Things that surprise you about the past

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History is full of social customs that come and go. In this thread, I ask "What surprises you about past social customs when you see movies, or other media from long ago?"
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-That smoking was socially acceptable. I get this feeling that during the 1950s, there was some sort of pro-smoking lobby, akin to how the NRA is for guns. If that's the case, then we'd be seeing toddlers LIGHTING UP!

-Having a woman reach into a man's pocket for money.

Things that surprise me about the past?

- In the 12,013 years of the Human Era, humanity has invented horrendous way to destroy itself as a species over mere ideological and cosmetic differences, yet we have survived this long.

- Over 12,000 years of human evolution from tribes of hunter-gatherers to what we are now, and we still have no permanent presence on the Moon.

- We still rely on a dating system that has no "Year Zero".

- Religion still dictates who lives, who dies, and who gets to be in charge.

What surprises me about past social customs when I see movies, or other media from long ago?

- Slavery was once considered an absolute necessity for economic growth.

- Women and children were once considered the property of their fathers and husbands.

- Conquest by genocide was once considered both right and proper.

- 99% for the movies about the Chivalric Era feature knights and nobility, when in reality 99% of the people of that era lived in abject squalor and poverty.

- The Indigenous peoples of the "New World" were every bit as civilized as the peoples of the "Old World", right up to the time when explosives were invented.

-Answering machines were a rarity in the 1970s.

That Sigmund Freud categorized father's rape of daughters as 'seduction' and this was accepted.


Sylkat

That people in the '70s tended to all have long hair. How did it change so much since then?

That it was once normal to marry a 13 year old girl to a man decades older than her.

That it was once legal for a husband to kill his wife and her lover if he caught them in bed together or in some throw of passion.

When I was growing up (and for much of my life, in fact), if you wanted to speak to someone via telephone, you had to ring a number associated with a building, and hope that the person you wanted to speak to was in that building when you rang. Sometimes, if the person you wanted to speak to wasn't in the building you rang, someone else might tell you that he was in another building, and so you could try ringing the number associated with that building instead.

But if he wasn't in any building at all, he was impossible to reach by telephone.

So right.


Sylkat

Britain's last Victorian, born in the 1800s, has died:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24940663

A tiny personal window into another age, now closed forever.

That humanity NEVER seems to learn from past mistakes.
History often repeats itself, and I had hoped that with each generation there would some form of intellectual evolution. But alas, it isn't taking place.

I remember when smoking was allowed everywhere almost. When I was a kid in the hospital with pneumonia, my mother and the doctor smoked in my room and the other hospital rooms, except for the times I was in an oxygen tent. At the time, they didn't believe smoking was as bad for you as it is, and the main thing about it to most people was that it relaxes you. When the info about cancer and lung damage came out, lots of people didn't believe it, so people continued to smoke. It's normal to me now to not be able to smoke inside in most places in the city, although here in town you can smoke in the smoking areas of the bbq places, etc. I am kind of surprised that the nonsmokers who were bothered by it didn't speak up more, but it was really considered rude and just asking too much to complain about someone's smoking. I guess because it was such a huge part of the culture.

What surprises me about the past is something I read several years back. During the Middle Ages many peasants and working class people would go to bed at dark to save candles and oil for lighting but it was a custom for everyone to wake up at some point around midnight and do certain chores by candle light, and to even eat a meal and get together with friends for an hour or so before going back to bed to sleep until dawn or shortly before. I think that would bother me to have to have two shorter sleeps instead of one longer one, but if that's what I was used to I don't guess I'd think it was too bad. I didn't like being around smoking but that's what I was used to, so it was normal and I didn't think it was all that bad. So, I guess it's all in what you are used to, but that sleeping thing blew my mind.

Ugly names like Minnie, Bertha, and Beulah were once popular about a century ago. I know naming trends were different, but how could people back then not realize how utterly ugly-sounding those names were?

Women in the United States didn't get the right to vote nationwide until 1920.

My hometown was racially segregated when my house was built (early 1950s).

Speaking of segregation, we're less than half a century removed from the Jim Crow era.