In Consideration of 1912

Lots of people that I know have talked about 'Downton Abbey' for a while now.  I finally got into it.  And now my head is full of thoughts about the 1910s.  This happens when I watch a historical period film.  I knew it would.  Everything links to every other thing I've ever learned about the time and place.  I just finished teaching the 1910s and WWI, and every year, I find it fascinating.  And 'Downton Abbey' incorporates everything I've talked about from a British perspective.    I am hoping to quell the thoughts in the mind by saying something about them.  

Every year in teaching when my classes transition out of Chapter 27 to a conversation about the 1920s, I breathe a sigh of life.  Internally, though I find this to be a fascinating time, it generally feels like I was wearing a corset the whole time we were there in the timeline of history.  Everything seems sort of tight and gray.  Sometimes when I think of the 1910s, it feels like there is fine soot all over everything and people are either working in factories or being carted around by a footman.  And listening to a waltz on the phonograph.  Installing telephones.  Changing their clothes 5 times a day if they are wealthy, and wearing giant hats just to go to dinner.  And, last of all, having older female relatives with pursed lips giving you advice. MY older female relatives don't have pursed lips or severe frowns.  (What a relief.)  As appealing as the beginning of the 20th century is to me, and as much as it links to so much that is NOW, I believe I would be a radical in that time.



 
Mostly it's the corsets.  I can't figure out how people, at least wealthy people, could live years of their lives unable to breathe.  For decorum, and duty, and poise.  Or not fear for their cardio health in the middle of the night when they really got down to counting just how many times they had fainted in the day.  (But probably saying 'cardio health' would have been foreign.)  If I had to live inside of the confines of whalebone corsets pinching the life out of me, I think I'd be a really angry person. And feel justified and snide.  And I would not be poised for very long.  I think I would want to run away and vote.  But that's the rest of the story talking.  And we all live 100 years later so we can see it all from far away.

You can spin history in a lot of different directions.  I am careful of this when teaching.  Life in the 1910s wasn't just consumption and corsets and conspicuous consumption and class structure and the Model T. It was progress and relief for populations on a world level, creativity, and a fair amount of solidarity and bravery in people going about their lives.  Fashion sounded stifling and horrible, but there was movement in a breathable direction.  And it sounds like a lot of people wrote good letters to each other and had a few skating parties with the neighbors.  I will give it that.  In the end, I am often very grateful for my life...the where, the when, and the how of it. 

Speaking of my own life, I have recently learned a new and inspiring Latin phrase.  It is actually inspiration to me for the whole of life.  

"Dum spiro spero."

"While I breathe, I hope."

I know this at all because my students are learning state mottoes in Latin. And Leigh and I have talked about making connections to historical themes at different times in American history.  It's all very interesting.  And there are 24 states in this country that have adopted Latin phrases in a formal way.  I would have never known.  But my friend is cool like that, and brings that sort of connection to our friendship. 

When I read this for the first time, the words out shined everything else on the page.  It brought some sort of resolution to some of the questions that are living with me right now.  I had a new found respect for the people who established South Carolina in the 1700s.  And I suppose Cicero too, which is probably where the South Carolinian got it in the first place.  Thinking about South Carolina in this capacity made me also feel less like a Yankee in my perspective of their history, especially right around 1861.  But that's another story entirely.