I’m not so sure about that. “Everybody” knew someone in the town or neighborhood who was “a confirmed bachelor” or in a “Boston marriage” - they just didn’t talk about what went on in private. So, I think they could accept the shift from private “deviance” to a private and respectable marriage. Gay Pride parades, I grant you, would raise an eyebrow, so to speak.
And that is what I think would be most shocking - the lack of modesty and the loss of privacy.
Technology? I too think the attitude would be “What, no flying cars?”
I’m calling presentism (putting the values of the present onto the past) on that idea. Everybody didn’t know that “confirmed bachelor” was “one of those.” Nobody discussed homosexuality. If someone was found to be “that way” they could lose their jobs and their friends and family. Most gays were so far in the closet they could see Narmia.
The idea of being gay and normal simply wasn’t. And being gay and proud–forget about it.
Remember–Back then, a man who molested little girls was a child molester. A man who molested little boys was a homosexual.
Gay liberation started in the late 1960’s, and they’ve come a long way. Still a ways to go.
Well said. People don’t appreciate how different things were. I didn’t know the term “confirmed bachelor” meant gay until just a few years ago. I just thought it meant a man who wasn’t interested in getting married … you know, a swinging playboy. It WAS a curious term, and I might have suspected something if I’d encountered it often or given it a moment’s thought on the rare occasions when I encountered it. Pornography was simply nonexistent in mass media. Playboy was about it, and it was available only under the counter. Beating your wife was a bad habit, not something that deserved jail time. It was a WAY WAY WAY different time.
The notion that a time traveler would be shocked, shocked by the rampant transgenderism is just silly. We might talk a lot more about transgenderism, but it sure ain’t everywhere. And the people who are transgender don’t tend to stand out. A guy from the 50s who sees a MtF transgender person isn’t going to be astonished by open trans* of a man wearing a dress, he’s going to see a woman.
I think people forget that things usually have much earlier origins that we think. Television was invented in the 20s, not the 50s for instance. As for casual violence, a guy from the 50s just lived through the 30s and 40s. I doubt he’s going to be shocked by violence. Cell phones are just Dick Tracey’s two way wrist radios. Email is just instant wireless telegraphy.
I think what might be the most shocking is how little things have changed since the 1950s. Think about a guy from the 1950s explaining modern life in the future world of 1950 to a guy from 1890. But again even in 1890 the roots of 1950 could be seen. They knew all about electricity, they had telegraphs, telephones, steamships, railways for fast cheap transport, all the weapons that made WWI so deadly were already in place, refrigeration, and so on.
So the most big differences between the eras are things that existed in the earlier era, but as curiosities or potential things that might work out someday. Even social attitudes–the fascist and communist movements of the 30s and 40s were all about the idea that we could remake society from the ground up into something more rational. So our present 2013 notion that you just can’t remold the world by rational fiat would seem strange to them.
Or to put it another way, it’s not the things they don’t know that will surprise them, it’s the things they thought they knew that weren’t true. That fashion is utterly different wouldn’t be surprising, but that family and daily life is pretty much exactly the same might be.
Read the wiki on All in the Family’s Cousin Liz. When Edith’s cousin dies, she inherits her silver tea service. When discovering Liz’s roommate was really her lover (today, she’d be called a long time partner) and really wants the tea set, she lets her keep it. Archie objects, threatening a lawsuit that would cost Liz her teaching job.
Good point. I used to consider the term “confirmed bachelor” to be more or less the masculine equivalent of “spinster”, i.e. someone who was unmarried, wasn’t likely to be married anytime soon, and was perhaps a little odd, eccentric, etc. to the extent that dating didn’t really interest them and/or they weren’t considered especially desirable. It didn’t necessarily mean you were gay - you might just have been more interested in school, work, hobbies, etc. to the point where you didn’t date enough to find someone and you ended up single.
When two women lived together back then, it was thought neither of them could get a man and they lived together for safety’s sake. Nobody thought anything of it, and lesbianism wasn’t even hinted at.
Good points. There are other technologies that go back further than they might appear.
Compact Discs were actually designed in the 1970’s and first sold in the early 80’s. It took a long time for them to become cheap and popular, but they were there. Laserdiscs (which were partly analog) were available even before CDs. Digital magnetic tape existed then. So the idea of purely digital, optical media would not be absurd to anyone after the mid (or maybe early) 1970’s.
Flash disks? There were console video games that took cartridges. Some cartridges in the 1980’s had batteries and let you save your game. An SD card is not that big a leap from an Atari or NES cartridge.
There was an openly gay character on the TV series “Soap”, which aired around that same time.
Conversely, I remember an episode of “Alice” where Alice sent her son on a camping trip with some men, found out later that one of them was gay, and asked her son if the man “bothered” him in any way. :smack:
Men could live together too. Abraham Lincoln spent several years living with his “friend forever” Josuha Speed. So were they bosom friends, or butt buddies? Remember that Lincoln had a lot of enemies - if his relationship had been socially unacceptable, you would expect that somebody would have pointed it out as a social attack. The fact that nobody did comment on it as awkward indicates that it was likely to have been a socially acceptable thing.
Victorian literature is replete with same-sex “bosom friends” who were very touchy-feely. Read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the relentless teen-boy cuddlefest. When one of the boys mothers finds out about her son’s BFF, she not only approves, she incites it further.
Lol. Consider the term “bothered”. In Spanish, the ordinary verb for annoy or bother in general is molestar. Sexual activity or intent is not essential. In Spanish, it’s possible to “molestar” your little sister without committing a crime. The Simpsons used this term once, having a character say that “Ay, es Homer Simpson! Me ha molestado!”, meaning “Oh, it’s Homer Simpson! He has annoyed me!” with the implied suggestion based on the English language cognate that Homer may have molested the person.
Well in English “molest” does not necessarily mean sexual activity, it means “bother” but like “gay” it’s a word whose original meaning has been more or less overtaken by its sexual connotation.
I think another important element would be which region of the US and which subculture you lived in, especially with regard to sexual matters. Someone from the backwoods of a rural area could easily not know anything at all about homosexuals other than that they were horrible, evil cowards who did awful sexual things and therefore should be beaten to death as often as possible. Someone living in a large urban area, not so much. True, there were mass media in the form of television, radio, newspapers and magazines, but they were heavily censored wrt sex until the late 60s. Bubbles could be very, very thick and hard to see out of back then. There was no equivalent of the Internet.
That was a television show about about a very narrow-minded person very much “behind the times”.
Look, I’m not saying that there was no “homophobia” * in the '50s; I am saying people were neither naive nor as narrow minded as many people assume. People knew homosexuality existed, they knew it was [considered] a perversion, but they knew perfectly nice people who were probably homosexual, and they didn’t care because it was kept private. (And, no, I am not saying that it is all Teh Gays fault for not being discrete.)
I am just sharing with you what I gathered from conversations with people who were adults at the time. But now that I think about it, they were talking about the '30s & '40s more that the '50s.
Except, I don’t think that was a word at the time, so in that sense there wasn’t.
I heard a podcast with some internet expert a while ago. What he said really struck me. He mentioned that the things we worry about, the stories in the media we become concerned about, enraged about, etc. It’s never about the biggest technological change. There have been leaps and bounds in certain areas, but those aren’t the ones we consider important. It’s those technologies that we think will represent some sort of cultural change. The birth control pill wasn’t a technological breakthrough. Radio and television and all the other communication breakthroughs weren’t discussed ad nauseum because the amount of change was so big. In the 1950’s, the future was depicted with jet packs and flying cars. A house wife could clean her whole house by just hosing down her tefloned everything! Entire meals would come in a pill form! Of course no one discussed the possibility that maybe Dad would do the cooking. Or that little Johnny would have access to all the world’s information completely uncensored.
I just don’t think GPS turn-by-turn directions and Pandora personalized radio would have that much of an impact, whereas stuff some of the social stuff that was going to start going down just a decade later would.
Actually, let me say it like this: the stuff someone from the 1950s would find most important, would probably be the stuff we found most important when it actually happened. If we thought it was important, or weird, or baffling, or whatever chances are someone from the 1950s would have the same reaction times ten.
It would have to be cell phones. Imagine a device that can communicate with anyone on the planet, has an unlimited phone book and encyclopedia, with a high resolution camera, could hold and play thousands of songs with a quality far superior to any home speaker (with ear buds), could track you to within a few feet of anywhere on the planet, could show you an aerial view of anywhere on the planet, give you visual directions to anywhere on the planet with verbal directions, replace all the instruments in a cockpit, display the current weather in real time overlayed on a geographic map of anywhere on the planet, identify all the planets and stars you’re looking at just by pointing the device toward it, calculate any math function to a significant fraction, act as a stop watch/timer/note pad/drawing pad/calendar/schedule book/ video camera/alarm clock, interact with your car radio as a phone/GPS/music storage device, display books to read, scan product codes and list the cheapest price… and thousands of apps not even possible to list.
The possible functions that cell phones have are virtually unlimited and impossible to describe but can be summed up by demonstrating the ability to simply ask it a question and have it answered.
They would have difficulty understanding the breakdown of the family unit, prevalence of singles and acceptance of divorce. Also, women’s lib and women putting off marriage and children to focus on their career.