds me of Queen Anne of Britain, who had 15 pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a child that lived past toddlerhood (and he died at the age of 11). Seven of them were stillbirths or died the same day they were born, which must have been terribly distressing for her as a mother, let alone as a queen who had to produce an heir.

I find it funny that fundies tend to idolise Austen's books, even though she was trying to show how problematic the submissive, dependent female archetype was. They read Pride and Prejudice like it's some great love story, completely skating over the underlying pressure to marry or end up destitute on their father's death.

[Muriel]

In my area of rural southwest Virginia during the late 1800's and early 1900's there was a lady named Orlean Puckett she was a midwife who delivered thousands of babies in the area yet because she had RH negative blood lost 24 of her own babies and Michelle Duggar acts like a martyr because she lost two imagine losing more kids than her entire enormous brood.

Also it really bothers me when some of these fundie homeschooling moms refuse to vaccinate their kids. It's like they don't realize what a medical miracle those vaccines are. My hometown had an outbreak of Polio back in the day the whole town was under quarintine at one point. Walk through the older parts of the local graveyards and you will see all these little headstones, good ol' days my ass.

Oh yes, I'm old enough to have personally known people who had polio and were severely disabled from it...

Not acknowledging the fact that vaccines saved the lives of thousand of children is just ignorance...

Diphtheria, tetanus, polio, tuberculosis were a death note only 70 years ago... Of course, with the herd immunization we have now in first world countries, even if you don't "believe in vaccines", you're not likely to catch those horrible diseases...

Their ignorance is killing me :angry-banghead:

[Lady_M]

Do not get me into this one: the appalling knowledge of history displayed by some of these people really gets me annoyed. I remember writing a very long post countering the Botkin girls' glorification of Anne Boleyn here on one occasion - and that's just one example.

And childbirth. The romancing of 'natural' childbirth. It wasn't romantic - it was hard, painful, debilitating, mutilating and ultimately deadly. Those lavender-scented Victorian ladies lying languidly on the chaise longue all day weren't just doing it for effect you know - they were lying down to deal with their prolapsed uteri, their ruined pelvic floor muscles, and their lack of urinary continence. What the lavender water was masking in many cases was the scent of leaking urine.

Yikes, I should not have googled and read the Botkin girls' take on Anne Boleyn. Tudor history is my hobby and this just made me :angry-banghead: . Anne Boleyn may have caused Henry VIII to break with the Pope and had reformist sympathies, but she definitely was far more Catholic than the Botkins would ever be okay with. Per Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn: "In these, her dying hours, she showed herself a devout Catholic with a pious devotion to the Eucharist, despite her reformist views" (pg. 264). The Botkins also conveniently leave out the divorce factor - no evidence shows that Katherine of Aragon was anything more than a devoted and loving wife. They also happily ignore that while Anne could be kind and was well-learned, she was demonstrably cruel to her stepdaughter Mary and definitely pushed to have several of her detractors punished and/or executed. She also alienated a great number of her supporters. She certainly didn't deserve to be beheaded, but she was a much more complex woman than the Botkins could admit. Actually, I'm surprised they don't go for Jane Seymour - meek, quiet, virginal, submissive, and giving her life in childbirth (maybe too Catholic?). If they're looking for Henry VIII's reformist wife, they'd be looking for Katherine Parr. Okay, rant over.

The childbirth thing - so true. I remember reading in nursing classes about medical students and doctors going straight from autopsies to birthing women without washing their hands and it just makes me ill. Thank goodness for reformers like Semmelweis.

And thank goodness for antibiotics...why anyone would want to live in a time period before antibiotics were discovered is beyond me.

[Conuly]

It's simple. When it comes to inequality and injustice, they haven't experienced this personally and, anyway, imagine that they'd be the ones swishing around in gorgeous period dress telling the servants what to do. They're none of them black, after all. (I can only imagine that if they were they'd have a tiny bit more sense!)

As far as disease goes, they haven't experienced measles, mumps, rubella, polio, or death in childbirth personally, so they don't really believe it exists. They're fools, they really are, but what do you expect from people with so little life experience? Heck, just open up a paper and you can read about women in Africa who are shunned because they lost all bowel control after giving birth, or places in Asia with high infant mortality rates because nobody can afford vaccinations. One and a half million children die yearly from diarrhea, and I bet these people have never so much gone on CNN to find this out.

[Lady_M]

Although, the fundies' sense of history reminds me of a fabulous set of lines from the musical Wicked"

Elphaba - where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it 'history'.

A man's called a traitor - or liberator

A rich man's a thief - or philanthropist

Is one a crusader - or ruthless invader?

It's all in which label

Is able to persist.

There are precious few at ease

With moral ambiguities

So we act as though they don't exist.

Pretty much sums it up for me...

[LucySnowe]

It's simple. When it comes to inequality and injustice, they haven't experienced this personally and, anyway, imagine that they'd be the ones swishing around in gorgeous period dress telling the servants what to do.

Yeah, it seems that no matter how poor the fundie, somehow in their fantasy they are always the lady of the manor. No one ever seems to imagine living in the past in an equivalent social sphere to where they actually are. 'Oooh, let's imagine we are taking in washing! Everyone, roll up your sleeves!'

[Maude]

What's particularly disturbing to me is that this isn't just a phenomenon that exists in fundie circles. Nostalgia for 'the good old days' is actually quite common. It's easy to fantasize and recall the [subjective] 'good' while ignoring the bad.

[Wolfie]

My own maternal grandmother died when my mother was two years old from what was called then, "childbirth fever". My mother and her slightly older sister were shuffled around between relatives because no one expected a man to take care of two young daughters back then. At age 7 she was shipped off to live in a convent in Canada for school. Yup, them were the good old days. :roll:

My paternal grandma was also shipped off to a convent for school. Her parents were both still alive, but her father felt that it would give her a better education than the rural area where her parents were living at the time. But she was 6. Can you imagine sending a 6 year old off to boarding school?

[Terrie]

Yeah, it seems that no matter how poor the fundie, somehow in their fantasy they are always the lady of the manor. No one ever seems to imagine living in the past in an equivalent social sphere to where they actually are. 'Oooh, let's imagine we are taking in washing! Everyone, roll up your sleeves!'

It's like ZZ, who dreams of living off the grid, on a farm somewhere, but can barely keep her garden alive, let alone get any edible crops from it.

[Conuly]

My paternal grandma was also shipped off to a convent for school. Her parents were both still alive, but her father felt that it would give her a better education than the rural area where her parents were living at the time. But she was 6. Can you imagine sending a 6 year old off to boarding school?

I have a book for kids, The Secret Language, about two kids in boarding school. They're eight, and one of them had been there a year or more already when the book started. :shock:

There's nothing wrong with them or their parents, no dramatic situation that requires them to be sent away, and they're presented as reasonably well-adjusted kids. Apparently, several decades ago, this was just another option for young children.

For that matter, I know of kids in real life (like Kipling and his sister) who were sent away from home even earlier!

[Wolfie]

Oh yes, I'm old enough to have personally known people who had polio and were severely disabled from it...

Not acknowledging the fact that vaccines saved the lives of thousand of children is just ignorance...

Diphtheria, tetanus, polio, tuberculosis were a death note only 70 years ago... Of course, with the herd immunization we have now in first world countries, even if you don't "believe in vaccines", you're not likely to catch those horrible diseases...

Their ignorance is killing me :angry-banghead:

Many of us possibly know people who are minorly disabled from it. There is an older family member in my family who has legs with several inches difference between them because of it. You just don't know this because he has the lift hidden in his shoes.

And even in the 50's and 60's mumps was still common, my parents both had it and were lucky to survive with no long term effects.