to think "everyone did it back then" isn't an excuse?

[taaay]

This comes up quite a lot whenever people discuss things that were commonplace in the past.

People say husbands beating their wives was normal, children were routinely smacked or caned, racism was widespread, homophobia was accepted, and so on. Often the defence is that people were simply products of their time and didn't know any better.

But were they really?

Not that long ago, police often treated violence against wives as a private domestic matter and were reluctant to get involved. Marital rape wasn't even recognised in law. Racist attitudes were commonplace and children could be hit in ways that would be completely unacceptable today.

Yet even then there were people saying these things were wrong. Women campaigned against domestic violence, people fought against racism and discrimination, and some parents chose not to hit their children despite it being socially accepted.

I sometimes wonder whether too much emphasis is placed on "that's just how things were". Were people really incapable of thinking for themselves? Did they lack an internal moral compass? If your neighbour was regularly beating his wife, or a child was being routinely thrashed, did it genuinely not occur to people that this was cruel and wrong simply because society tolerated it?

I understand that social norms are powerful and that people are influenced by the world around them. But surely "everyone else was doing it" can explain behaviour without excusing it.

I think people were split into 3 categories:

1. those who did what it’s always been done, no questioning, no reflection, no thought and very likely some relishing the power it gave them/the cruelty , some doing it out os self preservation.
2. those questioning and wanting to do better , but unsure how and bumbling through. Maybe they tried to be/do better, occasionally failed , but the intent and acknowledgement that it was wrong was there .
3. Those questioning and coming up with solutions, and not only having a vision/plan/insight but also the bravery, confidence and determination to follow through, from their own homes , to wider society.

The 3’s light the spark and are essential for change. The 2’s tend to join , in their own way and make that fire bigger. Also essential.
The 1’s are the ones that fight tooth and nail against any change.

It’s a huge mistake to think the further back you go the worse it got.

Domestic violence has always been very, very forbidden - the reason any fecal treacle got away with it was by hiding it. The community turned on abusers, in all cultures and for many centuries. They had brilliant rituals to stop it.

The past does have its horror stories, and as on MN, you only hear those.

Thanks I didn’t know that.

I’m no historian so maybe there’s a better example I could have used. I never said but the main women in that film about Peterloo were poor. Obviously class matters a lot and I should have thought of the likely differences. I think that does matter a lot to not just the expectations a person has in life but also higher classes have more free time to read about ideas, debate them, come up with new ones etc. that someone doing long gruelling hours won’t have the luxury of having.

I don't think YABU OP. My dad was chastised as a child, but only by his parents. My nan actually went to her children's school, grabbed hold of one of the teachers who physically punished my dad's eldest brother and made it clear that the only discipline would come from her and her husband (my grandad).

My parents never physically punished us, I was a child born in the early 80s. They told us off, for sure, but they didn't need to hit us.

I could never, ever look at a child and think that they need hitting, no matter what they are doing.

Racism, sexism, homophobia is not tolerated in my social network.

Totally agree. After education became compulsory you got a generation of educated working-class men and women in less gruelling jobs pressing for reform and change across the board.

Meanwhile, I sit here thinking how disgusting it is that billions of animals still suffer for humans. I hope that one day there are people looking back at us in disgust.

Can't say I ever hear the phrase "everyone did it back then so it's ok" unless it's in some politically charged social media content and used to get a reaction and even then I'm struggling to think of a specific example.

Surely no serious or half educated person thinks like this, I'm not very clever but have an interest in history and I certainly wouldn't think like that.

YABU because human minds are very plastic. Always have been always will be. People are victims of what they experience.

Also OP - I think your assumption about what people mean when they say "everyone did it back then" is fairly shallow.

It isn't saying that people can't think independently. It isn't saying their idea was right, or beyond criticism. It isn't saying no one would have disagreed.

What it does mean is that societies in the past had a whole host of other conditions, different from our own, that led to the choices and social norms they had.

People often live in imperfect systems full of compromises, because they are dealing with imperfect people. The way we manage things now is a product of a much larger set of social circumstances. Often it's a compromise.

I remember being in school as a teen and a student going off about how evil it was that in the Victorian period society thought that sex before marriage was a bad thing and promiscuity was "judged." The teacher then told the class about congenital syphilis. It had never occurred to the student that without reliable birth control, or antibiotics, the social effects of widespread sexual promiscuity were significant and involved damage to vulnerable people.

That's why we say the past is another country. Social norms were often based on circumstances and realities that we don't see or know about, or were attempts to deal with problems we don't have, or to deal with them without the technological or even administrative capacities we do have. D

SO maybe it's better not to jump the gun and judge people living a life you don't understand and will never experience. It won't do any good anyway.

It's also worth remembering, that men didn't always have the vote either, and some men had it later than some women.

One gets the impression at times that people think that men had been voting forever while women were being denied all that time. But the general public voting is a really recent phenomena. And who could vote was expanded fairly consistently over time. It actually looks more like an ongoing conversation over a period of 150 years about what it meant to vote. Too long - well, I don't know, that's really the blink of an eye historically speaking.

It was actually established in the 50s via a landmark case that using force to consummate a marriage unequivocally constituted assault. Only four men have ever tried to use the 'marital right' as a defence and three were convicted of assault.

I believe it wasn't technically considered rape partly because a married couple were considered a single entity in law. Something like that. Like how women can't technically rape because it requires a penis.

One could also argue that we condone paedophilia by women because a man who sleeps with a minor is charged with statutory rape while a woman wouldn't and has never once been charged as a rapist for committing exactly the same crime, despite women perpetrating the majority of child abuse, once you include physical violence and neglect. This would be definition based semantics too.

The problem is that a lot of feminists don't like men so they can't fathom a situation whereby two people are in love and don't actually want to hurt each other. Almost every male/female interaction is negatively framed.

And the suffragettes were mostly campaigning for property owning women to get the vote as was the case with men. They weren't worried whether their maids could vote.

OP you do seem naive and have a ooor understanding of human psychology.

I love that you are completely certain that your moral positions are simply correct but don’t see that people in the past would have been equally as certain of their morality or, MUCH more likely:-They didn’t know about things. Didn’t come across them. Didn’t discuss them. Were religious so had a ready made code dictated by the men imposing that religion.

I expect OP thinks she would be one of the past beacons of correct morality and standing up to wrongdoing. More likely she would be too busy raising children, relentlessly skivvying, illiterate or poorly educated, dependent on the people around her, obliged to obey a man’s every instruction, all knowledge of the world gathered via local conversations.

To say that historical beliefs can’t be excused is as dumb as being convinced you hold the only correct beliefs.

Go back in time and tell the mongol hordes, the romans, the vikings, the British peasants to do a racism awareness course and gentle parent their children 😁

"Everybody did it back then" is a reason, not an excuse.

Parents back then were judged if they didn't smack their kids enough. If a child was misbehaving, other parents would be saying "That child needs a good smack" Some older people still even say it now. Doesn't make it right, but you can see the pressure from society to "deal with your child", and they didn't have Google back then to research alternative forms of discipline

People were generally behaving with in the laws of the land. Being homophobic taking your wife weren’t things you were likely to be arrested for. People realised this was wrong and laws have been changed.
There are some unpleasant people around today, doing things that other people realise are unkind or unsafe and wouldn’t do. Eventually laws will be passed and societies view will shift inline.

I know what you mean. My grandparents were immigrants who grew up in the 50/60s. Racism was very, very normalised then and my Gran said she recalls being called a “darky” at school and a “kike”. She knew it was very wrong, she said her peers also knew it was wrong but did it anyway.

I guess social influence always plays a part, you’re more likely to do the wrong thing if your peers are when young especially. Also general intelligence, including emotional intelligence plays a part.

It does take a strong-willed person to go against the norm, but that doesn't mean everyone else gets a free pass.

A free pass for what though?- is anyone on this thread saying they beat their spouse and thought it was all fine at the time? I grew up in the 80s/90s and literally noone was openly beating up on their spouse or kids with everyone else looking on approvingly. It might have happened behind closed doors (as domestic violence always does) but it was certainly not an acceptable "norm".

I am not sure whom you are raging at?

We evolve and things change? That’s happened since the beginning of time.
yes things we look back on as wrong and we wouldn’t possibly do/say in this day and age were seen as acceptable for many reasons years ago. All we can do is learn and make sure the next generation is better then the one before. But we can’t change what happened.
it also depends on how far back you are looking, my grandparents are still alive - they lived during WW2 they seen and dealt with things as young children that hopefully we will never see. It will have shaped the way they were brought up, and attitude towards certain things which where passed on to the next generation.

There’s no such thing as statutory rape in UK.

’Domestic violence has always been very, very forbidden’!? Unfortunately, even a cursory Google will show this is absolutely not the case. There are plenty of examples through history and in the present day.

‘Despite women perpetrating the majority of child abuse’
😶

I find that hard to accept as a general rule because history is full of examples of people challenging things that had "always been that way".

Slavery had existed for centuries. Women being excluded from political life had existed for centuries. Child labour had existed for centuries. Yet people still questioned those things and campaigned against them.

As for your example, I completely understand why an individual teenage girl might not challenge being groped or harassed. The power imbalance, fear of being dismissed and the fact that everyone around you treated it as normal would make that incredibly difficult.

What I find harder to accept is the leap from "I didn't challenge it" to "it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to challenge it".

Even in the 1980s and 1990s there were women complaining about harassment, feminists campaigning against sexual violence, parents warning daughters about certain men, and people arguing that this behaviour was unacceptable. The fact that many people ignored them doesn't mean the idea of challenging it didn't exist.

Surely that's part of the reason it felt wrong when it happened? Most girls didn't enjoy being groped in pubs and think, "What a wonderful social norm." They felt embarrassed, frightened, angry or uncomfortable. Those reactions are a form of moral judgement in themselves.

What I struggle with is the suggestion that because something was common, it simply never occurred to people that it might be wrong. Human beings question accepted norms all the time. That's how those norms eventually change.

I think that's setting the bar unrealistically high.

Nobody is suggesting that an ordinary person in the 1960s was supposed to single-handedly end corporal punishment or rescue every unmarried mother in the country. Social change doesn't work like that.

There's a huge gap between personally solving a problem and simply recognising that something is wrong. You don't have to adopt every baby to think mother and baby homes were cruel. You don't have to personally stop all child abuse to believe hitting children is wrong.

The same applies today. I can't stop online exploitation by myself, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to have a view on it or acknowledge that it's harmful.

What I find odd is that whenever the past is discussed, people jump from "some people could have questioned this" to "oh, so what were they supposed to do, fix society on their own?" Those aren't the same thing.

Most social change comes from lots of ordinary people gradually changing their minds, speaking up, refusing to go along with something, voting differently, raising their children differently, or supporting those who are campaigning. It doesn't require everyone to be rich, powerful or running a refuge.

The fact that one person can't solve a problem doesn't mean they have no responsibility to think about it at all.

But you know it did occur to them (some people) it was wrong because they either didn’t do it , or actively fought/asked for change.

The fact that some use that statement as an excuse for their behaviours then (or even now) is a different issue.