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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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"Oh we're gonna have a family for sure, just not yet because we're waiting on the right economic conditions / career to come along / degree to finish." etc.

That is what I was griping about; the suggestions that "don't let women go on to college, just get them married out of high school". And who will they marry? Because if you want a 19 year old wife and mother who does not work outside the home, then the man being the breadwinner is going to have to be older, as in his thirties. So young men will still be out of luck on the dating/marriage front. They'll be going to college to get the good jobs to be able to afford to marry and set up a household, and in the meantime they will date - who?

This is just as ridiculous as the marriage bar put on young men by places like the Indian Civil Service (in the time of the Raj) where you weren't permitted to marry without permission, and that could take years as your career advanced. So of course the men took up with native mistresses. What will the equivalent be for the world of young wives and mothers? The double standard of whores.

Early marriage was seen as an impediment to a young man’s career and marriage was forbidden in the ICS before the age of thirty and made very difficult in the Indian Army. A marriage allowance was not paid until an Indian Army officer was twenty-six, and it was customary to seek the Colonel’s permission to marry. He could refuse, and mostly did, until the young officer had achieved the rank of Captain. In The Girl from Cobb Street an angry Gerald recites to Daisy the military’s informal rule: subalterns cannot marry, captains may marry, majors should marry, colonels must marry.

Kipling has an entire story around this very topic:

It was in 1858 that the British government disbanded the East India Company (see The British in India) and the Raj became a discernible entity, with the rigid forms and regulations that are familiar to us today. Clear rules came into being regarding marriage for British men serving in India, whether they were military personnel or worked for the Indian Civil Service. Marriage to an Indian became taboo and marriage to Anglo-Indians heavily frowned upon. The older Anglo-Indian families were the product of high status Europeans marrying similar status Indians, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lower class Europeans began to marry women from the bazaar and Anglo-Indians came to be seen as people you did not mix with if you were white. Anglo-Indian girls were generally lovely, beautifully made up and stunningly dressed. They made English girls look positively frumpish. And they were keen to marry into the British establishment. But the higher you went in that establishment, the more there was prejudice against them. They were welcome in the Other Ranks’ Mess but not in the Officers’. From the other side of the fence, Indians looked down on them because they were neither one thing nor another.

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