36 points

I’m surprised the women was allowed and able to read. The audacity!

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25 points

In 1615 only a third of men would have been literate and less than 10% of women would be. So statistically she would have learned about the Bible from someone else

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14 points

Just as god intended.

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23 points

And she’s showing her ankles, the absolute slut!

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8 points

Smoking is dirty and bad for you, but other than that it’s remarkable how indistinguishable these seem to me, given that the intent was obviously to offer a stark contrast.

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4 points

Yeah, I’m guessing, it was still a novel concept for a woman to sit comfortably.

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5 points
*

Except 1600’s woman has a footstool, and 1900’s women doesn’t, so that doesn’t fit on it’s own either.

The male dude who drew this apparently took issue with women’s fashion magazines, probably for some sort of vanity-related reason, but that was a period where clothes got less complex and manufactured, so it’s still ironic. That multilayered 1600’s outfit is a great example. Maybe the footstool is to highlight the high heels, which might still have been in the period where it was a butch trend in imitation of cattlemen. The hair covering might also be significant.

The alcohol is pretty much the only other straightforward thing to interpret (although the glass might be a new style?), what with US and Canadian prohibition starting a few years later. Also, in my head cannon 1600’s girl is reading from Song of Solomon.

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5 points

Things were better back when things were better back then.
In other words,
Things got worse after things got worse, back then… ish? Or something.

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7 points

A couple anthropologists have told me that this concept is as old as all recorded history: the youth used to respect their elders better, that people were kinder and more pious, that these are the last days.

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11 points
*

Oh yeah, there are Sumerian tablets about exactly this, someone around 4000-5000 years ago wrote:

Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.

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2 points

This is exactly what I would have preferred to cite. Thank you!

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7 points
*

Socrates bitches about kids these days quite a bit.

If you go to today’s grumpy old people, and openly emulate something their parents would have done, it throws them right the fuck off, by the way. In my experience, they still think mom and dad were uncool, and implicitly think they’re from the only generation that did anything right; the good-old-days stuff is just a facade.

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6 points

Indeed.

“since 624 BC people have complained about the decline of the present generation of youth compared to earlier generations”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_gap

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4 points

isn’t the ſ meant to be “ss”? Impling the ttle is “Progresss”?

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4 points

That’s a long s, not a German Eszett (ß).

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1 point

ok, but how would it be read? is the actual correct version Progreſ the way I think it should be?

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1 point

It’s a stylistic thing, it’s no different from a standard S. The opening of the US Bill of Rights is written the same way

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