Leap Day

Pope Gregory XIII, 1502 – 1585

Which is notable mostly because it simply is. We only get them, and don't notice them much, every four years.  Other than teasing people born on the day and miscalculating their actual age, not much will occur.

The added day, of course, come about due to the calendar adjustment that went into effect with the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. The added day was to keep the calendar from getting increasingly inaccurate.  The entire Christian world didn't adopt the new calendar all at once, in part due to the Great Schism and the start of the Protestant Reformation, but over time, it's taken over nearly completely for the entire globe.  About the only remaining use of the prior Julian Calendar is in some parts of the Eastern Orthodox world for their liturgical calendar, and even that is no longer universally true.

Pope Gregory actually met with a lot of opposition to the new calendar, FWIW.  Members of the general public were really upset at first.  Spain, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania and the Italian states nonetheless adopted it nearly immediately.  France, some of the Dutch Republic, and the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss Confederation did in 1587.

Denmark and Norway, then one state, and the rest of the Dutch Republic didn't fall into line until 1700-1701, by which time the Julian Calendar was seriously out of whack.  The UK didn't adopt it until 1752.  Sweden came around in 1753.

You would think a day as odd as Leap Day would be associated with some interesting customs, and it actually is, or more accurately was.  In Wyoming, there once was a custom of appointing a teenager to be Governor for the day, honorific of course.  I don't think that occurs anymore, but I guess we'll see today.  If this does occur, I have not taken note of it recently.   Wyoming Public Media reported it has having occured as recently as 1940, FWIW.

One political thing that does happen is the U.S. Presidential Election.  It's always in a Leap Year. . . so we get to enjoy one more extra day of campaigning.

A tradition in the English-speaking world is that women can propose to men on this day, which, in some versions of the custom, extends to the whole year. This tradition was surprisingly wide spread in societies speaking English, and is attributed by some to the Irish Saint, St. Brigid, who predates the Gregorian Calendar by quite some measure.   She died in 525.

Anyhow, supposedly she licensed women to propose to men every four years, which is likely just a story.

"Taking" a person, then, was a much more serious matter, even though it should be equally serious now.

Even when I was a kid, however, there remained the odd custom, apparently limited to English-speaking countries as noted, that in Leap Years girls could "ask out" a boy, it being implicit that otherwise that was a right/burden that fell to males.  It still, in fact, largely does.  This appears to have been the remnant of a custom in English-speaking countries, no doubt only lightly observed, that on Leap Day, this day, women could propose marriage to men, that also being a prerogative which then, and largely now, was reserved to men by custom.

Frankly, this is vaguely threatening.

How much of a deal this really was, I don't know, but it was enough of one that late in the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century it generated cartoons, not all of which were kind, and it generated cards, most of which were, although more than a few of them were somewhat aggressive. The cards suggest that women were using them, so in fact some women did avail themselves of the licensed role reversal and propose.

Less threatening.

As odd as this may seem now, it may have made some sense at the time.  Another thread we have in draft deals with the economics, in part, of marriage in the age, but things were, quite frankly, tighter.  As that thread reveals, a lot more men went through life unmarried than do now, and far more than we might suspect.  More than a little of that was probably economic hesitation.  For women, however, unlike men, being unmarried was a societal strike against them and often a personal lifelong disaster.  If they were waiting for a proposal, this was a societally licensed way to deliver it.

Whatever was going on with this, it seems to have flat out ended in its original form right about the era of the cards we see here.  What happened?

I don't know, but what I suspect is that World War One dramatically altered the marriage landscape.  Indeed, we dealt with this briefly in regard to Catherinettes;

In France, for St. Catherine's saint's day, the Catherinettes were out on the streets:

From John Blackwell's Twitter feed on the topic.

We noted this custom in 2020:

The day is also St. Catherine's Day,, the feast day for that saint, which at the time was still celebrated in France as a day for unmarried women who had obtained twenty-five years of age.  Such women were known as Catherinettes. Women in general were committed since the Middle Ages to the protection of St. Catherine and on this day large crowds of unmarried 25 year old women wearing hats to mark their 25th year would gather for a celebration of sorts, where well wishers would wish them a speedy end to their single status. The custom remained strong at least until the 1930s but has since died out.

We should also note that the plight of unmarried French women, and British ones as well (and probably German ones) had grown worse since 1914.  Due to the combat losses of young men in the Great War, their marriage prospects in an era when being an unmarried woman was somewhat grim, had greatly declined.  The youngest of these women had been 21 when the war ended, meaning that they were of marriageable age when most young men were fighting in the war.  As the war killed men in that demographic, it meant that some would never marry.  The war also meant that the surviving men had disproportionate options.

I'm sure there's a study of this somewhere, but it can't help be noted that it must have had long-lasting social impacts, and it probably also explains the significant number of "war brides" brought home from France by US servicemen after the war and occupation, as well as the same population brining home some German brides, and Russian brides.

This of course is from a different culture yet, the French, but it addresses the same topic, with the French taking it up annually, and more cheerfully it looks like.

This custom apparently has largely died, but interestingly milliners are trying to revive it, as it was associated with outlandish hats.  Having said that, French single women over 25 were still out on the streets with wild costumes and hats in honor of the day, whereas the somewhat maudlin English Leap Day cards don't seem to have made it past World War one.  It's hard not to draw that line in the case of the Leap Day cards.  1916 was a Leap Year, and then 1920.  By 1920 there were a lot of single women in English-speaking countries (and in France too) who were going to be single for life, the war having made that a fact.

Before we leave this topic, it's interesting to note that in Medieval Times, after the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, in some European countries this was Bachelor's Day for the same reason. I.e., Bachelors were subject to proposals.  It actually was a matter of law in some countries.  In some places it became the custom for men of means to be required to buy any suitor whose proposal he turned down twelve pairs of gloves so that she could hide her embarrassment at not having an engagement ring.

While on this, FWIW, as we've noted before, while spinster status was regarded as a disaster earl in the 20th Century, what exactly constituted it is misunderstood. As we have noted in another thread:

The median age for women was 21.6 in 1910. The same year, the median age for men was 25.1.

At the time the author wrote this entry, 2010, the median age for women was 25.0.  The median age for men was 26.7.  Data suggested that it had crept up a little over 1.7 years for women and 1.3 years for men.

Okay, that is a difference, but is that what you were expecting?

I doubt it, unless you are quite familiar with these statistics.

So, over century, the average age for "first marriages" has gone up a little under four years for women, and a little over 1.5 years for men.  Not that much of a climb.

That deals with the averages, of course.  Looking at my own grandparents, I think one set was married in their late 20s or early 30s, while another in their early 20s.  My parents were in their 30s.

Related Threads:

Of interest, I note that some other blogs we link into this site also noted Leap Day or Leap Year, with some noting the same items we noted above.

Leap Year

Leap Year Once Viewed as Opportunity for Women

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?

Friday, January 25, 1924. The First Winter Olympics.

The 1924 Winter Olympics opened in Chamonix.  It was the first winter games.

The USSR renamed Petrograd, which had been founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and named after St. Peter, Leningrad, thereby substituting the name of a name of a lawyer turned mass murder in place of that of the Christian saint and first Pope.

While Lenin's foul body remains in a specialized mausoleum for worship by the secular, the city regained its rightful name in June 1991, when it appeared that Russia might escape the treachery of its recent past.

Mexican rebels took Morelia.

Czechoslovakia and France signed a mutual defense treaty.

On the Coronation of King Charles III

Since the Act of Union in 1707, there have been only thirteen British monarchs, the first being Queen Anne.  The current royal family, if we discuss direct and not remote ancestry, dates back only to William of Orange, who was king from 1689 to 1702, prior to the Act of Union.  Anne was his successor and reigned until 1714.  She was in ill health most of the time.

Had the throne passed to Anne's nearest relatives, it would have gone to a member of the House of Stuart, who were Catholic. Anne was an Anglican, but she was the daughter of Charles II who became Catholic on his deathbed and who harbored strong Catholic sympathies, in spite of living a wild life, his entire life.  Indeed, his father Charles I was a High Church Anglican who teetered on that edge himself.  George I was chosen over 60 Stuart claimants simply because the Whigs had taken control of parliament, and he was a protestant.

I note this as people not familiar with the English monarchy, or perhaps more accurately the monarchy of the United Kingdom, seem to assume that the throne has always been inherited.  Not so.  It's been inherited since George I, when he was crowned the King over Catholic claimants who held undoubtedly better claims.

The second item of interest there is that the British monarchy is, therefore, by recent tradition, and by law, "Protestant", which his to say, Anglican.

Those watching the coronation yesterday, if they were not familiar with the process, would have been struck by how deeply religious it was.  I don't think people, or perhaps more accurately Americans, expected that, as Americans have the stupid Disney view of monarchy, in which there'd be a two-minute coronation involving beautiful people, rather than an hours long service.  Moreover, people with some religious knowledge, but not familiar with the process, would have been surprised that it was recognizable as a Mass, in Catholic terms.

Indeed, some commentators, including the Catholic Cardinal who participated in it, noted that it has "some" Catholic elements. 

"Some"?

Baloney, it's 100% Catholic in form save for the King having to take the mandatory oath that he support the United Kingdom's Protestant faith.

That became a topic running up to this because, in spite of the impressive performance, the Church of England is in real trouble in England.  It does remain strong in some places, but not in its old footholds.  In the United States and Canada, its North American expression, the Episcopal Church, is in really deep trouble.  In the UK, more Catholics attend services weekly than members of the Church of England, which is really something given that Catholics are a minority religion in the UK and have been at least since Elizabeth I forced the "religious settlement" on the country.  Lest that seem too encouraging for Catholics, all devout religious adherence has been on the decline in the UK for a very long time, a product of the disaster of the Reformation, which is playing out presently.

Be that as it may, at least to Catholic eyes, the absurdity of the English Reformation is brought to full light by such events.  The ceremony was so Catholic that the question has to be asked why the Church of England doesn't just come back into the fold, something which is becoming increasingly difficult in light of its recent accommodations to popular social trends.

Which brings me to my next observation.

I know one fallen away Episcopalian who is deeply anti-Catholic.  It's interesting how that tends to be the last thing that those raised in the "main line" Protestant Churches retain.  The Baby Boomer children of adherent Main Line Protestant churches may have chosen to ignore their faiths in favor of the world and its delights, but they remember the fables and hatred that the Reformation used to justify its actions, and still cite it as if they were buddies with John Calvin himself.  Odd.

I know that I'm personally tired of it.  But in part, that's because I'm tired of having to listen to two people I personally know debate religious topics as if it's a sport.  It isn't.  It's serious.  But then maybe I'm tired of people who argue just for sport as well.

Profoundly Christian, and frankly about as close to Catholic in form as you can get and not be Catholic, another interesting aspect of the coronation was reinforcing the United Kingdom's Christian heritage. 

And that's a good thing.

The Coronation really brought the monarchy haters out in droves, which was interesting.  Lots of "Not My King" and "Not My Queen" individual protests were here and there. Well, unless Parliament abolished the monarchy, if you are English or a resident of the English Commonwealth, he is your king.  You don't have to love him, but that doesn't mean he isn't the king.

This also brought out a lot of sanctimonious blathering by people who hail from former imperial possessions about the horrors of the British Empire. Well, whatever they may be, King Charles III and his mother Queen Elizabeth II weren't responsible for any of them.

Indeed, it's been eons since there was a king or queen really had extensive power.  Maybe since King Charles II.  The UK has been a constitutional monarch at least since Queen Anne.  If monarchy had been what people imagine, one of her Stuart relatives would have been the next monarch, not King George I.  So if people have a beef with the British Empire, it shouldn't really be with Queen Elizabeth, whom some proclaimed they could not mourn, or with King Charles III, whom some proclaim they cannot celebrate.

Let's make no mistake.  Colonialism in general was bigoted and racist by its very nature.  The underlying premise of it was that the European colonial power, and here we will limit this to European powers, was empowered by some sort of superior value which gave it a right to take the land of others and rule its people. That was the underlying thesis of colonialism everywhere. Generally the "superior" something they had was technology, which made it possible, but which didn't make it right.

But before we get too self-righteous about it, we probably need to take a look at in context, and over time, and then ask if the compulsion that gives rise to it is a universal human norm. That would not mean that it was right, but it might lessen the overall guilt.

Indeed, in spite of what people might now wish for claim, when European colonialism started the concept of one nation ruling over another was not only common, it was the norm.  In the early 17th Century when British Colonialism really started, Ireland and Wales were already unwelcome members, to some extent, of the United Kingdom, and Scotland wasn't all that keen on it. Figuring out who governed in the Low Countries and the German Principalities requires an epic flow chart.  Russia ruled vasts lands with no Russians. This condition would go on well into the 19th Century, and even to some extent into the 20th Century.  Contrary to what people claim, national feelings existed, but people didn't regard empires and monarchies that ruled over a collection of nations to be abnormal.

And it would have been extremely difficult for Europeans, early on, to be confronted with foreign cultures beyond their seas and treat them as equals given the varied states of development.  It's easy for us to say that the British should have landed at Jamestown in 1607 only after asking for permission, but frankly, it would have been impossible for them to have conceived it that way at the time.

This might not be the case for later European colonial efforts, but by that time competition between European powers nearly mandated acquiring colonies and a person would have to be naive to imagine that if the British had abstained, the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, and so on, would have done so also.

Indeed, frankly, if we were to land humans on Mars today, and find something waddle up and address us in some bizarre Martian tongue, I don't believe we'd abstain from colonizing the planet now.

Which gets to this point.  I can't really think easily of a people anywhere that had the power to colonize, and didn't do it.  Everyone did.  It seems to go back to our earliest days.  That doesn't make it right, once again, but it's obviously a common human trait.

Which means in turn that the only really valid criticism of empire that mean anything today has to come in terms of relatively recent historical context.

A conversation on this point the other day made me realize how different my "relatively recent" is.  The actual conversation was on British primogenitor in the monarchy.  I sincerely regard everything after 1066 as recent in terms of the British monarchy.  

Apparently, other people don't.

In this context, however, i.e., that of empire, I'd probably go back to 1800 or so.  If you are going to levy guilt on the British, therefore, you might have to start in 1858 when Parliament caused the British to officially take over India.  

There's a lot to blame the English for after that, but then there's a lot to blame the French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans for after that as well.

It's really the late 19th Century and 20th Century when you get into the full-blown "shouldn't you people have known better" type of situation. The Scramble for Africa is pretty difficult to justify in any sense.

Which takes us, I suppose, to this.  In its late stages, while it was still an empire, and should have known better, at least the British did a good job of trying to administer what it was administering well. Its actions weren't always admirable or successful.  The Bengal Famine of 1943 provides a shocking example of that.  And frankly, there's no way to reconcile the claim that the British were fighting for freedom only during World War Two, except comparatively.  I.e., the Axis wasn't seeking to liberate colonial peoples, but to enslave them to somebody else less democratic yet.   But, having said that, the British, more than any other colonial power, managed to depart from empire gracefully and with some rationale hope that the best things it had given to the people it had occupied would remain.

It didn't always work out, but to a surprising degree it did.  British Dominions largely did evolve into full-blown parliamentary democracies and largely separated from the UK peaceably, although this was notably not the case with Ireland.  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa are all democracies today due to the British example.  So, frankly, is the United States, the UK's first failed imperial endeavor.

The coronation of King Charles III probably contains within it a series of lessons that will only be evident in the coming days.  But for those who want to protest it, well you probably would better spend your time on real problems of the world, of which there are many.

Related Items:

King Charles III

Britain's projection of its hopes and gossip on its royal family may be more useful than America's projection on its presidential families

2020 Thanksgiving Reflections.

One of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings used as wartime posters, first coming out in 1943.  They were based on his prewar January 1941 speech advocating for these freedoms. At the time of the speech, and certainly at the time of the war, a lot of people didn't have a freedom from want.

In some prior years I've put up a Thanksgiving Day post. Some years, I don't.

There's a lot of hubris in writing a blog, a principal part of that being the thoughts that 1) you have anything meaningful to say; and 2) anyone cares to read it.  In large part, probably neither of those are true, so no blogger should feel compelled to write an entry.  Still, some years. . . 

For a lot of people, this will be a Thanksgiving like no other. Well, rather, like no other one that that we recall. There are certainly plenty of North American Thanksgivings that more strongly resemble this one than we might imagine. * 

After all, the holiday was already fully established as a European religious observation long before the passengers of the Mayflower put in early as they were out of beer (which is in fact why they put in when they did).  We might imagine those early Thanksgiving celebrants looking like they were out of a Rockwell or Leyendecker illustration, but they likely rarely did.

Clean parents, chubby child. . . probably not very accurate for the early colonial period.  Carrying a matchlock on the way to church might be however, and not because they were going to hunt turkeys on the way home.  Illustration by J. C. Leyendecker from November 1917.

Indeed, a lot of the giving of thanks on days like this from prior eras was probably of a much more to the bone nature. The crop didn't fail, when it looked like it might.  The milk cow didn't bloat up and die.  The Algonquian's simply walked by the village a couple of months ago when it looked like they might attack.  That ship on the horizon wasn't a French one and no Troupes de Marne landed to raise the district.  The Spanish didn't arrive from the south.

Freedom from Fear.  For much of human history, most people lived in fear for at least some of the time.

Part of all of that, on top of it, was dealing with political and physical turmoil.

Smallpox arrived and went leaving people, if they were lucky, scarred for live.  The flu came and when it did people died nearly every time.  Horses kicked people in the ribs and they died in agony a few days later.  Dog and cat bites turned septic.  Tooth infections were caught too late causing fevers that went right to the brain and then on to death.

Storms came with only hours, or minutes, warning.  Hurricanes arrived with no notice.  Tornadoes ripped through villages at random.  Hail destroyed crops.  Early winters froze the crops in the ground. Spring thaws came suddenly and swept animals, houses, and people away.  Snow blocked travel and locked people who still had to work outdoors during the winter indoors.  People got lost, and then were lost forever.  Seafarers disappeared in winter storms and were never heard of again, or if they were they were, their washed up bodies were identified by the patterns in their wool sweaters, unique to individual villages, like dog tags of their day.

And added to that, there was the additional turmoil of vast struggles beyond people's control.  Catholics lived in fear of oppression from Protestants.  Protestant dissenters lived in fear of the Established Church.  Jews lived in fear of everyone.  Forces in England struggled against the Crown and each other and their fights spilled out to their colonies.  Native Americans lived in fear of a European population of an expansive nature that seemed to defy the laws of nature.  Africans lived in fear of slavers and if that fate befell them they thereafter lived in lifelong despair.

Freedom of Worship. Even this American value didn't come about until the scriveners of the Constitution prevented the United States from creating a state religion.  At the time of the Revolution the Congress had declared the Crown's tolerance of Catholicism in Quebec one of the "Intolerable Acts". As late as the Civil War Gen. Grant's General Order No. 11 targeted Jews.

The point is, I guess, that our ancestors endured all of this and made it.

Of course, they endured it better sometimes than in others.  When they lost the ability to at least get along, things got very bad indeed.  The most notable example, probably, came in 1860 to 1865 when Americans had reached the point where their differences could only be solved violently.

When those things got that way, one notable thing was the fragility of civility, order and even common sense.  In bad times Americans have done well if their leaders had a vision, even if disagreed with, and were clear about it, even if the opposition was distinct in that opposition.  A key to it was an overall sense that we were all in this together in spite of those differences.  The US did well as a society in the Great War, even with lots of failings, as it generally agreed with Wilson that something needed to be done in Europe and we had to do it, and even if we disagreed with that, we were all Americans and weren't going to send just our neighbor off to fight.  We did very well in World War Two uniting behind Franklin  Roosevelt and Harry Truman on the concept that we were a democratic nation, united by that, and we were going to bring those values to a world that had forgotten them, even if some wished the war hadn't ever come.  We did pretty well in the Cold War, with the exception of some real distress in the late 40s and early 50s, and again in the late 60s and early 70s, with the idea that we were freedom's sentinel, even if we didn't always like what that meant.

Right now, we're a mess.

We are not united on anything, and we've politicized everything.  And our polarization is massive.

We've been polarized of course before, but it's been sometime since we were this split, or so it would seem. Some would argue that we're really not, and that most are in the middle.

If we aren't mostly in the middle, the problem then becomes the point at which we arrive at a point at which we not only aren't, but we've reached the state where the polarized sides only see forcing their view at all costs upon the other as the solution.

Advanced nations have had that happen before.  Weimar Germany lived in a state of being that started off that way in 1918 and dissolved due to that in 1932.  It wasn't that there were not right wingers who valued democracy over force, or that there were not left wingers who valued democracy over force, but rather that people quit listening to them and opted for the parties that promised to force their views with dominating finality.

That is, of course, sort of what happened in 1860 to us, when one side decided that it had to have its way so much that it would leave to get it, and kill to maintain it.

Surely we're not there yet. But one thing we are is fatigued.  And that's not a good thing.  A lot of people have just had enough. They're worn down by the Pandemic. They're tired of politicians.  They don't want to hear anymore.  It's not that they're disinterested. 

They're tired.

So perhaps we can look back on those early North American Thanksgivings here a bit.  The crops didn't fail.  The North Koreans didn't attack South Korea. The Chinese didn't invade Taiwan.  The Russians didn't suddenly decide they wanted Poland back.

And yes, a lot of us fell ill, some will never fully recover, and some have died. That will continue on.  But as tragic as that is, we've had their better times and our prior health, and as grim as it is, it serves as a reminder that our path through here is temporary, and if, in the words of the old country song, we "don't have a home in this world anymore", well we never had a perfect one.

Freedom of speech, something which most people have not had except on a local level since at least the point at which society became advanced, but which is an American hallmark.

Related threads:

Thanksgiving Reflections

A Thanksgiving Passing

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

*Thanksgiving isn't really a North American holiday any more than its just an American one, in the larger sense, and this confusing entry here reflects that.  I'm mostly referring to the United States in this entry, and the predecessor English colonies, but not exclusively, as can be seen by text above that's more applicable to other areas.

Blog Mirror: Boston 1775: How I Zoomed My Summer Vacation

Boston 1775: How I Zoomed My Summer Vacation: It’s the part of August in New England when the sky is overcast, the air has a chill, and hurricanes sometimes pass by. Back when I was gr...

Cooking Tech. How things have changed in the kitchen over the past two. . . or maybe three, centuries.

We've been taking a look at cooking and stoves here recently, getting back to more of the roots of this blog and its purpose.  

Frankly, we'd been remiss in doing that.  It's one of those areas that we should have explored, and in fact we did a little, but we didn't know, what we didn't know.  Or at least we didn't know it very well.

Back on August 8, 2009 (yes, this blog has been around that long, and actually as there's a prior variant of it, even longer than that), I posted an item here entitled The Speed of Cooking.  I'm resetting it out here:

The Speed of Cooking

I received an unexpected and surprising of how much things have changed even in my own lifetime this week, and in the kitchen at that.

Last week I happened to have to go to Safeway to buy some odds and ends, one of which was breakfast cereal. I'm bad about buying the same kinds again and again, so I decided to add some variety. It's been fall like here, so I decided to go with hot cereals for a change.

But not only did I decide to go with hot cereals, but I bought Cream of the West and Irish Oatmeal. That is, I did not buy instant Cream of Wheat, instant Oatmeal or quick oats.

Cream of the West is like old fashioned Cream of Wheat, except its whole wheat. Frankly, the taste is identical to "regular" Cream of Wheat. Irish Oatmeal, however, is really porridge, and it has to be cooked. It actually has to be cooked and allowed to stand, so it isn't speedy.

Anyhow, my kids have never had "regular" Cream of Wheat. They like "instant" Cream of Wheat, which has an odd texture and taste in my view. Sort of wall paper paste like. Anyhow, my son cooked some Cream of the West the first day I did, with us both using the microwave instructions.

He hated it. He's so acclimated to the pasty instant kind, he finds the cooked kind really bad.

Both kids found the porridge appalling. They're only familiar with instant oatmeal, and they porridge was not met with favor at all. I really liked it. It's a lot more favorable than even cooked oatmeal.

Anyhow, the point of all of this is that all this quick instant stuff is really recent, but we're really used to it. During the school year my wife makes sure the kids have a good breakfast every day, which she gets up and cooks for them. But it never really sank in for me how much our everyday cooking has benefited from "instant" and pre made. Even a thing like pancakes provides an example. My whole life if a person wanted pancakes, they had the benefit of mixes out of a box. More recently, for camping, there's a pre measured deal in a plastic bottle that I use, as you need only add water. A century ago, I suppose, you made the pancakes truly from scratch, which I'll bet hardly anyone does now.

A revolution in the kitchen.

Early posts here, as you can see, tended to be short.

Now, since that time I've also posted a major thread here on the revolution in the home, that became a revolution in the workplace, in the form of the advance of domestic machery;  That thread, which Iv'e linked into numerous others, is here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Post have grown in length, as you can also see.

Anyhow, given all of this, the ways that cooking has changed over what really amounts to a relatively short time frame should have occured to me.  And it sort of did, as I noted in this "Maytag" entry:

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

But nonetheless, it didn't really occur to me that the cast iron stoves of early 20th Century, and late 19th, were an innovation in and of themselves, nor did I really think much about what cooking was like before that.

The recent A Hundred Years Ago thread on igniting a coal stove caused me to ponder this and take a look at what that was somewhat like.

Somebody already has, of course, and in this very interesting Internet article:

Foodways in 1910

I just linked this in recently to another post here.  One of the things that's interesting to me about it, in an odd sort of way, is that its on a website that's sponsored by a woodburning cookstove manufacturer.  Frankly, looking into this pretty much convinces me that I want nothing to do with wood, or coal, burning stoves, but anyway.

It did not occur to me, as part of that cast iron stoves of all types are really a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.  But of course, they'd have to be.  It's not like average people are going to cast their own stoves.  So how far back do they really go. Well, that article gives us a pretty good look at that, noting:.

Most American homes did not have stoves until well into the 19th century, so cooking was done in an open hearth, using heavy iron pots and pans suspended from iron hooks and bars or placed on three-legged trivets to lift them above the fires. Pots and pans were made mostly of heavy cast iron. Along with long-handled spatulas and spoons, most kitchens featured long-handled gridirons to broil meat and toasting forks to hold slices of bread.

Though some women used Dutch ovens and some had clay ovens built outside, until after the Civil War when stoves with ovens became more common, people ate pancakes more often than bread. Because bread was hard to bake at home, most towns had bakeries. Bread was often the only prepared food that could be bought in town

That's a different type of cooking entirely.

And a different style of eating, for that matter.

Or, for those who use a cast iron frying pan alot, maybe not.

Well, anyhow. . .

Because it isn't all that long ago, it's one that we know a fair amount about, historically, even if we don't think about it much.   And due to reenactors of one kind or another, and historical sites that are accurate, we also can observe ir or even experience it if we wish to.  And thanks to the excellent Townsends series of vlogs about the late 1700s in North America, we can view the topic if we wish to.  Indeed, they've done a comparison and contrast edition of Colonial v. Modern kitchens, which is well worth looking at:

The part of this that's the real shocker, in my view, is the heath.  I.e., fires on bricks right in a house.

It's another one of those things I never would have thought of.

The video mentions smoke, which must have been a constant feature of life before modern stoves.  I've already mentioned the smoke from wood and coal burning stoves, but smoke from a hearth would be right in the house.    Life must have been. . . smokey.

And more than a little dangerous.

Before we move on, on that, we'll have to note cast iron here.  I love cast iron and indeed one of the additional "pages" on this blog is devoted to it.

Cast iron has been around for a long time, of course, but I frankly don't really know how long.  I can find references to it in Asia going way, way back.  At least 2,000 years.  It shows up for the first time in English in 679, but that use didn't refer to a cooking vessel, but a vessel of another type.  By 1170, however, it was showing up in references to cooking vessels.  The Dutch Oven was actually patented in 1708, later than I would have thought, however. At any rate, they've been around for awhile, and in their modern form are highly associated with sand casting, something that was coming in during the 17th Century.

There was obviously cooking in vessels before cast iron, but as this isn't the complete history of cooking from antiquity until the present day.  For the history we're concerned with, cast iron was undoubtedly the default cookware.  Indeed, it's well worth noting that Dutch Ovens were one of the most popular trade items with Indian tribes.  People think of guns, but cast iron was really valuable and rapidly became the Indian cookware of choice once it was available.

Anyhow, the important thing here is up until the Industrial Revolution really took hold, people cooked with fire in ovens and on hearths.  The fuel source was, according to the Townsends, whom I trust to get it right, wood or sometimes charcoal.  That would impact the type of cooking you'd do, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as I imagined as cooking over wood or charcoal does leave you a lot of options.

Cast iron stoves seem to have come in during the 1830s, as industry began to really change the average American's daily life.  It would be a mistake to think, however, that everyone had them overnight. They were expensive and, frankly, wouldn't have fit the way the average person's house had been built at the time.  Still, they may have come in pretty rapidly.  Just imagine what a revolution in cooking and simply life they meant.  No more building fires on the floor, for one thing, and that's a pretty big thing.  A fire that was more reliable, contained, and safe is another.

By 1900 coal was the main fuel for stoves and every family had one.  That was a big change over a period of time of less than a century.  By 1930, however, gas was replacing coal as the fuel for stoves, and no wonder.  It was cleaner and it didn't involve the constant endless cleaning that a coal stove did.  And for the first time some sort of heavy smoke didn't have to be contended with.

It's really gas stoves that brought in modern cooking.  Gas sped up cooking, for one thing, and it sped up the decision making process for meals as well.  Without  having to bank the stove and build the fire, and all of that, cooking, which had been an all day process was reduced down to one that was much less time consuming.  Electric stoves, which started to come in about the same time, accomplished the same thing.  Still, during the 1940s 1/3 of Americans still cooked with coal or wood, probably a partial effect of the Great Depression which slowed the introduction of new technology.  

Now, of course, hardly anyone does.

Okay, maybe I don't care if football players (who are individual people) take the knee, but keep your Corporation's "opinion" to itself.

Note, this is one of the many draft posts that I started a really long time ago, and then never finished.  I have on the order of 300 posts, most barely started, that fit that description.

Writer's block?  No, just the nature of available time.

Anyhow, this item oddly shows right back up in the news again.

Some time back I posted on football players "taking the knee" during the playing of the National Anthem.  As anyone who read it may have noted, I'm sort of generally lukewarm on any opinion there, unlike a lot of people I see (if Facebook is any guide).  I.e, I didn't have a fit about football players taking the knee and, absent an individual athlete's protest reaching the level of that of the 1968 Mexico City, Olympics, I generally don't get too worked up about that.

At the same time, I also tend to disregard individual opinions of people who have risen to fame through their athleticism or because they're entertainers.  Recently, for example, I read where Beyonce was expressing opinions at a concert of some fashion.  It would be nearly impossible for me to care what Beyonce's opinion on anything at all actually is.  Indeed, I thought her daughter's instruction to "calm down" at a recent awards show was pretty much on the mark.

But opinions, particularly social opinions, by corporations really aggravate me.

Recently this has become particularly common, and while I'll give a few entities a pass, it smacks to me of being blisteringly phony.  If corporations, as a rule, suddenly endorse something that's been recently controversial, the issue has probably actually become safe to express.

What this amounts to, of course, is belated virtue signalling, and it's phony.  Corporations main goal, indeed, their stated and legal goal in almost every instance, is to make money for their shareholders.  That's their purpose and focus, and when corporations suddenly take up a cause, what they are often really doing has nothing to do with values and everything with trying to co-opt a movement for profit or not offend a group that's been lately in the news and has obtained financial power accordingly.

Indeed, it's frankly much more admirable when a corporation has a stated position that it adheres to in spite of financial detriment.  The fact that they know an opinion will be unpopular and they stick with it probably says its a real belief.

Which gets back to the perceived views of people in general.  If you look out at a crowed of people supporting anything, or in modern terms posting their support in some fashion on Facebook or Twitter or the like, probably over half, and I'd guess around 2/3s, have no strong convictions on the topic at all. They may believe they do, but in other circumstances they'd be there supporting the other side equally lukewarmly.

Today is American Independence Day.  The day came in the midst of a truly bloody war.  Around 23,000 Americans lost their lives in the war fighting for the Revolution, including those who died of disease, and a nearly equal number were wounded in an era when being wounded was often very disabling.  The British took about 24,000 casualties of all types, meaning they took fewer than the Americans.

But among the "British" were a sizable number of American colonist who fought for the Crown.  Up to 1/3d of American Colonist remained loyal during the war to the United Kingdom.  Only about 1/3d of the American Colonist supported independence or the revolution at all.  The remaining 1/3d took no position.

Even at that, it's not all that difficult, retrospectively, to find example of combatants who fought on both sides of the war.  Some captured American troops were paroled with the promise to fight for the British, and did.  The times being murky and records difficult to keep, some men just fought on both sides depending upon how the wind seemed to be blowing, a risky course of action, but one that some did indeed take.

Howard Pyle's illustration of Tory Refugees.

After the war those die hard Loyalist who couldn't tolerate living in the United States, including many who were so outed as Loyalist they had little choice on that matter, relocated to Quebec where there descendants are still sometimes self identified by initials that note an honorific conveyed by the Crown.  But 1/3d of the American population didn't pull up stakes and relocate, which tells you a lot.  And what that conveys is that a lot of people who thought that the Colonies were making a mistake just shut up.  Indeed, it proved to be the case during the War of 1812 that British soldiers met with sympathy and assistance in Virginia as they marched on Washington D. C., and that was because many Virginians, in that state which had been a colony, of course, retained a higher loyalty and sympathy with the United Kingdom than they did the United States.

But if you read most common commentary today you'll be left with the impression that the Americans, and by that we mean all of the Americans, were eager to shake off the chains of British tyranny.  And I'd wager that as the war began to turn in Congress' favor that view became common at the time and that it really set in by the time the American victory became inevitable.  So most of the men who spoke quietly in favor of King George III at the Rose and Thorne, or whatever, on Saturday nights in 1774 were praising George Washington by 1781.

This commentary, I'd note, isn't directed specifically at Americans in the 1700s by any means, but is more broader.  There are big exceptions to the rule of the get along nature of human opinion to be sure, for example I think the Civil War may be uniquely an exception to it, but people shouldn't make any mistake about this in general.  During the 1930s a lot of trendy social types teetered on the edge of real Communist sympathy while some conservative figures in the country spoke in admiration of Mussolini's and Hitler's governments in their countries.  By 1941, however, everybody in the country was an outright die hard opponent of fascism and militarism.  By 1950 nobody had ever been a Communist sympathizer, not ever.  

In 1968 and later a lot of young Americans protested vigorously about the American role in Vietnam. Quite a few of them vilified American servicemen.  By mid 1980s the same people were backing the troops and by the 1990s quite a few of them were for other foreign wars.

If this suggests that people's stated opinions are fickle and can't be trusted its meant to.  I was in university during the Reagan Administration and a college student would have had to been cavalier or in very trusted company to express any kind thoughts at all about Ronald Reagan.  One of my most conservative in every fashion friends of long standing would openly declare that Reagan was going to reinstate the draft and send us all to fight in Nicaragua, which was just the sort of nonsensical opinion common at the time.  One young computer employee in the geophysics department was unique not only because he was an early computer genius, employed with their super computer that probably is less powerful than a modern cell phone, but because as a recently discharged Navy submariner he was an adamant and open Anti Communist.  Nobody openly expressed views like that.

Which isn't to say that a lot of people didn't think them.

Which is also not to say that a lot of those same people, in the presence of the granola chick at the bar, didn't express the polar opposite.*

Which gets back to the topic of corporations.

If people's confused and muddled approach to what they declare their views is quite often the rule rather than the exception, this isn't the case with corporations.  More often than not, their goal is the bottom dollar.  They're looking out at the confused and muddled crowed and assuming its focused and distinct, and they then leap on board because they want to sell you pants, shoes, or whatever.  and that's cynical even if its self confused cynical.

Which is all the more reason to ignore, or actually buy from the company that is open about just wanting to sell you goods because that's what they do.

*Which recall Zero Mostel's character's line in The Front as to his reason for becoming a Communist.

Eternal Standards. Changing Times.

High school couple, 1940s.

First, let me note that I don't know who is telling the truth in the whole Kavanaugh matter (and I didn't watch the testimony that was given the other day), but as I"m going to state later, I think that I've formulated an opinion on how such things should be handled in the public sphere.

You don't know who is telling the truth either.  How the heck would we?*

And I'm not commenting on that.  What I'm commenting on are two comments that I've heard from women who; 1) don't believe Kavanaugh's accusers, and 2) made statements that are pretty similar, I'm pretty sure, to what a lot of high school graduates who went to high school in the 1970s, 80s, and very early 90s, are thinking.

And that leads me to the Atlantic magazine.

The Atlantic is running an article under this headline:

My Rapist Apologized

The Kavanaugh allegations led me to reach out to the man who had assaulted me decades before.

Included in that article is this paragraph:

Let me tell you what life was like as a girl in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. I am a year older than Christine Blasey Ford and a year younger than Brett Kavanaugh. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles from both Holton Arms, Ford’s school, and Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended, but I went to my local public high school, Churchill. Never mind that any girl who was in high school in Potomac during that era knew, through the whisper network, not to go to a Georgetown Prep party alone. That was a given. What was also a given is that “date rape,” as a term, was in its infancy. Most of us thought getting our bodies groped at a high-school party—or anywhere—was the unfortunate price we paid for having them, not something we would ever go to the police to report.

Not just Montgomery County, Maryland.  I think that applied to every high school and every high school party in that era.

I'm not saying that's a good thing.  Indeed, I'm saying the opposite.  And I'm not commenting about anything at all past the very early 1990s, as I think things changed at the high school level.**  I am saying a lot, however, about the 1940s through the 1960s, and that era's impact on the 70s and 80s.

And let's go just a bit further from that article:

Even in junior high school, this was true. I have a vivid memory of my friend Marcia having her skirt ripped off her body in the middle of a bar mitzvah dance floor. It had snaps down the middle. I actually heard one boy say, as she was weeping in a corner, trying to refasten her skirt, “I mean, duh. If you’re going to wear snaps on your skirt, what do you think will happen?” I made a mental note: Never wear snaps to a dance party.

Horrible?  Yes.  Beyond the pale then?  Yes.  But hugely uncommon in that era.  Not so much.

Thank you Hugh Hefner.

This is an aspect of this entire conversation that is very interesting.

For most of us, the Maryland prep school atmosphere and the Yale atmosphere of the time cited is a vague cultural reference. We didn't go to prep schools and we didn't go to Yale.  Indeed, I've argued here more than once that the time for the Ivy League grasp on the Supreme Court, and frankly the Presidency, should go.  Deep down, frankly, most Americans are a lot more pedestrian, small town, rural, or blue collar than that, and frankly that's a really good thing.

The reason I mention that is that I’m continually amazed by how the fallout of the Sexual Revolution is really coming down on our society now.  The whole Me Too movement is really a highly confused cry for the return of the standard that we started abandoning in the early 1950s.  In 1953 Playboy came out and urged men to believe something different about women that what had been the standard for the prior millennia. By the early 60s pharmaceutical advances had come in which meant that the new standard urged by Hefner and his followers, that women were dumb, eager to please any man in bed, and completely sterile, made the sterile part of that potentially true and increased pressure on women to accommodate the eager to please part.***  Standards fell and illicit male expectations rose.  Now we have the natural fallout and the strong argument is to return to the prior standard which was natural and which worked, but the cry is divorced from the philosophical underpinning for that standard, Christianity, which those making the cry otherwise reject.  A cry with no solid underpinning is never effective or even fully understood.

Anyhow, while I’m rambling, I’ll note that I know nothing about these accusers at all, but I will note that the standards towards decent conduct had fallen so far that during the time I was in high school all of this would have seemed perfectly credible as a local story and people would have talked, but not that much.  At the time, to be a male with standards marked you in an odd way in that in certain situations you’d attract female company that you normally wouldn’t, simply because you were “safe”.  Having been a “safe” male in that earlier era, I can attest to it being a status that at least had some sort of honor, if only that.  It did mean that the pretty girls would hang out with you at parties and dances, however.

Which is not to suggest in any fashion that the lurid bizarre oddities stated by Swetnick were ever tolerated anywhere, in any society.  I'm not suggesting that.  Indeed, her claims sound, both descriptively and even linguistically, like something out of the period piece The Warriors more than anything in reality.****I'm not suggesting, therefore, that rape was sanctioned ever.  But to suggest that a girl going to a high school party, wearing a swimsuit even with clothes over it, was not risking getting groped?  Not so much.  That doesn't make it right, but frankly that wouldn't have surprised anyone and it likely would not have lead the victim of it to lasting trauma nor would anyone have expected it to follow a perpetrator into his adult years.

Indeed, I know a real gentleman who truly goes out of his way to help people who perfected, in his high school years, the ability to unhook a bra of a female student in the highway before she could catch which of course, in the case of chesty girls, has an impact.  He and his fellows didn't get into trouble for that, and had the girls complained to school authorities, which they uniformly did not (which doesn't mean that they cared for that), it really wouldn't have lead to much discipline of any kind.

Things have improved hugely here since that time, and stuff people tolerated when we were that age at that time now would not be at all locally, for which I’m hugely grateful.  Be that as it may, for those of us with no familiarity with how things worked elsewhere, it’s interesting to know how things worked.  My friends, and I now have some, who attended prep schools in the 1960s claim that nothing of the sort would ever have happened in them at the time, and that they were characterized by rigorous academics and proper behavior.  Perhaps so, but standards in everything fell since the 1960s and perhaps the service academies, which have had some really bad behavior exposed in this area, shows how that is the case.  In the 60s they didn't admit women, of course, but it's well known that rape has been a problem at the Air Force Academy and sexual misconduct a problem at West Point.  If it happens there, believing that standards amongst the prep school crowed in the late 70s and early 80s were as poor as they were in Western high schools isn't too hard to imagine. 

But assuming they are, what are we to make of the cry now?

Well, again, its an interesting cry to return to that earlier era. But when you do that, you have to return to the overall standard as well.  You can't have a standard that's purely built on human wishes, as the wishes tend to run toward the base.  Indeed, the dismantling of a standard that was underpinned by a deep philosophical understanding of the world and human nature is what lead us to the point where things like that being discussed could have occurred, and beyond that to confusion to what the standard is today.

But when you do that, you have to accept everything that philosophy brings to you, at least as being true or the underpinning of the standard. And that's what those most vigorously arguing for the return to the standard, in the guise of it being a "new" standard, are arguing for.

And perhaps most interesting of it all, the old standard had its peaks and valleys in the degree to which certain conduct was expected.  There was always a common set of standards that applied to it, but the vigor and ancillary rules that applied did vary.  And they varied the most in terms of being extremely strict, interestingly, in the Georgian through the Victorian Era.  At that time, among the educated, the standard was so strict that women were basically regarded as being highly vulnerable to any advance and to be protected from anything, even if they were receptive to it, at all costs.  Folks familiar with literature of the period may recall the side drama in Pride And Prejudice of the young maiden who runs off with the despicable Mr. Wickham, and the terrible scandal that ensues.  That she would be vulnerable to his improper advances is not questioned, and society's duty to address it clear.

It's interesting that this is essentially the standard now urged again.  Not at first.  At first the Me Too movement simply called out hte really reprehensible.  But it evolved pretty quickly to calling out those who had advanced and whose advances had been well received, but shouldn't have been offered in the first place. That's very Victorian.  And its now sort of been kicked around that the decayed standard of the 1970s was not only decayed, but that women, or rather girls, who strayed into situations that they would have best avoided should have been treated much more chivalrously.

And indeed, they should have.

And they should now.

But that means the restoration of a societal conduct that would protect them in other ways, and whose values run not only deep, but deeply counter to what many would wish for.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Having said all of that, I frankly find the claims by the third accuser, Julie Swetnick to be completely fantastical.  And I have questions at this point about Ramierez's (the second accuser's) statement as well.

**Indeed, since I first wrote those words, I've read an article, written by a woman who is the same collective 50s demographic I am and all of these people are, noting the exact same things I've noted in this one, so its not just me. I.e, there was a vast amount of misbehavior going on at that time amongst this generation to the point it was pretty common, unfortunately, and standards have since much improved.

***You'll note that none of Hefner's chesty dimbulbs appeared nine months later with a baby sucking on one of those big breasts, looking tired, worn out, and being presented in the centerfolds meeting with a lawyer for a paternity case. Weird.

****While I'm an attorney in my day job, I've done other things including working on drilling rigs, working in ranch work, and serving in the armed forces.  I have, therefore, a pretty broad exposure to interesting vocabulary.  The only place I've ever heard the phrase "train" used to describe gang rape is in the film The Warriors. Train?  Did people really use that term ever?  Hmmm