Technological Habituation

I forgot to bring my cell phone with me to work today.

That should be no big deal.  There's a phone here at my desk, although I do have a few clients who are routinely used to using my cell phone. But to my surprise, I fee odd without it.

The reason I feel a bit odd is several fold, but it shows how acclimated we become to technological changes, for good or ill.

When I started practicing law in 1990 I did not have a cell phone. Cell phones weren't even available, I think.  I know that we didn't have them as college students.  The first cell phone we had at all, in my family, was one that my father bought for some reason. It is what they called a "bag phone", which is a relatively large cell phone which you plugged into a vehicle's cigarette lighter (which is what we called a "power point" at that time) for power.  It had no power of its own.  And it was designed for use in a car.

Exactly why my father thought we needed one I don't know.  Maybe it was so that we would have it when we were out in the sticks. We didn't use it much, but we did have it for a period of years.  I know that I still had it when I started dating my wife, which was after my father had died, but only barely.  It seems to me that I also had it when first married.

I'm not really keen on cell phones, even now, and didn't have one for a long time after they became available.  My first one was a cast off from my wife.  Now, however, I have an Iphone and the reason is that it essentially became impossible for a lawyer not to have one.  You need it to check your email while traveling. That sounds like an excuse, but it is not.  I skipped the whole Blackberry thing but there came a day when I was working on a case, while I was on the road, and settlement negotiations broke out while I was traveling.  Having not adopted the smart phone at the time, I found that I was reduced to making piles of calls, where I had cell phone coverage, to see what the heck was going on.  That week I had an Iphone.

I never thought I'd be a person who texts, but I do, and that is what makes not having the Iphone here today odd.  Throughout an average day I'll send a few text.  My wife texts me, and some times my son does, even from school.  I like the fact that this means they're sort of connected to me all the time.

That's something that was totally different before the cell phone.  I was, and remain, used to the idea of being out in the sticks in contact with nobody.  And prior to the cell phone when I was at work, I was out of contact except via the office phone, which I limited pretty much to work calls. At that time I can recall it being a real irritant that some office staff took huge numbers of personal calls in a day. People still do, I'm sure, but  they aren't tying up an office line now by doing it. 

More significantly, when I was away at school, I was really away.  That wasn't so pleasant, but that's something that the current generation will really not experience, again for good or ill.

This is, of course, a species of habituation.  I'm habituated now to having a smart phone.  And a computer.  But it wasn't always so.  And perhaps it isn't a good thing.  Indeed, I have some changes coming up regarding that.

One thing I've been doing for a couple of years, and which I'm electronically habituated to, is updating a couple of historical daily calendars.  One is my Today In Wyoming's History blog and the other is the daily  history thread on the Society of the Military Horse website.  I've done those, for some time, every day before I head to work.  I'm stopping that, however.

Indeed, I've already stopped updating the Wyoming History blog entries, as of about December 1.  I have the old posts set to keep posting daily until December 31, but after that I'm changing the format of the blog to stop daily entries.  I have been updating it for over a year, and I have most of the daily events I can readily catalog entered, so there's no need for it to be repetitious.  I'll keep the blog, and hopefully find a way to make a calendar for it so people researching any one day can do so easily, but after December 31, 2013, the blog will only be occasionally updated with new entries pertaining to Wyoming's history. 

I'm also gong to stop updating the SMH calendar as well.  Maybe somebody else will take over it, but it's run for several years and is very complete.  Most days, I don't add anything new to it, so there's no reason to update it.  Or at least somebody else would add more flavor to it.

This means that my morning routine is starting to change, and I like it.  I may not turn the computer on as much in the  mornings, or at all, as I've grown used to.  My blogging will continue on as for some reason I have a compulsion to write, but the daily entry type of stuff will cease and I may go back to reading in the mornings, like I used to do.  Indeed, I did that this morning and didn't miss the computer really.

Persistent Myths III: Pacifist Canada, Cowardly French, Invincible United States

The Canadians have never fought a war.

 World War One Canadian Army recruiting poster. The thought that an Allied loss would cause Canada to disappear from the earth seems dubious, but lots of Canadians signed up.

Here's a really weird, but very common, one.  There's a sense in the United States that Canada has never been in a war.  A few years back a junior high middle school teacher actually lectured a class my son was in to that effect.

Well, guess again.  Canada fought in the War of 1812, and in its view, probably correctly, it beat the stuffing out of the US in it.  Canadian militia pretty much wiped up on American troops in the War of 1812, to be followed by the British landing in the US itself and beating the tar out of us, which relates to another myth below.

Canada also fought some Indian campaigns, just not as many as we did. And it also occasionally had to repel Irish rebels who somehow thought that launching an invasion from the US into Canada would achieve something.

And Canada fought in the Boer War. And Canadians bled in vast numbers in World War One and World War Two. And Canada fought in the Korean War as well.

What Canada did not do is fight in the Vietnam War.  Because the Canadian government at the time was sympathetic, for some reason, with American draft evaders in that period the myth seems to have been created that Canada is a pacifist nation.  It isn't.  Indeed, Canada has been fighting with us in Afghanistan.

"Surrender" is a French word.

 This intrepid French aviator is not amused that people accuse France of surrendering easily.

This rumor is even nastier than the idea that Canada is a pacifist nation.  It's common in the US to accuse the French of being cowardly.

This rumor seems to have come out of the French defeat at the start of World War Two, but it oddly hasn't attached to any of the other nations that Germany ran over at the start of the war.  And it shouldn't even apply to France.  The French were defeated on the battlefield in 1940 and the government did surrender, but it was being overrun and simply being realistic. Even at that, however, French troops kept fighting where engaged in order to allow the British to evacuate the continent, a valiant act.  A sizable number of French troops never surrendered and effectively disobeyed a legitimate order of their country to keep on fighting.  When the opportunity came in 1943, the French armed forces were pretty quick to get back into the war against the Germans even though it was technically an act of rebellion.

At any rate, accusing the French of cowardice ignores the fact that the French nation bled itself white in the Napoleonic Wars.  I don't admire Napoleon, but like him or hate him, the French troops of that period, which made up in some ways one of the first modern armies, sure weren't cowards.  They died in such numbers that nearly the entire army died in Napoleon's service.

And the French fought hard, if to defeat, in the Franco-Prussian War.  They fought extremely hard in World War One. After World War Two they put up a real fight in Indo China and Algeria, and they've fought with us in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. They fought with the British and Israelis in the Suez incident.  And they've been involved in third world fights, mostly in their former colonies, to an extent we can hardly appreciate. The French have conducted over 200 combat air jumps since World War Two. We've conducted less than twenty.

The United States has never lost a war.

 American naval heroes of the war of 1812. The naval war was about the only thing that went well for us, at least at first, although a war in the Atlantic was highly irritating to New England's merchants who thought about succeeding form the nation and who didn't support the war.  On the ground, we were pretty much a universal flop.

This may be a matter of perception, but  I'll occasionally hear that the Untied States has never lost a war.

Arguably, we lost the War of 1812.  We may pretend otherwise, but basically the Canadian militia wiped up with us in Canada, and the British pasted us everywhere else.  The war basically ended when the British defeated the French in Europe, and then dictated to us what the peace would be. We were allowed to enter into the peace or suffer the consequences. We did.

The US also lost Red Cloud's War. This may be a minor matter in the overall scheme of things, but still, we lost. Red Cloud's Sioux won.

We also lost the Vietnam War and there's no reason to pretend otherwise.  This isn't a simple story, in my view, and it is true that militarily we won. We were not defeated on the battlefield, but the American populace grew tired of the war and in 1975 when the North invaded for the second time in the 1970s, we threw the South under the bus.

If viewed as a campaign in the Cold War, however, which is how I feel the war is more properly viewed (and I'll blog on that in future) the result is a bit different.

Related Threads:

Persistent Myths

Persistent Myths I. The Great Income Tax Bracket Myth

Persistent Myths II: The First Amendment Protects...

Cold Then and Now: CST; December no colder.

The Casper Star Tribune reports today that, in spite of a common perception to the contrary:

[D]ata from the National Weather Service shows the weather system that brought sub-zero temperatures this past week to Wyoming wasn't unusual. Weather service meteorologist Chris Jones poured over decades of temperature data and said that, despite conventional wisdom, Decembers have not been getting warmer in Wyoming.

I'll admit I'm in the surprised category.  My recollections matches that of the person interviewed (whom I slightly know) who recalled it being colder, or at least snowier, than presently.  That person recalled that there seemed to be snow here all winter long, and that's basically my recollection too. The meteorologist claimed that people recall cold exceptional winters, but tend not to recall the more average ones.  Perhaps that's correct.

Tool Room. National Cash Register Company. 1904

The Big Picture: No Man's Land 1919

The Big Speech: The United Kingdom Declares War on Japan

Sir,
On the evening of December 7th His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom learned that Japanese forces without previous warning either in the form of a declaration of war or of an ultimatum with a conditional declaration of war had attempted a landing on the coast of Malaya and bombed Singapore and Hong Kong.
In view of these wanton acts of unprovoked aggression committed in flagrant violation of International Law and particularly of Article I of the Third Hague Convention relative to the opening of hostilities, to which both Japan and the United Kingdom are parties, His Majesty's Ambassador at Tokyo has been instructed to inform the Imperial Japanese Government in the name of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom that a state of war exists between our two countries.
I have the honour to be, with high consideration,

Sir,

Your obedient servant,

Winston S. Churchill

 

The Big Speech: President Roosevelt asks for a Declaration of War upon Japan.

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense, that always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.

I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the un-bounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7

Today In Wyoming's History: December 7: Today is, by State Statute, WS 8-4-106, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.  The Statute provides: (a) In recognition of the members of th...

Cold, then and now.

 Crow Indians, early 20th Century.

There's a really arctic cold snap predicted for Wyoming later this week and its 17F right now.  Bitter, bitter cold. The paper has the temperatures regularly dropping down below 0F.  Some folks I've spoken to, who must get their weather report from elsewhere, have even more dire weather reports.  I've heard predictions of temperatures reaching -21F.  I've personally seen temperatures here below -40F, so it isn't impossible.

So, what will occur is that we'll plug in our vehicles and keep the temperature up a bit at night.  And we may run facets at night as well.  Most folks will run their vehicles awhile in the morning before heading out to work, to let the cab heater (or whatever we call them) heat up a bit.

We'll also worry about the heat bill. Those of us with electric heat (such as me) will particularly worry about that.

So that's what we do in 2013.  And frankly that's not really any different than what we did a half century ago in 1963.  Cars seemed to be more sensitive to extreme cold at the time, but I don't remember much else being different.

But what about 1913?

In 1913, in most places, heat was by coal or wood.  I suppose folks with coal furnaces, which would have been most folks, made sure they had a plenty of coal in the coal bin. That houses had coal bins is probably something most folks don't know now, but I can remember being a bit fascinated with a house that one of my aunts and uncles had which had a heavy iron door for a coal chute.  The house, of course, had long prior been updated and didn't use coal.

Coal burns dirty, and smelly.  Even really high quality coal has a distinct petroleum smell.  A lot of people do not recognize that smell at all anymore, as they've never smelled it, but every now and then you'll run across somebody who heats even now with coal, almost always as an auxiliary to their main heat.  Towns must have smelt like and had a layer of smoke over them all winter.  This must have been particularly true during heavy cold snaps, as that almost always causes a temperature inversion, at least around here.

 Coal furnace.  I've never seen one.

Even now, where people burn a lot of wood for heat, and in some places in the west that's common, you'll often smell wood smoke during the winter, and that's just from auxiliary use as a rule.  This became more common in the 1970s and 1980s than previously, reflecting the nationwide rise in fuel costs.  A quarter century ago while a student in Laramie I lived in a rental house where we did that.  We largely heat the house with a wood burning stove and with wood that we'd cut in the Snowy Range on a Forest Service permit.

 World War One vintage poster urging the early ordering of winter coal.

Of course, this all deals with houses. What about office buildings, or even substantial apartment buildings?  I know that heat was provided via a boiler, but what was the fuel?  Oil?  I can't imagine that a building like the Con Roy Building, for example, was heated through burning coal. And it's been around since 1917.  Plenty of substantial buildings in the west are older than that.

 World War One vintage poster urging coal conservation.

In 1913 the majority of people walked to work, but cars were around to be sure, with a majority of those cars no doubt being Model T Fords.  I don't know how hard to start they were in cold weather, but they started with a hand crank, so I'm guess that they wouldn't have been easy to start.

Walking, of course, implied heavy dress, in weather like we're speaking of, and frankly the winters of that era imply heavy dress in general,  walking and being out in the cold on a regular basis will mean that the person who engages in it will dress warmly.  Indeed, people who work outdoors a lot will tend to wear warmer clothes all year long, rather than the current trend, for our indoor age, of people wearing shorts in the middle of the winter.

 Jack and Etta Johnson in winter finery, 1910.

Winter clothing of the period was heavier, sometimes considerably heavier, than now.  All the modern synthetics that most people sport in winter to some degree did not exist, and therefore natural fibers, and furs, were what were used to avoid freezing.  Heavier dress even applied to some extent indoors, as buildings were simply not heated as well as presently, and were sometimes fairly cold even under the best of circumstances.

German soldier, 1914 or 1915.

Postscript

Today provides a good example.  I got u pat 05:00, it was was -1F.  I turned up the electric heat a bit.  What would I have done had it been 1913?  Threw some logs in an iron stove?  Checked the coal burning stove?  I'm not sure.

I went and made coffee with an electric drop coffee maker.  I know I wouldn't have done that in 1913.  I would have had to put some logs in the kitchen stove and boiled coffee on the stove top.  And I had cereal for breakfast, which I likely would not have done in 1913, unless it was oatmeal, which I would have had to cook on the stove top again.

Any my truck is warming up outside.  If it were 1913, I doubt I would have driven downtown, I probably would have walked.  Had I needed an automobile for something, it probably would have been a Model T, which no doubt is okay in snow, but not the same as my Dodge D3500.  And I would have had to hand crank it in subzero weather, which would have been iffy.

Postscript II

Or what about a day like today.  -22F when I got up at 05:00.

Postscript III

One thing that weather like this serves to illustrate is how much easier cars have gotten to start in cold weather.

Even up to the 1970s, weather like this required that a car with a substantial engine have its block heater plugged in overnight.  Every vehicle I've ever owned has had one, but frankly it has to get this cold before I plug them in anymore.  They just don't need it as they'll start in very cold weather.

This is particularly true of diesels.  I have a diesel now, and I've had one made in the 1990s before it. They both start in very cold weather.  When its this cold, I use the block heater. But at one time people wouldn't even buy diesels in this region because they'd freeze up, sometimes on the highway, during winter.

Also, it's interesting to note how much better insulated houses are. This started to be emphasized in the 1970s during the country's first energy crisis.  The cries has waxed and waned, but the emphasis on insulation has not, and modern houses are very well insulated as a rule.  Not all, of course, but most are.

The degree to which this has changed is perhaps best illustrated by my wife's belief that we need to run the water at night if its really freezing, which happens to this level a couple of times a year.  The only places I ever lived in that required that were in Laramie, and were very poorly insulated.  Here, I've never done that, and we've never needed to.  It still, however, makes her uncomfortable.  But then the farm house she lived in was probably built in the teens.

The Big Speech: Today In Wyoming's History: December 6. President Roosevelt's telegram to Emperor Hirohito

Today In Wyoming's History: December 6:

1941  President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Emperor Hirohito reading:

Almost a century ago the President of the United States addressed to the Emperor of Japan a message extending an offer of friendship of the people of the United States to the people of Japan. That offer was accepted, and in the long period of unbroken peace and friendship which has followed, our respective nations, through the virtues of their peoples and the wisdom of their rulers have prospered and have substantially helped humanity.

Only in situations of extraordinary importance to our two countries need I address to Your Majesty messages on matters of state. I feel I should now so address you because of the deep and far-reaching emergency which appears to be in formation.

Developments are occurring in the Pacific area which threaten to deprive each of our nations and all humanity of the beneficial influence of the long peace between our two countries. These developments contain tragic possibilities.

The people of the United States, believing in peace and in the right of nations to live and let lives have eagerly watched the conversations between our two Governments during these past months. We have hoped for a termination of the present conflict between Japan and China. We have hoped that a peace of the Pacific could be consummated in such a way that nationalities of many diverse peoples could exist side by side without fear of invasion; that unbearable burdens of armaments could be lifted for them all; and that all peoples would resume commerce without discrimination against or in favor of any nation.

I am certain that it will be clear to Your Majesty, as it is to me, that in seeking these great objectives both Japan and the United States should agree to eliminate any form of military threat. This seemed essential to the attainment of the high objectives.
More than a year ago Your Majesty's Government concluded an agreement with the Vichy Government by which five or six thousand Japanese troops were permitted to enter into Northern French Indochina for the protection of Japanese troops which were operating against China further north. And this Spring and Summer the Vichy Government permitted further Japanese military forces to enter into Southern French Indochina for the common defense of French Indochina. I think I am correct in saying that no attack has been made upon Indochina, nor that any has been contemplated.

During the past few weeks it has become clear to the world that Japanese military, naval and air forces have been sent to Southern Indo-China in such large numbers as to create a reasonable doubt on the part of other nations that this continuing concentration in Indochina is not defensive in its character.

Because these continuing concentrations in Indo-China have reached such large proportions and because they extend now to the southeast and the southwest corners of that Peninsula, it is only reasonable that the people of the Philippines, of the hundreds of Islands of the East Indies, of Malaya and of Thailand itself are asking themselves whether these forces of Japan are preparing or intending to make attack in one or more of these many directions.

I am sure that Your Majesty will understand that the fear of all these peoples is a legitimate fear in as much as it involves their peace and their national existence. I am sure that Your Majesty will understand why the people of the United States in such large numbers look askance at the establishment of military, naval and air bases manned and equipped so greatly as to constitute armed forces capable of measures of offense.

It is clear that a continuance of such a situation is unthinkable. None of the peoples whom have spoken of above can sit either indefinitely or permanently on a keg of dynamite.

There is absolutely no thought on the part of the United States of invading Indo-China if every Japanese soldier or sailor were to be withdrawn therefrom.

I think that we can obtain the same assurance from the Governments of the East Indies, the Governments of Malaya and. the Government of Thailand. I would even undertake to ask for the same assurance on the part of the Government of China. Thus a withdrawal of the Japanese forces from Indo-China would result in the assurance of peace throughout the whole of the South Pacific area.

I address myself to Your Majesty at this moment in the fervent hope that Your Majesty may, as I am doing, give thought in this definite emergency to ways of dispelling the dark clouds. I am confident that both of us, for the sake of the peoples not only of our own great countries but for the sake of humanity in neighboring territories, have a sacred duty to restore traditional amity and prevent further death and destruction in the world.

Customer Service

Greetings!  You have reached our customer service line!  I'm not a real person, but a disembodied voice.  Please choose amongst the following options.

Uno por  Espanol!

Dieu pour Fracais!

Drei vor Deutsch!

6.5 for English!

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What, you're still there?  Well then, press amongst our following options to be better help you.

Press one if you are calling about billing (we really care about that one).

Press two if you are calling to spend a pleasant afternoon talking with our customer benevolence representative in Bopal.

Press three if you have a problem with our service which needs to be addresssed.

You have a problem?  How dare you. Well, pick amongst one of the following options regarding your problem

Press one if you can fix it yourself

Press two if you have ever been to Lithuania.

Press three if you are about to meet your ultimate demise due to our product, in which case you will be put on prema hold.

Press four to speak to a customer representative.

Hello, this is the automated line for customer representatives.  Please answer the following questions by speaking into our phone, which only recognizes the telephonic accent of a person born in Botswana who has learned to speak English solely through movies featuring Sean Connery.

Do you have a problem?  Please say "aye" or "nrrrrr."

Do you wish to speak to a person?  If so, give us their name right now.

I'm sorry, that person doesn't work to us, you will be transferred back to our answering service.

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Sign of Times Past

Remember how you used to see these everywhere?

Random Snippets. Inspiration for Helmet For My Pillow.

Robert Leckie, whose World War Two memoir about being a Marine in the South Pacific, Helmet For My Pillow, is regarded as a classic, was inspired to write it after walking out of a Broadway production of the musical South Pacific.

I have to tell the story of how it really was. I have to let people know the war wasn't a musical.

Leckie.

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 2) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 2) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 1) | Endless streams and forests

Lincoln Highway: Wyoming (Part 1) | Endless streams and forests

The Big Picture: Mulberry Indiana Horse Show and Motorcycle Meet. 1910

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

The Joy of Field Rations: Roasting Coffee in the Field

The Best Post of the Week of November 24, 2013.

Friday, November 29, 2013

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

A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of the working woman.  In reality, most Rosie's put the riveter down and actually did return to their prewar lives.  This image pales in comparison to Rockwell's stunning original version.

In the popular imagination, it was World War Two that took women out of the homes, and into careers.  Removed from the domestic scene for the first time by the necessity of the workplace in the greatest war in human history, the story goes, women realized that they could do a man's job and refused to return to their domestic roles.  It's a nice simple story.

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

A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of the working woman.  In reality, most Rosie's put the riveter down and actually did return to their prewar lives.  This image pales in comparison to Rockwell's stunning original version.

In the popular imagination, it was World War Two that took women out of the homes, and into careers.  Removed from the domestic scene for the first time by the necessity of the workplace in the greatest war in human history, the story goes, women realized that they could do a man's job and refused to return to their domestic roles.  It's a nice simple story.

It also just isn't true.

 General motors worker, World War Two.

It wasn't beating the Axis that changed the domestic scene, it was the conquering of domestic chores by machines that changed things, and not all that rapidly at that.  Indeed, women didn't even experience the workplace in large numbers for their first time in World War Two.  They'd already been there during World War One.

Riveting is hard, dangerous work.  But dragging a plow in the absence of draft animals, is hard, dangerous, brutal work.  This World War One poster isn't a flight of fancy, it's actually an illustration of an actual photograph of three French farm women dragging an implement as they no longer have any draft animals on their farms, and they no longer have their husbands their to help.

It is, as is well known, very true that women picked up the laboring oar in the Allied countries, by choice and by necessity, during World War Two.  But they also had during World War One.  It was women who loaded the explosives in artillery shells in the Great War, at a time when that had not yet been automated.  The men who would have done it were largely in the service, and their smaller hands made it an easier thing for them to do. And women filled scores of other industrial roles as well.

 Women war workers in dormitory, 1917.

And they filled farming roles at a level which was not approached again, ever.  So many women were needed for agricultural roles that Canadian women were recruited to work as timber cruisers in Scotland.  Women plowed the fields and did the sowing in France, England and Germany.  And they also were pressed into that role in the US and Canada, although in smaller, but not insignificant, numbers.

 

Recruiting poster for the Women's Land Army.

 

 

 The YMCA also recruited for young women to work as farmers during World War One.

Indeed, in some warring nations the role of women was more significant in World War One, than it was in World War Two.  Women worked in every warring nation in both wars, in what had been men's roles, but the need for female heavy labor was greater in France and the UK in the Great War than it was in World War Two.  During World War Two, because of German occupation, French women did not find employment much outside their traditional roles, while in World War One they had been employed in heavy labor.  World War Two was a horrific nightmare for the UK, but it actually required less manpower than did the Great War, which was a British bloodbath.  Women were largely not employed in Germany, due to some strange Nazi revulsion against doing so, and a view of women that was rather creepy. 

And women entered military service for the first time in World War One, not World War Two. The U.S. Navy recruited "Yoemanettes," prior to WWII's "WAVES."  The British and Commonwealth forces used large numbers of female nurses, including tow of my mother's aunts, who traveled from Canada to France for the war.  British and Australian horsewomen broke horses for their respective armies.  Russian women found a place as theoretical combat troops for the first time in World War One, not World War Two, when the Imperial Russian Army rose a Women's Battalion of Death (it didn't see action).

So what changed?

Well, in one sense, not much. The concept that World War Two's working women stayed in the workplace is grossly exaggerated.  For the most part, they didn't.  Most in fact left their wartime employment and returned to domestic lives they'd hoped for, or at least expected, prior to the war.  Indeed, a lot of occupations did not open up for women for decades.  Lawyers I know, for example, who went to law school right after World War Two have related to me that it was extremely difficult for a woman to get through the schools as they were harassed, in part, by male professors (and students) who didn't feel they belonged there.  I know one woman who did go through law school in the 1940s, and was a highly respected lawyer, but she's an example of one. For the most part, women's occupations weren't a lot wider in variety after the war than they were before. A big exception was the role of secretary, which had become an exclusively female role by the 1940s, but then it was very much well on the way to that prior to World War Two.  And that role is telling as to the reason.  The reason women replaced men as secretaries (which was controversial at first) was due to a machine. . . the typewriter.

 

Manual typewriters, 1940s.

It was machines that changed the relationship of people to work, and by extension it was women who were most impacted.  For women, the machines that would have the greatest impact in their relationship to work were domestic machines.

Electric washing machine, with hand wringer, 1940s.

We've blogged about it here before, but it wasn't just women who had a different relationship with domestic chores.  Indeed, this is so much the case, that it's hard to appreciate it now. This impacted what men and women did, and had to do, on daily basis.

Most modern domestic machines are post World War Two inventions, or post War War Two perfections.  Consider, therefore what average conditions were like prior to the modern era.

There are certain things that everyone has to handle, in one way or another, every day.  We all need to eat, we all need to acquire food to eat, and we all need keep ourselves and our clothing decent in some fashion.  Seems simple enough, doesn't it. And, for us now, it really is.

For most of us, today, we can easily keep several days food in a refrigerator.  We can easily cook that food with a gas or electric, or microwave, stove everyday.  Most of us have clothing that is easily washable as well.  No big deal.  And when we go to clean our living quarters, that doesn't create much of a problem either.

Well, consider now the situation prior to World War One.  That's now a century ago, but it's part of our modern era.  Quite recognizable to most of us, and when presented in film seemingly a dressier, if somewhat different, version of our current era.

But in that recognizable era there was no domestic refrigeration.  People did preserve food in the house, but via an "ice box."  Indeed, my father had grown so accustomed to this term when he was young that he always called the refrigerator the "ice box" even though he'd probably not lived in a house that had one since he was a small child.  

Woman pouring mild for her son, kept cold in a trailer equipped with an ice box. This is a WWII vintage photo of a Defense War Worker trailer. The really telling thing depicted by this photo isn't the ice box, which was an old technology, but that the woman is dressed in shorts, which reflected a very recent change.  She could appear as modern in nearly every home today, which her World War One counterpart would not.

Folks who cooled food with an ice box, acquired food everyday. If you wanted fresh food, you bought it that day.  Many women went to the market for fresh meat everyday.  There was little choice but to do that.  And ice was delivered periodically also, by a horse drawn wagon.  Both of my parents had recollections of the ice wagon.

Cooking the food was a long precess also. Nothing existed that was already prepared.  People didn't have frozen food to prepare. Canned food, of course, did already exist.  But by and large people had to prepare everything that day, whatever meal was being considered.  And part of that was due to the fact that modern stoves were only coming in during this period.

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.

And such innovations weren't limited to kitchen and the laundry room but other devices entered the house that saved domestic labor in all sorts of ways.  For example, the vacuum cleaner came in.

Woman in Montana vacuuming in her home, about 1940.  Of note, the book case on the right is a barristers case, something normally associated with lawyers.  She's vacuuming a large rug on a wooden floor.

It might be easy to scoff at that, but it shouldn't be.  Homes built before the vacuum cleaner generally didn't have wall to wall carpeting, and for good reason, but people did have large area carpets in them, like the one if the photo above.  And they were cleaned by beating them.  For those with large area rugs, of course, that's still done today after a while, as they can't really be adequately cleaned simply by vacuuming, but you don't have to do it as often.

To beat a rug, what you do is roll it up and cart it out to the clothes line, a feature in the yard that's actually prohibited in many subdivisions today, and you whack it repeatedly until the dust quits flying out of it.  It's a two person job for a heavy rug.  

Of course, as noted, wall to wall carpeting was not the norm, as cleaning wouldn't allow for it, nearly anywhere.  What that meant is that people had to take on the rest of the cleaning of the floor by some other method.  The other flooring surfaces were wood and tile, with both being in most houses to some extent.  Tiles were cleaned as they still are, with mop, scrub brush, and sponge.  Wooden floors, however, were polished.  Floor wax is something most of us don't think about today, but they did then.  A wooden floor was damp mopped occasionally and then polished with floor wax.  In larger commercial buildings there came to be a machine for this, and there still is.  A floor polisher is a large machine with a circular disk that will do this. At Ft. Sill, where I went to Basic Training, we polished the floor every Sunday.  My father had a floor polisher for his office, so I knew how to operate that before I went to Basic.  Now, most folks don't have floor polishers.

Although, I'll  note as an aside, tile and wood floors have come roaring back into the use. They were always pretty, but when the machines came in, people went berserk with carpeting. All carpeting wears and becomes dirty, but people carpeted everything, including having carpet laid over the top of beautiful wood and tile floors.  By the 1970s carpet became shaggy, the way that the eras teenagers did, and sometimes came in hideous loud colors.  On odd occasion, if you can find an office or home that's never been updated, you can see the special in all of its bizarre glory.

Okay, so we now have a lot of appliances of all sorts. So what?  How can that support the thesis stated above.  Well, consider how things worked prior to these things started to really come in during the 1920s.

Let's start with a farm example. The US was much more rural a century ago than it is now, and many more men and women lived on them than do now.  Indeed, a fairly high percentage of the country did.  And lets take the example of a labor intensive time of the year, say harvesting.

Some years ago I saw a documentary which interviewed old men who had been boys in Wisconsin during the waning days of big horse farming.  One of them described very well how this worked, and serves as an excellent example.  Harvesting was communal in nature, just like branding remains here today.  So a collection of farmers worked on each other farms to get it done. And in order to get it done, the women started the day really early, about 4:00 a.m.  They started the day that early, as they pooled their labor in order to cook a large breakfast for the collection of men who would be harvesting.  That large breakfast was necessary as they were going to expend a lot of calories that day. All that cooking was done by hand, nothing was prepared in advance as nothing could be.  They fed the men about 5:00, who then went to work in the fields.  

That didn't mean a break for the women, however.  Immediately after breakfast they started cleaning, by hand (no dishwasher) the dishes and cooking implements.  That took some time, which left just enough time to start cooking a large noon meal, which they delivered to the fields. After that, they cleaned again, which left just enough time to cook a large dinner, following which the men worked until low light shut the day down.  The women, in turn, were kept working in that task until late.  It was a long, long, day for men and women, and labor intensive all the way around.

Okay, that's a farming example, but it'd be different for folks in town, right?  Well, not really.

Elsewhere on this blog I have Henry Fairlie's excellent essay "The Cow's Revenge" up somewhere.  In that, he ably describes life of a century ago in towns and cities, for the average working man.  They average blue collar worker walked to work an average distance of seven miles.  He worked about ten hours a day, and he obviously didn't go home at noon.  To support that, once again, he ate a pretty hardy breakfast and packed a pretty hardy lunch.  Many also packed the tools of their trade with them on a daily basis. And with all labor being more intensive at the time than it is now, he ate a pretty hardy dinner to replace the calories expended during they day.

If a man is working ten hours a day, six days a week, and if the preparation of food, the washing of clothing, and even just keeping the house was a full time job, he wasn't going to be able to do it himself, or at all.  

Indeed, for most white collar workers, a much smaller percentage of the population, the same was also true, even though their working conditions were very much different.  Consider doctors or lawyers.  This was before the pay bubble, now ending, in which these professions were high paying as a rule, so offices were modest or even inside of their homes.  But they still lacked the individual ability as a rule to prepare their own meals or take care of their homes, offices, clothing etc.  

In other words, there was just too much labor to go around.

The example of single men and women at the time is telling.  Young men in this era typically did two things when they were of working age, if not married. They lived at home, if they stayed where they were from, until they were married.  If they never married, they just kept living at home.  Presently there's a bit of a supposed mini crisis of adult children returning to their parent's homes, but if that is a new trend, it's only a return to a former condition, to a degree.  These men weren't exhibiting being tied to their mother's apron strings, they were acting in accordance with reality.  By staying home and contributing to the household, the things they couldn't do were being taken care of by their mothers and probably by their sisters.

The other common male option was to live in a boarding house.  Men who did that paid for these tasks to be taken care of as part of their lodging.  We don't have boarding houses much today, but they were common right through the 1940s.  Indeed, the soldiers' song still common in the 1940s, "Hard Tack and Bully Beef" is actually simply a variant of "There Is A Boarding House."

There is a boarding house, far, far away,
Where they have ham and eggs three times a day
O how them boarders yell
When they hear the dinner bell,
They give the landlord

Three times a day.

The fact that this was used as a soldiers song based on this says something about another young man's option.  We don't think of food and lodging being an incentive to joint the service today, but it provided one in part of that bygone era.  With the age old custom of soldiers' grousing, of course, the ham and eggs becomes hardtack and bully beef, with other sarcastic comments worked in.

Young man engaging in the dangerous endeavor of cooking dinner in an apartment over a Primus gas stove. These aren't meant for indoor use at all.

Of course, some men took apartments in towns and simply ate out every day, or resorted to less than desirable means of cooking.  Even now, quite a few men engaged in heavy labor hit a working man's restaurant early in the day, and pack a lunch of some sort with them for lunch.  The point is, however, that for most working men, the conditions of the day didn't give a great number of options in terms of getting food cooked, clothing washed, etc., and still allow them to work.

That work, that is the domestic work, fell to women, but not because of some societal conspiracy thought up by men so much as by necessity.  The were some female out of the house occupations, as noted, but they were generally few, and the women who occupied them tended to be just as oppressed by the needs of every day life as men.  When you look at old advertisements that seem quaint or even a bit odd now, in which some poor young woman is depicted as being in desperate straits as she's in her late 20s and not married, it should be kept in mind that for most women getting married did indeed improve their lot in life as they'd be taking care of their own household, rather than be auxiliary to somebody else s.

It was mechanization that changed all of this. With the introduction of domestic labor saving machinery, there was time in time in the household that didn't previously exist. With the extra time, came other options of filling it, in one way or another.  And with the machinery also came the option to look at a wider range of careers if they wanted.  The implications of that were and are vast, but the cause of it seems rather widely misunderstood.

Thanksgiving

Today, November 22, is the Thanksgiving Holiday for 2012.  Thanksgiving remains one of the two really big holidays in the United States, although, as noted just below on this blog, it has now sufficiently diminished in importance that some major retailers are open today, trying to get a jump on Black Friday, the fairly recent introduction of a shopping bacchanalian event in anticipation of Christmas, sort of.  If we add Easter, it remains one of the three generally observed big Holidays in North American, with perhaps the 4th of July completing the series. Those four days are really the only days in the United States which most people have off.  Other days which were formerly commonly days off for most people, such as Memorial Day or Veterans' Day are less observed now.  I don't think anyone employed outside the Federal Government gets Veterans' Day off.

Thanksgiving's durability, up until now, is therefore worth noting.  There's something about it that keeps it going.

When we were kids were taught, back in the old days, that the holiday was thought up by the Pilgrims, those Puritan colonist who landed at Plymouth Rock, as an original day, celebrated with their Indian neighbors, to give thanks for their first harvest.  That's not really true.  I'm sure it's true that they celebrated a Thanksgiving, but then they would have for a variety of reasons. The most significant of those would have been that a Thanksgiving was the European norm.

Thanksgiving was a universally recognized religious celebration recognized in every European country.  The holiday gave thanks to God for the harvest.  At some point in Europe the celebration came to be formally recognized in the Catholic Church, centered date wise around the harvest in southern Europe, by a few days of fasting prior to the Church recognized holiday.  How the Reformation effected this I do not know, but I am certain that the Puritan colonists would have celebrated Thanksgiving in England and in Holland prior to every having celebrated it in the New World.  Indeed, as is sometimes missed, not all of the Mayflower passengers were Puritans by any means, and this is no less true for the other passengers on that vessel. They all would have come from a relatively rural English background and they all would have been familiar with a Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving remained a generally recognized religious based holiday in North America well before it was established as a national holiday in the United States, and in Canada (on a different day).  In the United States, the first Federal recognition of the holiday came during the Civil War, during which time Abraham Lincoln sought fit to note it, in the context of the terrible national tragedy then ongoing.  While that may seem odd to us now, there were real efforts even while the war was raging to try to fit what was occurring into context, which would eventually lead to Decoration Day and Memorial Day (essentially the same holiday). During the war, noting what was occurring on Thanksgiving seemed fitting.  The holiday was seemingly moved around endlessly for many years, and even as late as Franklin Roosevelt's administration new dates for it were fixed, all generally in November. States got into the act too, such as Wyoming, with governors occasionally fixing the date.  The current date stems from a 1941 statutory provision.

 Family saying Grace prior to their Thanksgiving Day meal.

How the holiday has been celebrated has actually varied but little over the years, again up until recently.  A large family gathering has tended to be the norm. When turkey came in as the main meal, for most people, is unclear but it was a long time ago.  It's worth noting here that turkey and goose have been the big American festive meats for Christmas and Thanksgiving for a very long time, with goose again dating back to Europe.  Goose doesn't tend to appear on Thanksgiving tables, but it does remain on the Christmas dinner tables for some.

Lucky New Yorkers taking home live Thanksgiving turkeys.

It's interesting to note that up until the mid 20th Century the norm was to take a turkey home alive, and dispatch it at home.  This is rare now, as people have become somewhat delusional and wimpy about food, with some even going so far to believe that if they abstain from meat entirely, that they're not killing anything, a delusion which demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of any kind of farming or food transportation (more animals die smacked by trucks on the road than most can begin to imagine).  That meant that the turkey was no doubt pretty darned fresh, as well as tasty.

Man bringing home Thanksgiving dinner.

Boy with plucked Thanksgiving dinner.

Connecticut farmer plucking turkey for sale.

Outside of a big gathering, for many people a church service was part of Thanksgiving, and for quite a few it still is.  Other than that, activities that occurred were, according to what I've read, games.  Various types of games seemed quite popular for such gatherings.  Thanksgiving football goes back amazingly far in the United States, and I've seen a poster advertising a college game that dates back to 1903.  If it dated back to 1903, I'd presume it went back somewhat further than that.

On Army posts, I'd note, this was also a date that was generally observed, and interesting records of food on hand, typically just what we'd now expect to appear on our tables, was common. Even late 19th Century Army posts in the American West made an effort to have appropriate food on hand for the holiday.

In a lot of rural areas this was also a day that men went hunting.  It still is in quite a bit of the rural West.  This had to be timed around the holiday meal, but morning hunts, often for waterfowl, were quite common.

Connecticut bird hunters, 1940s, on Thanksgiving Day.

At any rate, even given the intrusion of the shopping culture into the day, this holiday remains remarkably unchanged over the decades.  Even, perhaps, the centuries.  So, Happy Thanksgiving.

Note:

This entry is a rerun, as it was originally first run last year. 

Le mirage de la Charte - L'actualité

Le mirage de la Charte - L'actualité

Another article from L'Actualite, this time on a legislative matter apparently pending in Quebec.  The proposal would establish a Quebecois Charter of Values. A sort of legislative decree as to what it means to be a French Canadian in Quebec..  L'Actualite opposes it.   I'm not going to comment on that, as I'm not Quebecois (although I'm descended, in part, from some who were). Rather, I'm commenting here at this brings up the topic of what happens to a people when they cease to adhere to the things that made them who they were.

The only reasons that there are French Canadians is that the English allowed them to keep their Faith, to the horror of many American colonist to their south, and the Priests urged them to remain rural, stay on the land, and stay away from politics. This they did. And by doing that, they preserved, long after it should have expired, a French Norman culture rooted in the values of the original Norman colonist.  This has made them Quebecois, not French, and it's the reason that they have a cutlure they are proud of today (but which isn't the same one in France, which the French at least are well aware of.

Cultures do change, there can be no doubt, although they do not change as much as it might be imagined.  Cultures also can be amazingly resilient and evolve, adapt, or even reemerge.  They can, however, also become absorbed or even cease to really be.  An interesting question exists here on the nature of cultures that are defined, in part, by religious values.  

Once these cultures cease to have widespread participation in the Church, they can cease being themselves and begin to wonder why.  Ireland is one such nation. Still overwhelmingly Catholic, it's less Catholic than it once was as that situation develops it starts to be less Irish.  Quebec is very much that way.  Once overwhelmingly rural, overwhelmingly agrarian, and overwhelmingly Catholic, as the Quebecois have shed all of that they're now distressed to find that you really can't define the culture by the language it speaks.  Lots of Moslem Algerians speak French every bit as well as the Qeubecois.  

To give a counter example, however, the Russians managed to be Russian even after Communism murderously suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church.  The lesson there, however, might not quite be what it seems as it proved to be the case that the Russian Orthodox Church retained a stronger pull on Russian culture than would have been guessed. Virtually defining part of that culture prior to the fall of the Empire, it seems to have remained fairly strong in spite of Communist suppression and has enormously reemerged after Communism's fall. 

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in Quebec.  It's playing out in Ireland as well.  And in a lot of other cultures at the same time.  Not that this suggest things are hopeless by any means, as that simply wouldn't be true.  If the Quebecois are now pondering what makes them that, perhaps they ought to look at their Catholic, agrarian, past.  That doesn't necessarily mean a return to the past, and it doesn't even mean that everyone in Quebec must become a believer if they are not.  Rather, perhaps Quebec ought to acknowledge what the Russians seem to, in terms of culture, or what the Icelandic do, or what the Greeks do, which is that that certain influences, both agrarian and religious, defined them, and that without acknowledging that, they really aren't.