From Victorian Prudishness to Personal Vibes

Aug 27, 2012 by cherienava80

Yearning for the “Good Old Days” once you did not have to spend another half eliminating hills of junk, and half your life left on the highway to get your mail? Does your blood pressure increase at the end of the time when you try to have a quiet supper in a cafe and the inconsiderate jerk at the following table is hollering into his cellphone? Have a break using this frenetic insanity and enjoy REMEMBRANCES OF TIMES PAST, by Marta Hiatt, a timeless series of reports and photographs recalling the way in which life was in early part of the 20th Century, when life was not as complicated.Take an emotional journey back once again to an occasion of Model-T Fords, stay-at-home-moms, vinyl long-playing records, telegrams, radio days, strict principles of etiquette, and manual typewriters. Hiatt has collected a huge selection of individual stories of “the traditional days,” in her wonderful book, illustrated with 250 black and white vintage photographs that vividly provide the stories to life.”My brother and I were reminiscing one day about how precisely we used to invest almost all day Saturday helping mom draw the wash through a wringer many times to obtain the water out,” Hiatt says. “What an undertaking that was! We also mentioned how we’d to make soap suds to complete the bathroom in the days before soap was invented. We set the tough bar of soap in a little cord grate and swished it around for about 10 minutes to get enough suds. After our talk I thought it would be interesting to construct a complete book about the so-called “good previous days” by asking friends and family to lead their stories.”Dr. Hiatt compared her childhood in the ’40s your today:oYou have a cell-phone, we had a party-line, and everybody else on our line can listen in, generally surreptitiously.oYou send email, we delivered telegrams.oYou enjoy your music on a pocket-size iPod, mine arrived on 12-inch vinyl records.oIf you need data, you just Google it, but we had to find through index cards at the local library.Friends and family relations brought interesting, personal tales such as for example this:”In our family we always ate meals together; mother and my sisters and I prepared them, and we cleared up afterward too, while the children played games and dad read the report. Sometimes my mother played the piano after supper and most of us stood around it and sang. We were creative; we played board games together as a family group, and games were invented by us. On Sunday evenings all of us sat around the kitchen table and paid attention to the radio; plans like “The Lone Ranger,” “Jack Benny,” “Fred Allen,” and “The Shadow Knows.” Needless to say there wasn’t any TV, so we spoke to each other.Hiatt believes the greatest cultural adjustments were the hippie revolution of the ’60s and the feminist revolution of the ’70s, sparked by Betty Freidan’s guide “The Feminine Mystique.” “After this,” states Hiatt, “women obtained lots of independence. Before this time around, job results in the report were separated by gender, and women can only submit an application for “female only” jobs. While there’s still quite a distance to go, today we’re also referring to the likelihood of a woman president, so there have now been massive changes.”The ’60s technology changed our whole culture. We went from being a very uptight community controlled by religion and strict principles of etiquette, to such a thing goes, and “do your personal thing.” –From swimsuits that included a woman’s whole torso, to bikinis and thongs, and from ties and button-down white shirts at the job to ‘relaxed Fridays.’ Everyone was no more scared of ‘what would the neighbors think’? or mortified should they made a cultural fake pas.”In discussing “Sex and Social Mores,” Hiatt examines the modifications from Victorian prudishness to individual vibrators, and from corsets to Wonder Bras. She recalls: “It is surprising to realize that, until the feminist movement, it absolutely was legal for a person to rape his wife. It was deemed her wifely duty to send to his sexual needs when and however he wanted, whether she wanted to or not. Unless he or she could prove either infidelity or mental cruelty and a divorce could not be got by a spouse. Partner beating or chronic alcoholism were not adequate grounds for divorce. In case a girl wasn’t committed by 25, she was dubbed an maid,” and was usually refused entry in to school or advertising to administration, which was reserved for males.Hiatt states: “Life was harder in the 20th Century, but it was also much simpler.”

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