Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked. The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families.

Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season.

I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

▲

JuniperMesos 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be bad for their health.

Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made? That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually thought.

	▲	Swizec 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ruth is a historian who hosted a bunch of BBC documentaries about regular day to day life a few decades ago. They’re great, strong recommend. I assume BBC generally does strong fact checking for things like that. The episode was about how exercise became a thing that people do. However, I could be misremembering so I went digging. The internet suggests weight lifting was strongly discouraged for women. Here’s a pubmed paper: > Medical experts of that era believed that intense exercise and competition could cause women to become masculine, threaten their ability to bear children, and create other reproductive health complications. Consequently, sport for women was reserved for upper-class women until the mid-twentieth century. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28886817/

▲

Spooky23 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Victorians were talking about “ladies”, not the washerwomen and cooks. Ladies are delicate and slight.

The earthy workers existed to toil, not be beautiful. That wasn’t their station in life.

▲

5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

tolerance 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

What would the modern day iteration of that quote be like?

A woman on a brisk walk through the park mid-afternoon staying on top of the tracked metrics stored on her Apple Watch to offset the time spent sitting at her desk job while another woman lives relatively stationery sitting in traffic at the off-ramp waiting to pull into Erewhon to fulfill the walking woman’s Instacart order.

▲

nonceNonsense 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]