Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course
European History. So, we’ve come a long way: Electric powered
street cars, gas lighting of urban avenues, crowded railway hubs, vast outdoor cafés,
and workers in their Sunday best strolling through parks and along broad new boulevards—all
of this signaled the arrival of modern life in European cities. And those cities swelled because of massive
internal migration from rural areas to capitals such as Berlin, which grew to over four million
people by the end of the 19th century. Today we’re covering the leap to modern
life and what exactly “modern life” meant--. and as we’ve seen so many times in our study
of history, what it meant depends upon perspective, both for those living in 19th century Europe
and for those of us today looking back on it today
[Intro] In 1885 German engineer Karl Benz invented
an internal combustion engine; six years later, French manufacturer Armand Peugeot produced
a functioning automobile, bringing further speed to everyday life in cities. Initially doctors and their far-flung patients
were the people who benefited most from these new cars, while bicycles gave ordinary people
a new-found sense of freedom and adventure, and also an opportunity to break their wrists. And alongside revolutions in transportation
and lighting and many other, there was also a chemical revolution taking place around
1900, which led to synthetic drugs. Like, German pharmaceutical company Bayer
produced the first aspirin to help alleviate pain, did the globe just open? GLOBE It says right here on this bottle of Bayer
aspirin, #NOTSPON, “The Wonder Drug.” And it really is! So, before aspirin, pain was treated primarily
with opioids like morphine and codeine. But aspirin differed from opioids in many
important ways. For one thing it wasn’t addictive, but also,
it reduced fevers and inflammation. But what’s most amazing about aspirin is
that even though it was one of the first synthetic drugs, it’s still super useful. It is an effective pain reliever even 120
years later. OK, let’s turn our attention to the big
trends of early 20th century Europe. So, across Europe, populations continued to
grow despite the emigration to distant continents that we talked about last time, but populations
weren’t going up because people were having more babies. In fact, the opposite was true. Europe experienced a “birth control revolution”
between 1880 and 1930. With very few regional exceptions, in that
fifty-year period fertility rates dropped some fifty percent because knowledge of birth
control expanded thanks to a few occurrences: better understanding of women’s ovulatory
cycles, the vulcanization of rubber used in condoms, and the invention of the cervical
cap or diaphragm. But population rose due to lower child mortality
and increased longevity. Breakthroughs like pasteurization and greater
understanding of germs were just two scientific findings that helped extend life. There was also better sanitation, such as
improved sewage systems, which made people less likely to die of diseases like cholera,
which had ravaged European cities repeatedly in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But still, this decline in fertility gave
politicians an issue that they could use to get votes: women, they claimed, were conducting
a birth strike which would lead to the decline in the national strength. It was true that women’s lives were changing,
as a “modern woman” began forging her own way outside the confines of the household. Working women had already been laboring long
hours for low wages, but now middle-class women, supposedly too fragile and ignorant
of the world to work, began to take jobs. As industry, communications, marketing, and
needed skills became more complex, women took jobs in the new service sector. They became secretaries, sales clerks, telephone
and telegraph operators, teachers and nurses. And they had the skills necessary to do these
jobs thanks to the spreading system of public schools, which taught literacy and basic mathematics. If you wanna look for a single cause of why
life is better today than it was 50 or 200 or 500 years or 800 years ago….Public schools! But despite gains in education and employment,
women were employed in the service sector because they could be paid less since they
were seen as inferior and not as skilled as men. Let’s go to the Thought Bubble. 1. Obviously the reputation women had for being
inferior and less skilled was false. 2. For instance, women entered universities in
the sciences and math -- which were open to them in part 3. because at the time they were less prestigious
and lucrative than the Latin- and Greek-based humanities dominated by men. 4. Polish-born Marie Sklodowska-Curie was one
of these new, scientific women, 5. although the French Academy of Science would
not grant her membership, 6. even after she’d won two Nobel Prizes-- 7. one for physics and a second in chemistry,
making her the first person to win the prize in different fields. 8. It was widely believed that because she was
a woman, her husband Pierre must have done the work for her. 9. But for the record, Pierre Curie had been
dead for five years when Marie won her second Nobel. 10. She coined the term “radioactivity” and
discovered 11. two new chemical elements, Polonium and
Radium. 12. She also helped pioneer radiation treatment
for cancer 13. before dying due to the high exposure
to radiation she experienced through her research. 14. So called “Modern” women like Curie challenged
the established belief in women’s incompetence and professional inferiority, 15. although the myth prevailed; 16. in fact, it remains powerful today, 17. moreso in the United States than in most other
wealthy countries, 18. as measured by UN and OECD statistics. Thanks Thought Bubble. So changes in sexuality accompanied the rise
of modern women. And this led to massive scandals and the creation
of a new political tool, whereby politicians sought support by haranguing the mostly male
electorate about sin and the purportedly declining morals of the age, as exemplified by the rise
of women. And the fact that the male electorate was
growing was another sign of modern life, indicating the development of so-called mass society,
which broadened the number of people who had power and somewhat diluted the power of elites. Inventions like cheaper newsprint also facilitated
mass society, because more people had access to more information. But then as now, the amount of information
available was increasing, but not always the quality of that information. Also, then as now, sex scandals were big news. Both true and fabricated stories abounded. For example, successful author Oscar Wilde
was imprisoned and widely condemned because of his relationship with a young man. In members of the German Kaiser’s entourage,
meanwhile, high-ranking generals and other aristocrats were found to be regularly cross-dressing
and engaging in male-male relationships. The press dramatized that scandal so much
that royal publicists had to reassure the German public that the Kaiser himself had
a healthy family life--code at the time for heterosexuality. In 1902, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, owner of
the famed arms manufacturer, committed suicide when the press revealed his relationships
with young Italian men. And Politicians spoke of a crisis of male
virility, much of it caused by “new women.” In short, there’s nothing Innovative about
harkening back to an age of “traditional values” that never actually existed. It was true that women had been making demands
for change through the nineteenth century. They wanted legal ownership of their wages
and other property and access to higher education. (Increasingly young women could enter universities
and even rank higher than men in exams, but places like Oxford and Cambridge would not
grant them degrees. Cambridge did not until after World War II). Women also wanted the right to divorce and
to have custody of their children after divorce (by law, custody of children went to the father,
because children were considered his “property”). By the early twentieth century, feminist movements
had developed across the globe and included and extremely diverse group of activists. In Europe, some organizations had begun with
interest in the abolition of slavery, while others had greater concern for the situation
of women working in factories, or other low-wage conditions, including their health, access
to good jobs, and personal safety. Many pro-women advocates were also in favor
of temperance, given the prevalence of domestic abuse that so often accompanied drunkenness. Other groups lobbied to end the laws denying
prostitutes their civil rights: in many countries from Britain and France to Austria-Hungary,
police could and did arrest and incarcerate women found on the street and then subject
them to gynecological examinations on the grounds that they might be prostitutes. Austrian activist Marianne Hainisch defined
feminism broadly, as “the call of one half of humanity for its civil rights,” But others
saw feminism’s goal as uplifting humanity as a whole. Because it was a diverse movement without
one single narrative. So, feminists, literally hundreds of thousands
of them by the end of the nineteenth century, were seeking to address a broad range of issues--which
makes sense of course because women, depending on class and race and experience and profession,
were oppressed in a broad range of ways. Some view the feminist movement as an entirely
middle-class project that was unconcerned with working women. But in fact, working women such as those from
the textile mills in northern England also campaigned as feminists; other working women
wanted unions to be more active in supporting women, while others wanted the Social Democratic
parties to do more for them. But although women did operate within labor
movements, union men were generally opposed to women having jobs in industry because their
presence would drag down wages. Social Democratic parties at the time usually
took the Marxist position that middle-class feminists were the enemy of working women,
and that the eventual overthrow of the industrial owners by working class people would lead
to the liberation of women alongside the liberation of everyone else. Marxists argued that the private property
upon which capitalism was based necessarily led to the oppression and regulation of women,
so once capitalism had been destroyed, freedom would naturally follow. Gradually, feminist activists did begin to
achieve gains under laws throughout much of Europe, but one aspect of citizenship eluded
them: The right to vote. In England, philosopher John Stuart Mill,
a classical liberal interested in principles of personal freedom, spoke in Parliament on
behalf of women’s suffrage as early as 1866, but that initiative went nowhere, and across
Europe other efforts to gain the vote were thwarted as well. Mill went on to publish On the Subjection
of Women in 1869, which drew on the ideas of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill and became
one of the most translated books of its day. But again, the actual vote for women was very
slow in coming. In 1897, New Zealand granted women’s suffrage. In 1902, Australia did, and in 1906, Finland
became the first European country where women could vote. Norway followed in 1913. And I know i t’s easy to forget just how
recently that was, but for context, both of my grandmothers were born before women who
didn’t own property could vote in Great Britain. In Britain, a group of women led by Emmeline
Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Cristabel decided to take forceful action. In 1903, they founded the Women’s Social
and Political Union. It sponsored mass mobilization in which thousands
of women paraded through the streets. The reaction was brutal as men attacked the
marchers, grabbing and twisting their breasts and generally assaulting them. Other Feminists’ non-violent protests included
chaining themselves to the gates of Parliament and refusing to eat when imprisoned for their
actions. Authorities used the brutal tactic of force-feeding
those on hunger strikes. Alongside non-violent activities, feminists
also blew up mailboxes, slashed works of art in galleries and museums, and broke store
windows with hammers—all of this because for men “it’s only property they love.” In 1913, militant suffragist Emily Wilding
Davison cast herself in front of the king’s horse at a horse race and was killed. And so a lot of what we think of as contemporary
protest tactics have their roots in feminist movements. Misogynists struck back against these protests. In Austria men declared that feminists had
been corrupted by “crude dark men of the lower races”—combining racism with misogyny,
which has long been a tactic of dehumanization. Feminists were also portrayed oversexed, and
unable to appreciate the “refined sexuality” of the “heroic [white] races.” These people argued that for gender order
and thus political stability to be maintained, a man needed a woman “who looks up to his
intellectual superiority” and “wishes to do nothing but subordinate herself.” Women’s hands, the prime minister of Italy
said in the 1890s, were not meant for voting but for kissing. So OK, let’s go back to that question we
asked at the beginning. How do we characterize the term “modern
life”? Some maintain that technology is the key ingredient,
while others say there have been technological advances across the millennia. Some point to urbanization, or changes in
the role of women, or the control over reproduction that appeared across Europe by 1900 I revealed my own bias in this episode by
talking about the modern practice of public funding for education. Still others note that the idea of “modern”
has been used across the centuries: the Roman historian Tacitus, born in the first century
BCE was happy to have lived “in modern times.” And so perhaps “modern” is just a term
to positively compare one’s own times to other places and periods in history. In that sense, to call one’s society “modern”
was mostly propaganda. All of that leaves me wondering what makes
our contemporary world feel modern, and to what extent that modernity is a judgement
on ourselves and others. What does modern mean to you? And who is included in that definition of
modern, and who is excluded by it? Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time.
