UKC

Would you like to have lived at the same time as Michelangelo… or Da Vinci … or Van Gogh … or Picasso… or perhaps Hockney?

Well for me… it would have been just like growing up listening to Bob Dylan… I can distinctly remember the occasion. I was doing A level Art and someone appeared with the Freewheelin' album. Nothing has been the same since.

This says it all... youtube.com/watch?v=AgqGUBP3Cx0&

But we do live in the same time as Hockney!

...in other words, in the present time.

I sometimes get asked if I'd like to have lived in the Roman period (being a Roman historian). The answer is simple. No. I'm a woman. There is no period in the past that I'd like to have lived in!

Visiting the past, Time Machine style, different.

That has to be right. Just possibly some unusual female lives in times gone by would have been tolerable, but vanishingly few.

I was taken by multidimensional beings last night. 572 years in your future I was feeling nostalgic so I came back again tonight. It's still shite here.

No way would I want to have lived earlier. If, say, I‘d lived around 1820, there’s no way I could have heard even a tenth of Beethovens music, and in 1500 I‘d probably never even have heard of Michaelangelo. Add to that plague, constant wars, religious oppression, lice and syphilis, no anaesthetics or vaccinations, massive child mortality etc … nope!

PS if I had to: Paris in 1920. But I‘d probably have to had have lost loved ones in WW1, and the horrors of the Nazi era would have been waiting just round the corner.

PPS: or even better: rich, leisured,and very fit, healthy and lucky in the Alps from 1860 onwards

I'll just swap to being a boomer I think, as much as it is easier to romanticise other time periods. Buy a house for £3* and still get current day technology? I'll take it thanks.

And before anyone says 'interest rates blah blah' go and look at annual salary vs housing costs. 

I'm sure there have been whole societies where life would have been better than tolerable for most women (as opposed to just the occasional pirate queen), at least before the missionaries arrived.  Though probably not what British historians and anthropologists not so long ago would have described as "civilisation", so if you'd have wanted to be a scholar, a scientist or a famous author (writing under her own name) you'd be out of luck for sure.

Pre-17th Century St Kilda maybe?  (Other, more tropical, island paradises are available.)

I believe society there was organised more or less along matriarchal lines, and here's what a rare visitor from Skye wrote on returning from a trip there in 1690:

“The inhabitants of St Kilda, are much happier than the generality of mankind, as being almost the only people in the world who feel the sweetness of true liberty, simplicity, mutual love and cordial friendship, free from solicitous cares, and anxious covetousness; and the consequences that attend them.”

Sounds pretty good to me.  Though childbirth would still have been rather dangerous by modern Western standards, so it's much easier for me to romanticise it from a male perspective no doubt.

Yes, hard to imagine what it must have been like to look on helplessly with fascism on the rise all over the place and an outright would-be dictator spewing lies, baseless conspiracy theories and propaganda talking about purging the 'enemy within' who are 'poisoning the lifeblood of the country' almost on the brink of achieving absolute power over a large, powerful industrial nation.  Must have been absolutely terrifying.

Wow that makes St Kilda sound nice ...  but still cold and wet! And the likelihood of my surviving to my current age (62) would have been slim, not least as you say because of childbirth.

Yes, it would be fascinating to be able to witness significant people or events of the past if only to get a better informed opinion. Then again, all the archaeologists and historians might be having to get their CVs dusted off? I'm reminded of a science fiction short story I read in my youth which I think involved people of the future time travelling back to whatever event took their fancy. One particular popular event was the crucifixion of Jesus where it turned out almost the whole crowd there were time travelling tourists. Jesus would have been let off by Pilate if it hadn't been for the crowd's behaviour. I've often thought Bonnie Prince Charlie would have been a fascinating person to meet (before he failed and became an old drunk). His march down towards London is one of those 'what if' pivot points that could have potentially changed Britain in a major way if it had succeeded. 

Well, let's not get too misty-eyed. The same author noted that:

"Some thirteen years ago the leprosy broke out among them, and some of their number died by it; there are two families at present labouring under this disease. The symptoms of it are, their feet begin to fail, their appetite declines, their faces become too red, and break out in pimples, they get a hoarseness, and their hair falls off from their heads, the crown of it exculcerates and blisters, and lastly, their beards grow thinner than ordinary.

"This disease may in a large measure be ascribed to their gross feeding, and that on those fat fowls, as the fulmar and the solan geese; the latter of which they keep for the space of a whole year, without salt or pepper to preserve them; these they eat roasted or boiled."

Objectively, I expect I might have been born at just about the perfect time. It looks like I might end up having lived my life during a relatively peaceful era, benefitting from modern healthcare, general abundance and cheap travel before the worst of climate change with its attendant destabilisation really kicks in. A generation or two earlier or later and things might gave been very different. Obviously being born in the right place as well as the right time is also important though.

Yeah, time travelling (if it existed, or indeed exists) requires its own absolute prime directive. 

tbh I don't mind having a piece-meal past; it's often very frustrating (if only we had all those books of Livy or Tacitus!), but otoh it makes it a fun and interesting job to try to piece together a jigsaw missing so many of the pieces, and you can use your imagination more than in modern history

Good point.  I'd need to take a lifetime supply of thyroxine or it would be a short life mostly spent trying to figure out how to synthesise it from seaweed.

You'd just need to make friends with a butcher and collect pig thyroid glands to dry out yourself. Dose titration would be a bit of a pain though!

Aristotle is the one figure from history I would really love to meet. In and around 350BCE I'd also get to meet Plato and Alexander the Great.

I'd also like to see Earth 10,000 CE just to see what we've done.

Of course if we were talking climbing, just imagine getting on all those routes before Joe Brown or even before Colin Kirkus showed up. But I wouldn't be rushing to put up Whillans' routes!

I've always thought it would have been good to have been active during he golden age of alpinism.

Perhaps a better question is - would you still be alive if you'd been born before modern healthcare?

Lets ignore accidents - my appendix would have killed me at 30, that's assuming that without antibiotics I'd survived the bronchitis I had as a child.

The story is Let's Go to Golgotha! by Garry Kilworth. Well worth a read.

Polynesians seemed to have had a pretty good life, until the f****wit christians turned up. 

I'm with the other women on here, I wouldn't want to have to live in any previous age. I am very grateful for contraception and the ability to work and live my life how I want. I think we often forget quite how privileged we are now compared to previous generations.

Would be really interested to have seen North American before the white man turned up and screwed the gaff. But, as I'm also a white man, I'd know my presence would mean doom for everything I was looking at. 

I wouldn't be tempted to think the original inhabitants of North America were living in a kind of Eden. The tribes could be just as brutal and destructive towards one another as the Europeans were to them. One of the ploys that Cortez used to destroy the Aztecs was to ally himself with their neighbours the Tlaxcala who'd been subjugated by them. They were delighted to put the boot in to their overlords. Much later the USA took advantage of the enmity between tribes such as the Sioux and the Crow to expand westward.

Yes I do realise that the people there were often just as bad as they were anywhere. Still would have been interesting to see just what things were actually like. 

What makes you think male lives would have been more tolerable except among the wealthy classes?

Men who were sent into WWI to die in their millions without having had the vote.  Or  sent down the mines almost as soon as they reached their teens as my grandfather was, having to walk to work at that age for nearly 8 miles before and after work?  His brothers were all sent to war and only one came back severely injured by artillery fire.

Men transported at the whim of the rich classes for poaching to feed their families?

The rose tinted feminist view of how men of the working classes have been treated through the ages disgusts me

The likes of the IDF have killed others because they could all through history

I guess this is true - unless you were born into a privileged place in society. If so, you did have the chance to pursue your interests in a similar way to today. For example, in no particular order:

Ada Lovelace
Amelia Earhart
Rosalind Franklin

On a more general level, you see lots of material on how brutal life was in the past - murder death kill, etc. I'm never sure how accurate that was for the vast majority of humans.

Who said anything about working class men having an easy life? Several women commented on the particular reasons they wouldn't want to live in history. I didn't see any of them say, or even imply, that men didn't also suffer.

Some atrocious shit has gone on in the past and by all accounts IS GOING ON now! North Koreans being fed into the meat-grinder that is the war in Ukraine, for example, although to my delight I read that eighteen of them disserted; I hope they found safety. Then there's the utter horror-show in the Middle East. So you're correct; it's not time, so much as place; where the majority of the population of planet Earth seem blessed with meaningful lives, on the fringes lies utter desperation and there's a common denominator in these crisis zones. Unhinged leadership - A rogues gallery of venal paranoid despots. In fact, I would suggest that instead of romanticising (or demonising) the past, that we collectively focus on the present instead and make life as difficult as possible for these monsters whilst remaining mindful of the millions of innocents caught up in their chaos.

You're disgusted by something you literally just made up.

Even being born into the privileged class as a woman didn't exclude you from having to bear children. 

For me, contraception is a wonder of our age for which I am eternally grateful. Yes, I could have been incredibly lucky and either been infertile or one of the very very few who escaped being married off, but the chances were vanishingly small. 

What really did for these indigenous peoples was European coughs & colds. Similar to us going on the Indian subcontinent today, but we have antibiotics and vaccines. Another advantage to being around today.

The golden age of aviation, probably.

Although there's a load of things it would have been nice to have been the discoverer/inventor of.

I would have lasted about 3 days from birth without modern medicine!

Providing I were in the same sort of family (privilege klaxon!), I would like to have been around perhaps 5-10 years earlier.  That way I would still enjoy the social advances of the 60s and 70s and of course the music, but had a longer time in that golden age of hill bashing when there were no red line routes nor paths over much of the place and would have been at a less sensitive age when She Who Shall Not Be Named  came around.  Starting my working life at the normal time, not at 27 would have been handy as would the cheap house.

Having said that,  I only just missed the window so did get: social advances, late 1970s music, cheapish housing, supported tertiary education, experience of the world with less than half the people in it, and most important my life saved on several occasions by modern medical advances. 

Moving the scope out further - I dodged wars!   I think I did OK and try to remember my temporal privilege at all times.

I think I read somewhere that before around 150 years ago, the vast majority of people in Europe would have been solely pre-occupied with avoiding starving.  Not sure how accurate but when people think about the good old days, likely they were only good if you were rich.

Obviously a lot of people in the world are still living like this...

I haven't read all of the posts but whilst it an interesting question, the conclusion probably as always, is live completely in the present, whenever that is, if you want to enjoy your one and only life.

I agree in principle but when the present is stuck at home with a back injury it's sometimes quite nice to think back to past glories and make exciting plans for the future.

For explaining how much better things have got for most people in the world and clearing up misconceptions about this I cannot recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling too highly:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Factfulness-Reasons-Wrong-Things-Better/dp/1473637...

I think the fact that stuck in my mind is that present day living standards in Egypt are comparable to Sweden in the 1950's (I think I've got that right!).

There was a surprisingly interesting episode of "The Rest is History" about beards, and that one of the reasons why the clean shaven look is a rather modern phenomenon is that until the advent of antibiotics, cutting yourself shaving could be potentially lethal.

Even going back to the late 20th century there are things that seem unbelievable in retrospect - smoking sections on planes! To say nothing of the social aspect of being anything other than straight, white, male, and middle class.

The only reason to go back for me would.be to see the natural world before 1800s and industrialisation,  population explosion, large scale pollution etc. To see a flock of passenger pigeons 300 miles long and a mile wide!!

Potentially, but never under-estimate the power of fashion. Beards came and went in fashion-terms in the Roman period.

Under-estimating fashion is the only reason I can imagine that flares have come back into fashion several times this century. WHY??!! 

I was born in 1960 and would choose the same again. All the bands I saw at the peak of their careers, no computers mobile phones or internet. Relatively quiet crags. 

Wouldn’t you rather be the silent generation?

Er, steady on friend. The question I was answering was whether there was ANY era in which I would like to have lived, and my answer is none because as a woman I would, until just a few of generations ago, have had no vote, an inferior education if any, likely no career prospects, and a high chance of dying in childbirth.

These are specific problems for women at almost all times in the past, hence the answer to the question.

Some but not all those things have also been problems for many men, at many times. Plus men have had the additional problem (which women have not have) of being called up to fight. So there are many many male lives that would have been intolerable for other, perhaps worse, reasons. 

But that wasn't denied in either the question or my answer.

So, is there an historical period at which I would have liked to have lived if I coud have a choice of gender? Gosh too complicated too many choices ... may come back later with that.

Lizzie

Nah, too much rationing as a kid and just the right age to be scammed by phone callers offering to help with the issue with my Microsoft Windows 

8 miles? They had it good, when I were a youth (1990s) we had to walk 13 miles (300m) just to get t' school through knee high snow (perfectly clement weather). And it were uphill (actually downhill, but I guess up to get home)

It wasn't coughs and colds, it was smallpox. 

You are literally being disgusted by something you've made up, what feminists talk about, is how much fewer rights women had than they do now, and it (most often) happens to have been rights hard won to become on more of a level pegging with men. 

Attitudes on domestic violence back in the 50's are clear in Dixon Of Dock Green, where it's treated as a private matter behind closed doors, rather an infringement on a woman's right to not have it happen, there's many things like this one can find in the 20th and 19th centuries, and before.

You need to adjust the prism through which you view what feminists say I reckon, them speaking on what fewer rights they had than men, doesn't mean they're suggesting that working class men had an easy life.