btw, where does it say 12 year old sexual activity was not unusual or condemned 100 years ago?
Go read the marriage records.
Perhaps I should have made it more than 100, at least as far as Europe is concerned. Maybe by 1900 the ages were up some. But go back to the 1600s, 1700s, etc., and you'll find many marriages of that age.
And in other cultures, child brides were the norm. I don't have the references in front of me, but from my reading I believe that while India was a part of the British Empire, child marriage was still quite normal.
just under 150 years ago slavery was the norm, tar and feathering was done, lynching was done
no one in their right mind would defend any of that or try and find the "philosophical reasons for this shift"
Actually, I do think that the history of slavery and the transition in this country from a slave to a non-slave society is quite interesting and worth study. It is, I grant, complicated by the racial aspects of slavery in America, which makes it very difficult to study dispassionately, but keep in mind that slavery has been an accepted part of human culture for most of the history of the human race. And there are still areas of the world where slavery continues to be practiced, though not legally since the Western nations have managed to impose their opposition to slavery pretty universally.
And you will find a number of informed people who take the position that slavery in fact, if not in name, is alive and well right here in the US today. So it is not by any means a dead issue. It is worth figuring out why people even today hold others in slavery, since understanding a problem is usually an important step in eliminating it. |
