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RE: Crowdsourcing History

in #explore19187 years ago

Reminds me of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Carousel, which I saw for the first time over the summer. One of the young woman characters in the play was living in a boarding house with a requirement to be home before curfew (about 20 minutes in the linked video). If she was late, she was threatened with losing her job as well as her home.

According to wikipedia, that was based on the 1909 Hungarian play, Liliom. If that scene came from Liliom and if that was based on actual events, this sort of requirement might have been an international phenomenon in the early decades of the 20th century.

Also, this excerpt is interesting:

The deficit is taken care of by the charity of kind-hearted, well-meaning people, who do not analyze far enough to realize that a far better method would be to go to the root of the evil which permits girls to be underpaid, rather than to strive to make up in gifts what they really should have as salary....

...Laws never gave a human being backbone. Self-control and self-reliance are like healthy muscles; they develop from being exercised...

In the first portion, you're tempted to think of it in a modern context, ala Lily Ledbetter, but the second sort of contradicts that idea, as if Oakley is complaining about laws that are already on the books. And that reminds me of The Misogynist Origins of American Labor Law.

A century ago, just as markets were attracting women to professional life, government regulation in the United States specifically targeted women to restrict their professional choices. The regulations were designed to drive them out of offices and factories and back into their homes — for their own good and the good of their families, their communities, and the future of the race.

I really would like to know more about what Oakley thought was, "the root of the evil which permits girls to be underpaid"