back
3 comments
Might want to add (1915) to the title. I have no real interest in the specific topic being presented, but it's always fascinating to see writings from other eras that present first-person perspectives on social customs and subjective opinions on relatively minor things; it aids in humanizing the people of the past.
If you liked this, I've found Lapham's Quarterly to almost always be an interesting read. He collects writings from across the millennia and presents them around some central theme ("Democracy", "Pandemic", "Money"). Some are just little fictional stories that relate, others are deeper discussions. But since it draws from across so many periods it does as you suggest, humanizing the people of the past.
> But how charming, after all, when men grow dainty and women daring! Today might and tomorrow will bring such miracles to pass. Definitions are losing something of their definiteness. Sex is a technicality for the consideration of pathology and physiology; the psychologist is after the individual. It is no longer a question of are you a Man? or are you a Woman?—the answer is, I am an Individual. “I am what I am and so will I be,” as the old lines go. There are men who wear their hair long; there are women who wear their hair short; and yet there are those who still say, “A man’s a man for a’ that!” Trousers, and other things, I hold to be mere arbitrary symbols of sex which I, for one, think obsolete. [emphasis in original]

It only took another few decades for this idea to become more commonplace.