“‘Elite bilingualism’ – that is, bilingualism of the upper and middle classes – was typically presented as a positive phenomenon. This attitude is seen in the encouragement of bi- and multilingualism
among the children of the elite, and in European research on childhood bilingualism and second language learning (Epstein, 1915;
Pavlovitch, 1920; Ronjat, 1913). In contrast, bilingualism of immigrant and linguistic minority children was commonly associated with mental retardation, moral inferiority, split identity, and linguistic shortcomings.”
— Pavlenko, Aneta (2005) “Emotions and Multilingualism” (p.24)
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”
I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).
So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.
Awesome.
THIS POST LIFTS ME UP
IT GIVES ME LIFE
MORE LIFE THAN I’VE EVER HAD
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT
IT’S ALL I’VE GOT IN THIS WORLD
AND IT’S ALL THE POST I NEED
Also an important thing to note for the people who like to think “back when we were cavemen men were in charge” if you actually look at human biology that doesn’t stack up. In social mammals, the only ones who undergo menopause are those with matriarchal groups. Menopause allows older females to take a break from breeding and looking after young and solely focus on being a leader and looking after the social group. If we stop looking at historical evidence through the lens of “men are physically stronger cuz testosterone so they must have been in charge” we might make more sense of the lives our ancestors lived. (Also physical strength doesn’t always mean leadership, even in the animal kingdom. Look at ants for a great example. Majors serve a certian role in the colony where their strength is required. But that doesn’t mean they’re in charge)
What this bad history also leads to, which drives me nuts, is sci-fi that depicts future sexist societies that are even more sexist than historical Earth ones to economically impossible levels, because the people writing them take fictional depictions of historical societies – including and up to mid-twentieth-century society – as accurate, rather than stories told about how those societies would have liked to function.
I remember someone posted an article once about how during victorian times i think the tuberculosis “look” became the new beauty ideal for women, like unhealthily skinny, pale skin, glowing (with sweat due to fever), rosy cheeks, etc and i for real think about that almost every day because its like. We never had a chance lmao
really tho a lot of fitness culture is an intersection of the worst of late capitalist “masculinity”: pseudo-intellectualism, paranoia, objectification of the body, deference to authority rather than intuition or internal cues, intolerance of illness or weakness (universal human experiences), xtreme self-monitoring, delusions of grandeur, and on and on. it creates a front for pushing and falsely advertising useless products based on those elements, as well as (u know i can’t not say it!) operating as a means of social control
Twenty-First Century Victorians
Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all
demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much
praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate
signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion.
This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe’s and
Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat
in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who
care for their bodies, even when they aren’t exercising. Yoga pants and
running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives’ corseted dresses did.
Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food
culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being
a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy
functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way
working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.
Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control
themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No
need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers.
i feel like it’s also important to note that the cultural capital of ‘athletic’ bodies—which reflect wealth, leisure, and taste—is rooted in the flow of capital in Western countries. the effect of this is directly visible on working class bodies. shifts away from manufacturing and increased automation mean increasingly larger segments of the population lead sedentary lifestyles.
the essay, ‘auto body’, does a fantastic job of tracing the development of fitness culture and linking it to flows of capital: from its “shady” origins in Muscle Beach, demolished because working-class bodies congregating in public was dangerous; to the privatisation of fitness within iron gyms, like Gold’s; to the rise of Nautilus machines and commercial gyms embraced by employers both as preventative health measure and means of increasing the productivity of the aforementioned sedentary workers; and finally, to the CrossFit ‘boxes’ that profit from the nostalgia for an ‘organic’ community and ‘primal’ bodies that counteract the alienation of commercial gyms. CrossFits workouts shape a lean body that appear prepared for physical labour that no longer exists, especially for its relatively wealthy clientele. On this last point:
Culturally, Crossfit harnesses a nostalgia for a simpler past, and combines it with the romanticization of the natural in order to craft a comprehensible view of the present that embraces precarity by being prepared for everything. This is not simply a pre-lapsarian fantasy, though. The idyllic and savage “primal” is coupled with modern science in an attempt to recreate a born-again human that specializes in the unspecialized. As lean management forces all employees to be flexible in their working hours and expertise, Crossfit demands the same from their consumers. Crossfit is the figurative and literal lean production of the body. To avoid precarity, one must embrace precarity. Do a little of everything, and then do more of it. The fragmented sense of progress in lifting a heavier weight or beating an old WOD time creates a fleeting autonomy in a managed subject. Through Crossfit, despair and uncertainty are replaced by trust in the primal, one simulated shoveling exercise at a time.
CrossFit’s workouts shape a lean body which appears to be prepared for physical labour. said physical labour, however, is becoming less necessary in production with the rise of automation, especially so for its relatively wealthy clientele (at least when the essay was written in 2016). it’s no coincidence that CrossFit ‘boxes’ inhabit old production sites in urban centres:
As capital flows back into the city once again, old auto clearing houses and factories are prime locations for Crossfit boxes, and the loft condos that house many of their customers. Crossfit promises a physique that matches the aesthetic of new city wealth. The body as repository for the ghost signs of production reflects the social relations of labor and leisure presented by the economy. You can get strong, but not too big. The workouts are quantifiable and scalable, but never boring. Companion to the rise of beards, tattoos, “work” boots, and lumbersexuality, Crossfit sculpts a body that appears to have labored. Reminding us that physical labor was done at one point, the shell of industry now has a core of chiseled abdominal muscles. Crossfit reverses the traditional relation of labor to the body in that the bodies appearing to have labored the most now reflect the highest material conditions of leisure. Similar to the way that new technology introduced into the production process is embedded with the value of past labor, the Crossfit body is also imbued with the surplus value of past generations. In Scientific Management, Taylor remarked, “In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” Today is the future, and the Crossfit box offers a concise summary of our post-industrial predicament. “People walk through the door and say, ‘Hey, where are all the machines?’” To which Crossfit boldly replies: “We’re the machines!”
fitness culture, in other words, is inextricable from late capitalism.
“Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.”
— Adrienne Rich, Excerpt of North American Time from Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012
La mélancolie, effet d’une séparation subie par l’âme, est guérie par l’ironie, qui est distance et renversement activement instaurés par l’esprit, avec le secours de l’imagination.
Jean Starobinski, « La princesse Brambilla », L’Encre de la mélancolie (via irresolu)
« [The gothic genre]’s reliance on ambiguity, on the intersection of the otherworldly and the mundane, […] proves to be fertile ground for two women’s passion to be expressed and consummated. What cannot be supported in the everyday existence of the characters is not only possible but also sometimes preferred in the ghostly environment they inhabit. However, the conventions of the genre also let the writer frame and limit the passion of the characters in order to undercut the elevation of same-sex desire to a socially acceptable form of relationship. […S]ame-sex desire is turned into a Gothic tale—a story of ghosted desire and of erotic longing that can only find expression through rendering it impossible by “derealizing” one of the participants.
[…] The popularity of the ghost story authored by women fell out of favor in the early years of the 20th century. A possible influence on [its] diminished presence was the establishment of the lesbian as a public social category, and one result was that whatever positive images of same-sex relationships between women may have existed in the 19th century, the lesbian was now viewed as psychologically and socially damaged and dangerous. The lesbian no longer had to haunt the pages of fiction; she stepped into reality and was therefore even more monstrous. The pull of same-sex desire for women was undercut by the increasing influence of a wide range of social constraints on any affectionate expressions by them; the physical intimacy once approved of as one sign of feminine sensitivity became a signal of perversion. Same-sex friendship, previously supported and encouraged, was revisioned as predatory behavior. Literary depictions of lesbians incorporated such portrayals and reinforced this increasingly negative perspective. »
— Phyllis M. Betz, The Lesbian Fantastic: A Critical Study of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal and Gothic Writings
I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.
medusa-avenging-squad 