Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...adoptable children is driven by classic causes: faltering domestic supply and rising demand. The number of babies available for adoption in the U.S. and other industrialized countries has declined as birthrates have shrunk and legal abortion has expanded. In addition, the taboo against unmarried motherhood -- that mainstay of Victorian novels -- has virtually disappeared, removing another source of homeless infants. In the U.S., 65% of the white babies born to single mothers were given up for adoption in 1966, but 20 years later that figure was down to 5%. National statistics are not kept, but some experts place the number...
Since then there have been a few negative reactions from critics who seem to consider tears a sign of weakness in the human male. Unfortunately, it appears that there are still some among us who refuse to move with the times, and remain captives of an outworn Victorian ethic...
...that men should not display their emotions in public, and most specifically that they should never shed tears, was enshrined during the 19th century in the Spartan code of English public schools, which popularized the doctrine of the stiff upper lip, and was articulated by many writers, from early Victorian Charles Kingsley ("Men must work, and women must weep") to late Victorian "Mr. Dooley" ("Among men . . . wet eye manes dhry heart...
Nixon's judicious employment of his tear ducts enthralled the nation and helped propel his ticket to victory over Adlai E. Stevenson, who even in defeat clung to the discredited Victorian ethic by quoting Abraham Lincoln's anecdote about a little boy who stubbed his toe and said that it hurt too much to laugh but he was too big to cry. Poor Stevenson, a prisoner of the past, deserved to be a loser. For the more up-to-date Nixon, the prize was the vice presidency and, 16 years later, the White House itself...
...women into battle will be comforted and inspired by his example. It is a pity that such of his predecessors in the White House as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, each bearing on his shoulders the burden of a nation in dire peril, should be forced by the Victorian ethic to forgo the solace of a good cry. And then there was General George Washington at Valley Forge, who reportedly cried as seldom as he lied...