"Nobody used to think men exploiting women was wrong" is up there with "Nobody used to think slavery was wrong" as a really impressive giveaway of who you think counts as "nobody".
I shudder to think who is saying this garbage.
The gross thing is how thinking like this steps around the fact that male power, sexual abuse, and exploitation are in many ways STILL not seen as bad things that pervade the world that need stopped.
Oh you know. We can't get upset about past sexual offences* because it was a long time ago and morals were different then!
* "past" here means "up to the last thirty seconds or so"
Love the implication that people rush to support abuse/assault survivors today lol
Waiting for the day I see evidence of “feminism having gone too far” as opposed to it barely being started
Yes they did think it wrong. Or at any rate a sizeable number thought it wrong, certainly in the Victorian era, and right through the 29thc. And a number of others would happily exploit anyone they could for anything they could.
This is my favorite defense of Columbus because it’s so damn easy to refute. The man was FORBIDDEN FROM TAKING SLAVES BY THE SPANISH CROWN. Did it anyway.
I'm always irritated when people try to do "of his time" discourse about Jefferson, because he absolutely understood that slavery was evil and contradicted his other political ideals, and he did it anyway, because it would have cost him too much not to.
I made a (probably pathetic) attempt to turn his "The God who gave us life gave us liberty" statement into a work chant, with the idea of going back in time to teach it to his slaves.
I'm sure you can guess where I hit a snag.
"But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820.
He understood exactly the position he'd put himself in.
I got an A-Ha moment out of one of my conservative raised but smart kids a couple of years ago when she said “well slavery wasn’t illegal then” when I asked her “who wrote the laws?”
And the related "That was just how people talked back then, it was the accepted word"
The book King Solomon's Mines (pub 1885), hardly a paragon of progressive modern wokeness, has great white hero Allan Quartermain refusing to use the N-word because he considers it disrespectful and offensive.
Isn't the story of Lillith literally about a woman saying she didn't want to be oppressed by a man? Like. People were aware of it enough to paint resistance as evil back in ancient times.
I came here to say exactly this. All the way back to the Classical era there have been writers who said "obviously slavery is bad" although their conclusions were often "ah well, nevertheless" in defence of the status quo
I've seen "nobody in the Georgian era thought slavery was wrong" which is, like...apart from the slaves? And the abolitionist campaigners? And the boycotters of slave goods? Why the fuck do you think they abolished something everyone agreed with?!
This all goes back to my central thesis that conservatives who long for the past don't actually know anything about it, just the superficial aesthetics of prior eras that they think are cool
Seriously. As long as we know there has been slavery, there have been organized slave revolts. There were those unenslaved who helped people reach or fight for freedom. It's a deluded, ahistorical fantasy that these vile practices were universally accepted by any people at any point.
The same is implicit in statements like "you can't judge historical figures by modern standards". There might be some elements of truth to that, but it starts to fall apart when you're talking about stuff like slave ownership
People have only ever said that to me when I’m saying we should probably question the perceived absolute authority of many historical figures
owning slaves, treating women poorly, hating indigenous peoples, etc. are all, in fact, a good gauges of character and whether someone is worth listening to
When George Washington was trying to get Ona Judge (who escaped from being a wedding gift in a Southern state) back, he lied to the guy sent to retrieve her about how a Frenchman "deceived her" and later threatened to enslave her children. I think about that a lot when this argument comes up.
Let me cite the Marquis de Condorcet, who published this in 1789 (this is translation by leading British feminist and birth control advocate) www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3... He was also anti-slavery. C18th Woke guy.
I think I saw something like it, a kind of pamphlet, from Airstrip One, on my travels. "A Book of Goodthink: Axioms from the desk of Big Brother." The subtitle was "How to make Newspeak work for your Advancement in the Party" and it had an entire section on how to make single words do a lot of work.
