“You may look like a boy and behave like a boy, but you’re a girl all the same. And like it or not, girls have got to be taken care of.”
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That was bossy boots Julian telling tomboy George exactly where her autonomy ends.
It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it?
I’m not here to attack your childhood memories of the adventures of the Famous Five, but it can be a bit unsettling to revisit them.
To us, Enid Blyton’s books seem sexist and racist, yet they still exert a powerful pull of nostalgia over us.
Why is it that we love these characters, however much we dislike their attitudes to women or gypsies?
Maybe, it’s because we recognise that the past is a different country?
We see that Julian existed in a context where his culture told him that men protected, and that women should be passive protectees.
We take stories like the Famous Five on their own terms. We recognise that the past was different, and that people thought and acted in ways that are almost incomprehensible to us.
Likewise, the job of a historian is not to make judgements. Instead, it is to step into the past, to try to understand it on its own terms.
The best history recognises that we’re often too caught up in the assumptions of the present to see how different the past was.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t condemn decisions, or events or cultures in the past, but that’s not the job of a historian.
A historian’s job is to hold up a light to the murky world of the past, to try and understand the why.
Ultimately, good history is a mirror that challenges our assumptions, to make us realise how morally murky our own world is.
In this sense, the guilt or innocence of the past lies in the past. We should not dwell on our ancestors’ sins or virtues, but rather learn from their society as a contrast to our own.
For this reason, the Braidwood Times supports the work of local historians such as Peter Smith, in helping us further understand ourselves and our past.
Historians should have the freedom to explore the past and draw their own conclusions, without the threat of legal action lying over their heads.