I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that “accepted wisdom” – the rules and mores of a culture – changes over time. I’m old enough now to have seen a few of these changes.
For instance, I remember when the third-person singular pronoun was always “he” or “him”. Nowadays, that would seem a little unusual, if not sexist, as most writers are trying to make a point of being gender neutral. Similarly, “Ms.”, as in “Ms. Joan Smith”, is now a commonly accepted title. In the 1960s, married women were not only referred to as “Mrs.”, but often were denied the right to see their own first names in print, being referred to as “Mrs. John Smith”.
Also, here’s something that people younger than about 35 to 40 would find hard to believe: before about 1980, drinking and driving was (more or less) socially tolerated. It wasn’t considered a good thing, but it was accepted that, every now and again, people might find it difficult to drive home. I am just old enough to remember when people would come into their workplace and joke about how they didn’t remember how they got home last night. Nobody would do that now. (This, I hasten to add, is a decided improvement.)
I was thinking of this when reading Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Like all of Bryson’s books, his memoir contains a lot of fascinating facts tossed in as asides. For example, he talks about the early atomic tests conducted by the U.S. The size and scope of these tests boggle the mind. Governments were taking risks they wouldn’t dare take now.
For example, the largest of these bombs was a hydrogen bomb that was exploded underground in Nevada in 1962. The blast was powerful enough to raise the land around it by 300 feet, and left a crater 800 feet across. Bryson quotes historian Peter Goodchild, who wrote that the resulting radioactive fallout was so thick that street lights came on, in broad daylight, 200 miles away. The fallout was scattered over six states and two provinces – none of which were warned about impending radioactivity.
Bryson also describes the first hydrogen bomb test, in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954. (The bikini was named after this.) The flash was visible over 2600 miles away, and the atoll is still uninhabitable today.
Attitudes towards sex were also different back then. In the 1950s, according to Bryson, most of the United States had laws prohibiting oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, and sex between unmarried couples. And, apparently, in Indiana you could receive up to 14 years in prison for suggesting to anyone under 21 that masturbating could, perhaps, be a good idea.
Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, which I’ve just started reading, describes the restrictions on sex in even more detail. Here’s a few of them:
- Unmarried women who became pregnant were invariably shunned, and were shunted off to a home for unwed mothers to have their baby safely out of sight and out of mind. These babies were then put up for adoption.
- In Connecticut, a physician was arrested in 1961 for giving contraceptive information to a married woman.
- In 1967, in Massachusetts, a man was sentenced to 36 days in jail for “crimes against chastity” for giving vaginal foam to a woman after a lecture on birth control.
- Birth control was not universally available in the United States until 1972.
To make things worse: it was hard to obtain a divorce in those days, to put it mildly. According to the Canadian government archives, before 1968 a divorce in Canada required an Act of Divorce to be passed by the Canadian Parliament. A person wanting a divorce had to have an announcement published in the Canada Gazette and two local newspapers. This announcement had to contain the date and place of the marriage and the reason for the divorce petition. In the case of adultery or bigamy, a co-respondent was often listed. Six months later, if the petition was allowed, Parliament would grant the divorce.
If you’re curious, apparently you can look up divorce petitions in the Library and Archives Canada database.
Posted by davetill 