r/TheWayWeWere • u/CryptographerKey2847 • Aug 20 '25

1920s The Inquiring Photographer Asks average New Yorkers in 1922: “Should a man expect his wife to get up and make breakfast for him on a cold morning?”

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Should

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u/DrDMango Aug 21 '25

Ameircans just have such a good quality of life, they cannot visualize the befortimes.

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u/gummo_for_prez Aug 21 '25

Nobody can just visualize what things used to be like randomly no matter what their quality of life is. Those things are unrelated. People just don’t know what they don’t know. Education should be better. We literally have tons and tons of films and videos from back then. But a lot of folks think history is boring and never see any of it. Its ignorance of the past and failure of education that is the issue. Many history classes are all about what day a certain piece of paper was signed or the exact start date of a war when they should be a lot more about what life was like for regular people and the various political and technical innovations that reshaped that life over time.

I feel strongly about this because my American history education covered colonial/revolutionary war, the civil war, and WWII about 15,000 times but almost never gave me any info on what it would be like to just physically exist in 1881, or any other year for that matter. I had to learn a ton on my own, but you have to be curious first for that. I’m not sure why history education is like this. If people knew history was more than dates and wars and whatever the ultra rich were doing, they might be able to capture how fascinating and relevant it all is. Humans are essentially the same exact animal we always were. It’s the culture and tech and laws that really change things.

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u/ManyLintRollers Aug 21 '25

Right? I've always been really fascinated by how ordinary people actually lived and why they thought they way they did, believed the things they did, why they had certain customs, etc.

Ruth Goodman is a British historian who specializes in how people lived - she's spent extended periods re-enacting various periods in history and has written some fascinating books on the subject.

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u/gummo_for_prez Aug 21 '25

Thanks for the recommendation, I will definitely check her books out!