The past was not that cute

I was excited when cottagecore became a thing. Maybe my interest in retro clothes and handicrafts would be less embarrassing now!

I still enjoy it. But in spaces focused on old-fashioned vibes, you encounter a lot of people who believe that the past was actually this charming.

Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s Little House on the Prairie books are problematic, and also I will always love them. She wrote about the beauty of family and hard work, but she wrote them because she spent her whole life supporting disabled family members. She and her daughter beautified her “pioneer girl” history to make good books. Her daughter describes the reality:  “It took seven successive years of complete crop failure, with work, weather and sickness that wrecked [my father’s] health permanently, and interest rates of 36 percent on money borrowed to buy food, to dislodge us from that land.”

My own version of this mistake was thinking that people’s personalities were different in the past. I grew up listening to folk music and imagining a past where nice boys would admire a nice quiet girl like me, and I wouldn’t have to figure out dating because everything would just unfold, probably on a May morning. My mother pointed out that a lot of the songs along the lines of “my own true love proved false to me” were about unplanned pregnancies.

I also assumed the bonny lasses in these songs would be wholesome and nice. But were popular girls of the past nicer people than they are now?

Some of my picture came from growing up in the Anglo-American folk dance and music community: it had a lot of aging hippies with graduate degrees. So I came away imagining a past with a lot of the kind of people who become engineers and English teachers. A more accurate picture would have been “Imagine the high school in a small town where the same few dozen kids form your entire group of peers and potential partners.”

Bookish girls like Belle didn’t really go to live in enchanted castles with huge libraries. They stayed in villages where everyone thought they were weird and their best option was Gaston.

Maybe my favorite podcast episode ever is Rachel Laudan on food history: “I did have the extraordinary good fortune to grow up eating what I think the romantic movement dreams of. We had milk fresh from the cow; I never had pasteurized milk until I went to school. We had fish from the river, pheasant from the farm. The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden. So, I do romanticize—some of that because the taste was often extraordinary. And then I tweak myself and I say, ‘Look, Rachel, your mother spent all day, every day gardening or cooking.’ Essentially. As well as doing other chores. And she said to you, ‘Rachel, it’s servitude. I want you to have a life I didn’t have.’ “

I love living in a time and place where we get to choose aesthetics. I have bread rising in my kitchen right now, and I’m looking forward to baking it in an electric oven that doesn’t require me stacking wood or putting smoke into my house.

So I’ll continue to enjoy retro vibes, and draw on the past for lessons on how to be a human. (For example, making music together is one of life’s great experiences, and it’s a mistake to entirely substitute recorded music for that.) But I’ll enjoy doing so with indoor plumbing, dental care, and a desk job.