Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.
So, we’ve come a long way: Electric powered street cars, gas lighting of urban avenues,
crowded railway hubs, vast outdoor cafés, and workers in their Sunday best strolling
through parks and along broad new boulevards—all of this signaled the arrival of modern life
in European cities.
And those cities swelled because of massive internal migration from rural areas to capitals
such as Berlin, which grew to over four million people by the end of the 19th century.
Today we’re covering the leap to modern life and what exactly “modern life” meant--.
and as we’ve seen so many times in our study of history, what it meant depends upon perspective,
both for those living in 19th century Europe and for those of us today looking back on
it today [Intro]
In 1885 German engineer Karl Benz invented an internal combustion engine; six years later,
French manufacturer Armand Peugeot produced a functioning automobile, bringing further
speed to everyday life in cities.
Initially doctors and their far-flung patients were the people who benefited most from these
new cars, while bicycles gave ordinary people a new-found sense of freedom and adventure,
and also an opportunity to break their wrists.
And alongside revolutions in transportation and lighting and many other, there was also
a chemical revolution taking place around 1900, which led to synthetic drugs.
Like, German pharmaceutical company Bayer produced the first aspirin to help alleviate
pain, did the globe just open?
GLOBE
It says right here on this bottle of Bayer aspirin, #NOTSPON, “The Wonder Drug.”
And it really is!
So, before aspirin, pain was treated primarily with opioids like morphine and codeine.
But aspirin differed from opioids in many important ways.
For one thing it wasn’t addictive, but also, it reduced fevers and inflammation.
But what’s most amazing about aspirin is that even though it was one of the first synthetic
drugs, it’s still super useful.
It is an effective pain reliever even 120 years later.
OK, let’s turn our attention to the big trends of early 20th century Europe.
So, across Europe, populations continued to grow despite the emigration to distant continents
that we talked about last time, but populations weren’t going up because people were having
more babies.
In fact, the opposite was true.
Europe experienced a “birth control revolution” between 1880 and 1930.
With very few regional exceptions, in that fifty-year period fertility rates dropped
some fifty percent because knowledge of birth control expanded thanks to a few occurrences:
better understanding of women’s ovulatory cycles, the vulcanization of rubber used in
condoms, and the invention of the cervical cap or diaphragm.
But population rose due to lower child mortality and increased longevity.
Breakthroughs like pasteurization and greater understanding of germs were just two scientific
findings that helped extend life.
There was also better sanitation, such as improved sewage systems, which made people
less likely to die of diseases like cholera, which had ravaged European cities repeatedly
in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
But still, this decline in fertility gave politicians an issue that they could use to
get votes: women, they claimed, were conducting a birth strike which would lead to the decline
in the national strength.
It was true that women’s lives were changing, as a “modern woman” began forging her
own way outside the confines of the household.
Working women had already been laboring long hours for low wages, but now middle-class
women, supposedly too fragile and ignorant of the world to work, began to take jobs.
As industry, communications, marketing, and needed skills became more complex, women took
jobs in the new service sector.
They became secretaries, sales clerks, telephone and telegraph operators, teachers and nurses.
And they had the skills necessary to do these jobs thanks to the spreading system of public
schools, which taught literacy and basic mathematics.
If you wanna look for a single cause of why life is better today than it was 50 or 200
or 500 years or 800 years ago….Public schools!
But despite gains in education and employment, women were employed in the service sector
because they could be paid less since they were seen as inferior and not as skilled as
men.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
Obviously the reputation women had for being inferior and less skilled was false.
2.
For instance, women entered universities in the sciences and math -- which were open to
them in part
3. because at the time they were less prestigious and lucrative than the Latin- and Greek-based
humanities dominated by men.
4.
Polish-born Marie Sklodowska-Curie was one of these new, scientific women,
5.
although the French Academy of Science would not grant her membership,
6. even after she’d won two Nobel Prizes--
7. one for physics and a second in chemistry, making her the first person to win the prize
in different fields.
8.
It was widely believed that because she was a woman, her husband Pierre must have done
the work for her.
9.
But for the record, Pierre Curie had been dead for five years when Marie won her second
Nobel.
10.
She coined the term “radioactivity” and discovered
11. two new chemical elements, Polonium and Radium.
12.
She also helped pioneer radiation treatment for cancer
13. before dying due to the high exposure to radiation she experienced through her research.
14.
So called “Modern” women like Curie challenged the established belief in women’s incompetence
and professional inferiority,
15.
although the myth prevailed;
16. in fact, it remains powerful today,
17.
moreso in the United States than in most other wealthy countries,
18. as measured by UN and OECD statistics.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So changes in sexuality accompanied the rise of modern women.
And this led to massive scandals and the creation of a new political tool, whereby politicians
sought support by haranguing the mostly male electorate about sin and the purportedly declining
morals of the age, as exemplified by the rise of women.
And the fact that the male electorate was growing was another sign of modern life, indicating
the development of so-called mass society, which broadened the number of people who had
power and somewhat diluted the power of elites.
Inventions like cheaper newsprint also facilitated mass society, because more people had access
to more information.
But then as now, the amount of information available was increasing, but not always the
quality of that information.
Also, then as now, sex scandals were big news.
Both true and fabricated stories abounded.
For example, successful author Oscar Wilde was imprisoned and widely condemned because
of his relationship with a young man.
In members of the German Kaiser’s entourage, meanwhile, high-ranking generals and other
aristocrats were found to be regularly cross-dressing and engaging in male-male relationships.
The press dramatized that scandal so much that royal publicists had to reassure the
German public that the Kaiser himself had a healthy family life--code at the time for
heterosexuality.
In 1902, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, owner of the famed arms manufacturer, committed suicide
when the press revealed his relationships with young Italian men.
And Politicians spoke of a crisis of male virility, much of it caused by “new women.”
In short, there’s nothing Innovative about harkening back to an age of “traditional
values” that never actually existed.
It was true that women had been making demands for change through the nineteenth century.
They wanted legal ownership of their wages and other property and access to higher education.
(Increasingly young women could enter universities and even rank higher than men in exams, but
places like Oxford and Cambridge would not grant them degrees.
Cambridge did not until after World War II).
Women also wanted the right to divorce and to have custody of their children after divorce
(by law, custody of children went to the father, because children were considered his “property”).
By the early twentieth century, feminist movements had developed across the globe and included
and extremely diverse group of activists.
In Europe, some organizations had begun with interest in the abolition of slavery, while
others had greater concern for the situation of women working in factories, or other low-wage
conditions, including their health, access to good jobs, and personal safety.
Many pro-women advocates were also in favor of temperance, given the prevalence of domestic
abuse that so often accompanied drunkenness.
Other groups lobbied to end the laws denying prostitutes their civil rights: in many countries
from Britain and France to Austria-Hungary, police could and did arrest and incarcerate
women found on the street and then subject them to gynecological examinations on the
grounds that they might be prostitutes.
Austrian activist Marianne Hainisch defined feminism broadly, as “the call of one half
of humanity for its civil rights,” But others saw feminism’s goal as uplifting humanity
as a whole.
Because it was a diverse movement without one single narrative.
So, feminists, literally hundreds of thousands of them by the end of the nineteenth century,
were seeking to address a broad range of issues--which makes sense of course because women, depending
on class and race and experience and profession, were oppressed in a broad range of ways.
Some view the feminist movement as an entirely middle-class project that was unconcerned
with working women.
But in fact, working women such as those from the textile mills in northern England also
campaigned as feminists; other working women wanted unions to be more active in supporting
women, while others wanted the Social Democratic parties to do more for them.
But although women did operate within labor movements, union men were generally opposed
to women having jobs in industry because their presence would drag down wages.
Social Democratic parties at the time usually took the Marxist position that middle-class
feminists were the enemy of working women, and that the eventual overthrow of the industrial
owners by working class people would lead to the liberation of women alongside the liberation
of everyone else.
Marxists argued that the private property upon which capitalism was based necessarily
led to the oppression and regulation of women, so once capitalism had been destroyed, freedom
would naturally follow.
Gradually, feminist activists did begin to achieve gains under laws throughout much of
Europe, but one aspect of citizenship eluded them: The right to vote.
In England, philosopher John Stuart Mill, a classical liberal interested in principles
of personal freedom, spoke in Parliament on behalf of women’s suffrage as early as 1866,
but that initiative went nowhere, and across Europe other efforts to gain the vote were
thwarted as well.
Mill went on to publish On the Subjection of Women in 1869, which drew on the ideas
of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill and became one of the most translated books of its day.
But again, the actual vote for women was very slow in coming.
In 1897, New Zealand granted women’s suffrage.
In 1902, Australia did, and in 1906, Finland became the first European country where women
could vote.
Norway followed in 1913.
And I know i t’s easy to forget just how recently that was, but for context, both of
my grandmothers were born before women who didn’t own property could vote in Great
Britain.
In Britain, a group of women led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Cristabel
decided to take forceful action.
In 1903, they founded the Women’s Social and Political Union.
It sponsored mass mobilization in which thousands of women paraded through the streets.
The reaction was brutal as men attacked the marchers, grabbing and twisting their breasts
and generally assaulting them.
Other Feminists’ non-violent protests included chaining themselves to the gates of Parliament
and refusing to eat when imprisoned for their actions.
Authorities used the brutal tactic of force-feeding those on hunger strikes.
Alongside non-violent activities, feminists also blew up mailboxes, slashed works of art
in galleries and museums, and broke store windows with hammers—all of this because
for men “it’s only property they love.”
In 1913, militant suffragist Emily Wilding Davison cast herself in front of the king’s
horse at a horse race and was killed.
And so a lot of what we think of as contemporary protest tactics have their roots in feminist
movements.
Misogynists struck back against these protests.
In Austria men declared that feminists had been corrupted by “crude dark men of the
lower races”—combining racism with misogyny, which has long been a tactic of dehumanization.
Feminists were also portrayed oversexed, and unable to appreciate the “refined sexuality”
of the “heroic [white] races.”
These people argued that for gender order and thus political stability to be maintained,
a man needed a woman “who looks up to his intellectual superiority” and “wishes
to do nothing but subordinate herself.”
Women’s hands, the prime minister of Italy said in the 1890s, were not meant for voting
but for kissing.
So OK, let’s go back to that question we asked at the beginning.
How do we characterize the term “modern life”?
Some maintain that technology is the key ingredient, while others say there have been technological
advances across the millennia.
Some point to urbanization, or changes in the role of women, or the control over reproduction
that appeared across Europe by 1900
I revealed my own bias in this episode by talking about the modern practice of public
funding for education.
Still others note that the idea of “modern” has been used across the centuries: the Roman
historian Tacitus, born in the first century BCE was happy to have lived “in modern times.”
And so perhaps “modern” is just a term to positively compare one’s own times to
other places and periods in history.
In that sense, to call one’s society “modern” was mostly propaganda.
All of that leaves me wondering what makes our contemporary world feel modern, and to
what extent that modernity is a judgement on ourselves and others.
What does modern mean to you?
And who is included in that definition of modern, and who is excluded by it?
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.