A Different Experience 04/07/01

no mindwalker1910 posting for 06/09/01, so am taking the liberty of reposting this one, from 04/07:

Subject: a different experience
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 23:42:25 EDT

(Someone in an online discussion commented) "Aunt Benita told me that in her day (early 20th Century) once your pregnancy started showing you didn't leave the house. I asked her why; she said it was an obvious you had had sex, so to be modest you stayed in."

Benita Acton Odhner was a contemporary of mine. We were good acquaintances for most of our lives and close friends toward the end of her life, when I made her supper almost every night for her last ten or eleven years. She had just celebrated her 70th birthday when I started, about a year after Pete died, so I would have been around 65.

In our younger years, she was pregnant with Carmond at around the same time I was pregnant with Peter; her daughter, Astrid, was no more than five or six years older, so by my calculations both of Benita's pregnancies were in the 1930s.

Maybe it was the custom in the Acton or Odhner family that a woman not stir out of doors once a pregnancy began showing, but please believe me that it was not the norm, not when I was pregnant with Peter in 1938 nor when my own mother was pregnant with my sister Betty in 1912.

From my childhood, I saw pregnant women out and about and I do not recall my parents or any adult expressing shock at a lack of modesty.

It might have been the case at the height of the Victorian era, but then that was what made the Victorian era, well, so "Victorian." In those days, they did not even refer to a woman being pregnant - she was in a "delicate way."

Speaking of those repressed and downtrodden Victorians, I find myself wondering if those Victorian ladies would jump at the chance to live in today's society. It is true that many of the scourges that beset the world and society at that time are just a distant memory today.

I wonder, though, if after hearing about children murdering other children and teachers, genocides and worldwide epedemics, the number of single parents and latchkey children, and the never-ending stress of our day, I wonder if they would consider we have it better than they did.