Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
I Back 100 yrs ago it was normal for there to be seperate water fountains, restrooms, etc. depending on if a person was white or black for example. Today we find the idea to be wrong, but back then it was the norm. Caucasian people probably often didn't
think about it and black people had to put up with it. It's just the way the world was back then. Likewise women normally worked within the home and it was a scandal if a woman did make her own way in the world. Attitudes changed.
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Today "we" find the idea to be wrong - most of us anyway. But that doesn't mean that everyone found the idea to be right and "just the way things are" 100 years ago. Racism and sexism has existed for a very long time, but so has resistance to it. The civil rights and feminist movements didn't spring from a void in the mid twentieth century.
I expect to find at least some characters behaving in an authentically racist and sexist way in books written long ago (as I expect to find them, at least some of the time, in modern realistic fiction) - but when an author makes their own vicious racism or sexism clear in their writing, I definitely find it offputting.