Did the Rules of Etiquette Provide a Greater Sense of Safety For Women?

[Paisley]

I'd be climbing the walls if I was stuck at home all day--and I actually like doing stuff around the house. I'd be living a life without any purpose if I spent it shopping and gossiping and playing games. Volunteering is working, but without getting paid. And I never had a bit of desire to have kids. Further, I'd never, ever put myself in a position where I was financially dependent and had to take whatever nonsense someone dished out to me.

My mother was a Peg Bundy-type housewife. She, for one, might have been less depressed if she'd been compelled to get a job and get out of the house.

Would most women be happier staying at home? I don't think it matters. What's more important is the people aren't shoehorned into roles because of stereotypes. Every person and their situation is different.

 

[ChrisB]

I have zero sense of personal nostalgia. The past, and particularly my past, is better left there.

We tend to filter out bad memories, which is the source of nostalgia. It is not difficult to find things that truly were better in the past, but overall, it is a longing for a time that never really existed. I would not want to be 20 again, I was stupid and ignorant. I still am, but at least now I can recognize the fact.

 

[BlueTrain]

I don't see nostalgia quite the same way. The longing we have or may have could in fact be for a past we lived through, because we were young and carefree, or it may be a longing for a past that we just didn't experience when someone else was. But as you say, it can easily be a longing for a time that never existed. There were historical periods, some recent, that were not as they were described by people actually alive the time. But that isn't nostalgia; that's more like propaganda. Jefferson spoke of a country peopled by small farmers--the yeoman stock. But the reality was that the country was dominated by the gentry--the large landowners, and even more so in later decades. And Jefferson was one of them.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Everybody used to talk about the nobility of the petty farmer, except the actual petty farmer -- who tended to work himself to death well before his time.

 

[ChrisB]

We may indeed be nostalgic for a time that we experienced, but it is the good experiences that we recall, conveniently ignoring the bad. It is this idealized version of our past that we long for, not the one that we actually lived through.

 

[BlueTrain]

Make no mistake; there are some things about the past in certain places that I miss and miss very much. Frankly, however, it probably doesn't make as much difference to me as it does to others because I live someplace else now. I'm referring to the economic disaster that is the small town where I grew up. I've mentioned this before and it's probably true for a lot of other places even larger.

The root cause of the decline of these towns and cities that I refer to is usually the loss of the chief income-producing industry. It's as simple as that. In the case of my hometown, it was the closure of the railroad shops that employed around a thousand men (and probably a few women). In a town of 7,500, that's significant. Not all the employees lived in town, naturally, but it nevertheless was like driving a stake through the heart of the community. The shops not only did maintenance on railroad engines and other rolling stock and tracks, it built cars from scratch. The whole operation was moved to Roanoke, Virginia. It doesn't have to be moved overseas for the effect to be the same. The mill towns of New England went through the same thing a hundred years ago (or more) when mill operations were shifted to Southern states. Cumberland, Maryland, is another town that lost a major industry, which was a tire factory.

So I remember my hometown not so much as a beautiful town with a band gazebo in the park (because there was none) so much as simply a bustling community where lots of people had "fairly" good jobs and without the problems it had later, not all of which were of an economic nature. Supposedly the area has a drug problem and in fact, the whole state is said to have a drug problem. So anyone with any get up and go just got up and left. We had a Christmas parade and 4th of July fireworks at the city park (we had a park with a pool but no gazebo). Those things are long gone.

Philippi, West Virginia, on the other hand, is half the size of my hometown and was a town I passed through on my way back and forth to college. It not only had a gazebo in the city park, it even had a covered bridge, which they are very proud of. It's a college town.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our big industries here were chicken processing, fishing and fish packing, and shoemaking. Two of those three were taken south in the 1970s and 1980s leaving the area destitute. I'm not kidding -- unemployment in my home county was over 25 percent during the mid-1980s, and people did some pretty gruesome things in order to survive. The drug situation got to the point where people were being shot dead in their driveways over drug deals gone awry. It was an awful, miserable place to live at an awful, miserable point in time.

The fish business collapsed in the 1990s, and you can't blame the South for that -- we did it to ourselves by overfishing to the point where the resource was near collapse. We lost all our canneries, our fishing fleet collapsed to a fraction of its size, some fishermen put bullets in their heads because they couldn't survive, and others turned to dealing heroin. We're still dealing with the ramifications of that.

I don't have any particular nostalgia for my hometown, other than to think that it was a more sincere place when I was a kid compared to the ridiculous tourist trap that it is today. There is a Marine Museum that had a little space to itself when I was growing up, but it has since metastasized into a gigantic overblown complex overrunning much of the downtown -- the house where I lived as a small child is now a pile of rubble paved over with a museum parking lot. This type of thing can be said for most coastal Maine towns, including the one I live in now, which has a downtown consisting almost entirely of galleries and shops pandering to people who don't live here.

 

[Fading Fast]

Everybody used to talk about the nobility of the petty farmer, except the actual petty farmer -- who tended to work himself to death well before his time.

Here's my heresy on the farmer. First, if someone wants to be / remain a farmer and can pay their bills doing so, I fully, 100% support and respect their decision.

That said, if ever a business, IMHO, calls out for corporate ownership, farming does.

The seasonal, yearly and sometimes several years (think drought) cycles require either a lot of capital ("deep pockets") or suffering through lean years and, sometimes, failing and losing your farm. Additionally, today, farming is a very capital intensive business requiring large outlays of money for equipment, technology, chemicals, seeds, etc., that can take a long time to pay off (assuming it isn't a bad year where your crop fails or - conversely - a very successful year as are your neighbors' so prices plunge - it's a brutal business).

A reasonably smart corporation can budget and plan through all those up and downs better than most small farmers. There's a show "The Ranch" that highlighted this issue just this season. The main character nearly lost his cattle farm (and home) owing to a couple of things - low prices for beef and some of his herd dying. He is offered a buyout by a corporate farm company that would keep him on as an employee manager - regular pay, reasonable autonomy, ability to survive lean years, etc., - but he wants no part of it because he wants to "own his own farm."

Fair enough, but then I don't want to hear the crying again when he nearly goes or does go bankrupt. We all have to decide if we are going to work for someone or take the shot at entrepreneurship and its risks - there is no reason the farmer should get some kind of public halo for choosing the later.

 

[BlueTrain]

You've just made a good argument for government involvement in agriculture. It already is, of course, but not without controversy. All government should do, though, is to follow policies that are designed, over the long run, to help keep prices stable, help keep farm and ranch ownership stable, and most important, insure that the country can feed itself. We are much too big a country to ever need to import most of our food, wouldn't you think. If ensuring that the country can grow enough of it's own food to actually feed itself isn't a basic governmental function, then I don't know what is.

It doesn't follow that government involvement will necessarily do that but that's the general idea. I'm certain that this can only be accomplished at the federal level.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ I respectfully disagree. I specifically was arguing that corporations are better able to handle the capital needs and yearly ups and downs of farming versus the "family" farmer. As to gov't intervention, the convoluted and - many times - counterproductive gov't programs to help the family farmer (and farming industry writ large) argue, IMHO, against most of the gov't intervention we have today. But I'm stopping there as it's already too political (my fault). I was trying to make what I thought was an economic point - the corporation versus individual farm - so apologize for letting this bleed into politics.

 

[BlueTrain]

I made no mention of corporate farming, which has been going on for decades, or the family owned farm, because it makes no difference. The object in both cases is to create wealth for the owners, be they individuals or corporations. It should not be expected that either would have the best interests of the nation as a whole at heart, and rarely ever do, and that is why we have government to begin with. But I'm not saying that governments will necessarily work well, not because governments invariably do not work well, but because people in charge either make bad decisions (they're human like most of us) or they have reason to do something that benefits only some people instead of the country as a whole. The reason is usually money and that's called corruption. And by no means are these comments aimed at the American government but all governments in all countries. I hope that isn't too political. If it is, strike it from the record.

 

[Obob]

So I remember my hometown not so much as a beautiful town with a band gazebo in the park (because there was none) so much as simply a bustling community where lots of people had "fairly" good jobs and without the problems it had later, not all of which were of an economic nature. Supposedly the area has a drug problem and in fact, the whole state is said to have a drug problem. So anyone with any get up and go just got up and left. We had a Christmas parade and 4th of July fireworks at the city park (we had a park with a pool but no gazebo). Those things are long gone.

Your overall point about "your hometown" (which is my hometown, too) is pretty accurate, though the place is not totally dead-They still have Christmas parades that run long enough that you start thinking "ok, that's enough, lets get to Santa!" , still at night, and, believe or not recently have had crowds that would at least remind you of "the old days"! There's still fireworks-a pretty good 20-30 minute show, though they shoot'em off over near the football field, which is in the same spot as the field you likely recall. They did 'em from the City Park (still there-the pool too) a few years ago, but it seems to be more out in the open and more visible now. Still, it's Princeton, so something will get fouled up; this year they didn't even get 'em started till nearly 11 pm, instead of normally at dusk. A couple years before that, someone shooting their own fireworks managed to set a dumpster on fire at the Hardee's-it got hot enough that I had to move my own car back in the next lot over...LOL! There's also a pretty good Veteran's Day Parade, too.

Still, BlueTrain, I think you're dead on right about what happened to "our hometown" when the railroads consolidated, and the drug problem is just awful. And some of these people who live here-well, if you've ever seen one of those "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" shows, you might notice that a bunch of those characters came right out of the area...

Finally, I should note that I haven't posted here in years-I have my reasons for not doing so, but I will say that I've enjoyed a lot of what you've posted, especially about "our hometown"-both of my parents grew up in this town (during the same era you grew up there), and their parents lived in and around it, most, if not all of their lives. I was born there and it's still my hometown, though I live in "Nature's Air-Conditioned City" about 10 miles over-now there's an example of what happens when your whole existence depends on one industry, and that industry changes in a fundamental way!

 

[sheeplady]

My hometown has been in steady slow decay all my life (I was born at the start of the 80s). There might have been "good old days" when there were good jobs, but that was when my parents were young. There's a certain apathy and physical rot you see in a dying place. Outsiders don't see it. You feel it, and if you stay too long, you think you'll start to rot too.

Even if I had an idyllic childhood and the place wasn't starting both a slow and a fast death when I was young, I can't unsee what I've seen happen. I wouldn't be able to pretend that what happened after, didn't. You can't unring a bell.

 

[BlueTrain]

Still, BlueTrain, I think you're dead on right about what happened to "our hometown" when the railroads consolidated, and the drug problem is just awful. And some of these people who live here-well, if you've ever seen one of those "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" shows, you might notice that a bunch of those characters came right out of the area...

Finally, I should note that I haven't posted here in years-I have my reasons for not doing so, but I will say that I've enjoyed a lot of what you've posted, especially about "our hometown"-both of my parents grew up in this town (during the same era you grew up there), and their parents lived in and around it, most, if not all of their lives. I was born there and it's still my hometown, though I live in "Nature's Air-Conditioned City" about 10 miles over-now there's an example of what happens when your whole existence depends on one industry, and that industry changes in a fundamental way!

I didn't know anyone else from Princeton frequented these pages.

My understanding is that Bluefield is in just as bad a shape as Princeton. Princeton has a thriving hospitality business, though. I also notice that the big box stores and new hotels are there, out near the turnpike, and a couple of huge car dealerships out near the Green Tree, if I'm remembering the names right, one where the drive-in movie used to be. So perhaps conditions are not as bad as one might think from driving down the main street. I was there last for the 50th reunion of PHS class of 1964. My mother graduated from Princeton High in 1932. I am only an honorary graduate, though, having moved away when I had one semester to go in school. I actually finished at Herndon High, just over the hills in Wyoming County. That school has since gone out of business.

I'm tempted to mention things that only a local would know, like tank hill, Douglas Pond, stumpy bottom, Claude Long, George Seaver, Rod Thorn, Scoop & Snoop, Clarence Noble, Knob School, Mooney's Drive-in and Bluestone Lake. Those are places and people I can't forget.

 

[BlueTrain]

I meant to mention that, ironically, none of my neighbors or relatives were born in Princeton. My father was from Carroll County, Virginia, making me the first one in my line not born in Carroll or Grayson county since before 1800. Most, though, were born not far away. My mother and her family were from the Pipestem area.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My hometown has been in steady slow decay all my life (I was born at the start of the 80s). There might have been "good old days" when there were good jobs, but that was when my parents were young. There's a certain apathy and physical rot you see in a dying place. Outsiders don't see it. You feel it, and if you stay too long, you think you'll start to rot too.

Yep. I was the first member of my family to leave our block, let alone our town, since the 1890s, and I wouldn't go back there to live if you gave me the place. The places I knew no longer exist, and the place that town has become is, to me, everything that's wrong with this state. It's a terribly insincere town full of people who figure that if enough of them scream BEAUTIFUL HISTORIC SCENIC QUAINT loud enough, nobody will notice the desperate empty hole at the core of its soul. It's no more sincere than Disneyland, and that can be said of just about all "tourist towns" along the coast.

 

[BlueTrain]

Although I avoid using words like sincere and authentic, I hadn't thought that much about the people who literally got left behind when a place is bypassed on the way to the future. I can understand people clinging to the place where they were born and grew up but every town in this country was established by people who left some other place for a better future. It is as if people expect the past to come back, or, in a manner of speaking, the mountain to come to them. Some places become real (authentic!) ghost towns with all but a few building abandoned to the elements. In the East, that means that virtually everything will sooner or later become overgrown and decayed, eventually disappearing into the forest like a pre-Columbian Mayan temple.

Some places that were mere villages that I can remember have all but disappeared without a trace. If you knew the place in its prime, you might discover a few brick foundations but otherwise, you'd never know that anyone had ever lived there. In the larger towns, the chief industry eventually become caring for old people, the ones who retired and stayed on.

Some places which I've talked about before become retirement destinations for the well-off, not that I'm complaining about someone fortunate enough to be "well-off." I'd say that phenomenon is relatively recent, perhaps 30 or 40 years old, maybe more, but it's confined to relatively few locations, relatively few people actually being well-off. But when it happens, and I can think of a few such places, it totally changes the local character. There will be galleries! But because they aren't tourist destinations exactly, aside from when the children come to visit, there won't be many. But there will be a proliferation of establishments of the sort that weren't there before. Of course, the larger trends in retail marketing will have shown up at the same time, like the big box stores, and the chain fast food places, so it's a little hard to say what made the difference. But the old family-owned restaurant that had "always" been there (by which I mean as long as anyone can remember) is lost among the new fast food places and the nouveau cuisine restaurants. Most of the come-here's won't have school-age children but since property values will have gone up and gone up a lot, the county finally has real money to spend on better schools. But there are really few such places. Even though their new prosperity is due to their having become retirement areas, they have ironically become bustling places like they never were before.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Thanks for letting me know that I am not alone. I grew up in a vast, flat plain of endless suburbia, where the only natural features were occasional droning freeways, soulless malls, and a sprinkling of sad little golf courses. Herds of wine swilling moms and defeated, bored-senseless dads competed with each other to see who could tell the most pointless stories or go away on the most yawn-inducing three day weekends. Nights were marked by the creaking of lazy-boys and the flickering of TV screens. Yikes. Just thinking about it depresses me. And yet, I feel guilty. I have no doubts that they suffered all that primarily so that they could send me and my ungrateful/unappreciative siblings to a half way decent school and shelter us from unnamed demons.

 

[Fading Fast]

Regarding the value of the train, my old hometown is on the mainline of the old Pennsylvania Railroad that now serves as both Amtrak's mainline between Washington and New York (and on to Boston) and NJ Transit's mainline into NYC. IMHO, that helped keep the town alive (albeit only on life support) through the dark days of the late '60s to the mid-'80s.

No matter how bad it got - and at one point, half the stores were closed, the good ones had moved out and the streets were seedy during the days and dangerous in an ominously deserted way at night - there was a reasonable flow of people and cars into and out of town twice a day as the commuters did their thing.

That kept some businesses alive and some public services in place during those bad days which, ultimately, meant the "comeback" already had a small base. But to be honest, it was being near both Rutgers University and Johnson and Johnson's headquarters that ultimately saved the town as those two institutions started investing some money in the town in the '80s. Those investments, the general uplift of the economy in the '80s and '90s and early gentrification (in this case, overall, a good thing as the "new" wasn't pushing out the "old" but re-opening abandoned shops and fixing up empty tenements, etc.) pulled the town out of the near blight it had been in.

I moved out in the late '80s and haven't been back since the '90s, but from friends still there and what I can see on-line, the town is doing okay - maybe even good - but not in the way it once was. It appears not to be a town in the old sense, but a combination of a commuter hub, corporate headquarter and college overflow area that still has an "improving" but not yet there feel. Some areas look really nice but "corporate," others seem still blighted and some seem okay.

Back in its day, it was a traditional town - stores, shoppers, local businesses, clubs, a community center with its residents living in or right around the town, etc. - now it's kind of a propped-up area that does okay but doesn't have a holistical and local vibe. I'm told that during the day it's pretty alive - but mainly with office workers getting lunch - but it gets quiet at night despite having several successful restaurants and bars. Also, there's still not a lot of people living in the town and it does't have the "local community feel" of a small town.

Without the train it probably wouldn't have survived. Without J&J and Rutgers money, it probably wouldn't have been brought back. But it still isn't "right," in the sense of being an organic small town tied to the community - it's more a "hub" of the train, J&J and Rutgers with some vestiges of a small town still visible. Hey, it's better than towns that don't have those supporting establishments, but even with all that, it's not close to being the town it once was.

 

[BlueTrain]

It's funny but the way I remember my hometown in the 1950s was as a busy place in the daytime with people out and about at lunchtime, which included school students, but with the sidewalks rolled up at night.

No place ever stays the same as it was and even when restored like Williamsburg, it won't be the same as it was. And even if the railroad shops had not been moved out of my hometown, I'd say that the place still would have changed in many ways to the way it is now. The simple fact is, it's complicated. There are many reasons all at once that cause things to change.