"Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Sex Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners" by Therese Oneill
The book Therese Oneill is sustained in the respectable genre of horror stories about the horrors of life in former times and tells mainly about the physical, physiological aspect of the life of a woman in the XIX century. Moving on from all sorts of tricks designed to give a woman attractiveness in the eyes of the opposite sex, in the direction of domestic marriage, Oneill draws in broad strokes a picture of the plight of a woman in an era that many consider refined and gallant. However, the drama of what she writes about is partly concealed by the light and charming tone of the story: all sorts of horrors are interspersed by Oneill with jokes and ingenious parallels with today, designed to convince the reader of the incomparable superiority of her way of life over that which accidents the unfortunate Victorians.
What is so terrible in the life of a nineteenth century woman? First of all, of course, terribly uncomfortable clothing and a complete lack of hygiene. Women practically did not wash (head washing was recommended on average once a month, and warm baths were considered overkill and the right way to licentiousness), and their clothes - minus the undershirts - did not assume washing and at the same time were worn for years. In the multi-layered luxurious outfits that we admire in the portraits, it was simultaneously suffocatingly hot and terribly cold, because right up to the beginning of the twentieth century the women's trouser legs were not sewn, that is, quite simply a hundred years ago, women in any weather and all days of the month went without panties. In addition, of course, women smelled, and the heavy odors of an unwashed body had to be muffled by no less heavy perfume scents.
Self-care was virtually inaccessible, cosmetics were severely reproached by society (and rightly so, the best whitewash of that time was made on the basis of deadly lead), and the best way to preserve the blooming youth of the skin was considered raw meat - it was recommended to be tied to a person for the night.
Surprisingly, with such initial data women still managed to find companions of life. However, according to Oneill, from this point on, in fact, from the first wedding night, during which the bashful bride had to depict an unconscious log as much as possible, and real women's sufferings began, in comparison with which raw meat on her face could seem like a holiday. Infinite birth of children (of whom barely a third survived), adultery rates, endless household chores, lack of qualified medical care and socially approved tyranny from her husband serve only as a prelude to the inevitable result - a lonely old age, illness and monstrously early our death standards.
The book Oneill really causes at first a shock, and after it - a surge of keenest gratitude for the comfort and freedom that women enjoy today. However, if "Unmentionable" is not the first historical book you read, you can easily expose its main — and in essence the only — flaw. The author with a naive progressism believes (well, or pretends to believe) that the amount of convenience is directly translated into the amount of happiness, and ignores the happy ability of the human brain to perceive many aspects of everyday life uncritically as granted. In other words, showing how unhappy were the women of the Victorian era compared to their well-groomed, clean and independent great-great-granddaughters, Oneill makes a typical mistake of a novice historian, habitually measuring the past with a single standard of today and self-satisfied sigh of "bestiality" and "atrocity" that It seems to him in the past.