I remember many years ago see a cartoon depicting young people with, basically, mid 20th Century style winter farm clothes that had the caption "It is to be wished that the fad of dressing North Dakota will soon pass", or something to that effect.
The satirical cartoonist accidentally sort of anticipated the fad, if it is one, of dressing Hipster.
I saw this couple recently at a City Brew.
Clothes are meant to send a message, whether we mean them to or not, and we normally mean them to. What's the message here?
This was, I note, on a Sunday. My gess is that the young, probably dating, couple had just come from church.
Pastoral scene, pre Soviet Ukrainian village. Not a lot of homsexuality, transgenderism, etc. going on there.
Those who protest vehemently belong to small ideological groups," Francis told Italian newspaper La Stampa. "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it".
"But in general, I trust that gradually everyone will be reassured by the spirit of the 'Fiducia Supplicans' declaration by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith: it aims to include, not divide," the pope said.
We all see things through thick lenses of our cultures, and the history of our cultures. This was true even of the authors of the Gospels, which sometimes come through on certain items in their writings.
I think Fiducia Supplicans demonstrates this.
For that matter, to use a bad secular example, I think Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges did as well, which is not to say that the documents are analagous. They are not.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy seems to have generally believed that the Obergefell decision overturning tens of thousands of years of understanding on the nature of marriage would be met with rapid universal acceptance, rather than turning out to be the metaphorical shot heard around the world that gave us Donald Trump in short order.1
The Supreme Court, in Obergefells, and the Papacy, in Fiducia Supplicans, are reacting to the same development seem to have made the assumption of thinking that what happens in European cultures is what happens, or what even really is of major concern, all over the world. That just isn't the case in this instance.
A pretty good case can be made that "homosexuality", as Western Society regards it, doesn't even exist, although certainly same sex attraction and sexual conduct does. They are not the same thing. Therefore, when the Pope says "A special case are Africans: for them homosexuality is something 'bad' from a cultural point of view, they don't tolerate it" it might in fact be the case that the opposite is true. That is, the "special case" is Western Europeans, for whom homosexuality exists, and is not a "something 'bad'", or at least a significant number of Western Europeans, of which North and South Americans are (once again) part, have now been schooled or accepted that it isn't bad.
In most, of the world, homosexuality is regarded as a European thing. Again, the conduct occurs, but not the gender characterization. And in no society, does it occur with the frequency it does in Western Society, which is also the society which as become the most libertine, albeit only in the last seventy years, particularly in regard to sex and manifestations of sex, including outward manifestations of sex.
We've dealt with that before, but now that It's come back up in this fashion, it's worth looking at again. Pretty much everywhere this conduct occurs, it's strongly associated with a variety of factors, one of which, in its broad manifestation we now see, is a wealthy society that has lots of idle time. Put another way, it's a factor of resources and availability to them.
This is true of a lot of human disorders that are closely related to elemental needs and what we tend to universally see is that when we have a society that is heavily deprived of an elemental needs, a disordered desire for it, combined with disorder conduct, pops up in a minority (never a majority) of the population.
Food is a good example.
Scarcity of food will result in a massively strong desire to eat. In some people, that leads to desperate acts under desperate situations. Cannibalism, for example, comes to mind in regard to the Donner Party, or the residents of Leningrad. People took measures they normally wouldn't.
Not everyone did, however.
At least in the Soviet examples, which repeated in various fashions from 1917 through early 1944, most people didn't. People would starve instead.
Conversely, in food situations where there's a surplus of food, the entire population will tend to gain weight, but not everyone tends to become excessively overweight. Modern dieticians will yell in horror at this, but overweight, and truly grossly obese are not the same things. Grossly obese happens for a number of reasons, including people having a makeup which is extremely efficient in order to avoid famine, but it's only in an unnatural situation of surplus calories that it manifest itself.
As a scene in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee presents it:
Sergeant Chillum: Don't look to me like them gut-eaters has been feeding them very good.
Wiley: Did you ever see a fat Apache?
Sergeant Chillum: I ain't yet.
This scene depicts the pick up cavalry formation taking the kidnapped children and feeding them, but the point raised, accidentally, is a good one. Native Americans lived in a state of nature, and in that state, they were in good shape and not packing around extra weight. No culture in a state of nature does.
When things become disordered, such as in famine, some people will do something that can be argued to be disordered, eat other people. When there's too much food and no real need to work too hard, physically, to obtain calories, everyone puts on weight, but some will very much to their detriment.
So what's this have to do with homosexuality, let alone Fiducia Supplicans? Well, quite a lot, really.
Just as, in a balanced state of nature, or close to one, people don't get fat, and don't turn to cannibalism, in a balanced state of nature, they don't turn to the range of sexual deviations that they do in an unbalanced one.
Edgar Paxon's Custer's Last Stand. While it might seem odd to see this posted here, the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors who won this battle, and one just days before it at Rosebud, were never more than a day's ride from their families. Women were of course present in the Native camp at Little Big Horn, as the battle was brought on by the 7th Cavalry's attack on the village, but at least one native woman had been present at Rosebud as well. Native raiding parties might separate from their families for a period of days, but not months.
In a state of nature, people live in pretty small communities and there's pretty much a 1 to 1 sex ratio. Men would only be separated from women for very brief periods of time. A war party, for example, might separate for several days, but not months. The Great Raid of 1840, for example, which is regarded as the largest Native American raid every conducted, just lasted two days. Add in travel, and the warrior bands were gone longer, but it probably wasn't much more than a week, if that long.
Hunting parties are also often cited for periods of separation, but in a healthy native state, the separation was often just a matter of hours. Women were usually close enough to a really large hunting party that they could partake in the processing of the game. There were undoubtedly exceptions, but by and large, this was the rule.
Taking the war example again, consider this from Ethiopia's mobilization order of 1935 when Italy invaded:
Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.
Emperor Haile Selassie
Married men, take your wives. Not married? Find a woman who isn't married and taker her.
It's only once you begin to mess with the basic human living patters that the opposite is true. Industrialization, which we'll get to in a moment, really brought in a major disruption from the normal living patter, but there are preindustrial examples that are notable. War provides a pretty good example again.
Major military campaigns in antiquity relied on theft of food, which is not ordered, and which is well known. If the fighters were separated from women, they also rapidly descended to disorder. Early military campaigns (and some recent ones) are famously associated with "rape and pillage", and by men who would not ordinarily do that.
Another example of adjusting to desperate times might be taken in Muhammed authoring his troops, who were ready to go home as they were tired of being without their wives, to have sex with their female saves taken in war. This is widely denied by Muslim scholars today, but it seems to be fairly well established and in fact the practice has been resumed by Islamic fundamentalist armed bands and its the origin of Muslim sex slave trading, which is an historical fact. That this is basically an example of licensed rape can't really be denied.
Conversely, in Christian societies the "marital debt" was taken very seriously up until recently, and it was taken so seriously in the Middle Ages that a wife of a man who wished to go on crusade could veto it simply by citing the marital debt. That's fairly extraordinary, but telling, in that she could simply declare that if her husband departed her needs in this category might cause her to fall into sin, and therefore, he couldn't go. Moderns like to look down on such things today, but in reality that was a very natural and realistic view of human sexuality.
Same gender attractions play in here too, but within bands of men kept away from women for long periods of time. The most famous example of that may be the Spartans, who were fierce warriors trained from young adulthood, in the case of men, to be soldiers. However, the warehousing of men, and boys, away from women brought about widespread homosexual conduct as the living conditions were, rather obviously, completely abnormal.
So too are much of our current living patters.
Industrialization separated men from women and parent from child in a major way, recreating the abnormality of living conditions noted above on a society wide level.
And that's deeply unnatural.
It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that men left their homes every day, working long hours, and were separated from their wives and children for what amounts to well over half of their adult waking hours. And this was not only true of industrial laborers, but also of their white collar bosses. In many industrial societies, moreover, this was amplified by the fact that men further segregated themselves, or were segregated by society, even on off hours.
It was essayist Henry Fairlie who noted:
Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family and churches. But in the city today, work and home, family and church, are seperated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of thier home life. AT the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of hteir work hours on thier off hours. They rush form the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool to work at their play with the same joylessness.
Fairlie wrote this in 1986, well after the most aggressors conditions of the Industrial Revolution had slackened, but he did note in The Idiocy of Urban Life what that had been like. Men left early in the morning and walked, on average, seven miles to work. They worked their all day, and then returned home after twelve hours of labor. Well over half their day had been spent away from their family.
By the 20th Century that had, in many heavily industrial regions, created a new pattern of living he didn't address, and one which lasted well into the 1970s. Men left for work in blue collar jobs, worked all day with other men, and at quitting time, they hit the bars. Men in the American Rust Belt, for instance, commonly hit a bar every night on the way home, spending a couple of hours drinking beer in an all male company, save for the barmaids whose tips went up as the beer flowed. Rough and tumble places, these were not the equivalent of charming English or Irish pubs of the same period. The maleness, if you will, of their work was all the more amplified by the nearly universal membership of men in organizations that excluded women.
Not surprisingly, this all encouraged conventional sexual vice. Some men, a minority but nonetheless an appreciable nature, took the jousting with bar maid and waitresses further, with some of the women reciprocating. When Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells sang about the "wild side of life" it's easy to wonder why they were hanging out in bars, not really appreciating that a lot of men in particular simply did. Indeed, the term "family man", conversely, had real meaning.
Not to dump this exclusively on blue collar workers by any means, philandering conduct was common in the white collar world as well, to such an extent that it became instantly recognizable to people who went to see 1960's The Apartment, the entire theme of which plays out through the vehicle of cheating married executives using their younger colleagues' apartment.
Indeed, when I was young, I can recall my parents openly talking about professionals in town who had affairs and mistresses. This certainly didn't include anyone in my family, which was 100% Catholic and meant it. That conduct was clearly not approved of, but my point is that it occured. While never discussed in this fashion, in the context of what we're discussing here, the mistresses were sometimes targets of opportunity, so to speak. Secretaries and assistants. Indeed, I heard a lawyer of the generation prior to mine, once relate of the generation of lawyers two generations older than hers, that quite a few of the paralegals of that old, now largely dead or very old, were effectively mistresses. One such assistant had mysteriously had a child out of wedlock when that was pretty rare, and it was widely known who teh employer father was.
There's a lot more that could be explored here, but the point is that the contra natural working conditions give rise to departures from morality and nature. Even now, or particularly now, you'll hear a close female colleague of a male be referred to as his "work wife". I've even heard a person refer to herself that way. Work wives have no marital debt, but hidden by the statement is the vague suggestion or fear that they might be providing such a service, illicit thought it would be.
Homosexuality, in large part, comes about, I strongly suspect, due to something similar.
In an earlier thread, we noted that there are in fact cultures that not only have low incidents of homosexual conduct, but none. As we earlier posted:
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptane of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
But what would be the conditions that bring it about in our culture?
We're not even supposed to ask that now, but for most people who have same sex attraction, it's a pretty heavy cross to bear. We should be looking at how it comes about.
Well, what we know is that if we separate men from women, particularly in their formative years, we'll get it at a higher rate than when that doesn't occur.
Going back to war, that fountain of all problematic things, we can look back as far as the Spartans to find this. Spartans, faced with a constant threat of war, took up separating men from women large-scale and raising boys in barracks. It also had a notable degree of homosexual conduct.
Hmmm. . . separate young men and keep them separates just as things begin, for lack of a better way to put it, turn on, and . . . .
The Spartans were a notable early example of this, which in turn tends to be exaggerated. It's not likely that every single Spartan male was a homosexual. It's also not the case, as is sometimes suggested, that Ancient Greece was wildly homosexual. Indeed, Plato abhorred it and regarded it as contrary to nature and proposed the Athenian assembly ban homosexual acts, masturbation, and illegitimate sex in general.
Going forward in time, when we really start to see references to the acts (but not a claimed "homosexual" status) comes with the first semi modern navies. It was a constant concern, for instance, of the Royal Navy, which perhaps might be regarded as the first modern navy. A great navy, it was not necessarily recruited in the most charming way and many sailors were simply press-ganged, a type of conscription, into it against their will. As press gangs favored hitting bars in ports, many of the men conscripted into the Royal Navy already lacked a strong attachment to home and family, and ports were notoriously associated with prostitution. Anyhow, a lot of men away from sea for months, or years, at a time, and a lot of them being fairly young. . . well the problem rose again.
It replicated itself in large modern armies as well, interestingly often among the officer class. In European armies where the officer class was made up of minor nobility as a rule, the men in it had entered as the only other real employment option, if they were not set to inherit the estate, was the clergy. In some European armies officers were strongly discouraged from marrying, which in part reflected the fact that their pay was very bad, as their countries knew that they could rely on family money. While it didn't occur universally in every such army, in some, such as the pre World War One German Army, there was a strong streak of hidden homosexuality.
English private schools, which were widely used by the upper class, were notorious for homosexuality for the same reason. Homosexual conduct became so common in them that homosexuality used to be referred to elsewhere as "the English Disease". Private schools were segregated effectively by class, and very much by gender. Unlike the charming portrayal in the Harry Potter series of works, boys went to boys schools and girls to girls school. Quite often, over time, parents enrolled their children in the same schools they'd gone to. Overtime, a closeted institutional homosexuality, or at least its common occurrence, crept in.
It could be legitimately asked how on earth any of this relates to our current era, but it does in more ways than we might imagine.
In most Western societies today, we make no effort, for the most part, to separate men and women in anything, formally. But as we've already detailed, we do send men, and now women, out of their families and into an unnatural environment on a daily basis. People often meet their future spouses in periods of time when young people are constantly together, such as in school or university, but as soon as they are established, we pull them apart.
Starting during World War Two, moreover, a false academia combined with the corruption and destruction of the war, gave rise to the Sexual Revolution. We commonly think of that as arriving in the 60s, but in reality it probably really started in the 1940s with the publication of Kinsey's false academic narratives. That was the first shot, so to speak, and the publication of Playboy the second one. While Playboy was opposed in some localities into the 1980s, by the 1950s it was so well established, in spite of completely rejecting conventional morality, and in spite, moreover, of publishing photos of women younger than 18, that the ground had been massively lost. The pill followed in the early 60s, work patterns changed due to the introduction of domestic machinery, and sexual morality took a beating. Once its natural purpose was obscured, and then lost, which really basically took all the way into the 1990s, the widespread acceptance of homosexual sex was inevitable.
None of which means that a large number of people will take it up.
But what does mean, that some people, in some circumstances, will. And the unnatural conditions that we live in, amplified by societal moorings having been cut by the Sexual Revolution, help bring that about. And as society has chosen to simply embrace everything that deviates from the norm, and natural, as it applies to ourselves, those afflicted have almost no place to go, but deeper in, no matter how destructive that may be.
All of which is a good reason that people in this circumstance need blessings, if blessing are properly understood.
And which would, therefore, support Fiducia Supplicans.
But none of which suggests that the Church's view on sex is what is causing a decline in attendance in Europe, and that a wider acceptance of homosexuality as normal, as some would urge, would actually do anything. This all is a problem in the West, to be sure, but the underlying evolution of thought that some have, that this is all natural, is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence supports the contrary.
Which gets us back to our original point. African and Asia, for all of their problems, have lived closer to nature, longer, than we have. But that is rapidly changing, and in much of Asia in particular it already has. People who like to imagine that there is such a thing as broad progress, for which there is no good evidence, would argue that this is all progress, so that everything we have noted as a byproduct of the evolution of industry in the West will necessarily happen everywhere else. But that's not necessarily the case at all.
And indeed, in the West itself there seem to be an awakening of tradition, and a desire to return to a more rooted lifestyle. Ironically, evolutions in technology may bring that about. We know that populations are declining everywhere in the Western Northern Hemisphere, which is seen as a disaster but which in fact may emphasize this sort of return to the village.
Footnotes:
1. Obergefell is an incredibly weak decision which, if it were to reappear in front of the United States Supreme Court today, would be reversed. My prediction is that it will be within the next decade as it devoid of solid legal reasoning.
When it was handed down, it was my prediction here that it would cause massive social disruption and resistance, which in fact it has. Pollsters like to point out that the views on same gender unions have moved greatly since it was handed down, which is true, but what they seem to miss is that it was basically the last straw on the part of traditional social conservatives, as well as (Southern type) populists on forced social change. The latter group had long ago accommodated itself to divorce, to people shacking up, and begrudgingly to homosexual conduct but it wasn't about to be told that homosexual unions equated with marriage. In very real terms, Anthony Kennedy, whether he realizes it or not, has always been Donald Trump's running mate.
On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.
His points were really good.
Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern. It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016. Well, guess what, she has a right to do that. You have a right to ignore it.
She also expressed support for abortion being legal. I feel it should be illegal. That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.
But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out. He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.
Indeed, they are.
Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club. Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex. Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.
Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed. Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.
And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.
Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private. It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues. And we really don't need to. But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper. As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.
It's not that there's nothing to see here. There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about. They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do. No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.
Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.
The Andy Griffith Show
I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun. It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.
It's interesting.
The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much. It ran from 1960 to 1968. It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964. Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.
But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here. The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago. That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.
Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means. But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers. To some degree, that world view had returned.
Epilog
The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.
Soviet realisim painting depeciting sorting grain. While hopelessly romanticized, the depiction of women in this work is accurate, and would have been fort the pre Soviet era as well.
A tired, discouraged Tik Toker young woman has gone viral with a post, in which she says in tears;
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
I am so tired. . . I want to put my feet up. .
She says it, struggling back heavy tears.
A couple of things before we go on to analyze this topic, and people's reaction to her cri de coeur.
First, my initial guess was that this probably would have resulted in a flood of people making fun of the young woman, but in fact, there isn't much of that. Lots of women actually posted back with complete sympathy.
A few men posted, too, in this one instance, stupidly:
Jacob McCoombe
Who thought ANYONE should have to work? We should all be sitting on the beach eating cheese and wine 😭
6-61453Reply
AtticusMax123
but... there would not be any cheese or wine .. 😱
6-9 64Reply
Jacob McCoombe
I’d classify it as a hobby. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t mind at all making homemade cheese and wine
6-950 Reply AtticusMax123
but that's work. it's where we have gone wrong. all worried about money, instead of worrying about actually enjoying and being passionate about
Ahh. . .that age old belief that farming and agriculture is not work. . . from urbanites. Farmers, of course, believe hte same thing about people who have office jobs in town.
But I digress.
Quite a few replies were like this one:
Fr why did they do that🤨 I would have been completely chill running a household cooking, going shopping, cleaning stress free like ugh I hate working
One of the most interesting replies was this one:
🥀𝐸𝓂𝒾𝓁𝓎🥀
we just wanted the option we didn’t want to HAVE to work 😭😭😭
So I'll start my comments here.
Secondly, therefore, the question, answered straight, and then I guess through a technological analysis and economic analysis. . . or I suppose I'll look at all of these simultaneously.
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
Well, proto feminist and early feminist did that. The reason that they did it, as understood by them at the time, was that they lived in a world that had been heavily impacted by industrialization which had removed men from home based enterprise, for the most sake, and sent them off to "work places" of various types during their working shifts. This vested economic power in men, and in turn the economic power equated with political power and societal power. Arguably, it was the power aspect of this that most concerned early feminist and proto feminist, as that imbalance of power worked heavily to the detriment of women in all sorts of ways.
At the same time, however, technological advances made women's labor in the homes greatly reduced, as we have described here:
So, basically, feminism rose up in the 20th Century as part of a long, slow, female emancipation movement that began prior to the Civil War but which really took root in the very late 19th Century and very early 20th Century just as technological changes made it possible for fewer women to be required to be employed in the household, a necessity which had greatly increased, ironically enough, when industrialization mandated men to leave the household.
Put another way, consider this. Once men worked in factories, or town jobs, there was no way that they were really available to lend any kind of hand with domestic matters. This was so much the case, that boarding houses were a staple of men's lives if they were single. Indeed, they were so much a staple that they inspired a long-running cartoon which would now make no sense to most Americans.
Indeed, boarding houses were so common that they were the souse of a folk song noted by Mark Twain, which went:
Women have always worked, and some women have worked outside their households for time immemorial. Indeed, as the thread linked in above discussed this:
That's correct. Nearly 20% of women worked outside their households as early as 1900.
Of that remaining 80%, at that time, you have to keep in mind that the farm population was much higher than it is today, its decline as a percentage of the population being one of the sad realities of the barbarity of modern life. Even this is a bit deceptive, however. PBS's American Experience relates the following:
1870 The 1870 census shows that farmers, for the first time, are in the minority. Of all employed persons, only 47.7 percent are farmers. As farming becomes more mechanized, farmers rely more on bank loans for land and equipment.
1880 U.S. population reaches 50,155,783, with farm population estimated at 22,981,000. Forty-nine percent of all employed persons are farmers, and of those, one in four is a tenant, despite the Homestead Acts. With the development of barbed-wire fencing and windmills, plow farming reaches the Great Plains.
1893 U.S. experiences an economic crisis: 642 banks fail and 16,000 businesses close. As produce prices plummet, tens of thousands of small farms go under.
1900 There are 5.7 million farms in the U.S., with an average size of 138 acres.
1920 The number of farms has grown to 6.5 million and is home to roughly 32 million Americans, or 30 percent of the population. This would soon change. Migration, mostly by young people who left for the cities, escalated over the next ten years.
What this shows us, of course, is that farmers as a percentage of the American public peaked in the late 19th Century, dropping to 30% by 1920. 1919 was the last year of economic parity for American farmers. Still, for our discussion here, this is significant. 1920 was the year that the 19th Amendment was ratified in the United States, and women got the right to vote throughout the country. At that time 20% of women were employed outside the household, and approximately 30% of them lived in farm families, and women in farm families most definitely worked. That would mean, therefore, that about 50% of women were actually working in some fashion in addition to maintaining their households, and that's at a bare minimum.
Indeed, if we consider the fact that family run businesses were much more common in the first half of the 20th Century than they are now, that figure increases even more. For families that owned small businesses, whether they be stores, or restaurants, etc., the entire household was employed in them in some fashion. There may have been a division of labor in those households, but it was not as great as might be imagined.
Even for professionals, this was true to some degree. Doctors, for example, frequently had their offices in their homes up into the first quarter of the 20th Century. Medicine was more primitive to be sure, and the practice was not as lucrative as it was to become. Quite frequently, jobs preformed by hired help today, were preformed by a spouse. A person might expect the receptionist, for example, to be married to the physician. "He married his nurse" or "he married his secretary" was a common line for doctors and lawyers, and other professionals. The businesses were much less lucrative, and the family connections, and the natural inclination for couples to work together well expressed.
So, in terms of "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?", well, women didn't have to fight for "jobs". Having a job, one way or another, was a condition of life for most women well before women are regarded as having entered the workplace.
So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.
Well, what's up with it is that as farming as the primary occupation of people declined, and men began to have no choice but to work in other capacities, an unnatural economic division of resources occured. A division of labor, quite frankly, is natural. Men and women really are different, vegan eating emaciated weenies views aside. But men working daily away from their families are not. The economic power, therefore, vested in men, and that created an odd unnatural living condition that still prevails in some quarters. The Rust Belt life of going to work in the factory early, for a good paycheck, getting off work late, hitting the bars with the guys in the Rust Belt Tavern where the workers would get blotto and make wolf whistles at the bar maids, before going home blitzed and demanding dinner from their wives came about.
And while that is clearly an exaggeration, it's not all that unrealistic of a depiction of the height of the American blue collar era. The point isn't to unfairly condemn it, but rather to note that money, the motivator for crawling out of bed every day and heading to the GM plant, vested primarily in the hands of men and not women. That was a problem.
In addition to that, what we've already noted above occured. Domestic machinery came about, which made female household labor surplus.
While we haven't addressed it yet, of the 50% of women not employed on the farm or outside the home, the remainder tended to be actually "employed" in the true sense of the word, in the heavy labor of just keeping a household going. Indeed, the 20% that were employed outside the home tended to be actually employed, as maids and servants, in the houses of those who could afford it. And employing domestic help was surprisingly common.
Americans of a certain age will have watched The Andy Griffith Show, in which, of course, Aunt Bea is a resident of the widowed Sheriff Taylor's household, and acts as the woman of the house. In the very first episode of the show, she's introduced when Taylor's prior live in female servant has left to get married. Sheriffs don't make a vast amount of money, of course, but the audience would not have thought this odd, as it wasn't that unusual. Other television depictions of the same era have similar depictions.
In my own family, my mother's family in Montreal employed several domestic servants. Now, in fairness, they were doing very well at the time, but again this wasn't unusual. With a large number of children, and before our current era in every way, she employed a collection of Québécoise who cooked and cleaned in the house. They were not servants, in the English manor house manner, but domestic labor.
And this gets us to the next facet of this discussion. Prior to the 1950s, and even well after that, female labor outside of the household fell into a fairly limited number of occupations, and that is what feminist were struggling against. Women of lower means, including married women, often found employment as servants and maids. By the first quarter of the 20th Century, they were finding employment in offices. Poor women found employment in certain types of factories, often featuring extremely dangerous working conditions. Women of greater means, but not wealth, had teaching and nursing open to them.
Indeed, it is that last fact that demonstrates what really occured, and what the "fight" was actually about. Young middle class women finishing school, and more women than men finished school, who wanted to work could choose to teach or nurse. If they were Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican (Episcopalian) or Lutheran, they might choose to become nuns. We don't tend to think of Protestant denominations having nuns, but they in fact do, and this opens up another aspect of this. Nearly all women married at the time, and nearly all women still do. It's a natural institution. But not all women wish to marry. Just as we've discussed with the topic of male homosexuality, religious institutions offered an acceptable way to avoid marriage and still have a career. That may well mean that not all had deep religious vocations (certainly most did), but that was an honorable path for them.
What was not possible, generally, was to become a physician, lawyer or the like. Professions were closed to women. Most occupations outside of those noted were, which was a legacy byproduct of the early stages of the industrial revolution. Men were forced outside of the home for heavy labor, but some had the option of working outside the home in "desk jobs". While these jobs were in particularly less subject to gender differences than those involving heavy labor, the concept that they were was absent and women were excluded.
Eliminating that exclusion is what feminist were "fighting for".
That fight, we might tell our youthful distressed TikToker, was one worth fighting for. In the end, it's not that the fight was to allow her to work, the fight was to allow her to work at something other than scrubbing floors.
But all battles are always subject o the law of unintended consequences.
Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about. The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force. In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them. Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.
Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss. Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy. Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s. Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family". The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family. Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to. Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.
The problem with it is that it's a lie. Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy. Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.
The additional problem is corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism became so dominant in American society that by the 1970s it had swamped the original purpose of the economy and converted human beings into consumers. Often missed in this is that while corporations need people to have enough money to buy products, it needs labor to be as cheap as possible, or even better nonexistent. In this fashion, capitalism's two driving forces are actually pitted against each other.
Be that as it may, the freeing up of female labor from the household after World War Two was a boon to capitalism. More workers within the same population meant reduced labor costs. Combined with a new societal imperative pushing women into the workplace, the rise of birth control which inhibited one of the primary reasons they were not, and the creation of a child warehousing industry, capitalism, along with socialism, drug women out of the household who didn't want to be in it, and put them into jobs which had little value in terms of the feminist dream of "fulfillment".
Indeed, the ultimate irony of the entire effort was that at the end of the day, corporate interest most benefitted. Feminist never supported a movement that would "allow" women to work, but which actually compelled them to be required to, believing somehow that every woman who worked would find a high paying professional job. In reality, doubling the workforce within the same overall population depressed wages in non-professional categories and ended up forcing all women to work, including in families in which there were children, which ended up being most families. Feminism, ironically enough, had a mostly male view of the world, and a mostly Hefnerescque few of it, and the general assumption was that women wouldn't have children, and wouldn't even get married, but live a variant of the Playboy Philosophy, albeit without the huge boobs and dumb girl next store, but rather with an anorexic career woman in that role.
So in the new, in the dominant Anglo-American Culture, all women must now work and there's really no other easy economic option. While plenty of families opt out of this, at least for at time, many cannot. The big lie of "career fulfillment" has become a cultural norm, and interestingly enough has lead to personal misery on the party of many, who abandon all else for a career that, in the end, is just a job, but one without purpose or meaning. And more than a few women have been left embittered by being forced into a labor/employment lifestyle that they resent and feel is unnatural. Indeed, we've noted that here before:
We don't know, but it's apparently physically fatiguing. A quick look at her TikTok page (and it is quick, as TikTok is weird) suggests that she works in something in which she interacts with customers, so perhaps sales.
So is her cri de cœur misplaced?
Well, at least partially, and probably substantially. Unless she was born into wealth, and there's no reason to believe that, she was not going to escape all work in the first place. The nature and the purpose of it would be different, however. More likely than not, if she was her current age in 1923, she may have worked outside the home a bit, but then would probably find her work, and it is work, would be at home. If it were 1823, on the other hand, or 1723, her work for her entire life would almost certainly be at home, unless she was born into severe poverty or wealth, neither of which seem to be the case.
So is her complaint about nothing?
Well, like a lot of female cries in this area, and there are a lot of them, the answer to that is no.
One thing that the feminists crossed into, at some point, although they've started to cross back due to the unintended results of their success, was a war on women as women. People remain people no matter what. Truth be known, a lot of people don't want to be career people, they just want to live their lives and for a lot of them, those lives are close in their minds to the historic norm. The authors of Cosmopolitan may have imagined all women living lives of professional independence, sterile, and free of any commitments to anything, but sane human beings don't imagine lives like that. So most people end up marrying sooner or later. Truth be known, in people's younger years, they spend a lot of time worrying about this topic and hoping to find somebody.
But the world brought about by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution doesn't really accommodate that very well. So women who would have preferred the more traditional roles are punished as society won't allow for it. Beyond that, the logical conclusion of a sexless society is a gender bending one, and we now see disturbed men trying to cross into female status, as in spite of everything women are allowed societally breaks on the demands that men still remain subject to.
In the end, while things were achieved that needed to be, perhaps in part because of the era during which they were achieved, they were overachieved. Women were allowed ultimately into every role, including some, such as combat soldier, which history and genetics would naturally preclude.
All in all, what we've never figured out is how to deal with the aftershocks and destruction that followed in the wake of massive societal change in the West following World War Two, and more particularly the Revolution of 1968. As societies don't really tend to debate what direction they're headed in, at least cleanly, this creates a titanic mess. But stepping back from one sad girl with sore feet, what we should be seeing is a host of things. One is that feminism combined with Hefnerism, pharmaceuticals and corporate capitalism to the detriment of everyone. The late stages of that contribute to the warp and woof of our times as the left pushes to destroy what remains of evolution and biology and the varying elements on the right grasp to restore it, without really understanding what happened. Society isn't going back to any particular date in the past, and there never was a perfect one, but most likely evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained human nature will recover an awful lot of it, in some new sort of compromise.
Footnotes:
*It seems a little disputed, but the same tune may have been used by, or came from, There Is A Happy Land, which was a religious themed tune.
There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;
Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,
Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.
Come to that happy land, come, come away;
Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.
Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;
Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;
Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;
And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.
There is a Boarding House was adopted for the classic soldier's song Old Soldiers Never Die.
There is an old cookhouse, far far away
Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.
Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea
And we are gradually fading away.
Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.
Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.
Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.
Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will
So we drill and drill until we fade away.
It's worth noting that the Army, prior to World War Two, and indeed for some time thereafter, shared certain common features with boarding room life in that it was largely all male, and the occupataion took care of room and board.
