alt Hacker NewsYou can discover beliefs that are shocking today, such as this excerpt from the article "Adolescence":
"In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with their brothers for the first twelve years or so of life. But as puberty approaches, with all the change, stress and strain dependent thereon, their lives should be appropriately modified. Rest should be enforced during the menstrual periods of these earlier years, and milder, more graduated exercise taken at other times. In the same way all mental strain should be diminished. Instead of pressure being put on a girl’s intellectual education at about this time, as is too often the case, the time devoted to school and books should be diminished. Education should be on broader, more fundamental lines, and much time should be passed in the open air."
Replies
It’s only shocking to write it, or declare it as sacrosanct
Many people practice it, and women’s movements that put most energy on doing the opposite have since dialed back to pointing out that they were fighting for choice, including that choice of not being in a workforce. An option of a “soft life” that is wildly popular, and timeless. People just needed a new way to say it.
If it was culturally supported for men to be subsidized by another, a large percentage of men would immediately take that graduated and intellectually diminished role too. This is not a reliable option and is rare.
If common, it would unironically solve representation imbalances in other fields, since it would no longer be about shoehorning women into them, because enough men would leave on their own. A level of enlightenment still missing from Women in <field> fireside chats at every industry conference worldwide
You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), and then gladly tell you about all the things in the historical text that would be absolutely beyond the pale today. (Sometimes you have to nudge it by prompting "How would this text be received today?" or something like it after it has put its nice summary in context, but once you do that it tends to be quite thorough.)
No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the time.