I am currently double majoring in History and Classics-Greek Civilization and a common question that I get asked is in which time I would prefer to live. My answer is going to shock you but I want to live in the present—2017. People wonder why I would not want to live in another time period. The present is not perfect by any means, but it is far preferable to living in a time period where women had few rights and modern medicine was non-existent. I am not uncultured or poorly read. Majoring in history has helped me to appreciate the time period that I live in and realize that romanticized aspects of different time periods hide violence and rights violations. As a result, I do not want to live in a different time period and prefer the present because there is no time like the present.
As a Mestiza woman I do not want to live in a different time period. I would have very few rights and married to someone that I did not love. Being a woman in a different time period would mean that there were little opportunities other than marriage or the nunnery. I would have been labeled a witch and burned at the stake for being unmarried and single. If I was living in Ireland from the 50s to the 90s I could have been sent off to a Magdalene House, where I would be beaten and forced into slave labor for having sex before marriage. Before 1920, I could not have a say in the future of America because men were believed to know better. Before the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 60s, birth control was illegal and a woman deciding that she did not want children was blasphemy. Until 1973, abortion was illegal and unsafe, back alley abortions were common. There was even a time in the United States where a woman could not take out credit or buy a car without her husband. Living as a woman in a time other than today meant little rights, little opportunities, and little freedom to pursue a life other than married life.
Not only would living in a different time period as a woman leave me with few rights, but also I would have succumbed to either pneumonia or pertussis because there were no vaccines or antibiotics. In the 21st century, my survival is ensured and I can keep creating the life I want for myself, instead of having it cut short by a preventable disease. Before modern medicine, getting sick was a certain death sentence unless you were very lucky. I prefer to live in a time where getting sick does not mean the end, where recovery is a possibility, and where certain diseases such as polio have been eradicated.
So in which time period would I rather live? Present-day USA. I can survive both pneumonia and pertussis, and most importantly I have more rights than I would have had in a different time period. I can choose to not get married, I can control the amount of kids I want, I can terminate an unplanned pregnancy, I can choose to be single without worrying about violence against me, and I can have assets in my name not my husband’s. Those who say they would rather live in a different time period overlook that most groups of people had few rights and lived short lives. Only rich,white men enjoyed full rights and freedoms during other time periods. So stop romanticizing certain time periods as better than the present because only rich, white men were considered fully human, while other groups were looked down upon and denied basic rights. Your romanticization of times where rich, white men were considered the pinnacle of civilization only perpetuates that non-whites and women should not have their own destiny, but instead be at the mercy of rich, white men.