By about 1850, cities became centers for government offices, public things, and art and commerce. People moved out to the city in droves, the men taking up work in the catacombs and women becoming everything but lawyers. This oppression might have its origins in better public health, which sought to remove women from factories when men began to live longer, and also those men, prizing their newfound longevity, didn’t think they could win many arguments against lady litigators.
Some women had to work, but more began choosing to stay home and let the man of the tenement partition win the bread. Catherine Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister, wrote a book on home economics. The close ties between religion and life at home lead to confusion and disruptions with the lady feminists. Male feminists, however, would not be given a voice until the collegiate wasteland of the grunge age.
First Communist International meeting was held during this time, made up of trade unionists, political dissidents, and scoundrels. Other movements in socialism included British formation of the Fabians and Labour Party, in Germany it was the SPD. Honestly, it sounded like a really good idea at the time. You had to be there.
The worldview was changing yet again, and in 1850 the West saw the world as mechanical and dependable, the scientific method and rational thought. Many lost faith in their maker, fashioning new gods in Nietzche and Freud. Everyone ends up really sad and repressed and crazy. Al Compte was a forerunner to Freud, with his positivist philosophy. Contributions to modern thought included the belief that everything true can be verified through experimentation, and that theism and metaphysics were dumb.
W.E.B. Dubois organized the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and they began to lobby for civil rights. America was “anti-black.”
The Dreyfuss Affair brought anti-semitic sentiments up to the surface so everyone could see it. Proves too much for the nation’s babushkas, who faint after screaming in Yiddish.
