Behind the Scenes Minis: Hardy and the Women's March

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we discussed the drama of Thomas Hardy's life this week third did and you told me you have strong feelings about Thomas Hardy. Yeah. So. Um. My entire K through twelve education, from the time we started being assigned homework, I did not do homework. I thought it was a pointless waste of my time. Yeah, I very really did it. I did have a very long bus ride, and even though I get kind of motion sick in the car, if I sat in the right way on the bus, I could usually get like my math homework done on the bus on the way to school in the morning. So I just didn't I didn't do it. I was in trouble for not doing homework all the time. However, I read every single reading assignment for like English or literature class because I really enjoyed reading. And the one exception to that in my entire you know, elementary, middle and high school career was Test of the Derbervilles, which I started trying to read, and I was like, this is the most boring thing I have ever read in my entire life. Uh. I know this is not how literature class happens for a lot of folks, but um, what would happen was we would read the thing, and then we would be given this multiple choice reading comprehension test. And so we were all supposed to read test of the Derberville's. We were all supposed to get in like a small group and discuss it, and then we were going to take this multiple choice tests. And one person in my small group had read it, the rest of us had not. The rest of us like, this was so boring. I couldnot, And so she basically told us the whole plot of it. Uh. And then I took a test that I did so badly on because I had not read the work that when my teacher gave it back to me with this failing grade on it, she looked at me with this just sorrow on her face and said, Tracy, why did you do that? Uh? And so, yeah, and you've hated Thomas Hardy ever since. Yeah, I just I could not. I could not read it. And so that I was like, am I remembering this right? And so I went to the project Guttenberg, and I opened up Test of the Deerbervilles and I read the first three or four paragraphs and I was like, yeah, I can see why tenth grade me was like, no, not here for this. Yeah. We I read a Jude obscure in high school and we my little band of Merriman and I UM made a video of about it as our class project, which was very silly, of course, as one does. UM, and I got to be Arabella and I played it very broadly, UM, But I definitely did not, as I said at the top, have that connection with Hardy, And like I said, now as an adult looking at his work, UM, and I've read more of it since and knowing his life story, I'm like, good lord, this is all embarrassingly autobiographical. Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit more about Emma because she's a fascinating figure and one of the things that I loved, But there wasn't really the right place to put it in here that didn't feel wedged in. It went in and came out like six times while I was working on this, is that she she was writing throughout their marriage, like she was still trying to have her literary career, even though he wasn't really supporting it. And one of the things that she wrote that I didn't get the original of I got I was reading several papers about her, and one of which quoted several times this particular piece of writing that I love so much because it's an article in a periodical called The Animals Friend that she wrote in and it's like just about kiddies. And my favorite part is she has this whole thing about um, how to pick up a cat to keep it happy, and it's all about being really sweet and treating it as if it were fine China. It's just so charming that she was a cat lady. She had a lot of cats up in the attic um. This brings me to my next thing that I found fascinating doing this research, because every biography you read of Thomas Hardy picks a villain in this this triangle of people, and they pick different villains depending on the point of view of the author, right, so some of them are very like Emma was a pain in the neck. Poor Thomas Hardy was saddled with this monster who would openly say that she was from a higher class than him, and like others will be like Florence was really the gold digger. She right after that business and everyone knew that she was trying to lure Hardy. And Emma even does seem to have gotten a bit suspicious eventually of like wait, why is this woman in our lives so much? Um? And others are like, man, Thomas Hardy just didn't He was in love with falling in love and he didn't know actually what a relationship was. Yeah, And it's very fascinating to look at at all of those because I think the bottom line is right, like, probably none of them we're really I mean, this is humans, right, Like we all have foibles and nobody's perfect. But all of them had these idealized views of relationships that no one could live up to. You And instead of being like, oh that's not realistic, they were like, damn it, you didn't fulfill my dreams. Florence the least of all. I think she wanted to know Thomas Hardy. She was a fan girl. She got married to him and that worked out for her. Yeah. I think she kind of got the most happy ending of them all. She did. Uh. This is another part though, So the cats. I read one biography that said that Florence got rid of Emma's cats full stop. And I read another version where it was like, no, Florence actually wrote a letter to a friend about how some of the cats ran away when they didn't have Emma to take care of them, and some of the cats just died of old age and some were killed. It sounded like, and I'm like, what exactly happened with those pets? But we know that the cats were not cared for after Emma past, which is very sad. But yeah, everybody is a villain. Depending on who's whose biography you're reading. It becomes one of those stories that's really important to read multiple different sources because none of them will say the same thing. Um That was why I selected that piece that we quoted about Emma because it's it was really the most fair handed of any that I came across, where it was like, no, she probably was a pain in the next sometimes, but she was also really unhappy and miserable, and that was because she wasn't getting any kind of support. Um So, let does be a lesson, don't be anything like these people in your relationships. Um Uh. Also, you can turn out okay if you never do your homework. I never did my homework. It was very bad. Thinking on homework has also changed since we were Like, I see increasing numbers of educators being like, especially in elementary school, it doesn't really serve a purpose, Like the homework that should be done is the work that didn't get done in class, because that's the practice that's needed. But I always just like, I learned this in class, and you want me to learn it more home. I guess I don't. I don't know. I would rather be doing literally anything else. Yeah, I was not a great homework doer. When I have the fondest memories of growing up in terms of school work at home was studying for tests with my dad because if I made like flash cards or notes for him, he would quiz me on stuff and it was the most fun sometimes we ever had. Like I will forever remember us discussing the four kinds of algae at length and him just laughing at all the different names of algae, and like I that was a really fun time. But yeah, I was not a good homework doer. I coasted a lot. I got pushed through a lot of classes that were advanced. I think because my best friend was the smartiest smarty pants of smart town. And they were like, we should keep her happy, which means just keep putting home in the classes. Yeah. Yeah, I was lucky enough that I was usually a well to do well enough on tests and stuff, having not done my homework that that zero on my homework did not cause me to fail. Like I never had a zero on a homework, I would have died first. I would literally like throw it together lickety split. But I would never have done that. However, I do also have a good um, well, it's a mixed in terms of good and bad our physics class in high school, I did none of the work before the first test. I still don't know how it happened. But I aced that test and all of my friends, who were much smarter than me, did not, And so then it was like Holly is the wunderkinda physics And I was like, I don't know what happened here, y'all. I don't understand any of this stuff. Yeah, so the rest of that semester was very difficult for me, But ah, education everyone responds to different stuff. That's the trick that nobody knew when we were kids. Yeah, there's been a whole. Uh. Like we heard a lot about learning styles some years go, and like there's some research that like learning styles are more about preferences than actually whether you are able to learn better. But I do feel like the uh a lot of people, the things I will hear teachers talking about doing with their classes now sounds a lot more engaging and relevant than what was happening in classes that I was in in the nineteen eighties and nineties, where it was really like, you are in tenth grade. You're gonna read tests of the Derbervilles for some reason, You're going to discuss it in a small group, and then you're gonna take a multiple choice reading comprehension test, and that is somehow going to be useful to right, right well, And I think that's the thing, right, Like, you studied literature in college, as did I, and it's like when you actually start to like really dig in, and like I said, for me, the biographies of it the entry point to that too, looking at literature as a lens of humanity, even it becomes much more interesting. But you don't get that when you're younger, and I know, at least we did not. I think now more teachers will introduce that concept, but um in a in a way that's compelling. Yeah. I also had college experiences where I found the reading so dreadfully boring that I was like, how am I even going to get through this? This is awful? And then when I got into class and our professor talked to us about it, I would realize things that I, as a reader reading by myself in my dorm room, had never seen and was like, Oh, this is actually really cool. There are all these layers to this that I did not understand upon reading it. And that was not how. That was not how my tenth grade literature class with tests of the Durbervilles worked at all. Oh Tess, Oh, Thomas Harvey and the kiddies this week onto the show. One of the things we talked about was the women's march on Pretoria, South Africa in nineteen fifty six, which I stumbled across in some random way and then but I want to make that an episode of the show, and discovered one of the things that can be challenging when talking about a topic about something that is uh that far away from where we physically are, which is the availability of resources. There are various books UM about this specific thing and the people who are involved with it. A lot of them do not have the book versions, or if they do have the book versions, I was not able to find them, and they are not in print beyond South Africa and in terms of online resources. So you know, I grew up in the United States. I speak American English. I've read a lot of stuff that was written somewhere in the UK or Ireland and so familiar with the like stylistic conventions of English in those places. Also to some extent Australia, UM reading stuff that was about South Africa that was written in South Africa and either in English or translated into English. I kept finding stuff like idioms I'd never encountered before, and just sort of general slightly different stylistic conventions that I just wasn't familiar with, and it was kind of like, Wow, this is like a just a slightly different, uh, flavor of English than the ones I have been immersed in my whole life. Sometimes it seems like even syntax is a little different. Yeah, Like just the way other cultures will construct a sentence will put emphasis in different places than we might naturally fall into. So it can be a little like kind of um tugging apart threads and being like, Okay, what is this actually saying? Even though it is a language we know, Yeah, so was I don't. It's um. It's not the first time that I've done research related to South Africa, but it was the first time that I was really struck by just like a slightly different English usage. Then I have spent most of my time on so many of the people who were part of planning that march seemed like they have had such uh fascinating and important lives and uh, if I can sort of pick away it, maybe getting some access to some more international resources, some of them may return for full episodes on them. Right. Yes, I find more and more lately. I think maybe because we have been doing this show for so long, that it starts to be easier and easier to see threads connecting seemingly disparate things in history sometimes, and then when you start following, if you're like, oh, I want to talk about that and that and that and that, and then I end up with a huge whole long list just off of one episode, and then I'm like, mm am, I making cluster episodes of these all about things too much together. But this is the peril. That's why sometimes I'll like intentionally space stuff out. It's also interesting in that, uh, most of what we focus on on the show is not stuff that you and I lived through in some way, not all the time most of the time, but like I was in high school and college when apartheid was being dismantled um and you know, younger than that was you know, aware enough to remember like the boycotts of South Africa and different actors and musicians and other celebrities like taking really vocal stands against apartheid and stuff like that, And so it is interesting too then look back on that period from now the perspective of having worked on a history podcast. Whenever when we started doing this history podcast, I one d percent learned about apartheid because of Stevie van Zaaneah starting Artists United Against Apartheid eighties and like that being really the first time that I was really i think exposed to activism on that level of like being like, oh, people who have a certain degree of privilege because of celebrity can actually leverage that to make statements. That was really the first time I remember being conscious of that going on. I think I'm trying to now remember when that versus um. You know, all of Bob Geldoff's work was happening, like which was first and which was second, but they're kind of clustered there together. So that's how I learned about activism musicians in the eighties. Uh, yeah, I did. I had a haul, just a pile of YouTube videos that I had as I was going through and uh and corralling um sources. I had a whole bunch of YouTube videos that were all naming the Women's March in some way, and a lot of them when I actually viewed them, were you know, the recent years addresses in public commemorations and things like that about the Women's March UM, and consistently they all had a message of we've come so far and what these what these women did was so important, but we also still have so far to go, particularly in terms of of the rights of women, UM and violence against women and things like that in South Africa. UM. So yeah, it was. It was really interesting to see that really consistent through line through all of these different speeches and newscasts and things like that from within the last few years. Yeah, well it becomes a study in resilience, right, Like, it can be difficult when your protest or your um document that you've assembled or your petition doesn't seem like it's really moved the needle very much. I know I would have a very hard time going okay, but I'm still going to keep trying and not going. Well, that didn't work. Um, so it I am always impressed by, not necessarily in the sense of that word, like, oh, I'm so impressed, but just it impresses on me how important it is to really retain commitment to a cause. Yeah. Yeah, because you don't always feel like you're making any progress for getting any wins. Right, But that's how change happens, is that you don't get deter urge by what feel like setbacks or lack of progress. Yeah. Yeah, So I'm glad I stumbled across this reference and some I don't even remember, some random place that maybe go, hey, let me look into more about that. Since it's Friday, I hope everybody has a good weekend coming up, regardless of what is on your plates. We'll be back on Saturday with a Saturday Classic and then Monday with a brand new episode. We'll hope you'll stick around for it. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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