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Thank you We sneak here's a fun surprise It turns

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out that women existed during the gilded age two and

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then we're all sitting around knitting and gossiping about dancing

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with the stars More and more they were trying to

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make their voices heard on serious political and social issues

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because apparently the their people who have real historical value

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or something Yeah women who knew but here's an even

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crazier surprised gender history isn't on ly about things women

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have done it's also about how our collective ideas about

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gender have mutated over time like take women's looks for

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example please these days the general idea is that women

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should be one of a kind of skinny which of

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course has caused all kinds of eating disorders and other

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issues anorexia bulimia and every awful thing in between But

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back in the early to mid twentieth century women were

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worried about being too skinny Seriously it's true we're not

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kidding Women even bought special padding to make themselves look

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bigger We probably would have just used it as an

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excuse to go eat more ben and jerry's but separate

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issue well the point is that neither men nor women

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were necessarily responsible for this gradual shift in the ideal

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of feminine beauty It took a complex shift in perception

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that crossed both genders and this complex shift has affected

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more than perceptions of women's looks Otherwise it wouldn't be

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all that complex what it ideas of women's entire place

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in society has changed In the nineteen forties women were

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supposed to be stay at home moms who baked perfect

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cakes or perfect makeup and basically acted like the women

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in mad men but happy yeah today's women have more

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options men's roles and expectations have changed a lot too

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what's interesting is that a lot of movement to change

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men's role in society has been a reaction to something

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women were doing Why were american men around nineteen hundred

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told that they were a bunch of mama's boys who

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needed it Crunch heads and football games than wrestle bears

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Well partly because american women had been asserting themselves and

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taking a leading role in society This made the dudes

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in power sweat because if women were powerful well then

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men couldn't be at least that's how the reasoning went

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they figured one sex has to be the leader and

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the other has to be the follower Big teddy roosevelt

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got in on this idea He liked to go on

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and on about how men needed to get strenuous because

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women have been getting pretty strenuous themselves in the eighteen

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seventies through about the nineteen hundreds and by straining us

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we don't mean they were brushing up on their dead

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left What exactly were these strenuous sisters doing well after

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the civil war when black men were given the right

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to vote women pushed harder than ever before to get

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suffers a voting rights They gave speeches wrote editorial staged

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a protest march held prayer meetings and generally work themselves

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ragged Yes that's Why we call it suffrage while american

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women were not given the right to vote in all

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local and national elections until nineteen twenty between eighteen seventeen

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nineteen twenty many states allowed women to vote in local

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elections and this freak some men out So they cooked

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up the idea of separate spheres in the maternal commonwealth

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Both of these ideas proved that just because of words

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sounds fancy doesn't mean it's right The idea was that

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men and women naturally had different abilities God meant them

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To be separate and that god naturally gave men the

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ability to have power education wealth intelligence and independence God's

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gift to women Well the ability to have children and

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take care of men who weigh about women spend a

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lot of time looking for the gift receipt there Well

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men fighting against women's right to vote said women contributed

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to politics by raising you guessed it boys who would

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someday vote and that was the maternal commonweal Women have

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children so the nation can grow and that's what women

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are supposed to dio at their political rule Society would

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blow up in an explosion of death star proportions if

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ladies didn't stay in their women's sphere It's A shame

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that women sphere wasn't one of those plastic bubbles We

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can roll around it Make history of gender issues in 00:03:57.58 --> [endTime] america a whole lot more fun

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