Difference between revisions of "328 2010--Week 9 Questions/Comments"
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(→Dorothy Dunbar Bromley Comments on Birth Control and the Depression, 1934) |
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I also, like Morgan, completely agree that this is an issue that is still debated about today. Granted, our generation seemingly has an easier access to birth control, but even with insurance and information on it it still is pretty ridiculously expensive. On the other hand, if there is a chance that you could get pregnant AGAIN when you are already too poor to feed yourself and your children (even if it is because of circumstances outside of your control) then stop having sex. It seems like a pretty easy sacrifice to make (especially since there are other means of having an intimate relationship with your husband or wife...) when you're already struggling to survive. It's stupid. and on page 338 when Bromley quotes "it is evident that a high birth rate during the depression prevailed in families which could least afford, from any point of view, to assume this added responsibility" it makes me only imagine who suffers from the burden of that new responsibilty-- Society as a whole and more importantly that child born into a crappy world where it wont even be able to eat enough to survive. Having a child during the depression when you couldn't afford it, especially if you knew the risk you were taking by having sex, is selfish. I also am disgusted at the fact that society wouldn't allow a woman to control whether or not she HAD another child because the officials in society were sooooo afraid about talking about female sexuality, birth control, and the religious implications of a woman controlling her body has. Ultimately though, it is the children born accidentially into this society that suffer more than anyone and eventually end up perpetually on welfare because they had no other options because society wouldn't allow their mother to practice immoral birth control, and their parents couldn't refrain from having them. -Ssellers. | I also, like Morgan, completely agree that this is an issue that is still debated about today. Granted, our generation seemingly has an easier access to birth control, but even with insurance and information on it it still is pretty ridiculously expensive. On the other hand, if there is a chance that you could get pregnant AGAIN when you are already too poor to feed yourself and your children (even if it is because of circumstances outside of your control) then stop having sex. It seems like a pretty easy sacrifice to make (especially since there are other means of having an intimate relationship with your husband or wife...) when you're already struggling to survive. It's stupid. and on page 338 when Bromley quotes "it is evident that a high birth rate during the depression prevailed in families which could least afford, from any point of view, to assume this added responsibility" it makes me only imagine who suffers from the burden of that new responsibilty-- Society as a whole and more importantly that child born into a crappy world where it wont even be able to eat enough to survive. Having a child during the depression when you couldn't afford it, especially if you knew the risk you were taking by having sex, is selfish. I also am disgusted at the fact that society wouldn't allow a woman to control whether or not she HAD another child because the officials in society were sooooo afraid about talking about female sexuality, birth control, and the religious implications of a woman controlling her body has. Ultimately though, it is the children born accidentially into this society that suffer more than anyone and eventually end up perpetually on welfare because they had no other options because society wouldn't allow their mother to practice immoral birth control, and their parents couldn't refrain from having them. -Ssellers. | ||
| − | + | I hate to be the one who has to call people out but I am offended ON BEHALF of those struggling working-class Depression-era women whose complicated and difficult lives we're so flippantly joking about. I think we need to take a step back and put some historic context on these events--the temptation to cast our modern lens about birth control, considering what we know now, on events, personal decisons, and legislation so permanently mired in the past is alluring, but dangerous. Think about what it was like to be one of those women--the desperate women who inspired Margaret Sanger to push for birth control in the first place. Imagine yourself as one of the women we're talking about this week--married to a husband you may or may not love but whom society is screaming at you that you should, the both of you unemployed, going out every day to try to find work, any work at all, willing to suffer long hours and terrible conditions for a tiny bit of money that you desperately need. You could stand for hours in a breadline, trying not to make eye contact with all the other miserable women around you, or you could go to the welfare office and attempt to reapply again, even though you'll be denied just like you have all the other times before, but your dignity is one of the only things you have left to your name and you just can't degrade yourself that far. Not today. So you scrounge for small jobs, anything you can do--cooking, washing, cleaning--with no job security and no legislation to protect you. You take home the pennies you made, which you add to the nickels your husband managed to get, and you have to scrape it all together to buy a very small amount of food, which goes to feed your kids and occasionally you and your husband. How many kids do you have? 3? 4? 5? Too many mouths to feed as it is, and then one month your period is late and you know that you're pregnant, AGAIN, and you don't have any money for clothes, food, hospital bills, or anything else a new life requires. So what do you do? What CAN you do? Beg for charity? Write letters to the First Lady that will go unanswered? Get rid of the child you can't have with a coat hanger? Can you even imagine that? And years later some college student sitting in her class suggests you should've just stopped having sex. That if you hadn't used all that "free time" to get busy, maybe you wouldn't be so damn poor? That you should give up the only time you ever feel close to someone else, the only time you feel beautiful or loved? Or, worse, that you should somehow convince your husband not to have sex with you, knowing that there are very few laws that would help you if he chose otherwise against your will? Maybe if you knew any birth control methods that had more than a 5% success rate you could be saved from a bit of that misery. Maybe. There are, of course, the problems of logistics--manufacture and distribution at a dirt-cheap price you could afford--even if the problems of legislation and government blocks are overturned. | |
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| − | I hate to be the one who has to call people out but I am offended ON BEHALF of those struggling working-class Depression-era women whose complicated and difficult lives we're so flippantly joking about. I think we need to take a step back and put some historic context on these events--the temptation to cast our modern lens about birth control, considering what we know now, on events, personal decisons, and legislation so permanently mired in the past is alluring, but dangerous. Think about what it was like to be one of those women--the desperate women who inspired Margaret Sanger to push for birth control in the first place. Imagine yourself as one of the women we're talking about this week--married to a husband you may or may not love but whom society is screaming at you that you should, the both of you unemployed, going out every day to try to find work, any work at all, willing to suffer long hours and terrible conditions for a tiny bit of money that you desperately need. You could stand for hours in a breadline, trying not to make eye contact with all the other miserable women around you, or you could go to the welfare office and attempt to reapply again, even though you'll be denied just like you have all the other times before, but your dignity is one of the only things you have left to your name and you just can't degrade yourself that far. Not today. So you scrounge for small jobs, anything you can do--cooking, washing, cleaning--with no job security and no legislation to protect you. You take home the pennies you made, which you add to the nickels your husband managed to get, and you have to scrape it all together to buy a very small amount of food, which goes to feed your kids and occasionally you and your husband. How many kids do you have? 3? 4? 5? Too many mouths to feed as it is, and then one month your period is late and you know that you're pregnant, AGAIN, and you don't have any money for clothes, food, hospital bills, or anything else a new life requires. So what do you do? What CAN you do? Beg for charity? Write letters to the First Lady that will go unanswered? Get rid of the child you can't have with a coat hanger? Can you even imagine that? And years later some college student sitting in her class | + | |
THIS is why we study history. When we see life the way someone else once did, when we consider others' hardships and are able to empathize with their problems, we learn to get outside of ourselves and our own narrow opinions. If you walk through life with blinders that you've constructed for yourself or let others construct for you, you'll miss so much of the world around you, and we can't afford that blindness any more than we can afford to forget how these women thought and felt. --Sarah Smethurst | THIS is why we study history. When we see life the way someone else once did, when we consider others' hardships and are able to empathize with their problems, we learn to get outside of ourselves and our own narrow opinions. If you walk through life with blinders that you've constructed for yourself or let others construct for you, you'll miss so much of the world around you, and we can't afford that blindness any more than we can afford to forget how these women thought and felt. --Sarah Smethurst | ||
