Top ten reasons I’m glad I live in the present

I spend a lot of time feeling nostalgic about past eras. I appreciate a romantic vision of the 1930s and 40s, but I realize it’s not a realistic vision. I like the fashions and the music, I like the hairstyles and makeup.

But I am also a fan of history, and I enjoy submerging myself in the past—for example, I have been on a 19^th century women’s literature kick for the past several weeks, and before that, I was reading early 20^th-century American lit. After swimming in the past for so long, I’d like to take a few moments to appreciate the present, and express some gratitude for progress.

1. I am thankful for performance fabrics. I spend most of my day wearing four-way stretch materials. Although I generally disapprove of the current trend in wearing pajamas to the store, I am glad that manufacturers have invented pants that you can both move in AND wear someplace decent. Even more than this, I am glad to live in an era when women and girls are encouraged to run, ride bikes, and play sports. It wasn’t always that way: first off, you can’t run in a hoop skirt. Secondly, society once thought sports were inappropriate for girls. http://www.northnet.org/stlawrenceaauw/timelne2.htm

2. I am glad that whalebone corsets are no longer the norm. First of all, it wasn’t really fair to the whale. Secondly, after a lifetime of forcing a woman’s waist to its tiniest possible proportion, ribs became permanently bent out of shape and internal organs shifted out of place. I know how much I dislike wearing pants with a too-tight waist. I can’t even imagine being laced into breath-restricting underwear every day.

For more info about uncomfortable fashion trends, check this out:

http://strangeremains.com/2014/01/12/the-stylish-deformities-the-ways-in-which-fashion-has-flattened-bent-and-broken-bones-over-the-centuries/

3. Women today are allowed to own property. In Victorian England (before 1850) married women did not legally own any money they inherited or earned. If my father had owned an entire estate and left it to me, a married woman, my husband would become the legal owner. Also, any income I made from my job would legally belong to him. I would have to rely on his generosity to give me enough money to take care of the household bills and pocket money.

4. We have modern hair styling tools.  

5. I get to wash my hair and SHOWER every day. Consider for a moment how recent is the advent of running water and an indoor shower in mostly every home in the United States. At the turn of the 20^th century, people had to draw water for a bath from the well, and heat it over the fire. This was a kind of a pain, so people were more likely to just wash up with a basin. Keeping clean is important, but do you ever think about having to use an outhouse in the middle of winter?

6. This is similar to “modern styling tools,” but it deserves its own category: hair dryers. I have a whole lot of very thick hair, and it can take several hours to dry without help. That’s fine in the summertime, but in the winter, air-drying is definitely unpleasant.

7. We have efficient indoor heat. Yes, past generations had radiators, wood stoves and fireplaces. In houses heated by these means, the whole family huddles in the one warm room where the wood stove is, and on the upper levels, your water glass turns to ice.

8. Young people today are less likely to be disowned by their families for making choices the parents disagree with. Sometimes, we may sit around and lament what society has come to. We shake our heads over teen pregnancies and misbehavior, but a few generations ago, these same behaviors still took place—but the girl (yes, the girls always had the worst end of it) would be completely disowned by the family. They would be cast out of the house with little, if any, money, sent out into the streets to fend for themselves, and the family might even refuse to utter the daughter’s name again. What happened to these girls in a time when women earned pennies on the dollar compared to men, and they had little ones to care for, also?

9. Class differences are less pronounced. Yes, there is a gap between rich and poor in this country. There will always be disparities in education, accomplishment, health and opportunity. These things are unfortunate, but think about, say, the Chicago meat packing industry at the turn of the 20^th century (say, 1906, as depicted in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm). There, laborers were literally killing themselves for a few pennies a day, sleeping under vehicles, and dying of tuberculosis while the factory owners slept in hotel-sized mansions. Do disparities still exist? Of course. This is a constant area for human improvement, here and abroad.

10. The nature of discrimination has changed. I would never argue that discrimination or prejudice is dead. If you are aware or listening to others, you hear people making snap judgments about others based solely on their gender, race or orientation. However, we have at least passed a time where these judgments are enforced by law. Of course, there is still progress to be made, but at least we live in a time where we can openly acknowledge the need for change without being ostracized by our neighbors.