Word: 1850s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During the 1850s, a Congregational cleric named Horace Bushnell said that the distinction of sex puts men and women "in different classes of being. One is the force principle. The other is the beauty principle." Men had muscles. Women were soft, or at least they were very differently muscled. Bushnell's distinction survives, more or less, in a new movie called Perfect. The actress Jamie Lee Curtis plays a sleekly made aerobics instructor described by the movie's title. It is in another movie, Pumping Iron II: The Women, that Bushnell is definitively put in his place. In this semidocumentary...
They needed whatever friends they had. The gnomic initials P.R.B., appended without explanation to their signatures in the 1850s, had the combined effect on many critics of a red flag and a leper's bell. "Monstrously perverse," was a typical comment. "Plainly revolting," was another. Charles Dickens, no less, saw "a hideous, wrynecked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke ... and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster...
Birth control was so rudimentary that pregnancies came annually. They were both painful (until chloroform appeared in 1847) and dangerous (childbed fever was not solved until the 1850s), but Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber in 1839 and soon thereafter got his first patents on birth control devices. More than a century before the famous Pill, the sexual revolution inspired by contraception was under way. The cultural leaders preached against birth control, even prosecuted its advocates, but that only spread the news. Contraceptive devices sounded "perfectly revolting," as one California matron wrote to a friend, but "one must face anything rather than...
...penance, as distinct from the Japanese practice of eating it every day for pleasure. Even Kobe beef, on which every Japanese dotes when he can afford to, is a Western import. The first cow butchered in Japan died for the table of an American consul in Shimoda in the 1850s, and a monument has since been raised to it by the butchers' association of Japan. Before that, cattle were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of eating roast tractor...
Near the corner of Main and Walnut streets in the small town of Maynard, Mass., stands a massive complex of aged red-brick buildings. Within those walls, workers toiled amid clanging, churning machinery to produce carpets in the 1850s and Army blankets during two World Wars. But today the sturdy, old facade houses an entirely different enterprise. The noisy machines and grease-stained factory floor have given way to offices where engineers huddle over glowing oscilloscopes and secretaries peck quietly at word processors. The woolen mill has been reborn as the headquarters of the Digital Equipment Corp., the second largest...