Feedback Question...

[caprine]

In one of my recent stories, Tess: New Ranch Foreman, the lead female is twenty years old in 1874 and just returned to the family ranch in Texas from four years at a female finishing school in Virginia. The lady makes a comment about believing in the program promoted by the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1834

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=411341


A READER COMMENTED:

“Highly unlikely that Tess would have ever heard of it. The fact is it was only reported on the inside pages of the Albany Times-Union. As the philosophical question goes, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?’ So too with the Seneca Falls gathering (convention is much too organized a concept for what occurred)” [None-the-less, that's what the attendees called it-author]


In the story, I didn’t specify the curriculum of the female finishing school. The school may or may not have stressed female rights, equality, and such or it may not have. Tess might have discovered this on her own initiative. Point is, her knowledge of it was possible. Probable?


SO, JUST FOR FUN, WHAT DO YOU THINK?

PRIMARY QUESTION: would Tess likely have known about such an event forty years previously?

SECONDARY QUESTION: Was Tess’ aggressive, inquisitive, and women’s liberation attitude innate, acquired, or both?

Thanks for your interest.

\\\\ caprine ///

 

[psyche_b_mused]

Would she have know about such an event.....
I think it's possible. She was at school and even if the school doesn't necessarily teach something like that as part of the curriculum another student might have had knowledge of it through her mother, aunt or some other family member. Because it sounds like your character was from Texas and the school was in Virginia, my assumption would be that families from a number of differet locations might send their daughters to school there. I think it might be the perfect place to learn about a lesser-known event from someone who had a connection to the event.

Innate or acquired....
I'm not a good one to answer that. I think everything we do behaviorally is acquired in response to environmental factors (especially early in life). We all have the potential, but without experience it remains dormant. Not everyone would agree with that view.

psyche b

 

[caprine]

My Thinking...

Would she have know about such an event.....
I think it's possible. She was at school and even if the school doesn't necessarily teach something like that as part of the curriculum another student might have had knowledge of it through her mother, aunt or some other family member. Because it sounds like your character was from Texas and the school was in Virginia, my assumption would be that families from a number of differet locations might send their daughters to school there. I think it might be the perfect place to learn about a lesser-known event from someone who had a connection to the event.

Innate or acquired....
I'm not a good one to answer that. I think everything we do behaviorally is acquired in response to environmental factors (especially early in life). We all have the potential, but without experience it remains dormant. Not everyone would agree with that view.

psyche b

almost exactly in your first paragraph. As to your second, pyschologists and pyschiatrists have argued between innate vs. environmental factors vs. a combo of the two as causal factors of behavior at least since Freud if not before.

Thanks for taking time to comment.

caprine

 

[driphoney]

I'm not sure if female finishing schools in Virginia, especially, during that era would have been hotbeds of feminist thought, but she might have had a teacher who was impacted by that event. The teacher herself would potentially, if she had known or attended, have been greatly effected by this and it could very well have become her personal agenda. We've all had those teachers/profs who were so influenced by something in the past they don't get over it and you hear about it a lot. (Had a science teacher who could always be run off the rails by asking her about her travels out west!)

Interesting thing to ponder.

 

[caprine]

Yes...

I'm not sure if female finishing schools in Virginia, especially, during that era would have been hotbeds of feminist thought, but she might have had a teacher who was impacted by that event. The teacher herself would potentially, if she had known or attended, have been greatly effected by this and it could very well have become her personal agenda. We've all had those teachers/profs who were so influenced by something in the past they don't get over it and you hear about it a lot. (Had a science teacher who could always be run off the rails by asking her about her travels out west!)

Interesting thing to ponder.

Yet another interesting possiblility for Jen's knowledge. I also had at least one college prof like that. I'd be willing to bet that institutions of higher learning back then had more of those type profs than we realize. Said profs may not have lasted long at some schools because of their beliefs, especially if those beliefs were too far outside the norm of the time. But for Jen, it could have happened that way.