..basing your opinion on your personal experience with your grandparents .. Absolutely. And why not? They were real people and normal people as were their parents and grandparents and the people they told me about. We are fortunate when we can learn things about how things were historically from people who lived through the time. Yes, we see one persons view, but that is what we're getting with a book too - the authors view - who chooses what to include and not include.
I know you have grandparents too. Do you think they were browbeaten submissive and oppressed because of their gender? If the feminist view of the past is correct, then some of us ought to have grandmothers who were like that. I didn't. And I don't think my grandparents were unique.
Picking daffodils, canning fruit for patients, selling walnuts. I admire them for doing what they could within the existing system, but what if they wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer?
Being a doctor or lawyer was out of the question for everyone in the family in that generation regardless of gender. Difficulties getting college educations and becoming doctors or lawyers wasn't a big problem for people for whom that wasn't on the agenda anyway. And until recently that was most people.
• Married women had no property rights.
.... >• Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity.
.... • Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women
.... • Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men.
Then why was my grandparents 40 acre farm in my grandmother's name and stayed in her name till she died? She had inherited it from her father, who inherited it from his mother - yes, that means another female land-owner two generations farther back. Another one of my gg grandmothers (born before the Civil War) divorced her husband - because he was a "mean man" my Mom and grandmother said - I'm guessing that means he was abusive - and amazingly she didn't put up with it but divorced him and kept her children. Don't know how she made a living but she did obviously (she never married again) and while I don't know if she owned land or not, I know she owned some things as we have a picture of her in her horse drawn buggy. I was told she proud of always having a nice looking buggy. Which means she wasn't destitute.
Did you know the Supreme Court once ruled that a state could prevent a married woman from practicing law?
I'm not surprised. At one time the SC let states do whatever they wanted. They'd probably have allowed a state to allow a woman to practice law too - it was the states rights idea.
This mentality was ingrained in the male gender, even in the kindest and best-intentioned. Without women fighting for these gains, your relatives wouldn't have been able to get educated or own land, or vote.
As I mentioned I have female ancestors (a couple gg grandmothers who according to what my mom and grandmother have told me) who owned land back in the middle of the 1800's, got divorced back then, and acted pretty independently. So the liberation or women must have been accomplished a pretty long time ago.
I'm not convinced that the world, at least here in America, was ever so hostile to women as feminists claim. Yes, women did have to struggle to get equal rights but the result of the struggle was that they got equal rights. We didn't have to fight a civil war over it either, nor did it take 100 years.
Even as late as the 60s when I was in college, women still faced enormous barriers in entering certain professions.
Barriers I'll believe. Enormous ... ?? There are female doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc etc. today who were educated then. Were the barriers that enormous?
I assume that many men saw allowing women the right to vote, or to practice law, or toserve on a jury, was a terrible thing.
I'm sure some did. But I think most didn't see it as that big a thing. Otherwise the changes wouldn't have come so easily. |
