*Correction added-Lydia wrote the post about stocking crappy posters at Walmart, but it was Mrs Alexandra who cherry picked Little House on the Prarie. Names used in the post have been changed to reflect this.*
My favorite anti-feminists haven’t updated their site in sooo looong. It turns out that they’re busy blogging. Lady Lydia, a living example of the kind of delicate femininity that can be yours if you have some kind of Victorian fetish and a husband and or community willing to help you indulge, has her own blog. She likes home decorating, tea parties, AllPosters.com (a near-infinite supply of prints of Victorian-era Flowers & Women paintings), and dressing very flouncy. She blogs with Mrs Alexandra, who has similar tastes.
Both Mrs Sherman and Mrs Alexandra are a bit, um, old-fashioned, and understandably a bit defensive.
No matter who you like, do not attempt to marry outside of the blessings of your parents (both of them) unless your parents are deceased or institutionalized. Do not attempt to medicate them just to get them to say “yes” to your choices. If there is even a small doubt about a woman that you are going to bring into their lives; if there is even a conflict over it, put it off until some somber evaluating of your thinking and reasoning can be done. . .
As a mother, it matters to me what kind of girl my sons marry, because she will be in the kitchen with me on Thanksgiving Day, and she can either be a constant grief to me or she can be someone who reinforces the values that we put into our son. There is nothing sadder than to see the things you worked so hard to accomplish in your grown child, deteriorate because of a scoffing woman who ridicules your lifestyle.
They like being at home, in the kitchen, doing time-honored womanly things like making the home a bright and cheerful place with their tasteful style and unwavering commitment to flouncing, flowing, white-robed femininity. Such dedication to such a simple life and their unparalled expertise in bread-baking and hope-chest decorating makes it understandable that they’d be less up to speed on the latest theories on media consumption. So I will not make fun of them too badly for suggesting that if Wal-Mart stocked more Edmund B. Leighton prints, girls would stop being so slutty.
On the Lady Lydia Speaks Column that I originally started at LAF, I posted many beautiful 18th and 19th century paintings of women in sweet domestic scenes, peeling apples, making pie crusts, arranging flowers, talking to their children, reading a book or writing a letter. The inside of living rooms, tea sets and food, and cozy cottages.
I did this for a reason. I wanted those images to influence young women. . .
These movie star posters influence the way our daughters dress. Can you imagine how the clothing in Edmund B. Leighton’s paintings would influence our young women? They would want to imitate them. . .
We need to petition places like Wal Mart to stock these posters. Surely it can be done!They are all available from art companies, and can be ordered in bulk. I just need to be taught some marketing strategies.
Lydia, all by herself and probably without any help from her husband, has stumbled upon the bullet theory of media influence. At a mere 40 to 60 years out of vouge, it’s right modern by Lady Lydia’s reckoning. It was popular back in WWII when Orsen Welles’ War of the Worlds stunt scared the ever living shit out of the entire Eastern time zone. However, it turns out that monkey-see-monkey-do is not normally how people consume media, and merely replacing Hillary Duff with Elizabeth Bennet will only work if, for some reason, gowns and private balls become all of the rage again – and don’t for a second think that your “simplicity” message would have any room at that party.
The column does leave me bewildered about how a person who shops at Wal-Mart can maintain a belief that most people strive for beauty and can and should be willing to go way the hell out of their way to obtain it-has she ever really looked at her fellow shoppers? Some of them would be ambitious to strive for sentience.
Less excusable, however, is the esteemed ladies’ glossing over of history and literature to justify their devotion to old school wifely submission.
There are a lot of things one can learn just reading old books, especially those based on real events, like Little House On The Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
One thing I learned reading her books is that in those times there was a clear distinction between woman’s work and man’s work. Man’s work was to provide for the family, woman’s work was generally to take care of the house, husband and children. It normally included cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and making clothes for the family. Men normally did heavy types of jobs, like working in the fields, carpentry, home reparations etc.
What is especially interesting, women in those times did not view normal female tasks as “menial”, or degrading or whatever. They were actually proud to be ladies and to stay in the house and to wear pretty clothes.
The girls want to decorate thier cake and eat it, too. They want the dependency and delicacy of the Victorian era combined with the industriousness and selflessness of the frontier era. But it’s hard to make fine, beautiful clothes or paint china when you have to make your own thread and your main color option is “excrement gold.” and Sears isn’t yet shipping china to your isolated door.
Women made the clothing out of flax and wool. Flax was used for sacking, canvas, and men’s work shirts. The purest fibers were used for the women’s and children’s clothes. Women had to card their own wool because there were not any carding mills. Women carded their wool into slivers by dragging bits of it between two flat, wooden cards studded with short wire teeth. It was then spun into yarn. Women dyed all of the fabric used for the family’s clothing. The most common color was butternut, a permanent brown-yellow made by boiling the inner bark of the white walnut tree.
Mrs A.:
What is also noteworthy is that those ladies of the past were not obsessed with fairness and equality. They were often busy from dawn till dusk, but they worked with joyful heart, without whining and complaining, without demanding that their husbands do their fair share of housework.
Reality:
Laboring to the limit of her strength, in every waking hour, she was perpetually tired, and the fatigue was not lessened by a succession of children, born usually without the benefit of a doctor. Her entire life was spent in a bare shack. For months she might not even see her closest neighbor. Little wonder that many a pioneer wife sat down and cried bitterly at the memory of her lost girlhood spent in the east.
Mrs A.:
Isn’t it because feminists have been teaching women for several decades that men are the privileged sex (oops, sorry, gender!) and to become really equal women must do exactly the same things as men do, including wearing the same types of clothes, drinking, smoking, swearing, working in construction and coal mines etc etc.
Reality:
Women took care of their families when they were infected by the ague, cholera, malaria, smallpox, pneumonia, and pleurisy. Women were subjected to illness more than anyone else in their family because they were overworked, and “they were the ones who worked in the kitchens in the hottest weather, who breathed in the smoke and soot and who alternated between too much or too little heat,” noted historian Elizabeth Farnham. If there was not enough food to go around, the woman often took the short portion. Given those conditions, it is not surprising that Illinois pioneer women were often described by travelers as pale, emaciated, depressed, and shivering with ague—the frontier fever.
Mrs A.:
An interesting thing is, that those women were highly respected by their menfolk and held in the high esteem by both their husbands and children. Quite unlike what modern feminists say, their husbands did not view them as servants, slaves or property.
Reality:
Historian Emerson Hough describes the image of the pioneer mother as the “sad-faced woman, sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he might lead.” Despite little input into the decision to leave their former homes, those brave women were asked to take on a crushing physical and emotional workload in order for the family to survive.
Men often chose a stout, big wife able to work hard in the fields and in the home. Men believed a woman was needed to cook, sew, clean, have children, and help out with the farm. Elizabeth Farnham, in Life in Prairie Land, quotes a man’s preference for a wife, “I reckon women are some like horses and oxen, the biggest can do the most work, and that’s what I want one for.” Newly married women were quickly thrown into a situation where they were tested to the extreme.
You know, even if I was married to a guy who really, really, really liked his car and took great care of it and held it in the highest esteem, I would still be a bit pissed off if he compared me to it. And if that means feminism has made me an uppity bitch, then I guess I’ll have to deal with it.
But, Mrs A. says, she has this quote from Laura Ignalls Wilder that says women’s work and men’s work are different!
In one of the books Laura asks her mother’s permission to go into the fields with her Pa and to help him make hay, and her mother allows it, but she doesn’t particularly like it, since “She did not like to see women working in the fields. Only foreigners did that. Ma and her girls were American, above doing men’s work”. (The Long Winter, 1st Harper Trophy ed., 1971, p. 4).
I’m not exactly sure how you can look at that quote and not see the xenophobia or classism there. American women don’t do men’s work because arbitrarily eliminating half of your labor force from the fields is a sign that your clan is better off than that other clan. Obviously if foriegn women are doing field work than American woman can do it too, they just don’t to prove a point about how much better they are. Women’s “inactivity” is a symbol of the men’s success. So instead, they get to stay inside and do the delicate work like candle making and soap making and quilting, none of which activites are bad for your pretty hands or eyes, and none of which will turn you into a stooping, lye-scarred blind arthritic crone.
Well, fuck this equality, then, I got to get me some of that. I wonder if Border’s sells an authentic soap-making kit with a cauldren where I get to render fat scraps, or an intro to quilting book that will teach me to make my own thread.
This is a parody, right? They’re doing characters, right?
It’s so hard to tell these days.
After reading the title to this post, I considered quitting blogging for good out of that burning feeling of joke inadequacy. I realized it was just that I had spit a mouthful of hot coffee into my lap. Now if I could just marry the spawn of some nice Wal*Mart shopper, I could get this cleaned up.
I posted this little summary of a late 18th century sex guide last year: The Horn Book. Although it’s probably the most graphic howto I’ve ever seen on the ways of the bedroom, maybe you should send the link along to Lady Lydia.
She wouldn’t want her sons’ wives to think it’s wrong to cuckold their tightly-wound, disinterested husbands, would she?
Ryan, I recall being sent to that post awhile back. Thanks for reminding me about it.
If you keep writing headlines that like, you’re going to make it easy for me to figure out who you are.
Whys that?
because your humor has a distinct style.
Dammit, and I was doing my best to copy Amanda exactly.
The Wilder books, which are a lot more realistic than this bint gives them credit for, also have a scene, in Little Town on the Prairie, I believe, where Laura, sent off to teach school to help support the family because her Pa can’t manage to do it on his own, has to board with a woman who tries to murder her husband with a *knife* because she’s so sick of being treated like a servant. Slaving from dawn to dusk, I believe the actual dialogue reads. Maybe Miss Lydia skipped that chapter.
When I click on the profile button of these ladies’ blog, I see an item marked “Team Member”. Apparently, one has to be such a member in order to leave comments about their posts (fair enough). Ergo, I suppose it’s safe to assume the team members listed consitute the entirety of the team’s membership. Is a stretch for me to assume that they constitute a society of exactly two, as the only members listed are…themselves? I am not being facetious, I know as much about how these memberships work as I do about phrenology. Please advise.
This is where I confess that I have a sick, fetish-like obsession for websites about uber-Christian female modesty. Have you seen Lady Lydia and her ilk’s catalogs of “modest clothing for women”? Amazing.
Anyway, I linked to you from my blog – Feel free to do the same if ya like
THANK YOU. I read that post the other day and didn’t even know where to begin to comment on it.
Thank you especially for this: Lady Lydia, a living example of the kind of delicate femininity that can be yours if you have some kind of Victorian fetish and a husband and or community willing to help you indulge, which pegs her community’s mentality perfectly, and had me rolling with laughter.
By the way, to the commenter above me, you are not alone; I share your obsession. I think there are many of us, actually.
it matters to me what kind of girl my sons marry
And then crazy lady continues with the singular. That’s fucked up. I bet her family is more like the Peacocks.
Kyso: “Ryan, I recall being sent to that post awhile back. Thanks for reminding me about it.”
No problem. But that should be ’19th’ century, not ’18th’. Meh.
If you ever get a chance to, listen to the old audio recording of the original War of the Worlds. It’s pretty good, and people throught it was really happening when they heard it on the radio.
It took me a long time to make the costume that you see on my blog. I wear it a little more often than a girl would wear her prom dress.
Soap kits are popular even amongst those of “your ilk”. Check out Michaels, JoAn Fabrics, Hobby Lobby, and many other places where craft products are available. Yes, in the year 2008. Imagine that. Making soap in the 21st century.
Yeah, “Soap making” with pre-built kits don’t exactly include animal fat that you have to render, and the lye is in little bottles with a book telling you to wear gloves. Not really the same thing.
`You might like my post Dear Lady Lydia on the website whitewashedfeminist.com
Their teachings drive even many conservative Christians batty.
And thanks for this, it seriously cracked me up.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for bringing some REAL history into the world of anti-feminist historical revisionism.
A former “lady-against-feminism,”
Molly
That first quote about the future daughter-in-law being in the kitchen with her (whichever LAF woman that was — Lydia?) was so full of self-absorbed snobbery! Talk about the future mother-in-law from hell!
So, THAT’S one way how so-called, modern-day hierarchalist, patriarchalists are made. For a while now I supposed it had more to do with peeniee envy only, and not just the neurosis of latent matriarchs with their lace collars buttoned up too tightly.
Loved the reference to the Allposters.com site
I’ll have to be careful here, because I happen to really gravitate towards intelligent and pain-in-my-side-from-laughing-so-hard sarcasm. It’s addictive.
Xenophobia is not just attached to the national folk religion that Lady Lydia follows but is also a consequence of the gender related effects of enmeshment that they manifest.
The women in Lydia’s cultic religious movement generally have a fantasy-based view of life as part of their “love you into loving yourself” mentality, their own reactions to their own upbringing. The men are detached and pathologically paternalistic, so they are a good yang to their partner’s yin.
Both types are Xenophobic, so the whole pious fear of contamination from other cultures and groups just becomes intensified by their gender-enmeshment traits.
They just read like the textbooks about dysfunctional (addicted) families, actually.
http://botkinsyndrome.blogspot.com/2008/07/roles-that-enmeshed-and-abandoned.html
Let’s not forget that ma had to go to work in the local hotel in order to provide.
If Lady Lydia learned “One thing I learned reading her books is that in those times there was a clear distinction between woman’s work and man’s work” … then she missed the point of the series.
Laura’s daughter ended up being a career woman … she was a journalist. Moreover, it is my understanding that Laura’s daughter was encouraged and supported to have a career by her parents & maternal grandparents.
I see that Lady Lydia conveniently ignores that most men could cook, sew, iron, manage a household, and more. Why? Several reasons …
• cowboys/trappers/hunters needed to perform these tasks consistently or risk losing their businesses (I am NOT saying there weren’t any cowgirls, trappers, hunters … e.g., Annie Oakley)
• a family could NOT afford to have women inside working all day … they needed EVERY body they could get out into the field to work … this was vital to the existence of the family
• when a woman was in labor men needed to perform these tasks to keep the family going
With respect to the statement: ““She did not like to see women working in the fields. Only foreigners did that. Ma and her girls were American, above doing men’s work”. (The Long Winter, 1st Harper Trophy ed., 1971, p. 4).”
That simply demonstrates that foreign women performed these tasks all the time. It demonstrates how nationalism was beginning to take root in the USA where American women felt that only the lowly European or Eastern European were fit to be in the fields. Even though this is a racist statement, it is beginning to demonstrate how American women were leaving the field for other paid endeavors (e.g., Ma Ingalls working as a teacher and working as a cook in the field, Laura Ingalls working for her own income, Laura’s daughter having a career as a journalist, etc.)
duh …
that should have read …
(e.g., Ma Ingalls working as a teacher and working as a cook in a hotel
duh
Maybe the punk rock culture today can guide young women into a safer, better lifestyle. Maybe Madonna is a better role model. Maybe.
Do you seriously have nothing better to do than to troll our blog?
Why do we seem to have Dawn of the Dead threads? Seriously, this one was dead YEARS ago.
Plus, as far as role models go, I’ll take Joan Jett over Ma Wilder any day.
Hell yeah!
Oh my god, I just clicked over there, and say this (which I don’t remember the last time I was there:
This had me in stiches for a good minute.
The internet; you’re doing it wrong.
LOL, she’s been around before. Check this out.
http://punkassblog.com/2008/07/10/ilk/
Grad school’s killed my blogging. My years-old threads return from the grave yet my new posts are stale and unloved.
Is punk rock even still around?
Give Lydia credit, Quin. She’s very deliberately not hip to what the kids are doing these days. It’s basically her job.
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My favorite quote from Little House on The Prairie, a series of books that my kids have devoured is as follows: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”