Claire98909’s preoccupation aside, this is a good post imo.
We know exploitation of children was standard - they worked from what age?, we now understand that historically child abusers migrated to specific occupations - for example, the Catholic church shows us how schools, orphanages, etc, attracted men with an ‘interest’ in children.
Also, even I can trace a huge shift in societal attitudes during my lifetime so goodness knows what people turned a blind eye to 100 years ago.
In relation to the Daisy character, I guess anything is possible but my impression was she seemed wholly naive and innocent. I thought Thomas was effectivly her boy band cruch.
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Claire - You might be interested in the book Below Stairs, an autobiography of a girl who was put into service as a scullery maid by her mother when she was 12, because the family couldn’t afford to feed all the kids. I think Margaret Powell was what Julian Fellowes was thinking about when he wrote the character of Daisy.
Why not? In A Little Princess, Sara starts her fancy school at 7 and is orphaned and turned into a servant at 8, and I am sure that in Great Houses you would find fairly young kids doing things if you peeked downstairs.
I could imagine a number of things to do, watching stuff cook, helping to prep foods for cooking, helping the washerwomen with laundry, helping the gardeners with the yards and gardens, helping the grooms with taking care of horses and their tack. There are actually a fair amount of things a really young kid can do around a house if you think of them as miniature adults and not chidren. How about today? Pick up your room, let the dog out/in, take your dish to the kitchen, can you please get me that < >, can you stop your sister from crying? Play with her for a minute …
First, children worked. Modern childhood, mostly leisure and education, is a modern invention, an artifact of industrialization and before that a conceit of the rich. Anyone who’s prepared a decent meal (Thanksgiving) from scratch knows that there’s a lot of work when you have to make things from scratch. Peeling potatoes, cutting vegetables, even continuously stirring the pot. Now make taht 3 meals a day. Before iceboxes, a lot of the items would come from the market within the last day (walking), or you dug the stuff up from the garden and plucked the chickens yourself. Add in laundry, cleaning by hand, etc. - housewife was not a full-time job, it was a multi-person job. An extra set of hands would help as soon as they were able. Out on the farm everyone who could helped with teh chores and the production work.
A 6-year-old could help set the table, stir the pots, hold the other end when folding sheets, and generally make herself progressively more useful as she got older. I wouldn’t characterize it as “exploitation”, just as the way it was. Unless we’re talking Cinderella-evil-stepmother, downstairs was probably a much better and more relaxed world than drunk and neglectful parents. Class snobbery comes into it, the owners probably would ot want to see the girl wandering their house like she owned it or hobnobing with their kids, but I doubt they worked a child to death (unlike the mills down the road).
As for child sexual abuse… I’m not an expert, never studied it, but from what I read and what’s in the news - people are pretty much born with their preferences embedded. The catholic church for example - in more traditional societies (Irish, Italian, etc.) it was not uncommon for the devout mother to pressure a boy in the family to become a priest, or they’d get encouragement from the parish school. During the teen years, the ones who were not interested in girls would realize they did not feel what their peers were expressing about the girls around them. Some may have interpreted this as a “calling” if properly pressured by their elders. So the older preisthood likely contains a disproportionate number of men who are not heterosexually “normal”. Of course, unless they propositioned the wrong types, gay priests probably did not attract a lot of attention. Priests who dealt with young children OTOH, had opportunity.
I seriously doubt that a predator becomes a priest for the opportunity. There are plenty of less demanding lifestyles with much better access to children. Those with pedophile tendencies likely joined teh priesthood sincerely, but sucuum to temptation eventually when they get opportunities. More likely they hit the news because they are an identifiable group and the acts are seen as that much more hypocritical. Odds are there are many more risks from a scout leader or teacher. It seems the risk is everywhere; quite often the risk is a family member or family friend.
I suspect the risk is from a specific percentage of the population. the prevalence probably no more or less now than then. The big difference is the risk of getting caught. Today, children are more likely to be listened to and believed, and adults are less likely to be in denial.
So I suspect it is not unusual for a child to have a miserable childhood, especially at the turn of the century, without necessarily being sexually molested. There’s a lot of miserable childhood stories out there, and a lot of them do not involve sexual molestation.
I have only watched Season One of Downtown, but I was re-reading Lark Rise to Candleford yesterday, (Flora Thompson’s autobiographical novel about the late Victorian peasant class), and she says that girls 11-13 were routinely sent out ‘into service’, starting as scullery maids or the bottom-most type of house maids, and worked their way up basically until they were ready to marry or had made a career of house service (housekeeper, cook). So Daisy being young and a scullery maid was normal.
Duplicating my post from another thread: Claire98909, you need to find another subject to talk about. This "was Daisy sexually abused? thing has been the only subject you’ve talked about for the last couple of weeks and it’s too much. Consider broadening your interests.
But in the season 2 Christmas Special Daisy complained to Mrs. Patmore “You talk to me like when I first came, but I know things now.” If Daisy had arrived at Downton when she was 6, would Mrs. Patmore really have been a huge bitch to her?
Who said she was being a bitch? It’d be like if I still talked to my teenaged daughter like she was a little kid and hadn’t learned anything. She just means Ms Patmore wasn’t giving her credit for knowing more now than she did when she was new to the house.