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I often wonder how many more scientists we’d have if we congratulated kids for working hard rather than praising them for being smart. We need to get rid of the myth that science is only accessible to an intellectual elite.
Yes yes yes!
Malcolm Gladwell and Matthew Syed have both written books about this and it’s well known phenomenon in psychology. If you tell people they did well because they’re smart they actually under-perform in future, whereas if you tell them they do well because they worked hard they just get better and better. The myth of talent is really harmful and frustratingly persistent.
hands up everyone who coasted through school on talent then hit a gigantic wall when the talent ran out and the hard work started
This is a huge thing that got talked about in my education/child development classes.
If you compliment kids on working hard and trying things, rather than getting the right answer, you have kids that are more creative and have better self esteem. Death to complimenting intelligence!
appreciate people for the effort the put in and the grit needed to pursue things well!
I was watching my little niece today. She’s seven and the definition of spoiled brat. She knows I don’t take much of it though, and is pretty good when her parents aren’t around. Unfortunately, she’s been taught to respond to the unknown or ‘scary’ with fear instead of curiosity.
So this morning she runs up to me, shrieking about a spider in the basement and wants me to go kill it.
Firstly, there are lots of spiders in the basement. Secondly, I like spiders. They do good things for the environment and cut down on the bugs-I-don’t-like population. Thirdly, I’m hella lazy. My kiddo had just fallen asleep and I wasn’t getting off the couch for anything less than armageddon. A spider wasn’t going to cut it.
So I ask her what kind of spider. When she looks confused, I briefly describe the local wolf spider, jumping spider, and orb weavers. She doesn’t look like she cares, but I say I won’t go down there unless I know what I’m dealing with. She runs off and comes back telling me it’s a wolf spider.
So I ask her how big it is. She fetches a ruler, I show her how to use it, and she runs off. Comes back with her finger on the ruler to show where the spider made it to. You can guess how close she got to the ‘scary spider’.
So I ask her what it looks like. Colors and patterns and whatever. She goes downstairs, comes back and tries to badly explain. Then she borrows my phone to go take a picture. This transitions into a quick lesson on how to take a photo when all she gets is blurriness.
So we end up on the internet after she gets her picture, finding out exactly what kind of spider it is and what it eats and why it’s okay to not kill the spider. She decides to name it Leggy. Then she runs downstairs and proceeds to take pictures of all the other spiders and various bugs she can find.
So I get her a jar. We poke holes in the lid and she carefully collects the best of the bugs, although she’s a bit heartbroken when she can’t find Leggy anymore.
By the time her mother comes to pick her up, she’s got a dozen spiders, a centipede, and a silverfish for pets. All have names, many have been drawn on the paper next to it, along with a plan for how to feed them and keep them alive.
The look on my sister-in-law’s face at the sight of the jar of ‘pets’ will delight me forever. :)
It’s a common story – lots of women enter the workforce during World War II, doing all the jobs normally restricted only to men, before millions had to go off to fight Fascism. Then the war was won, the soldiers came back, the women were forced back out.
But, at least, it was acknowledged, and, at least, some credit was given.
But not at Gibson Guitar. They officially say that they shipped no instruments during World War II at all – not a one. But that’s simply not true. They did – they made and shipped thousands of instruments, with a wartime workforce of women. Some even went with GIs overseas.
Apparently, management decided that people wouldn’t want instruments made by women, so they erased the Kalamazoo Gals from history. When law professor and music journalist John Thomas got a hint there had actually been wartime production, and found out the story, the acoustic department was initially very interested – and then corporate found out he had been digging, and started threatening him for revealing it. It’s fascinating:
I did a little searching to see if this was really true, because, honestly, it really hurt my feelings - I love my old Gibson guitar, and I’ve always said that if, god forbid, I ever had to replace it I would buy another one as much like it as I possibly could, because it has the sweetest sound of any guitar I’ve ever heard, and knowing that they would try to hide the fact that women built their guitars during the war really put a bad taste in my mouth.
I found more stories corroborating what was said above. But I also found out my guitar, which we’d never quite been able to pin down to its exact year but thought was from the late 40s based on my grandpa buying it at a pawn shop when he was in college, as well as on several features of its design… is actually a bit older.
My guitar has that exact logo. Another quote from the above KPLU link:
Sheehan says the proof is in the sound. A 1943 Banner guitar, compared to a modern Collings guitar, has a brighter and sweeter sound, she says, adding the younger guitar, by contrast, has a louder and more resonant voice.
Damned right. Bad taste gone. My Gibson is even more a part of history than I thought before.
It’s a common story – lots of women enter the workforce during World War II, doing all the jobs normally restricted only to men, before millions had to go off to fight Fascism. Then the war was won, the soldiers came back, the women were forced back out.
But, at least, it was acknowledged, and, at least, some credit was given.
But not at Gibson Guitar. They officially say that they shipped no instruments during World War II at all – not a one. But that’s simply not true. They did – they made and shipped thousands of instruments, with a wartime workforce of women. Some even went with GIs overseas.
Apparently, management decided that people wouldn’t want instruments made by women, so they erased the Kalamazoo Gals from history. When law professor and music journalist John Thomas got a hint there had actually been wartime production, and found out the story, the acoustic department was initially very interested – and then corporate found out he had been digging, and started threatening him for revealing it. It’s fascinating:
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
