Love and desire in the penny press 1830-1870

I'm really glad newspapers are completely different now than they were in the 1800s. I would not have survived in such a vicious literary environment. I was captivated by this presentation because it's still relevant, just to a lesser degree. Newspapers and other forms of news still enforce social standards and norms and play on the emotions of viewers but in a less invasive manner.

The newspaper had a way of altering people’s behavior by publishing embarrassing personal information about peoples’ love lives, true or not. This reinforced social standards in gender roles because those who chose to ignore the standards were the subject of gossip throughout the community.

The fact that divorce and elopement were found in the headlines of newspapers so much more than murder and crime seems a tad past invasive. I can understand that it was against social norms at the time but clearly people were more wrapped up in other peoples’ lives than they had interests in the latest murder story. I feel bad for a generation of people who had nothing better to do than to gossip about who got divorced. I know it’s popular to list engagements and weddings in the newspapers even today but you shouldn’t be required to display your personal trials and tribulations all over the town newspaper for everyone to pick apart.

By publishing about the weddings, newspapers put pressure on women to get married, thus enforcing the social norm. There’s a piece of me that almost wishes that newspapers still made a big deal out of weddings but only for the people who put their information in. because of the marriage rate has been decreasing, I think that reinforcing that tradition is kind of key to enticing people to get married and thus keeping society in position to grow in a healthy way.

I guess the biggest takeaway (to me it was big at least) was that while the whole world has changed since the 1870s, human nature has not changed. We still get divorced, married, and eloped and we still gossip about it. We still fall in love and we still think we’re the only person to who has ever existed who ever felt that way. It’s nice to see that we have progressed socially in a way that, as a woman, makes life better today, but it’s amazing how inhumanely women were treated with respect to abandonment and those unfortunate woman who couldn’t get married.