A Road Less Travelled

Last week sometime Crystal and I sat down with the kids and watched a documentary about early Colonial days in America that was made for children. All in all I thought it was a well made documentary and spoke to children well. Were it not for the glaring biases it would have been a fine documentary all around. Now, I know everybody has a bias and that therefore anything said or made will have the same bias as its creator. I know this and I knew that this documentary was most likely going to have a bias I did not agree with. But it did not have the bias I was expecting and the one it did have very much surprised me.

There were two bits that bothered me, though I’m only going to talk about one. It is so easy to misunderstand the Puritans (first by confusing them with the Pilgrims) and then make digs at them that I won’t even talk that bias. It is so over-done and this documentary didn’t say anything new. It was the bit that was talking about what life in Colonial Williamsburg looked like for children. First, the narrator talked about boys and how thy would often be apprenticed to a craftsman. Then she started talking about girls. And I quote “Girls were expected to stay home and learn how to sweep the house and sew… At least the boys learned a trade.”

This boggles my mind on a multitude of levels. First, if they really think that is all the girls were taught how to do they haven’t done enough research to make a documentary. Sweep and sew? Yes, I will agree that if that is all a girl is expected to know how to do that can be demeaning, but that is not at all what girls were taught to do. I wonder if people have contemplated what it took to make a meal completely from scratch. Sometimes if you wanted to eat today you needed to have started this food last week sometime. Depending on how good your general store is or how close you are to it if you want to sweep out your house you might be making the broom yourself. This isn’t including all the gardening, sewing, long-term food preparation or child rearing women had to do. “At least the boys learned a trade”? At least the girls learned five.

This bothers me on several different levels the main of which is that, for the most part, we are so entrenched in our own biases and modern issues that we take history and look at it through modern day lenses. Today most people believe that it is demeaning for a woman to stay home and care for her family and her home. So we look back in time and we say it was demeaning for those women to stay home and care for their families and their homes. But what would the makers of this documentary want the women to have done? Did they want them to go out and become blacksmiths? Did they want them to be out plowing the fields? Or would they rather the women pulled the plows when the horse was down? I don’t see these people understanding the fact that life was so different then than it is now that if there was not a woman in the home making sure things happened that family didn’t eat and that family didn’t have clothes. They couldn’t stop by the store on their way home from the fields and pick something up for dinner. So what is it so demeaning to be the heart and pivot of a home?

This rant has been sitting in the back of my head for a week or so, though I haven’t been very diligent to get to this computer and write it out. Honestly I haven’t had enough time in one place to feel I was doing it justice. I haven’t had enough time because I was reading to a sick child or making lunch for all the children or cleaning the house or adding a zipper to my pair of boots to make them more usable or doing something for Crystal so she could put together a logo for a small baking business we’re trying or any number of other tasks I do in a given day. And that doesn’t count anything I might have been reading or thinking about that was taking up thought space. There is far more to this life than just sweeping the house and sewing. I actually sometimes wish I had time to sew. And if anyone is going to try and tell me that I have not learned a trade then I challenge them to try this life out before they try and tell me what it’s like. No, I haven’t learned a trade. I’ve learned more than I could possibly pursue in my lifetime.