Hubby had severe acne as a child and heard much of the same “advice.” Worse, some quack put him on daily antibiotics for [Iyears*. I guess it just goes to show that even those who have gone to medical school can dispense bad advice.
You’re not supposed to take daily antibiotics for acne? 
I was on daily antibiotics for several years in high school. Seemed to help a good bit. Facial antibiotics are the bomb, too.
Actually, yes. Yes you are. Tetracycline is the most commonly pescribed antibiotic for acne treatment and I’ve taken it several times before, as well as Isotretinoin. I’m not sure what Lissa’s on about.
My dad, late 1970s: “You don’t want to go into Computer Science. Hardly any future in it, outside of being a damned data entry clerk!”
(emphasis mine)
I can’t imagine advice much worse than this. :eek: :eek:
“All women are lying whores.”
Not an offhand, bitter comment, uttered in a moment of frustration – but an earnest warning, delivered again and again, reformulated, and elaborated on, ad nauseum.
“If you ever lose sight of the fact that all women are lying whores, you’re a doomed man. If you get confused and think for a second that you’ve found the one woman on the planet that you can trust, you’re fucked – because all women are lying whores. If a woman demonstrates to you by word or deed that she is an ally and worthy of your trust, this is itself an unconscionable deception and you must see it for that, because, in the final analysis, all women are lying whores.”
At various times this theme was expounded to me with the earnestness usually associated with an evangelist determined to save some poor sinner’s soul.
Those five words would be graven on my father’s headstone, if he left anyone who cared for him enough to bury him and mark his grave.
“You don’t need your teeth pulled. Wisdom teeth being pulled are just dentists’ way of taking your money.”
Six years later I’ve got broken teeth thanks to my wisdom teeth. Thanks, Dad!
“Ignore that. Spiders aren’t poisonous.”
Black widow bite. Required hospitalization. Once again, thanks Dad! And he used to be a nurse, too.
sigh
~Tasha
“Get that kid out in the sunshine, fah Chrissake!”
That kid, now 53 years old, was a blue-eyed, white haired (almost the exact shade of white it is today, for different reasons) 4 year old, whose skin turned pink almost upon exposure to the sun’s rays, and lobster-red upon extended exposure (20 minutes or more) who protested vigorously all trips to the beach for 6+ hours of exposure, and who heard the bromide above all day long, all summer long. It’s a miracle I’m not a cancer patient–yet.
“you’re too smart for that.”
referring to anything from taking a job as a waitress to doing physical activities (like dance or gymnastics) to wanting to go into almost anything but law as a career (I’m too smart to be a teacher? really? or a surgeon? how does that work, exactly?) I refuse to live my life looking down on things and I refuse to reject something I would otherwise enjoy because someone tells me it’s beneath me.
“If you want to marry a prince, act like a princess.”
I wouldn’t want to marry anyone who would tolerate me acting like a princess.
“So what? You can do it!”
from a guidance counselor who is a bit out of touch with reality and probably had parents like mine… referring to highly impractical things like spending the summer in Italy when I have no money or going to Juliard when I have no money and am truly, honestly, not that great of a dancer or going to college and majoring in something like theatre or dance or art history when I don’t have any money to spend on a degree that is unlikely to get me a job. Taking risks for what you love is great, but it’s not smart when you don’t have a backup plan. I don’t want to spend my life as an out-of-work actress, thank you very much.
“You’ll have to go to the public high school. Your brother will go to the private high school because he’ll have to support a family one day.”
OK, I’ll cut Mom some slack because it was 1965-ish and she had every expectation that I’d marry and raise a family right out of high school just like she did. She had no way of knowing that I’d start college, drop out, join the Navy, go back to college, not marry till I was 29, or that my brother would marry, then divorce, childless, which is how he remains at 50. Still, she was operating from her experience base and at age 10 or 11, it didn’t occur to me that my life would be so different from hers. I was able to tell my daughter quite honestly that she could do almost anything she wanted to with her life.
On the bright side, had I not gone to the public high school, I never would have wound up in the A Capella Choir and I never would have gotten to go on the trip to Europe for the choral competition.
Men won’t like you if you’re too smart.
You’ll never get a man till you lose weight.
Don’t part your hair in the middle - it makes your face look round.
Never buy colored shoes - stick to the neutrals. (Mom - I know you would have loved my leopard D’Orsay pumps).
There are a million others. I had a platitude-happy family. 
VCNJ~
My mom always told me to marry for money, not love. That did not work in so many ways.
But at least she didn’t give such oddball advice as my SO’s mother. She told him never to drink anything a woman offers because we make “panty water” to keep them from leaving us.
My grandmother did the butter-cure-all for years too, and insisted that my acne came from chocolate, depriving me of my favorite treat for about six years. Still had acne too.
Ooh ooh my mom also said “it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion in the ocean”! Which is mostly true, but it’s just really bizarre that she’d share that when a few years earlier she couldn’t even explain what menstruation was.
“You have to take what you can get.” My mother thought I was worthless, could do nothing, was an idiot, nobody would love me (she such didn’t) and I didn’t deserve anything above the minimum. When I told her I wanted to go to business college and learn computers (this was the early 1980’s): You couldn’t do it. You’re too stupid.
If she could see me now: Living well is the best revenge.
My paternal grandfather believed that people shouldn’t go to college (or church for that matter…) because it’d turn them communist. I was told this as an explanation for why my paternal grandmother couldn’t muster so much as a hurrah that I was the first person in my immediate family to make it through. Those grandparents apparently had very interesting views about the role of women in society but my parents were fairly careful to keep me from having to listen to that crap.
My maternal grandmother told me that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, when I was maybe 12. My dear mother who has always been quite frank told me that her sexual experience as a young woman with glasses did not bear that out. Thanks, I think, Mum. Granny did try to mold me into a ladylike young woman, but thankfully never to the extent of suggesting I should act stupid to get men.
A friend of the family expressed horror that I was taking a year off between high school and college and would be all of 18 when I started college because “men don’t really like going out with older women and you won’t be able to find a husband at college it you don’t go right away.” Really, and I thought I was going for the booklearnin’.
(Let x=my career choice, y=my mom’s idea of a good career choice.)
“You don’t wanna be an x. They’re cheap, disposable, and worked like slaves. Why don’t you be a y?”
Use for every value of x until child stops coming up with his own ideas and has to go out into the world with his ambitions seriously weakened.
Oral antibiotics are effective in some people with some forms of chronic acne, especially the cystic variety. So listen to your personal physician, not advice on a message board. Says me on a message board.
I was a complete pizzaface from age 12 up till they put me on tetracycline. Ever since, my hands shake slightly more than average.
Btw, “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses” is a corruption of the original phrase, “Men don’t make passes at girls with fat asses.”
And in the culture of my grandparents, reading such a book as “Marital Hygiene” would have been the equivalent of reading pornography. Many people worked hard to maintain everyone’s ignorance in many, many area of America. And as you’ll see below, Lysol is NOT a contraceptive.
And said condoms were still illegal in most states until 1930 (my mom was born by then), and then allowed to be sold in most states only for the “prevention of disease”. It was illegal to market them for use as birth control devices.
Untrue, and a dangerous statement. Douching is NOT an effective means of contraception. The marketing of Lysol as an a contraceptive was one of the great frauds perpetrated upon american women. http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=51170
Again, none of the devices you name there are effective contraceptives. The primitive diaphragms evolved into more effective devices, but at the time, lacking a good spermicide, (unless crocodile dung was used, a la the Egyptians) they did not fill the bill.
Given the fact that current studies show that over half of the fertile female population in the US have grave misconceptions about how to use contraceptives and their risks of pregnancy, why do you insist that every woman in the 1920’s had fundamental knowledge of contraception? And was shame-free about their sexuality?
And why do you not just take me at my word that my grandparents had no likely access to contraceptives? At the time they were married, condoms were illegal where they lived, other devices marketed surreptitiously as “contraceptives” were not, and their culture heavily condemned sexuality, birth control, and any other attitude about birth control except abstinence if children weren’t wanted.
And now I intend to stop hijacking my own thread.
And yes, the whole hijack could have been avoided if I’d used more precise language in my OP, to whit: “they only had one kid in an era before contraceptives” should have been “before they had ready access to reliable contraceptives”. Sloppy on my part.
I know it’s not, but it was used in that fashion. The wording on the bottles I’ve seen is something to the effect that it will kill "germs: in the vagina, which was a commonly used euphamism for sperm. Again, I’m not saying it was effective or even a good idea-- just that it was used in that fashion.
Right, but remember that the illegality of an item doesn’t mean it’s completely unavailable. (Witness drugs.) I’ve seen packages for them in our museum collection from local pharmacies, indicating that even in Small Town America, they were being sold and used.
I’m not recommending that women use it today, Doc. Women used douching in the past because of lack of other options. They most likely knew the fail-rates but went on the assumption that something was better than nothing.
And, yes, using Lysol as a douche was one of the worst ideas ever concieved by a company. Women got the idea that if a little Lysol would kill “germs” a *lot *of Lysol would kill more. Women were horribly burned by it.
Again, they were operating off the notion that something was better than nothing, and if it reduced their chances of pregnancy even slightly, it was worth the effort.
I’m not saying every woman accepted their use or was comfortable with the notion. I’m just saying that the information was out there if a woman wanted it, and a lot of women did use the devices, even in rural America. The methods may have been faulty, but again, something’s better than nothing.
I have grave doubts that your grandparents didn’t have access to a Sears and Roebuck catalog. If they’d wanted them, they could have ordered them as easily as anyone else, comfortably hiding their intention under the notion of disease prevention or that your granny’s womb needed support with none the wiser.
She also likely had access to “women’s pills”. Even my ultra-conservative hometown newspaper had ads for drugs which were usually labled something like: “Caution: Pregnant Ladies Should Not Take Three of These Pills.” (Dangerous in of themselves, but widely available.)
All I’m saying is that, effective or not, these items were available to women, along with herbal folk methods. Your grandmother may have refused to even consider it-- that’s personal choice. But I can’t imagine that she would have been entirely ignorant of their existance, considering how ads for them were everywhere.