[dougmwne]

This "advice" makes me want to barf, but probably because I hold convictions about gender and sexuality that would have been extreme or unheard of 100 years ago. For me gender, is a flexible construct and sexuality is fluid and this "advice" reinforces abusive gender stereotypes.

So I am not claiming that Einstein's demands were normal 100 years ago (We can surmise that they likely were not given that Maric asked for a divorce instead). I'm not saying that we should look to their personal life as any kind of positive example. I'm only saying that I know they were working on an incredibly different set of cultural assumptions than I am. In their time, I don't know if they would have been judged by their peers as progressive or regressive. I judge them regressive, but what the heck is that worth?

[throwaway_pdp09]

I'm not discussing Einstein but saying that decent behaviour towards spouses evidences itself, up to a point I agree, back then. That's all I was getting at.

"Your husband has no right to control your individuality // Don’t belittle your wife before visitors // Don’t call your wife a coward because she is afraid of a spider. Probably in a case of real danger she would prove to be quite as brave as you"

This makes you want to barf? I mean, this is as good advice now as it ever was, and there are plenty of men & women who fail to follow it today. Other items are poor by today's terms, but you're dismissing it all as barf-making.

> I judge them regressive, but what the heck is that worth?

It's worth lots. Those who don't judge permit bad stuff to happen. Keep on judging, and change the world for the better.

[dougmwne]

To me it was almost all patriarchy disguising itself as benevolent wisdom and all the more insidious because it dresses itself up in father knows best clothes. Every bit of it is heavily gender stereotyped. It's not clever manners to refrain from controlling your spouse's individuality! Yikes.

Anyway I'm not offering this in the spirit of debate but in sharing. As a minority myself, I understand that we all stew in the pot of the majority and the powerful. In order for someone to extend an olive branch and offer you back your humanity, it had to have been taken from you first.

[throwaway_pdp09]

I don't get you. You want perfection and aren't willing to give any leeway to a book that is over a century old. Things were very, very different back then and I'm not sure you recognise that, or seem willing to recognise that.

> ...in father knows best clothes

Both books were written by a woman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blanche-Ebbutt/e/B0034NHXDW

> It's not clever manners to refrain from controlling your spouse's individuality

I just don't know what to say. It's not acceptable, but people tried to then, they try to now, what is your complaint about pointing out it's wrong?

Your last sentence doesn't help - what minority are you in and why does it matter? The rest seems so negative and helpless

Not meant personally but I am confused by your response.

[dougmwne]

My entire point is that we need to give people from centuries past some leeway and make an effort to view their lives through the lens of their time. And we should view them through our current lens as well but we're not likely to learn anything but that we think our morality is the best morality.

My chain of responses is meant to highlight this tension. That I can personally find something reprehensible in 2020, but taken in it's cultural or historical context, also find it enlightened or inspiring. In the USA we have an increasingly militant progressivism and we close ourselves off to our own history if we can only judge things by one set of standards.