Showing posts with label The roles of men and women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The roles of men and women. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2026
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.
Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comm...: A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are. The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is o...
Having said that, she isn't wrong.
CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 119th Edition. Comments on Culture. A Galwaywoman's comment on men and women, Rubio's comments on Western Civilization, and Hegseth hosts a Christian Nationalist.
A series of posts on viewpoints that aren't related. . . well maybe there are.
The first one is from Chloe Winter's vlog, which is one of the agricultural ones that we link in here. Ms. Winter is a married Galway greenhouse farmer (that's how I'd put it) in her very early 20s (maybe actually 20) who took up greenhouse farming when a close friend of hers died. Galway is very rural Ireland and Galwegians are very rural Irish. I've actually heard them referred to as "Bog Irish" by other Irish. The county is one of the few areas of Ireland where there are bonafide Irish Gaelic speakers and it has its own accent, which Ms. Winter very thickly has.
This entry was surprising, in a way in that its very anti first wave feminist, but in a really genuine way. It may actually be fourth wave feminist. If released in the US (I believe most of Ms. Winter's followers are Irish), it'd create some sort of firestorm in some social medial communities.
Having said that, she isn't wrong.
And her vocabulary and manner of speech is delightfully Irish.
This flat out puts Rubio in the National Conservative movement and is their thesis to the core. It doesn't say anything, you'll note, about religion at all, it's all about culture. You can perhaps read more into that if you want, any many would, but this is pretty much the Dinneen/Dreher/Reno thesis.
Two different right wing cultural views emerged from Trump servants so far this week. What's interesting in part about them is that many commentators aren't able to realize that they actually express radically different world views, which shows how poorly people are informed and educated in some things.
The State Department, which still calls itself the Department of State, posted a photo of Marco Rubio with this entry, summing up his recent deliveries to European figures:
You can pretty much rest assured that its not the Trump thesis. Trump just isn't smart enough or interested enough to grasp something like this at all.
Rubio has endorsed Vance for 2028, but it's probably an endorsement of convenience. By doing this, Rubio has raised his flag in the National Conservative camp. This, moreover, may actually be what Rubio believes.
Rubio is drawing a lot of attention, and getting a lot of excitement, in Reaganite and other genuinely conservative camps. He's not a populist. The big question is whether he can overcome the stench of having been associated with Trump. A secondary question is whether contemporary American culture, less than half of which is all that conservative, sees itself in this fashion very deeply.
In contrast is Pete Hegseth, who will never overcome the stench of Trump.
The Department of Defense posted this item about its activities this past week:
We have gathered at the Pentagon for our monthly worship service.
We are One Nation Under God.
First of all, the Department of Defense has no business whatsoever having monthly prayer meetings. The United States may be One Nation, Under God, but this basically is a forced acknowledgement of a certain type of Christianity, that being a minority branch of it by far, over every other religion. Yes, I'm a Christian, and a member of the original Christian faith, but not every soldier is, and no doubt there are soldiers who have no religion at all.
Moreover, this is Doug Wilson, who appeared here in an earlier discussion. He's a Calvinist who holds really extreme views. You can be rest assured that considerably less than half of the American population wants a Puritan Calvinist regime in the U.S. Indeed, a couple of people responded to this Twitter post with:
Christopher Hale@ChristopherHale 13hDoug Wilson routinely mocks the pope and the Catholic Church.It’s beyond shameful that @PeteHegseth allowed him to lead taxpayer-funded anti-Catholic worship services.
Hale a Democratic Catholic blogger who has a pretty good blog dedicated to Pope Leo that you can also find on our blog lists. He served in a prior Democratic administration and I'm still waiting for him to explain how an insider Democrat reconciled that with the Democratic Party's support of abortion. That's an side, but that issue is one of the ones that keeps people like me from being Democrats, even though we aren't voting for very many Republicans any more.
Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson 13hListen. Doug Wilson is one of the most disgusting revanchist monsters on Earth. He doesn’t think women should vote, wants slavery back, and believes the U.S. should be a theonomy—Government by God. He runs a cult in Moscow, ID.This is wildly unconstitutional & deeply immoral.
I don't know who Stewartson is, but describing Wilson as a revanchist is correct. Monster might be a bit much, but he doesn't think women should vote and does think that the U.S. should be a Calvinist theocracy. I don't know what he thinks about slavery and I'm not going to look it up, but Wilson is articulate and extreme.
And that's why Hegseth's actions here are really disturbing. Rubio is trying to stake a claim for Western Civilization as special, something the National Conservatives hold and which a lot of people disagree with. Hegseth is here advancing Christian Nationalism of a type that holds a very peculiar view on the United States' place in the world.
Last edition:
Saturday, December 28, 2024
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 69th Edition. TDS, Vance in the wings. Our geriatric oligarchy. Immigration spats. Banning puberty blockers. Mjuk flicka and the Mantilla Girls
Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 69th Edition. TDS, Va...:
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It is interesting, however, how a fight has suddenly broken out in the MAGA camp which is related to this. The GOP campaign against immigrants in the general election blurred the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. It was relatively clear that basically many hardcore Rust Belt and rural Trumpies didn't like immigrants in general.
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 69th Edition. TDS, Vance in the wings. Our geriatric oligarchy. Immigration spats. Banning puberty blockers. Mjuk flicka and the Mantilla Girls.
The really ugly American
Trump’s win shows us who we really are
An excellent, and exactly correct, article.
And who we are isn't very pretty.
Many people worried that the election of Donald Trump, a thoroughly reprehensible man, would mean the end of the American democracy. It probably won't, but it does mark the complete end of the United States as a great nation in every sense.
We have no claim, as of this last election, to any sort of exceptionalism. A certain moral status, hard won and defended in the Civil War and the wars of the 20th Century has been forfeited, and for blisteringly limited self interest. Indeed, much of the electorate, frankly, proved themselves ignorant, choosing the interests of billionaires over their own, based on mean and vindictive promises and a false vision of the past. Others, limited in their minds to a binary choice in which they felt compelled to choose between the threat of progressivism in the Democratic Party, which never saw a gender perversion or mental illness it didn't want to glorify and demand you do too, and a GOP which at least looked to some sort of sanity on such issues. Yet others chose a narrow issue, gun control, abortion, which they highly valued and made the leap. Others were simply mad about being lied to for decades by the Democrats and pre Trump Republicans on matters like job exportation and immigration.
Not all Trump voters are alike by any means.
But there's only one Trump.
Since being elected he's insulted Canada repeatedly in a childish manner. On the day I'm typing this out (originally), he's threatening Panama, suggesting we're going to demand a return of the Panama Canal. Since then he's been demanding Greenland.
The amazing thing is that in spite of the utter lunacy of these ramblings, plenty have signed on board to back them. People who wonder how the absurdities of the Nazi Party found acceptance after 1932 now know.
I don't expect Trump to serve out his term. Behavior like this shows that the nation's incoming Chief Executive is returning to his middle school years, years which caused his parents to send him to military school, and that return is probably organic in a man who is flabby and ancient. We'll see, of course, but it appears to at least me that the dementia train has left the station, as it earlier clearly did for Joe Biden.
Merely having a chief executive this age is, frankly, dangerous.
At any rate, I suspect that backers of J. D. Vance are just wanting to give things a decent interval before a cabinet finding of non compos mentis is delivered.
I'm not a Vance fan, but the sooner, the better.
Trump Derangement Syndrome
One of our dear readers, who has I might note a truly excellent blog I keep meaning to link in here, gently noted that this blog suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It's a fair accusation.
As is evident, I just can't grasp why a thoughtful highly intelligent person like our reader would vote for Trump. I know plenty of them I might add. Highly educated, very well spoken, very well read, individuals who voted for a person I find nearly loathsome.
I wish they could explain it to me.
I wonder too if they fear for the nation the way that those of us who recoil form Trump do.
I will note that I perfectly grasp why people didn't vote for Harris, and wouldn't have for Biden. Biden's descent into incapacity aside, the Democratic Party has just become, well, weird in many ways. I noted at the time that Obergefell was decided that disaster loomed, and frankly, I was spot on. Contrary to Kennedy's naive assumptions about his legally bankrupt ruling, Obergefell really opened the doors of a sexual and sexually perverse pandora's box, although frankly that box had been unlocked in the post war by Kinsey and Masters.
By the way, there's actually an article in Psychology Today about TDS.
Anyhow, for the Trump supporters who are routinely insulted by my posts regarding Trump, but stop in to read anyhow, thanks for doing so, and if you can explain your support for the man, I'd appreciate your doing so.
I'll confess. I feel that Trump should have been tried for sedition and should be in prison, so my view is indeed harsh and unyielding on him. I hope I'm proved wrong, but I expect him to be a disaster.
Waiting in the wings
Vance in uniform, and not that of a military prep school
As noted, I'm pretty confined J. D. Vance is waiting in the wings, and isn't much more of a Trump fan than I am. I also think as a National Conservative, he's the real deal.
Love him or hate him, Vance would have made a much better contrast to Harris than Trump. Vance actually has an intellectual concept of where he wants the country to go, and it doesn't appear in any fashion to depend on Elon Musk personally arresting the decline in the North American birth rate.
Must is a National Conservative, as noted. He couldn't have been elected in a race against Harris. The National Conservatives, who ranks are filled by some real intellectuals, know that they have a very limited time to get in their man.. That time is limited to the next four years. Vance won't be able to pull off a post Trump win in 2028, and they know it. In order to make the reforms they want, and they are genuine and massive, they need to get Vance in before then, and that depends on Trump being gone.
Age may very well remove Trump, through death. If it doesn't, my guess is dementia will. Then we will have Vance, and that will be quite interesting.
Oligarchs.
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Drone Bee. By Guillaume Pelletier - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59927223
A really interesting thing about the incoming Trump administration is the now open and obvious influence of the mega rich on it. The most obvious example is the overarching presence of the world's most wealth many, South African Elon Musk, but he's far from the only one.
It wasn't all that long ago that Republicans continually suggested that mega rich Hungarian George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg were a big problem. Even now, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray wants to do something about "Zuck Bucks".
Love of money, as we know, is the root of all evil, and and one thing it does is to buy power. Absolute power, we're told, such as the U.S. Supreme Court has pretty much handed over to the Executive Branch, corrupts absolutely.
Something needs to be done about this and what that something is, quite frankly, includes taxation. Populists have to decide if they want to be drone servants of their party, or the owners of their party in this regard.
So far, it looks like the drones have it.
The immigration spat
The best argument for doing away with H1B I can imagine. Also, not only a crude dip into vulgarity, but an unfortunate sexual insult by a man who clearly knows that's now how that actually works, given his many progeny by many willing women. And explain to me how Evangelicals feel that this camp is moral?
There are, I'd note, real reasons to be concerned about the American immigration rate. But for immigration, the US population would be falling, which contrary to widespread belief would frankly be a very good thing. But demonizing immigrants is flat out wrong, and we're not actually having the conversation we should be, which would have a lot more to do with conservation, economics, and yes, culture, than whatever it is that we are arguing about.
One thing now that we are arguing about is H1B, a visa program. I've seen an immigrant Pakistani Trumpy robustly claim that this program lets in illiterate people who can't speak English in Italian restaurants to, in contrast, Elon Must backing it on the basis that that he came in the country that way and as the world's richest sperm donor, he loves himself, and everyone else should too, as he's good for the country.
He's not good for the country.
Interestingly, there's some lingering questions if Musk violated the country's laws when he came in. He probably didn't, but it's interesting. If he did, and I'm not saying he did, that would make him one of those super nasty law breaking immigrants who should be back up and returned to their land of origin.
On other ironies which are worth noting, this spat has really taken weird turns. Ann Coulter told Vivek Ramaswamy that she wouldn't have voted for him as he's of Indian extraction, which is as racist as can be, but at least honest. Some Republicans are defending H1B, others are condemning it.
And Trump clearly is okay with some immigrants, such as ones he'll marry. It makes me wonder what dinner talk is like at the old Trump homestead.
When things hit the news.
On this story, I had the odd experience of having somebody say the other day "I see you are now having trouble up there with immigrants too". They were from Texas, and this was a phone call.
I had to ask what he meant, but apparently the arrest of an illegal alien here made national news.
It's interesting in that this isn't all that newsworthy here. I don't know why people would think otherwise, but rural states like Wyoming have had illegal aliens just as long as anyone else, and given the blue collar nature of work here, probably longer.
Gerontocracy
Not only are we developing an oligarch problem, it has a gerontocracy problem as well, which this past election certainly pointed out. We have an ancient (and seemingly impaired) President, and an ancient, and rather odd acting, President Elect.
Trump is 78 years old, of course. Locally, one of our Senators is 72, and the other 70. Not young. Our Congresswoman is a comparatively youthful 62.
Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger is 81, and is now living in a memory care facility. She hasn't cast a vote since July, which of course makes sense.
Of note, she spent a year, starting in January 2023, as the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. That says something, and what it says is that mental decline can really be rapid.
Why, as a nation, are we comfortable with this?
On a positive, if perhaps sad note, she did not seek reelection.
The UK bans puberty blockers
The US should follow suit.
The entire "trans" movement is really based on an illusion of epic proportions. We are, truly, born male and female while some are more masculine than others, or more feminine than others, boys are boys, as they say, and girls girls. People who are confused on this point are, in reality, very few, and those who persistently are mentally ills. Almost all teens who claim to be "trans", aren't and the overwhelming majority of them come out of it relatively quickly. For that matter, adults who claim to be "trans" aren't.
Puberty blockers are child abuse on the Aktion T4 and there's no excuse for it.
Back to the populists for a second, it's insanity like giving children puberty blockers that helps explain their rise. In future years this behavior will be regarded the same way eugenics in Nazi Germany is now. How mass lawsuits have not broken out is beyond me.
Mjuk flicka. Soft Girls, Kept Women, Feminist Women, and a More Natural Life.
ICELANDIC MILKMAID ON HER MORNING ROUND
Mjuk flicka a Swedish term for "a kind pleasant" girl, but it sort of translates as "soft girl". In this context its a bit of a trend, and one that's worrying feminist.
It probably should.
We've had other threads along these lines, but its fairly clear that a fair number of women have come to the conclusion that the push into the business and working world that came along in the 1970s hasn't really done them as much as a favor as the propaganda then and now would have it. This recalls the TikTok breakdown some young woman had that's discussed here:
Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.
And also here:
A lamentation. The modern "world.*
One of the odd things that the "soft girl" is exhibiting is that she's an example of reinventing old social norms backwards and highly imperfectly, and that is concerning. Rather than acting as a very traditional wife, she's essentially reduced herself to concubinage. Her male supporter could sever ties at the drop of a hat. She's serving in the traditional concubine role, free of any children or responsibility, and providing what we might charitably refer to as companionship. This is bound not to go well, which reaching back to tradition without the duties of responsibilities associated it, usually does.
I can't help but note the contrast to the Mantilla Girls I continue to run into at Mass, including Christmas vigil. Due to being in a packed church, combined with my wife' s decision making process, we ended up in the cry room. This followed a brief pre Mass trip to the balcony, where there was room, but then the long suffering spouse brought up 200 other options which sent us back down. Anyhow, there was room in the cry room, which also contained one extended family with a baby. The baby never cried. One of the parishioners in the room was a Mantilla Girl, quite attractive and very nicely dressed.
Its interesting for a variety of reasons, including the contrast to the soft girl. The Mantilla Girls have a much more realistic grasp of the world.
Mehr Mensch sein.
Related threads:
What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.
Last edition:
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 67th Edition. So you say you want a revolution?
Thursday, March 21, 2024
Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.
Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.: 
The first in print use of the term "Dear John Letter" appeared in a UPI article entitled Hollywood Girls Gain Weight on Tour in Africa.1 It was clear from the use, which was a quote from one of the increasingly corpulent Hollywood Girls that the term was in the common vernacular at the time.
Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.
The first in print use of the term "Dear John Letter" appeared in a UPI article entitled Hollywood Girls Gain Weight on Tour in Africa.1 It was clear from the use, which was a quote from one of the increasingly corpulent Hollywood Girls that the term was in the common vernacular at the time.
We've touched on the topic of wartime marriages and breakups several times before, but my ability to link them in is restrained, as I can't find them all. We haven't done one on wartime romantic relationships in general. As our Fourth Law of History details, War Changes Everything, but like a lot of things surrounding World War Two, this topic is subject to a lot of myth. According to one scholarly source:
Marriage rates rose in 1940-41 and peaked in 1942, only to slow down during the war and rise to even higher levels in 1946. Divorce rates followed a much smoother pattern, increasing from 1940 to 1946, then quickly declining in 1947.
World War II and Divorce: A Life-Course Perspective by Eliza K. Pavalko and Glen H. Elder, Jr.
Frankly, looking at it, the Second World War didn't impact divorce nearly as much as commonly believed. If it is taken into consideration that World War Two came immediately on the heels of the Great Depression, and that the ages of US troops in the war was higher than commonly imagined, it makes sense. Consider:
While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods.
Love in the Time of the Depression: The Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage in the Great Depression, Matthew J. Hill.
Indeed, that short snipped is revealing.
There were a lot of marriages contracted before soldiers went overseas, and some people did marry very quickly, which is probably balanced out by a lot of people who were going to get married anyhow getting married before they would be husband deployed. Also, according to The Great Plains during World War II by Prof. R. Douglas Hurt, there was an increase of pre deployment pre marital contact, although the book relied solely on interview data for that claim. Having said that, a Florida academic, Alan Petigny, has noted that "between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled".2
That the war had an impact on behavior in regard to relations outside of marriage is well documented. Prostitution was rampant in every area where troops were deployed, with it being openly engaged in locations like London. Examples of illicit behavior aren't very hard to find at all. The length of the war no doubt contributed to this. Nonetheless, traditional moral conduct dominated throughout the 1940s and after it, with the real, and disastrous, changes really starting in the early 1950s.
That "Dear John" letters weren't uncommon makes a lot of sense, however. The majority, but not all of them, would have been written by single women to single men, i.e., by girlfriend to boyfriend. Those relationships were not solemnized and largely unconsummated, if we use those terms. The war was long and accordingly the separations were as well. Young women in many instances would have aged a few years, as the men would have also, but in conditions that were dramatically different than the men. The women were, to a large degree, temporarily forced outside their homes, if they fit into the demographic that would have remained at home, but in conditions that were considerably more stable than the men. If they went to work, they could have remained at one employer for years, whereas the soldier boyfriend may very well have constantly been on the move. Workplace romances certainly aren't uncommon now, with around 20% of Americans having met their spouses at work (Forbes claims its 43%). Some large percentage of Americans have dated a coworker. Given the long separations, a young woman meeting a man at work, or perhaps at church, or in her group of friends, was undoubtedly a common occurrence during the war, as it was never the case that all men were deployed, even though a very large number were.
FWIW, the Vietnam War is associated with the highest rate of "Dear John" letters, even though troops deployed for only one year in the country. This undoubtedly says something about the change in economic and social conditions from the 1940s to the 1960s.
On a personally anecdotal level, I think I've met three people, now all deceased, who married during the war prior to the husband deploying. One of those marriages failed, but the other two were lifelong.
The 20th Indian Division completed a withdrawal to the Shenan Hills. The 17th Indian Division was conducting a fighting withdrawal.
The Japanese were accordingly engaging in a very successful offensive in northeast Burma. The war in that quarter was far from settled. Be that as it may, as that was going on, the Western Allies were advancing in the Pacific ever close to Japan itself, which Japan was proving unable to arrest. The Japanese situation, therefore, was oddly complicated in that in order to really reverse the tide of the war, they would have had to taken Indian entirely, and then knocked China out of the war, neither of which was realistic in spite of its recent battlefield successes.
As that was going on:
The Aerodrome: 21–25 April 1944. First Helicopter Combat Rescue: 21–25 April 1944.
We don't think of helicopters in World War Two, but they were starting to show up, and in one of their classic roles.
US and Australian troops linked up on the Huon Peninsula.
Fighting in New Guinea, while going in the Allied direction, was proving endless.
The Finnish parliament, in a secret session, rejected Soviet peace terms. Secret or not, the Finnish rejection hit American newspapers that very day. That the Finns and Soviets were talking was very well known to everyone.
The papers were also noting the German invasion of Hungary, and there were rumors that Hungary was going to declare war on Germany, which proved far from true. The Hungarian situation must have caused some concern, however, in Finland.
It was the first flight of the Japanese kamikaze rocket plane, the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka (櫻花)
The first flight was an unpowered test.
It might be noted that there's a real logic failure with this design. If you can build a powered rocket suicide plane, you can build a rocket powered drone.
The ice jammed Yellowstone broke over its banks in Miles City, Montana.
The Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit was founded near Conyers, Georgia.
Footnotes:
1. The "girls" were Louise Allbritton, an actress who would have been 23 years old at the time, and June Clyde, who would have been 35.
Allbritton married a CBS news correspondent in 1946 and retired from acting. She remained married until her death in 1979. Clyde, who was a pre code actress and dancer, was married (1930) and also remained for the rest of her life. She passed away in 1987.
2. World War One, which was comparatively short, does not seem to have impacted behavior and marriage rates nearly as much, but it did cause a very notable boom in overseas "war bride" marriages anywhere American troops were deployed, including Siberia.
There were, of course, war brides as a result of World War Two, but that's another story.
Related items:
Yeoman's Laws of History
1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Baby Boom Generation, Great Migration, It was because of World War Two, mehr Mensch sein, trends, World War II (Greatest) Generation, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History
1940s, 1942s, Commandos, Czechoslovakia, Infantry, Marilyn Monroe, Personalities, Rangers, Second Washington Conference, Special Air Service, Special Boat Service, Teenagers, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History
Last prior edition:
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World
Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World:
Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World
In the West, we just celebrated Easter. In the East, where the Old Calendar is sometimes used, it's today. This might mean, for the observant, that they were in Church the prior Sunday, in which case, for churches using the Catholic liturgical calendar, they heard this.
Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned,deeply regretted what he had done.He returned the thirty pieces of silverto the chief priests and elders, saying,"I have sinned in betraying innocent blood."They said,"What is that to us?Look to it yourself."Flinging the money into the temple,he departed and went off and hanged himself.
We all know, of course, that Judas was Christ's betrayer. Not too many stop to think that he was seized with remorse and hung himself.
Why was he so miserable?
Probably for the same reason that Western society, on the whole, is.
He thought of himself and chose his own inner wishes rather than being willing to sacrifice.
It's struck me recently that this is the defining quality of our age. We won't sacrifice and don't believe we should have to. It explains a lot.
Interestingly, in a matter of synchronicity, after I started writing this I happened to listen to an episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know on Augustine's City of God and Lewis' The Great Divorce that ties in perfectly. It's here:
Also, a matter of synchronicity, we passed the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic after I started this.
The wealthy men on board the doomed ship, and a lot of the other men, stayed on the sinking ship so that women and children would be saved. The men who went were largely the crew, needed to man the lifeboats as part of their tasks. Otherwise, men didn't complain, they just stepped aside so that as few women and children as possible wouldn't die. A Catholic Priest stayed with them to prepare them for entry into the next life. All of them were living up to a standard, but the interesting thing to note there is that it was a standard. They were heroic, but not because they exceeded the standard, but rather because the occasion came to apply it, and they unflinchingly did.
Now we shove women into combat, something that in any prior age would be regarded as an outright societal act of cowardice and a complete failure of male virtue.
We've come a long ways, all right. And not in a good way.
Sacrifice was almost the defining quality of any prior age, or at least those that preceded the late 1960s, and very much the defining quality of the 18th through mid 20th Centuries. Men would die before they'd let women and children be injured, and if they didn't, they'd be branded as cowards for the rest of their lives.
Most people married, and marriage was understood to have a sacrificial element to it in numerous ways. People didn't "write their own vows", the vows were part of the ceremony and they were, well, vows. Promises you weren't getting out of, in other words.
Latin Rite English wedding vows still reflect this. The entire series of events reads goes as follows.
First, the Priest asks a series of questions, to which the couple responds "I do", or words that effect:
(Name) and (name), have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?""Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?""Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"
Only after ascent to that, the Priest reads:
Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life.
The element of sacrifice is so strong in marriage, that in Croatia, a Catholic country, an added element is present, in which the Priest states:
You have found your cross. And it is a cross to be loved, to be carried, a cross not to be thrown away, but to be cherished.
That's really heavy. That's not a fuzzy bunny, flowery rose, type of view of marriage at all. You're signing up for a real burden.
But one to be cherished.
And that's the thing that the West has lost.
We don't want to sacrifice at all.
If you look at life prior to the late 1960s, sacrifice was darned near universal. Everyone, nearly, married and divorce was rare. People sacrificed for their marriages. Most married couples had children, and having children entailed sacrifice. Reflecting the common values of the time well, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven summed it up in this fashion in a comparison of family men to hired gunfighters:
Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.
Bernardo O'Reilly : Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.
The line, "And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground." was literally true for many. Indeed, it's been noted that up until some point after World War Two Finland, which routinely comes in as the happiest country on Earth, had a very early male death rate, simply because the men there worked hard, and basically worked themselves into the grave for their families.
People were not, of course, perfect, and therefore children naturally arrived on the scene with an unmarried origin. Depending upon the age of the couple, that often ended up in a marriage before the child was born, adding an added element of sacrifice in which the couple sacrificed, in essence, an element of freedom or even their future for what they'd brought about. When that didn't occur, the child was more often than not given up for adoption, which involves an element of sacrifice, but because it arises in a different context, we'll not get too deeply into that.
Things tended to be focused on that fashion. There were people who didn't follow this path, but they were a minority.
This has been portrayed, since the 1970s, as some sort of horrible oppression. But the surprising secret of it is that people seem to be hardwired for it, and when it's absent, they descend into, well, a descent.
None of which is to say that sacrifices aren't present in the modern world. They are, although by and large society tries enormously to avoid them.
It's tried the hardest in regard to the natural instincts of all kinds. People are able to avoid nature, and so they do, least they have to sacrifice. But that's a sacrifice in and of itself, but for what?
The self, is what we were told initially. But the self in this context turns out to be for the economy. In a fairly straight line, we're told that you should avoid commitments to anything requiring commitment, so that you can get a good career, make lots of money, and go to Ikea.
Very fulfilling?
Ummm. . .
No, not at all.
In The Great Divorce, which I haven't read but which Catholic Things summarized extensively, Lewis placed a self focused Anglican Bishop in the role of the self-centered intellect. Self Centered is the epitome of the current age. And that self-centered role placed the figure in Hell.
We're doing a good job of that figuratively for the same reason, and literally as well.
Prior Related Threads:
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . maybe.*
Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . m...: 
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Footnotes.
The Post World War Two increase in divorces. . . maybe.*
Monroe's third marriage, Miller's second (he'd go on to a third).
The other day, I had a thread discussing the youthful (16 years old) marriage of the then Norma Jean Baker to James Dougherty.1 It was this post, here:
Friday, June 19, 1942 . James Dougherty and Norma Jean Baker marry.
The marriage didn't last.
We know the rest of the story, of course. Norma Jean would divorce Dougherty while he was serving overseas in the Navy so that she could sign a modeling contract. She changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, became a famous actress, married and divorced Joe DiMaggio and then Arthur Miller, and then died from a sleeping pill overdose in the early 1960s. Her life, really, was fairly tragic.2
She's still regarded, justifiably, as one of the greatest beauties of all time.
It's tempting to sort of sum up her early marriage history, the first one, as a wartime phenomenon. Youthful marriage, followed by long separation featuring wartime female employment, followed by divorce.
And then followed by societal expansion of divorce.
And certainly there's some evidence to support that.
Indeed, the Monroe story is hardly unique. Bill Mauldin provides us another example.
Like Monroe, his early years were a mess, with messed up parents and a lack of parental supervision quite frequently. He also didn't finish high school, although a large percentage of men did not at the time. And he also ended up married three times.
He married his first wife, Norma Jean Humphries (Jean) in 1942, before he deployed overseas. Neither she nor Mauldin would be faithful during his wartime absence, and they quickly divorced upon his return. Indeed, the length of their marriage was nearly identical to the Dougherty's and Monroe's, although infidelity did not play a role in the latter's divorce.3
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The phenomenon of wartime marriages followed by marital trouble was so common that it became a film trope. It shows up in the great immediate post-war drama The Best Years Of Our Lives, with the Fred Derry character's marriage falling apart immediately after the war. Indeed, divorce is portrayed as the solution to Derry's problem, with a youthful female character played by Teresa Wright actually plotting to break his unsuccessful marraige up. Infidelity shows up in The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, although divorce does not.
Well, just the way wars work, right? Maybe World War Two is responsible for our current situation regarding marriage, shacking up, and divorce?
Maybe.
And maybe not, and this might not really have quite the story that it might seem at first.
The current state of the law regarding divorce is a "no fault" regime. This wasn't always the case. Indeed, an entire highly developed set of laws existed regarding marriage, promises of marriage and divorce prior to the second half of the 20th Century. No state had no-fault divorce until California adopted it in 1969.
That development came about in no small part as divorce was becoming more common. But note, that was 1969.
Not 1949.
And I had never read, nor could I find, a recitation of a post World War One spike in divorces. Although, while working on this entry, the following showed up from 1922 on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Subreddit:
So apparently there was a perception of divorce rates really climbing. I posted a query on that, and a respondent noted that it had in fact climbed from a tiny 1 for every 1,000 to 1.7 for every 1,000 marriages by 1928. It was around 2 per 1,000 in 1940. It was 3.4 by 1947, but dropped back down to about 2.2 by 1960. It started t climb in the early 70s, and really started to jump by the late 1970s.
Given that, World War One didn't seem to have much of an impact. If anything, the war caused a spike in post-war marriages as American doughboys brought home French, English and Russian (yes, Russian) brides home with them. For that matter, a few who had served in the brief post-war occupation brought German wives home with them, although fraternization between Americans and Germans was extremely heavily discouraged for a variety of reasons. One British study noted:
And, for example, this article from Colorado discussed Russian war brides coming into Colorado.
Leadville Herald Democrat, June 16, 1920. I've seen others discussing French war brides coming in, in numbers, to South Carolina.
Clearly, the war brought about a lot of marriages of couples who hadn't known each other all that long, and who weren't from the same cultures. No gigantic corresponding spike in divorces seems to have occurred at any point.
And for that matter, while World War Two did result in a spike in divorces, it was marginal. Divorce rates had climbed to 2 per 1,000 by 1940 and were up to 3.4 per 1,000 by 1947, but they fell back down to around 2.2 for a long time thereafter, and it wasn't until the 1970s when they began to climb.
So, what are they now?
2.3 per 1,000.
So what gives?
Indeed, is there a story here at all, or is the "skyrocketing divorce rate" just a long, really persistent, myth?
Let's start with the status quo ante.
Prior to the second half of the 20th Century, divorce was obtainable in the United States and most English-speaking countries, Ireland being the exception, together with Newfoundland in Canada.4 Indeed, we might note that divorce was obtainable in most of the protestant countries of Europe, something that isn't surprising if we consider the history of the Reformation.5 Be that as it may, however, there was no such thing, generally, as no-fault divorce pretty much anywhere until Soviet Russia introduced it in 1917, something which is quite telling, really.6
The body of law that governed male/female relationships, to obfuscate it a bit, has been collectively referred to as the "heart balm laws", but frankly, there was nothing romantic or warm and fuzzy about them. They were very serious statutes that bluntly took into the account the realities of those relationships and biology. Indeed, they were much more realistic on those topics and the fundamental nature of marriage than the law today, including recently evolutions in the law that Obergefell has brought about. On that, they were wholly unconcerned with love. They were pretty concerned, however, with sex, and what sex could bring about.
And indeed we see that, albeit in a disturbing way, in the story of the nuptials of Chester Linkfield and Ernestine Burnett.7 But not only there, we see it in one of the retained sets of laws that remain in effect.
Because this has taken me so long two write, I read of an even more youthful marriage than the one involving Marilyn Monroe just the other day, on Reddit. It was this one.
Yikes.
The news story was apparently regarded as an odd human interest story, so it made it all the way to print in New Zealand, where it actually gave more details:
Yikes again.
FWIW, for most of Western society, including American society, marriages involving very young couples, let alone teenagers, were uncommon. Marriage ages change a lot less than people generally think, as we reported here:
But what a strange story.8
Obviously there was more to this story than the press reported, although there are hints at it. Fighting a duel for the affections of a twelve-year-old is exceedingly odd under any circumstances, however. Linkfield was shot in the duel, but apparently only Carpenter was locked up. Why? Dueling was illegal under any circumstances at the time. Did getting shot suffice for Linkfield's punishment, or was Carpenter regarded as the aggressor?
Also hinted at, Linkfield and the young object of his affection obviously met back up, as she was almost certainly a pregnant 13-year-old when they married, which is more than a little icky. As the young husband, married to a true child bride, apparently had no means of support for a family, they moved in to his parent's home.
It's hard to imagine this story developing this way today. Almost impossible, in fact. And that it was treated somewhat as a love story in the paper is a bit hard to fathom.
If you look at the Reddit entry, you'll see that by and large people were pretty shocked by the 1922 story, and I can include myself in that group. As always with such stories, you get a minority who will come in with the "well, back in the day everyone married young", or "at one time child marriages were common". Nope, they weren't, and they haven't been since the Church decreed that marriage could only occur with consent and in particular with the consent of the bride.9
Burnett did marry Linkfield, as noted, which gets us back to the law, as noted when we took this diversion. The retained set of laws, and we'll get more into the law in a moment, are those dealing with "statutory rape", the concept that below a certain age people cannot consent to sex. How this works varies by state, and indeed it changed in my own state over time. I haven't kept up with it as it's outside my area of the law, but all US jurisdictions and probably every Western World jurisdiction has a law that essentially says that below a certain age, consent doesn't matter, it's rape. Some modify this with age provisions, such as if the couple is both below the age of consent but close in age, or if the couple is close in age, etc. As noted, I haven't kept up with it, and I'm not going to bother to look it up.
All states also have provisions that hold that below a certain age, you can't consent to marriage. Again, I'm not going to see what it currently is here, but at least when I was first practicing law, you had to have your parent's permission if you were younger than 18 years of age, and the court's permission if you were younger than 16 years of age.
As noted above, I have known some people who were married younger than age 18, but frankly the youngest of them would be about 60 years of age now. This isn't common at all, and it hasn't been at any point in my lifetime. It hasn't been for eons, frankly, and it's a super rarity now. The very few people I know, outside of one example, who fit in this category would be up in their 80s or 90s now, but for the fact that they're dead.
Save for one example I know of in which a couple, originally from Louisiana, were married when he was 19, and she was 13.
That's strange, to be sure. She wasn't, I'd note, "in trouble".
Anyhow, I digress. The point here is that if you read the story of Linkfield and Burnett, it's pretty clear that she was "in trouble" and the options that were left were to marry her off to the father or send him to the pokey. Marrying her to the father relieved, at some point, the parents of Linkfield and Burnett and provided some sort of family for the child. Sending Linkfield to reform school or jail would have left her in desperate straights, along with the child, and would have imposed a financial burden on her parents and probably a hostile financial burden on his parents.
Not as romantic as the news stories made it appear, but then they were written at a time when the readers understood all of this without having to have anyone explain it.
Which brings us to shacking up, or um, cohabitation.
These laws changed over time, but if you combine the civil law and the statutory law, generally what you find is that cohabitation was illegal in some places, or it resulted in common law marriage in others. A promise to marry, an engagement, was legally enforceable and "calling off an engagement" could result in a civil action by the party that had not sought to call it off (breach of promise). Divorce was generally allowable, but there had to be a cause, such as abandonment or cruelty, to justify it.
So what was the thinking?
It's pretty straight forward, actually.
Rather than the current mushy thinking about male/female relationships, our ancestors knew that at a certain point in time in our development, once we passed our childhoods, we were male and female, and attracted to the opposite, and at some point that could lead to children.
We've dealt with this before, so I won't go into it in great detail here, but laws regarding men, women, marriage and divorce, and everything related to the topic, was, in some way or another, related to that. Cohabitation was illegal or brought about "common law" marriages, as the law didn't want society to be responsible for any children that came about by way of the relationship. In other words, the law operated to attempt to force men to comply with their obligations to their offspring, and to protect the long term economic best interest of those offspring.
Breach of promise type actions existed, as there was a general assumption that a single woman who had accepted a proposal of marriage might now be "damaged goods" that other suitors would avoid. In a world in which female employment was harder to come by, particularly good paying jobs that didn't involve manual labor, there was a fear that a woman who had been engaged, with her fiancé backing out, would be left "ruined". Burnett, for example, certainly would have been and likely would have had to face life as an extremely young mother basically alone, her moral status irreparably tarnished, and her child a problem for any potential suitor that wouldn't have existed had the father been absent due to death, rather than disinterest.
And this all ties into another set of statistics, part of which involve cohabitation, and part which don't.
Let's go back to the "divorce rate".
Frankly, the divorce rate was probably never as high as people imagined it was, and according to even a news story that has it a lot higher than Census Bureau reports, it reached a fifty-year low last year. Not that this would be great, as 1972, fifty years ago, is when things started to climb.
Percentage of divorces per 1,000 is one figure, but the overall number of marriages that end in divorce is quite another.
When we look at the start of the 20th Century and the overall low divorce rate, that equated pretty well, without really looking it up, with a generally low overall percentage of the population that divorced I.e., some marriages ended in divorce, but they were few, and the implications were pronounced. Being tagged a "divorcee" wasn't a good thing. This remained the case up until the 1970s really, although to less of a degree than had previously been the case.
Indeed, by way of a couple of examples, when I was young there was a neighboring couple that my parents really liked, but it was noted from time to time that they'd both been divorced prior to their current marriage. My parents didn't hold it against them, but it was sort of a mark against them. It was an odd character defect, if you will.
As another example, my mother was friends with a woman who had at one time worked for a friend of my father's. My father's friend was divorced and remarried, which was likewise regarded as a bit of a character defect. My mother's friend held it bitterly against him, her former employer, even though she was herself divorced. She may have felt liberty to criticize as her divorce from her husband, whom I understood to be an alcoholic, may have left her raising their son alone, but she never remarried. She remained faithful, in essence, to her marriage by not remarrying.
Or, as a final example, two of the kids I was friends with in grade school lived in homes in which their mother's had divorced their fathers and remarried. It was regarded as so unusual it was a topic among parents, and we were all very conscious of it.
Now, meeting divorced and remarried people are very common. I'm sure hardly anyone can't list several friends or associates that haven't been divorced, and some have been divorced and remarried.
It may be just me, but I think I see a bit of a trend here as well.
I know several people that have been married multiple times, but interestingly, this seems to be something that applies mostly to a generation that cuts off at age 50. I may be wrong, but I don't really see younger generations getting serial divorces. Part of the reason for that may be the rise in cohabitation. I'll go onto that in a moment, but of those whom I know who have had serials marriages, a couple of them probably fit into that category of too immature to marry when they first married, and maybe when they married a second time, but the third time it really stuck. On the other hand, some just seem to have a light attachment to the meaning of marriage, or they have bad skills in regard to whom they have chosen to marry.
Some would now claim that the rise of cohabitation has caused the drop in the phenomenon noted immediately above, but there's no evidence of that. On the contrary, statistically it's been shown cohabitation does not in any fashion make subsequent marriages more stable. Quite the opposite is true, it increases the instances of divorce.
And indeed, cohabitating men in particular never quit looking. It's been shown that by not being bound, they really don't regard themselves as bound. Quite a few, to at least some degree, still are heding their bets just a little.
And in someways this takes us to what we might call "stealth divorces".
As we noted above, cohabitation was generally illegal, certainly in the 19th Century, and in some places in the early 20th Century. It was societally regarded as absolutely scandalous. That taint began to wane with the Sexual Revolution.
Now, we don't want to fall into the error of claiming that before 1968 everyone's behavior was absolutely correct. Having said that, studies in more recent years have shown that the groundbreaking sexual studies of the late 40s and early 50s were erroneous to a whopping degree. Indeed, well into the 1950s, most men and women had no sexual relations with anyone until they were married. This was the societal standard, and it was very largely adhered to. Not absolutely, but fairly well.l
The Second World War clearly made some inroads into that, and frankly the Great War had dented it as well, but after both wars the standards revived, even if they'd temporarily eroded during the war. They started to steadily erode starting in 1954 following the December 1953 release of Playboy magazine, and that definitely had a cultural impact that's apparent in films of the late 50s and early 60s. The 1960s, however, bust things wide open, which exploded all over the 1970s in the form of the Sexual Revolution.
It's a fairly short line from sex outside of marriage to cohabitation, but here again it didn't happen instantly. Even as late as the 1980s when I was in university, cohabitation was regarded as semi scandalous society wide. People really didn't know how to take it, and where it occurred it was pretty uniformly regarded as a temporary arrangement. Again, by way of personal recollections, one politically highly liberal friend of mine was scandalized by the conduct of a female roommate who, well, we will skip it, but this is in the mid 1980s. Of my college friends who married about that time, only one had "lived with" his girlfriend prior to their marriage, although their story presents an interesting one in terms of trends.
By the late 90s things were really changing in this regard, and you started to run into couples, for the first time, that seemingly cohabitated with no thought of getting married.
Having said that, some of this trend, like much in the way of widely reported social trends, may be exaggerated. Nonetheless, the trend is there, and in 2019 the Census Bureau found:
In 2018, 15 percent of young adults ages 25-34 live with an unmarried partner, up from 12 percent 10 years ago.
It further reported:
Fifty years ago, in 1968, living with an unmarried partner was rare. Only 0.1 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 0.2 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds lived with an unmarried partner, according to the Current Population Survey.
The measurement of cohabitation from 1968-1995 was less precise. The estimate came from an indirect measure of opposite-sex partners sharing living quarters, and the late 1960s through the early 1970s had particularly low reports of cohabitation.
Also, when comparing 2008 to 2018, years in which the Current Population Survey asked a direct cohabitation question, cohabitation only increased for 25- to 34-year-olds and slightly decreased for 18- to 24-year-olds.
So, although cohabitation has increased for young adults over the last 50 years, it is important to note the limitations in measurement and that certain periods of time did not produce increases in unmarried young adults living together.
In contrast to the rising rates of cohabitation, the proportion of young adults who are married has declined over time.
Today, 30 percent of young adults ages 18-34 are married, but 40 years ago, in 1978, 59 percent of young adults were married.
So, what the Census Bureau found was that, basically, cohabitation had jumped enormously for young adults in fifty years, but was decreasing for other sections of the population. Also of note 59% of young adults, if we run the "young" criteria up to age 34, which is a questionable way of doing it (at one time 34 was actually considered "middle age", and not all that long ago) were married. Now, 30% of the population in that age range is, although it's still the case overall that the majority of Americans live in married households.
That is quite the change, but I'd also note that it actually sort of, but only sort of, replicates a situation that had existed in the 19th Century when "common law" marriages came about. That legal creation was created by the courts to deal with the byproducts of just such unions and to handle the legal problems they created. And in looking at that, we an find a surprising number of notable common law marriages in the United States in the 19th Century, particularly in the wilder regions of the country.
Indeed, looking back even further, it's hard not to recall that it was not until well into the Middle Ages that marriages needed to be witnessed at all.
Some of the current cohabitation going on is basically in the nature of common law marriages, even if not recognized as such. This is particularly true of the ones that use the extremely irritating word "partner" to describe the putative spouse. Others are just examples of people playing house, and there's everything in between. We note it here, however, as these couples do split up, and often without any sort of intervention of the law at all, and therefore they create a sort of stealth divorce.
Some of how this works overall, as a social observer, is interesting. Some of these couples get around to marrying later, some never do, but with some it's almost impossible not to view them as common law marriages. It speaks in part, however, to the breakdown in standards in society, but this thread is already broad enough without going there.
So what is going on here?
It's actually pretty hard to say.
When I started this thread off, I had intended to look at the often claimed link between "marry in haste" marriages during World War Two leading to a breakdown in marriage itself, which isn't a theory that I came up. However, much like the popular theory that "World War Two caused women to enter into the work force forever" claim, it really doesn't have the facts to back it up. There was in fact a jump in divorce rates after the war, but it wasn't titanic, and overall societal divorce rates returned to what they had been just before the war and remained there into the late 1970s. And frankly, attitudes towards divorce, while they changed, didn't change all that much until the 80s.
So if the war played a role, it was indirect.
What does seem to have played a role, however, was the combined impact of increased wealth and a big focus on materialism, and we're still living with that, although it seems to be breaking down in recent years, with a boost in that from COVID 19.
For most of human history marriage played a variety of roles, but the big societal one was making sure that children were protected, and then widows were. This doesn't mean that marriage doesn't have an important religious aspect to it, particularly in Apostolic Christian churches. It does. But societies, and by this we mean all societies, regulated male/female interactions for the reasons noted above, as society didn't want the tribe, the village, the shire, or whatever, to be stuck with the burden of raising children or taking care of widows.
There was really no thought at all to doing so until the post-war era, for the most part. "Mistakes of nature", as children born out of wedlock were sometimes referred to, were a disaster, for the most part, for the economic well-being of the mothers, save for the instances when the fathers were well-to-do. Contrary to what progressives like to claim, however, the overwhelming majority of women took the children to term. Giving the children up for adoption was a very common option, particularly for teenage and early twenties mothers, who were often "sent away" for a time until the children could be delivered in hopes of trying to salvage some element of the girl's reputation. Quick marriages, or the proverbial "shotgun marriage", were also solutions, and there's some question of whether the Linkfield marriage described above may have been one of those.
Anyway you looked at it, abortion and living with heavy public support were not options. As readers here will note, I don't feel that abortion should be now. But its undeniable that public money to aid the mothers of unwed children, and the children, came about following the introduction of the Great Society. Indeed, the often heard claim of people for sympathy about a protagonist that "she's an unwed working mother" just would not have been made prior to that time, and probably not until the 1990s really.
What also came about was a change in sexual behavior due to the Sexual Revolution, with the Quartermaster of the Revolution being pharmaceutical birth control. We've dealt with that before here as well, but the overall mix of birth control combined with Playboy's separation of the concept that sex can result in children really hit in the 1960s, right at the time that a youth rebellion was underway. None of the results would have been possible without that combination, and added to it was the post World War Two massive increase in societal wealth.
The huge increase in societal wealth meant that it was possible for government to imagine, if erroneously, that it could address the desperate plight of unmarried mothers and their children, which came partially, but only partially, true, just at the same time that the Sexual Revolution broke down sexual mores.
And added to that was the change in people's views about what their own lives were for that accompanied the backside of the youth rebellion.
As we've noted here before, prior to the 1960s, and very much prior to World War Two, the United States may have been a capitalistic society, but it was also one which, for most people, was actually family oriented. When the authors of I'll Take My Stand assaulted the New Deal, they in part emphasized that, as it was so much the case. I.e., they expected a sympathetic audience to the argument that Rooseveltian capitalism/liberal government was super pro business and was destroying familial leisure. A person can take that for what it's worth, but in the 1970s that really became true. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, you'd still occasionally hear parents encouraging their children in post high school academic careers on the basis that "you'll get a good job, so you can support a family".
I haven't heard that argument made for decades now.
Now, people are urged to get a good job as it'll produce a high income and that means lots of stuff. And that's the real difference between then and now.
People now routinely leave friends and family for their careers, and in doing so abandon their spouses and "others". Since the 1970s, and very much since then, societal propaganda has been full of "fulfilling career" arguments, arguing, particularly to women, that their path to a meaningful life and a sense of self-worth is solely linked to their careers and completely internalized.
Of course, another concept that didn't exist is that people had to approach something really serious, sex, as entertainment and that they were doing something wrong if they weren't acting like alley cats in heat in at least a certain point in their life.
The basic psychology of sex is pretty well known in our species, and it does in fact vary enormously by species. As we've gone into that before, we'll not plow into it again, but sex serves more than reproductive purposes in our species, which is one of the reasons we're one of the few mammals that will act sexually in spite of a female not being "in season". Cattle, for example, don't act that way. If a cow isn't in season, they're perfectly content just lying around doing nothing, and they don't hit on the cows.
The basic reason has to do with our evolutionary biology, which has a child-rearing strategy that entails along childhood. Given that, children need a long period of nurturing and protection, and that means that both of the parents need to be involved.
Interestingly, that also forms a certain basis for why women and men are not the same in regard to sex drive. Once a source of 1950s and 1960s style ribald jokes, women, particularly if they have children, are less interested than men, which doesn't mean disinterested. Anyhow, according to evolutionary biologists, the deal that nature imposed on our DNA is that men would stick with their mates and secure them food and protection, with the biological bargain being struck in favor of sex.
Now, modern social critics, who often have a poor understanding of biology, fail to note one thing and miss another entirely here.
The missed one is that it's well demonstrated that psychologically sex trips a trigger in our psychology and that what it does to us, in terms of the opposite, is to create a bond pretty much instantly. That bond never goes away. Indeed, old romantic tales of people pining for a "lost love" or somebody that they met decades ago are probably related to, or barely disguised depictions of, people having this intimate bond very early and then moving on for some reason, but not getting over it.
The thing social critics bring up about this is "what about cheating men", etc…, but that says something, once again, about wealth.
And survival.
As early in our species' history, by which we pretty much mean up until last Thursday, women died at a high rate, in part because of child bearing, men tended to outlast them. As recently as the early history of the United States, this remained so much the case that an average "middle class" or "upper class" man was presumed likely to have at least two or three marriages during a lifetime. It's grim, but it was accepted that women stood a fairly high chance of dying relatively young. Indeed, not only was this the case for women, but children struggled to make it past about age seven.
A good example of this is provided by Martha Jefferson, who was just 33 years old when she died. Her health was wrecked by multiple exposures to disease and bearing very heavy children. But the example doesn't stop there.
Martha Jefferson had been born Martha Wales. Her father was John Wales and her mother, Martha Wales, née Eppes. Her parents were married just two years at the time of her birth, Eppes was a widow when they married, when she was 27 years of age. Her first two children were born stillborn and the third, the woman who would grow to adulthood and marry Thomas Jefferson, lived, but she died five days latter, essentially a casualty of the birth.
Her father then married Tabith Cocke, who died sometime prior to 1860, meaning that they'd been married six to ten years (her date of death isn't really known). Martha, her stepdaughter, didn't get along with her. Her father then married Elizabeth Lomax, who was a widow, and who died but a year later. Martha didn't get along with her either. Her father then took his slave Betty Hemings, who was "half white" by descent (her father was an English sea captain) into a sexual relationship, producing more children.
Martha Jefferson make Thomas Jefferson promise not to remarry, as she didn't want her children to endure a stepmother. Jefferson didn't, but then took one of the Hemings as his concubine, or what have you. This relationship was fairly widely known of, but less well known today is that Sally Hemings was, according to the way Americans account "race" now, 3/4s white and 1/4 black. Indeed, it was often noted that she bore a resemblance to Martha Jefferson.
Now none of this is meant to be a charming story. Some of it is downright creepy. But what we see from it is that people were dying left and right all the time, and women were particularly likely to die young. Men usually remarried within a couple of years. In this instance, the perversion of slavery made it easy for both of the men involved to end up taking enslaved concubines, with whom they actually shared a close cultural connection. Jefferson upheld his promise to Martha not to remarry in that fashion, but only in a deeply weird and sort of technical way. What this shows us overall is that a biological imperative operating in nature basically regards men as incompetent to raise children on their own and then, death having intervened, they're off and running looking for new female help.
Now things have dramatically changed, and life is about self fulfillment and the like, and if people get in the way of that, even if they are infants, they are to be dumped.
Prior to the 1970s people didn't really have that concept.
Because its not true.
And therein, more likely than not, lies the answer.
If its all about you, after all, leaving them, whomever they are, is not only easy, its the right thing to do.
Of course, it isn't. And there's some indication that the generations Post Generation Jones know that. As we noted the other day, they're Quiet Quitting and Laying Flat. And there's some indication that they're groping back to social conservatism as well
The Wayles and Jefferson story provides additional illustration of a fundamental truth. We live in a fallen world, so this area of our lives, like all of our basic genetic instructions, can be set to run off kilter, and sometimes in a very destructive way.
Just as the imperative to eat can go awry in some people to their ultimate demise, the sexual one can get pretty fouled up, and fouled up society wide, as well. In Wayes and Jefferson's day, that was obviously operating, in that they'd defeated the basic human rights of women to say yes or no to a married relationship. We can't know what conversations Wayles and Hemmings had with two different generations of Hemings women, but we sure know that they were at a colossal disadvantage. Both women were born into bondage, and saying no was going to be pretty freaking difficult for them. We don't really know if they ever had said no, as slavery silenced their voices.
So there we have a massive perversion, although certainly not one without a historical precedent. Arab raiders took Irish women for sex slaves in raids designed just for that purpose, for example.
We benighted souls, of course, endure no such horrors in our modern lives.
Or do we?
In our live the grand perversion, already referenced, is the divorce of sex from reproduction and sex from reasons. As a super rich society, we've reduced everything to entertainment.
This corruption came first in those parts of our society with the most money and the most free time. The lives of noble aristocracy, for example, reads like a novel sold that should be sold in a brown paper bag. Even such a figure as Czar Nicholas II, who was fiercely devoted to his wife and who lead a very conventional moral life as the Russian Emperor, no matter what else we might think of him, had a mistress early on who went on to be his brother's mistress.10 In North America, real libertine behavior or hit first in Hollywood where there was a large surplus of cash, time and superficiality, leading to scandals of all sorts, but more thing that simply never became scandals. Indeed, even in pre-1945 North America the commonality of divorce amongst celluloid entertainers, when it was fairly rare for everyone else, was blistering.
Mathilde Kschessinska, Czar Nicholas II's mistress prior to his marriage, who survived the revolution, moved to Parish, and died at age 100.
The association here with Hollywood is important, actually, as the entertainment industry became an agent for the pornographication of the culture and an ally of the destruction of standards during the Sexual Revolution. Why wouldn't it have been? Sex sells, as everyone knows, and in many ways when Hollywood portrayed something in an "avant-garde" fashion, it was merely portraying its own moral standards as practiced behind the movie screen. People have a long history of normalizing their own conduct, no matter what it is.
And that went on to convert the culture from one in which sex was in fact relegated to marriage as a standard and in reality, to one in which such shows as The Big Bang Theory or Friends operated to tell people there as something wrong with them if they didn't engage in sex readily and casually, and with multiple partners.
Which is a corruption of the basic genetic roadmap nearly as profound as that of Wayles and Hemings taking enslaved women to bed.
And this has had the impact of wearing the trigger.
Even in the early history of the country, in which more than one wife was common, we're really just looking at men who had a handful of "sexual partners". For Jefferson, it was basically two. For Wayles, it was four. It's extremely unlikely there were anymore. And there is no evidence that the triggers were pulled again until their first "partner" had died.
Playboy, on the other hand, came around and told American men that women should be putting out constantly as women were sterile ditzes and male urges were all that mattered. The Sexual Revolution came about and changed the standards, and it was really women who were made to suffer. Their trigger falls, if you will, on a much harder hammer, and they are accordingly much less likely to move on, not having the same evolutionary drive to the same extent as men, as in antiquity, while they might need to move on, they were less likely to. Additionally, choosing wisely was always more of a concern for women, biologically, as they were going ultimately end up with the product of the relationship, children, no matter what. Single fathers exist, in other words, but not at the same rate as single mothers.
Added to that, the study of pedophiles has shown that one of the statistical factors in their backgrounds is having had five or more sexual partners. I.e., the risk factor that somebody will become a pedophile increases when they reach that level, which makes sense as by that time the natural unifying aspect of sex is pretty clearly breaking down to yielding instead to urges. If a person can, in other words, defeat their DNA to the extent that satisfying the base urge, it seems to break down other barriers to satisfying it. When we realize that when we started off looking at this, most Americans did not have sex until they married, and now the average number of "partners" in the US is seven.
This matters to our story as it demonstrates another part of this story. If the "there's something wrong with you if you aren't doing it" view can break down a person's ingrained inclinations to view the opposite gender as potential lifelong mates and allow some people's eyes to turn to children, it's pretty clearly going to weaken the inclination to stay together at all.
Now, for most people, this isn't going to be the factor leading to a divorce. It's only one of the background factors in society at large, and that's the overall story.
Most people live according to societal standards pretty much, and accept societal standards pretty much. Indeed, even in areas as substantial as the ones we're talking about, people will tend to live up, or down, to societal standards. More than that, they'll tend to comport with them and incorporate them into their own views.
We've already noted some of this. When the standard we're addressing here, that regarding divorce, had a pretty high bar, society at large also had one. For example, there were real questions on whether or not Ronald Reagan could be elected President, as he was a divorced and remarried man. In contrast, this didn't even come up with Donald Trump, who is a serial polygamist.
In other words, all that we've discussed above operated to weaken the bounds of marriage in general and make divorce more common. It also operated to change the nature of marriage in American society in particular, and in the Western World in general, different from what they had been, which made the obligation to enter it to in a somewhat grave fashion, or enter into it at all, lighter.
Indeed, due to the latter, a lot of divorces might really be compared to that oddly disused means of separation, annulment. People tend to think of annulment solely as a religious procedure, but it isn't. Wyoming, for example, has statutes covering legal separation, annulment, and divorce. Annulment is rarely used, and legal separation has fallen into disfavor as well. People simply get divorced.
But things may seem to be slowly changing, at least by observation.
That the Sexual Revolution was a complete and utter disaster is clear. It turned out that people didn't go on to happy lives a la Friends or The Big Bang Theory. Their lives tended to end up a mess. And over time it seems that younger, post Boomer generations, or at least those that followed after the forgotten and trapped Generation Jones, have tended to grope back, although largely in the dark as all the lights are off, to the prior standards. Average sexual partner figures were dropping, albeit slightly, for those between 25 and 49. A separate figure for those now in their teens so surprised the figures at the highly conservative and religious First Things that they did a podcast episode on it noting, in their (rather odd here) view, that teens were abstaining in record numbers for recent times, but for the wrong reasons, giving us once again the odd Boomer view that Gen X,Y, & Z can't do anything right.
Now, it's probably not safe to assume that we're going to return to the standards of the middle 20th Century anytime soon, but by the same token, things are changing. And in terms of what this blog serves to do, we've certainly seen an interesting long term trend that's important to appreciate. Starting with the 1960s, fictional depictions of past eras tended to present them with modern, or rather Hollywood modern, mores. But that what things were like.
Which were never accurate, actually. Divorce rates were never as high as thought to be, and experienced a rise, and fall.
Where we are now, is not where we are going. Having experimented, it seems younger generations are deeming the experiment a failure, and looking, at least to some extent, for a way back.
Footnotes.
*A thread like this really runs the risk of some people thinking "you are picking on divorced people", or just the opposite, "you are endorsing divorce".
I'm doing neither in this thread.
This is a social history, just trying to track a trend.
To the extent that I'd make any observations on the topics above it would be this. As standards have changed, the view society takes of divorce has changed also, and as we'll show below, that means that people may be (but in actuality might also not be) more likely to get divorced.
People generally hold the concept that "marriage is forever", and in the Christian religions it is, although it's really only in the Catholic Churches that this remains a hard and fast rule. Out in society, and the US is a Protestant country no matter what people might otherwise like to claim, this remains the ideal but with large exceptions, although perhaps not anywhere near as large as commonly imagined.
Societies adapt to even existential changes amazingly rapidly, but often only temporarily. It's an interesting aspect of our character as a species. Often, when some big huge change and society is introduced, if it's somehow enforced either through laws or societal standards setters, it'll gain widespread acceptance, sometimes nearly overnight. But the interesting thing on this is that long term views can turn back, particularly if not grounded in our evolutionary makeup. There are multiple recent examples of this.
Without adding a thread to the thread, divorce gained widespread acceptance as a concept after 1970, and it retains it, so much so that even a lot of Catholics divorce and remarry, though the Church absolutely prohibits it. What this means in terms of members of the Apostolic Faiths in general, and Catholics in particular, is one thing (you can't be adherent and ignore these concepts), but what it means out in the larger society at large, which is what we're discussing, and how average people in the statistical majority view it and act up on it, is another.
1. Well not really the other day, it's now quite some time ago, actually.
This is another post I started some time ago, and then ended up not finishing. This is unfortunate as, in part, I don't quite recall where I was headed with this, but given as it's an interesting societal topic, I’m going to blather on anyhow, in part because I sort of remember where my brilliant insights were going, and in part because this tied into something completely different that I started writing about, or sort of completely different.
2. During her marriage to Miller, Monroe was heavily addicted to prescription drugs, both to sleep and to wake up.
I'm really mystified by Monroe's marriage to Miller. Her marriage to Dougherty makes sense in the context of the times and her, frankly, desperation. So does her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.
But Miller?
Why?
Frankly, the divorce wasn't surprising either, and in a different context, or perhaps this context, this marriage likely could have been anulled. She was only 16 and in pretty desperate straights when they married.
3. The Mauldin story has a surprising end, however. Bill and Jean Mauldin never lost touch with each other, and towards the end of his life when he became incapacitated, she moved into his house and took care of him. In the end, therefore, she resumed the role of a wife in a really deep sense. The couple, in spite of their early rocky start, may have been truly well suited for each other after all.
4. Outside the US, most English-speaking countries had some variant of an 1857 English law.
5. Note, however, as a religious matter, the Church of England, like the Catholic Church, disallows divorce. Be that as it may, since the Second World War the churches of the Anglican Communion have very much diluted their adherence to this expressed belief.
6. We should note here that prior to the Russian Revolution Russia had, of course, a state church in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, part of the churches that separated from the Catholic Church during the Great Schism. Eastern Orthodoxy, like Catholicism, is an Apostolic Church, and it holds largely the same set of beliefs, even though a reunion of the two major branches of Christianity has not occurred. One of the differences between the two branches, however, is that the Orthodox actually allow up to two divorces and three remarriages under some circumstances, although it's a little difficult to grasp what governs this for the non-Orthodox. It's basically regarded as a concession to human nature. The Church, that is the pre Schism Catholic Church of which the Orthodox were then part, very clearly did not allow for divorce early on and so this is a development in Orthodoxy which has occurred since the Schism.
7. So how did this all work out? Like the protagonists in Chuck Berry's Teenage Wedding?
Not hardly.
According to the Reddit follow up, Chester Linkfield was in and out of jail for the rest of his life, which wasn't all that long. He worked as a repairman and died of TB at age 32. At that young age, he'd literally been married to Ernestine for half of his short life.
She remarried less than a month after he died, which is peculiar. She would have known that his death was coming, of course, as TB was a slow but sure killer. Her new husband was Denzil Swan, who died in 1950, and who was listed as divorced at the time, although that doesn't mean that the devorce was from Ernestine, she may have predeceased him.
Their son, born in 1922, was named William Chester Linkfield. From what little I can tell of him, he served in the Second World War and moved to Pennsylvania at some point. As odd as it is to realize it, he would have been 16 years old when his father died, the same age his father had been when he married his mother.
8. Or was it?
To some extent, a person has to wonder if this was just an Appalachian story for the time.
Appalachia is a region of the country which has remained culturally distinct, and poor, for a very long time. In most poor cultures, poverty operates against early marriage. A good example of this would have been pre Celtic Tiger Ireland, where generally marriages occurred late due to circumstances, and indeed a fair number of men remained unmarried their entire lives.
As history certainly rhymes, if not repeats, part of what we see now in current late marriage trends may be due to something similar. The press likes to imagine that young college educated couples are busy pursing their super glamorous careers, 1970s/1980s career propaganda wise, but in fact many are stuck in jobs that pay relatively poorly and can not find a means of actually getting married economically. This same trend reflects itself in the current trend of multiple generations living in the same household, or older children returning home ot lvie with their parents, all of which are norms of the past.
At any rate, two teenagers dueling over the affection of a young girl isn't hugely surprising in a region where generational feuds had persisted into the late 19th Century. Her age remains surprising, and icky.
Consider, however, Alvin C. York, the great hero of World War One.
Alvin York after World War One, his mother and younger sister are in the photo.
York was a wild youth who had been involved in violence prior to his profound conversion to Christianity. He was one of eleven children. His wife Gracie was 19 at the time of their marriage, almost immediately after his return from service, and they had obviously planned the marriage before he entered the Army. He'd entered the Army almost exactly two years prior to that. He was twelve years older than she was.
In other words, York, a Tennessean Appalachian, was from a huge rural family and his wife was relatively young in context, alhtough certainly not twelve, at the time of their marriage. . . but, wait. . . .
Honest compels me to admit here that my wife was 21 when we got married, and I was 31. We became engaged when she was 20.
9. This is one of the many areas in which the Church, by which we mean the Catholic Church, was an enormously liberalizing force, in spite of what modern day self-appointed pundits like to think. Up until Christianity giving away girls at a fairly young age was in fact common. The Church put a complete stop to it by simply providing that women couldn't be married to anyone they didn't consent to be married to, a radical, and frankly very protofeminist, position.
10. Depending upon where you wonder to in social media, sooner or later you'll stumble upon modern monarchist, an exceedingly odd group.
By monarchist, I don't mean English citizens who want to keep their constitutional monarchy. No, I mean people who really believe in monarchy.
They tend to be highly traditional and often radically Christian traditionalist (never mind that today's real ruling monarchs are Muslims). They have a variety of reasons they cling to the now long dead body of monarchy, sometimes saying that God has decreed it the ideal form of government, but one of the primary ones is that the monarch is there to set the moral standards.
Which leads me to believe that they've never looked at the lives of real monarchs.
The sexual mores of monarchs, quite frankly, tended to be like something out of Playboy long before Hugh Hefner though it up. If you read the lives of Kings, for example, its surprising when you find one that didn't have multiple mistresses.
Related Threads:
Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?
Et Ux*: A legal and societal history of marriage
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