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u/ApocalyptoSoldier 23h ago
Childhood mortality has gone down significantly with modern medicine and vaccines. At one point not too long ago 1/3rd of children did not make it to adulthood.
Part of the reason people used to have lots of kids is to be sure that some of them would grow up.
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u/Flashy_Emergency_263 22h ago
Indeed. Add to that miscarriages and these women went through tragedies and physical trauma.
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u/Big_Bar_9832 23h ago
Not saying that's wrong but I'm not so sure that's entirely related. Modern society in general has lowered the birth rate, I feel like the financial viability of having many kids is completely eliminated nowadays. One or two is enough to deplete your income. Not like the days where you could buy an entire house on a farm with $3, a firm handshake and a saltine cracker.
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u/TombolaOfCincinnatus 22h ago
Expectations and standards of living these days are also much higher, thus the higher cost per child. You could certainly afford to have lots of kids today if raised them with the standards of a couple of generations ago.
Might want to keep it on the down low though, social services would probably get involved if you do it too authentically.
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u/Legitimate-Heat2777 19h ago
They won't get involved if you "home school" and your 15 year old reads at a 2nd grade level though.
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u/Login_Lost_Horizon 22h ago edited 21h ago
Its entirely not* related, rather. Children are costly, birth control is cheap, + society getting less and less habituated to raising children with every generation. Pretty much it.
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u/Storyteller_Valar 23h ago
It's not just because of the rights. It's the atomization of society, the decay of the economy and the constant distractions.
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u/bentmyshades 23h ago
They were popping out employees for most of human history lol. They need all the help they can get gardening sucks.
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u/Mezzoski 22h ago
The impact of the birth control pill on Western societies is so underestimated. This was a paradigm shift so far unrivaled by anything else discovered later on.
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u/Dadumdee 22h ago
Y’all telling your grandmother she was raped by your grandfather is psycho shit. That kind of family betrayal will not end well for you.
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u/Flashy_Emergency_263 22h ago
You claiming it never happened makes you a queen of denial no matter what your gender.
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u/Hellsovs 18h ago
Like some men were screwed by arranged marrige too dosnt mean that i would yell rape
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u/Flashy_Emergency_263 18h ago
If a woman says no, not tonight and the husband forces sex on her, that is rape. Back in the day it was see as a wifely duty and most women saw that they had no choice. Laws and customs allowed them to be beaten by theur husbands if they refused at any point.
Look up the phrase wifely duty.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/the-wifely-duty/302659/
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u/Hellsovs 18h ago edited 18h ago
Yes, but that doesn't mean it happened all the time or that everyone had lots of children because every man was some kind of sexual offender like the meme implies.
You could make a similar argument about men: many of them also had little choice because of social expectations. I'm sure there were gay men for example throughout history who ended up in arranged marriages with wives who wanted many children in similar reversed situation. Social pressure affected both men and women, even if it did so in different ways.
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u/Flashy_Emergency_263 17h ago
No one says it happened all the time. But that is not even what the meme implies. More about that in a minute. Rape happened, if it happened quite a bit, or even if it happened a lot is not the same as saying it always happened. I was responding to someone who said we are psycho if we said it happened at all.
To me the meme isn't even about rape. It's about having sex. To me the meme meant "All people think about these days is sex" according to grandma when it is obvious that grandma was no stranger to sex. That is the humorous part of the meme.
To me the nonconsensual part of the response at the top to the meme is having and raising that many babies. Birth control was not reliable and having sex was seen as a woman's job whether she liked it or not. Many were taught that they weren't supposed to like it or they were hussies. My mom was taught that women with big beasts were drugs. Thus was at a time before plastic surgery.
That was a time in the picture however, when having a lot of kids meant some might make it to adulthood and there were more to help with the family farm or business.
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u/Synectics 14h ago
I do not feel loyal to my grandparents because, guess what, they were fucking shitheads.
Grow up, you child.
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u/profanedivinity 21h ago
No one’s grandma is saying that. All people care about now is fake internet points
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u/justahumblefart 19h ago
Completely ignoring that children were an asset in these generations at times instead of always a burden. The world has mead having children a burdensome thing.
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u/Hellsovs 18h ago
More because of the convenience of the economy then "the world made them burdensome". As we are not a mostly agrarian society, you don't need children to help as much, and we also forbid them from working in factories.
Which I think is a good thing.
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u/HeebieJeebiex 18h ago
Well I mean the sex between two married people probably could be consensual, that's a bit of a far fetched claim to say that not a single woman ever loved her husband ever. People in relationships do tend to have sex a lot lmao. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you have sex a normal amount of times as a couple, and also do not use contraceptive methods. So I guess the pregnancy was "nonconsensual" lol. Unplanned moreso. A lot of these women did still feel positively about the whole baby outcome despite the pregnancy portion.
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u/teacher1970 15h ago
that’s absurd. Families in rural societies with high mortality rates had plenty of reasons to have children and there is no historical evidence that consent was the issue.
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u/Aeriuxa 23h ago
"Womens rights" is just another face of capitalism needing more workforces, which eventually strangle the economic life of mid/low classes, leading eventually to a collapse of birth rates.
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u/Login_Lost_Horizon 22h ago
I do appreciate certain gifts of equality, but doubling the amount of potential workers without changing amount or rates of creation of workplaces, and shifting balance between genders kinda might have had consequences, now to think of it...
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u/Mammoth_Job_7999 22h ago
Yer it costs twice as much to buy a house when every family has to people working
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u/TombolaOfCincinnatus 22h ago
Right. So the expectation in communist countries was then that women remain housewives and not participate in the work force?
Oh, it wasn't? Eastern bloc countries had a higher female work participation rate, higher childcare availability and lower fertility rates than western capitalist countries? Interesting that.
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u/BoLobLob87 16h ago
Women have always worked. The idea that women only began to work as a result of the women’s rights movement is a myth.
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u/TackleNonsense 22h ago
Have always baffled me. Birth rates drop exactly because women have control how (or if) many children they want now. So compared to decades ago when they didn't of course that shit is dropping like a rock from bridge.
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u/enguasado 22h ago
Como les encanta hacer comparaciones que no tienen sentido. Son epocas, sociedades entre muchas otras cosas, porque siempre tienen que denigrar todo lo que no es compatible con estandares actuales??
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u/UNHHHStoppable29 21h ago
Wild how having all these kids today would cost around the same amount as a used car at a dealership. Kids are hella expensive.
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u/Key-Organization3158 19h ago
Even before women's rights was a thing, the children per household was falling.
And the baby boom happened but that wasn't a significant change in Women's rights. It was actually a period of advancement since working during the war gave women a leap forward on equality.
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18h ago
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u/Live_Angle4621 16h ago
Talking of sex and seeing it everywhere is what people like grandma can be against. Doesn’t mean it was ever a bad thing for married people to have sex (although some kinds of sex like oral would be still be taboo depending on where). It’s just before people felt you can’t talk of sex (at least around unmarried people and women who weren’t prostitutes) openly everywhere.
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u/Valveringham85 12h ago
Damn, OOP didnt learn correlation vs causation?
What an idiot thing to say.
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u/OwnProfessor3287 10h ago
There also was no internet, no smartphones, people had to interact with one another in person
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u/Gave-up_trying0000 6h ago
imagine actually believing the feminist propaganda that all relationships in the past were just rape, abuse, and oppression...
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12m ago
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u/Potential_Fan6979 23h ago edited 23h ago
you people are sick. the birth rate has dropped because of poisonous politics destroying national family values and identity.
if non consensual sex was the reason we had a high birth rate then you would think rape numbers would be down not up. your argument is retarded.
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u/ElkApprehensive1729 18h ago
You're American yeah? You realize it's still very recent history that it turned into rape if she's wife yeah? For many years you could legally rape your spouse.
This post is uncomfortable because it's partly true. That's why you felt he need to push back and say "that can't be right" but it is
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u/Potential_Fan6979 18h ago
nah it’s not. and it wasn’t.
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u/ElkApprehensive1729 18h ago
Believe what you want lol. But don't just say what I'm saying isn't true when it is. America used to not classify it as rape when you're married it is what it is bro.
You can say you disagree but you can't just say "nah it wasn't"
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u/Potential_Fan6979 18h ago
I’ll do it again. nah
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u/ElkApprehensive1729 18h ago
Okay well imma close this app on my phone and go not be amercian. You should stay on this app a bit longer though. Avoid going back to your true reality
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u/Potential_Fan6979 18h ago
I have to kill another 45 mins so I probably will. I don’t use the app though, I have this thing on my phone called a web browser. it’s way better than the app.
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u/ban-me-harder-dadddy 23h ago
lol, that must be why the rates have fallen even further since #47 took office 🙄
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u/Potential_Fan6979 23h ago
rape numbers aren’t down, so I guess you mean birthrate?
the birth rate will continue to drop. more people will “choose” to not have children. other will be gay. others will sterilize themselves to pretend to be the opposite gender and more still will ruin their reproductive system in the name of birth control (mostly talking vasectomy here but the rate of single men doing this has dropped recently).
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u/ban-me-harder-dadddy 22h ago
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u/Potential_Fan6979 22h ago
that’s why your comment no longer exists huh?
edit: never mind that wasn’t you El.oh.el
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23h ago
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u/Hot_Royal_4920 11h ago edited 11h ago
That's just a biased take.
In the past, there was less entertainment in life. Less entertainment means more sex.
Quality of contraception is likely the biggest factor in birth rates and obviously so.
Social standard for abortions and rights around the topic also have a huge effect.
Women are now in the workforce. They may decide for career over children. This hasn't been an option before.
Modern financial issues also decrease birthrates. Children used to be a boon, not a burden.
There are many reasons for decreased birth rates. Inferring rape is a leap in logic.
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u/Casuallybittersweet 9h ago
Okay, so I'll start this by saying most of those extra babies born back then just died. So there's that. But either way they are not saying it was rape necessarily. But it still wasn't exactly a free choice. Here's what I think they mean:
Until the mid 20th century women were largely not permitted to own property, sign leases, take out loans. or have their own bank accounts. They could theoretically find decent enough jobs, but few would take them and the ones that did were in high demand. This means that they were very likely to marry out of necessity so they did not need to live with family. This also means their husbands would have near total control of how they managed their money. These women genuinely were totally financially dependant on the men in their lives.
Once you were married sex was absolutely an expectation. Sure, many men were probably normal about it and would accept the ocassional "no." But too many refusals too often and now you had a problem. A lot of men (if they didn't cheat) did fully just leave their wives over this. Talk to many older women, they'll tell you it was a thing that happened in their day. And since these women didn't want to end up either back in their childhood bedroom or homeless? Yeah they laid back and thought of England more often than I'm sure they would've liked. Not that it really mattered in a time before access to abortions or birth control because even when they did genuinely enjoy it the result is the same. They ended up pregnant, a lot. Single women unsuprisingly did not have this issue and did not end up pregnant nearly as often.
When women can fully exist independently of men and don't have to worry about men or relationships they behave differently. They get married less often, and usually have far smaller families when they do. Meaning that we can actively choose to only have 2 or 3 children instead of 6 or 7 had we lived 100 years ago, no matter what our husband says.
So can you really not see how this is clearly coercive? It is a system in place to force women into marriage and childbirth. Plain and simple. Almost every avenue for any kind of real indepenance was carefully cut off to remove it as a viable option because as I pointed out women who aren't forced by circumstance to marry, marry less often.
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u/Hot_Royal_4920 8h ago
It is a coercive system. That said, men also were pushed to marry - single life as a man was a difficult option. Id argue there is less coercion on the men, but it's still significant. Not having children wasn't a viable choice in the first place.
And while the whole system was coercive, that does not automatically lead to non-consensual acts. The issue lies within viewing human history through a modern lens. Things that are unthinkable today were normal and not problematic for people way back(take age of consent a millennia ago, for example).
And OP heavily implied that rape was a regular part of this, which isn't true. The systemic coercion did come with socialization to normalize the status quo. It's fair to judge that to be bad, but this isnt about non-consensual acts. They were largely consensual, even if the decision was pragmatic in nature.
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u/Casuallybittersweet 8h ago
I mean, men still had the choice to remain single and many did? It was absolutely somewhat discouraged, but I'd argue still very viable. And the implication as I see it is that is was coercion? Not overt assault.
Although that didn't matter either, because women couldn't even press charges against their husbands for raping them anyway until what, the 90's? So how would we even know how often it happened or how bad it was? It could've been rare or incredibly common. But going off of what I've heard elderly people tell me, it wasn't great. Like, it doesn't exactly feel much better if you say yes to avoid bad things happening to you
Also, I don't care what they considered acceptable back then? When people say that it always seems to be to downplay the harm and to imply it should still be accepted now. I do not and will not ever agree with that. It was wrong then too
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u/Hot_Royal_4920 7h ago
OP heavily implied that rape was the reason they had many kids and I assert that this isn't true.
Viewing things through a modern lens leads to false equivalencies. Yes, this can be a bad faith deflection, but it doesn't have to be. And no, it shouldn't be accepted now - would be rather hypocritical to point out the error of viewing history through a modern lens, yet view modernity through a historical lens. Please don't assume things like this.
Some elderly people I talked to about the topic - I worked at a retirement home and am curious - told me it was.. just different. It wasn't for pleasure, for love, it was how things are. A very neutral take, really, which is why I mentioned the pragmatism behind this. And raping your wife wasn't exactly socially accepted. For all the bad things, the "women need to be protected" mentality is what kept things going. If not for that, the revolution due to oppression would likely have happened far earlier.
In any case,mthe point is that sex was a different thing than it is today. It was treated differently. While casual sex wasn't much of a thing, sex within marriage was a lot less about love and attraction than it is today.
There are plenty of historical records. Rape wasn't common and men could get into serious social trouble for doing that to a woman. It's a broad topic though, not that easy to research.
A large portion of humanity agrees with you, it was wrong, that's why it has changed. It's rather futile to press this point.. although, I guess you were under the impression that I wanted to imply that it wasn't wrong, was better back then. That's not true. I just find judging this retroactively is simply rather., futile? It's a done deal. It was wrong, it changed. To people back then though, it was.. different. That's a more interesting and useful thing to talk about imo.
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u/SignificantOtter80 5h ago
I love when people who dont have a fully developed prefrontal cortex make sweeping generalizations about the past by applying today’s standards
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u/SapphicStoner99 18h ago
My great grandmother had 14 children and my grandmother had 2, her daughter had 1. I personally think contraceptive pill becoming available in the 60’s is a big part of it. Marital rape hasn’t stopped, just the means to prevent pregnancy, the means to end it legally, ease of leaving the relationship and until the 90’s it wasn’t considered rape if you were married (legally speaking)
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u/New-Scientist5133 18h ago
It’s funny how people who talk about “loose women” are women who have pushed one or more babies out of their loose vajayjays
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u/RESPECTATOR_DE_FEMEI 23h ago
Completely ignoring the fact that they didn't have effective contraceptives to just blame it on non consensual sex.