Posted on 06/02/2014 3:35:50 AM PDT by kingattax
Our parents and grandparents may shake their heads every time we grab our smart phones to get turn-by-turn directions or calculate the tip.
But when it comes to life skills, our great-grandparents have us all beat. Here are some skills our great-grandparents had 90 years ago that most of us don’t.
1. Courting
While your parents and grandparents didn’t have the option to ask someone out on a date via text message, it’s highly likely that your great-grandparents didn’t have the option of dating at all.
Until well into the 1920s, modern dating didn’t really exist. A gentleman would court a young lady by asking her or her parents for permission to call on the family.
The potential couple would have a formal visit — with at least one parent chaperone present — and the man would leave a calling card. If the parents and young lady were impressed, he’d be invited back again and that would be the start of their romance.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.ancestry.com ...
They had MORALS.
Not having writing material cheaply available, they had better memories. Not having TV they had longer attention spans.
They knew fewer people and had better attachments to them. They had a sense of community and knew their neighbors.
They knew how and when to fight.
I read once that 1/3 of all Revolution-era marriages were to pregnant brides. Their morals may not have been much better than ours, but their willingness to accept responsibility for their actions was evidently much greater.
excellent comments.
I’m 70. Except for making lace...I’ve done all those things....and I’m female.
Yes...every desk had an inkwell and we learned to write beautiful script in the second grade.
It was part of our lessons...writing essays or our spelling words or writing "I will not talk in class".....100 times.
What disposable diapers in the 1930s? My children were born between 1960 and 1965, and there were NO disposable diapers that worked. We “wore out” 9 dozen cloth diapers for 4 children. They saw the end of their useful lives as shoe shine cloths and furniture polishers.
There was plenty of “behind the barn” stuff going on.
Dust rags...Yes....now I have to use my old socks.
We were not issued ink until the 6th grade which is when we substitued the pen with the removable nib for the pencil. Each desk had an inkwell, and we were required to bring a home-made “pen wiper” at the start of school in September.
The boys just put a couple of rags on a string, but the girls carefully crafted pen wipers that had lacy and beribboned covers. By the time we got to 7th grade we used ball point pens, but we all had to go through 1 year of struggling with real ink and a pen.
Furthermore, In my first office job we were all issued pens and their own inkwells/stands. These were fancier than the pens we used in 6th grade and could be filled with a little suction device, like a fountain pen. I think they were made by Cross, or one of the famous pen companies.
We drove across country when my oldest was just 4 weeks old in 1960, and we tried to use disposable diapers for the trip. Everything just poured out the side — they weren’t absorbant at all. My husband went down to a drug store on a stop and bought a package of Kotex and placed a pad inside each disposable diaper — worked great.
Of course, the reason most today don’t possess those skills is because there’s no demand.
Making lace? I know several people who do. It’s a hobby now, because the everyday demand isn’t there.
Calligraphy? Again, several hobbyists. It might look beautiful, but it’s painstakingly slow, can be messy, is costly, and there are easier ways to write a letter now.
And that brings up writing a letter to begin with. Now that the Post Office has said that the ~400 bulk/junk mailers they do business with are far more important than your first-class mail, why would anyone bother to use them? There are faster, cleaner, and more-interactive ways to communicate.
There are still PLENTY of people out there who know hunting/fishing, butchering, and field-dressing, at least in the free areas outside the liberal enclaves known as “cities”. And more than a few of those also know enough about bartering and haggling to conduct an exchange of the fruits of their labors with each other. They probably also know a thing or two about lighting fires without matches or a lighter.
And darning socks? Sure, it was useful when socks were actually expensive or hand-made and therefore worthy of preservation. A lot of folks back then knew how to drive a horse-and-buggy too, but I note that particular skill didn’t make the “list”. Likewise using an outhouse, drawing water from a well, walking 5 miles each way to town, or freezing your ass off in the winter because there was only one woodstove in the house to keep it warm.
This article is little more than rose-glasses nostalgic twaddle that conveniently ignores all the inconveniences that these skills masked. Ink-and-pen writing was the *only* means of communication for everyday matters, because there weren’t many telephones. Many folks also did without things like electricity, indoor plumbing, or modern medicines, and few people today would willingly go back to such a standard of living.
Just a brief expansion: around the time the skills in the OP article were in widespread use, Texas was all but unlivable. There’s only one non-manmade lake in Texas. Everything else is the result of damming up streams that don’t even flow year-round. Try living there back then when you didn’t have air-conditioning. I’ve seen enough Texas summers to know I wouldn’t want to try living there back in 1890.
I can’t make lace. Other than that I can and have done those things.
I’m 64 and I’m really glad I was not born 100 years ago.
My oldest is 25 and we did cloth diapers also, though I’d buy disposables for traveling.
In the late 80s the lefties were all over TV hyperventilating that we’d soon be out of landfills because of disposable diapers. So anyone who noticed thought I was some stupid greenie. “Um NO, disposables are a really expensive!”
I was privileged to do that one time, writing it on the blackboard */ but I don't think it was as much as 100, probably around 50. The lesson took, I didn't talk in class again. */ Do they still use blackboards? I'm way out of touch with school stuff.
All of my great aunts and great uncles got married because of pregnancies lol! These are the most God-fearing, salt of the earth people that I know. When the young men came back from Europe and the Pacific, they ushered in the baby boom regardless of marital status. The difference is that back then they did get married and stuck with each other regardless of the circumstances.
Our next chicken croaked via the guillotine.
Gutted my first deer at age 18...and I'm female.
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