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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2niFKwk:
sagansense:
halalbarbie:
do you ever sit and think about your female ancestors and like how many of them endured forced marriages, sexual abuse, physical violence and complete deprivation of education and autonomy and suffered silently for literally centuries. going through pregnancies and child birth without modern medicine, having multiple children and watching most of them die before the age of five because that was just the way of life back then? and ultimately you are a product of their pain? i think about them a lot and then i think about how many women continue to share their reality in this current year
YES, YES I DO. CONSTANTLY. THANK YOU FOR THIS.
I think about this a lot too.
And I also think about how it’s kind of a myth that in the Bad Old Days everything was Terrible. Like, not to downplay the suffering of people in the days before modern medicine and all, but I think it kind of– it absolves our society of some guilt, to give in to this fantasy of The Dark Times Before, kind of? Like, oh, modern medicine and modern times are this crazy luxury and we should all be grateful and everything used to always be terrible–
but that’s just not true. I’m extremely lucky to have access to a ton of my family’s genealogical data, and I went through at one point and wrote down the name of every female ancestor, her age at marriage, her age when first child born, and how old she was when she died. I had pretty comprehensive data back to the early 1600s or so (which is when my grandma stopped counting, as she was mostly doing this for American history purposes).
One woman was married at 19. All others were over 20. I mean every single one. In my entire sample size. I’m going back 11, 12 generations; that’s a lot of individuals.
Most of their children lived. Most of them had more than two or three children, sure, but not all did. (And, I mean. There were a ton of single ladies in the genealogies who didn’t get married ever or have kids, I’m just– I mean, obviously– not descended from them. They tend to disappear in the historical record for that reason, but they very much existed and were pretty common really. It has never been universally expected of women to marry. The nuclear family is a modern invention.)
Of my ancestresses, most of them had the majority of their children survive to adulthood. Their children were, largely, well-spaced, indicating that they had some modicum of control of their own family planning, one way or another. (Family planning predates the Pill, for the record. The rest of human history was not all random chance.) And for the most part, these women lived to be quite old.
(An example, Ann Borodell, born in Ireland 1618, was married circa 1648, had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood [one died at 12, no recorded infant mortalities and no long spacings suggesting such], and died at age 96 among her children and grandchildren. She was 30 when she married– and to a younger, poorer man at that, one who she apparently chose of her own accord and by all accounts out of personal preference. In the SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.)
What’s the deal? Oh, my people were white. And mostly middle-class. Farmers, at least; some merchants, mostly land-owners. Not wealthy, but never destitute. (Ann was a wealthy leather merchant’s favorite daughter.)
It’s a lie that life used to always, universally be terrible. No, if you were white and middle-class, life was pretty all right. (Circling back to my point: not to downplay the very real suffering of a lot of real people! But it was neither universal nor inevitable.) Just like now, luck played a big part– don’t get me wrong, there were awful things that people went through, and some of them weren’t so lucky, a great many of the menfolk died young of various causes, and a fair number of the women perished in childbirth-related incidents– but it’s a myth that everyone’s lot was misery.
Absolutely, mourn the tragedies that befell those who came before. I’m sure there were plenty. But doesn’t it make the current bullshit all the more deplorable to realize that it’s not even precedented in history! They’re making up how bad things used to be, to make it seem like this is somehow acceptable.
The horrors of the past were neither universal nor inevitable. The horrors of the current day, therefore, are likewise. We must resist where we can, and that means those of us who have inherited privilege must do all we can to extend it to others.
sagansense:
halalbarbie:
do you ever sit and think about your female ancestors and like how many of them endured forced marriages, sexual abuse, physical violence and complete deprivation of education and autonomy and suffered silently for literally centuries. going through pregnancies and child birth without modern medicine, having multiple children and watching most of them die before the age of five because that was just the way of life back then? and ultimately you are a product of their pain? i think about them a lot and then i think about how many women continue to share their reality in this current year
YES, YES I DO. CONSTANTLY. THANK YOU FOR THIS.
I think about this a lot too.
And I also think about how it’s kind of a myth that in the Bad Old Days everything was Terrible. Like, not to downplay the suffering of people in the days before modern medicine and all, but I think it kind of– it absolves our society of some guilt, to give in to this fantasy of The Dark Times Before, kind of? Like, oh, modern medicine and modern times are this crazy luxury and we should all be grateful and everything used to always be terrible–
but that’s just not true. I’m extremely lucky to have access to a ton of my family’s genealogical data, and I went through at one point and wrote down the name of every female ancestor, her age at marriage, her age when first child born, and how old she was when she died. I had pretty comprehensive data back to the early 1600s or so (which is when my grandma stopped counting, as she was mostly doing this for American history purposes).
One woman was married at 19. All others were over 20. I mean every single one. In my entire sample size. I’m going back 11, 12 generations; that’s a lot of individuals.
Most of their children lived. Most of them had more than two or three children, sure, but not all did. (And, I mean. There were a ton of single ladies in the genealogies who didn’t get married ever or have kids, I’m just– I mean, obviously– not descended from them. They tend to disappear in the historical record for that reason, but they very much existed and were pretty common really. It has never been universally expected of women to marry. The nuclear family is a modern invention.)
Of my ancestresses, most of them had the majority of their children survive to adulthood. Their children were, largely, well-spaced, indicating that they had some modicum of control of their own family planning, one way or another. (Family planning predates the Pill, for the record. The rest of human history was not all random chance.) And for the most part, these women lived to be quite old.
(An example, Ann Borodell, born in Ireland 1618, was married circa 1648, had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood [one died at 12, no recorded infant mortalities and no long spacings suggesting such], and died at age 96 among her children and grandchildren. She was 30 when she married– and to a younger, poorer man at that, one who she apparently chose of her own accord and by all accounts out of personal preference. In the SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.)
What’s the deal? Oh, my people were white. And mostly middle-class. Farmers, at least; some merchants, mostly land-owners. Not wealthy, but never destitute. (Ann was a wealthy leather merchant’s favorite daughter.)
It’s a lie that life used to always, universally be terrible. No, if you were white and middle-class, life was pretty all right. (Circling back to my point: not to downplay the very real suffering of a lot of real people! But it was neither universal nor inevitable.) Just like now, luck played a big part– don’t get me wrong, there were awful things that people went through, and some of them weren’t so lucky, a great many of the menfolk died young of various causes, and a fair number of the women perished in childbirth-related incidents– but it’s a myth that everyone’s lot was misery.
Absolutely, mourn the tragedies that befell those who came before. I’m sure there were plenty. But doesn’t it make the current bullshit all the more deplorable to realize that it’s not even precedented in history! They’re making up how bad things used to be, to make it seem like this is somehow acceptable.
The horrors of the past were neither universal nor inevitable. The horrors of the current day, therefore, are likewise. We must resist where we can, and that means those of us who have inherited privilege must do all we can to extend it to others.
