Question of the Week – Go Back in Time
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If you could live in another time period, when would you pick?
Me? You need to ask? The Middle Ages, shortly bef
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Karen
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Dec 01, 2011 11:49AM
I've always thought I was born about 100 years too late (hate technology and it feels the same about me). So that said I would love to have lived in the 1840-1890's time period. Life may have been harder, but there is something to be said about the satisfaction doing things with your own hands, and being tired at the end of the day from sheer physical labor.
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While I love fantasy novels with medieval-type settings, there is no way I'd want to live in the real actual Middle Ages, for several reasons:1. Women were chattel. For a woman in the Middle Ages, the only lifestyle choices were A)get married (usually at a young age and not to the person of your choice) or B)become a nun.
2. Bathing was optional (actually, in many areas of Europe, it was considered "dangerous" to bathe more often than once or twice a year), and there was no indoor plumbing or sanitation of any kind, so the streets were basically open sewers. Gross.
3. No public education, and because the printing press hadn't been invented yet, books were scarce. Since the majority of the population was illiterate (due to the aforementioned lack of public education), this wasn't really a problem for the masses, but there is no way I could cope with such a thing, knowing what I know.
4. Bubonic Plague and assorted other nasties.
5. Superstition and religious oppression. Freethinkers and dissidents were imprisoned and/or executed. I have an ancestor who was burned as a witch in France during the 1400s. If I were to go back in time to that era, I would probably receive the same treatment, being a scientist and all.
I've always thought the early 1900s would be an interesting time to live in, but the Gilded Age wasn't really all that shiny unless you happened to be one of the gilded ones. Aside from the travesties of child labor and segregation, you had the self-inflicted deformed ribcages and damaged internal organs endured by women as a result of lacing their corsets too tightly.
Of course, if I had been born into either of these eras, I wouldn't know any better and these concerns would probably be nonexistent. But if it's a question of leaving my own time period for another, I'll pass.
I would, however, love to have a time machine so I could visit the Middle Ages, the early 1900s, the American Revolution, the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the Upper Paleolithic.
