This icon because I don't have one for Ms Parker's apothegm re girls who wear glasses
Have been noticing on Twitter people remarking that spectacles are not a stigmatised assistive technology and neither is the need for them -
Well, maybe that is so now, but I think we have had some discussions in comments in this here venue about the Victorian resistance to letting people with myopia wear glasses rather than struggle and try to accommodate and the idea that wearing glasses was somehow 'giving in' (okay, maybe this was a particular Thing in the works of Charlotte Yonge...)
And people are shocked! shocked! when they come across Marie Stopes's hostility to having a daughter-in-law who wore 'hideous specs' and would communicate that defect to her offspring, and I do not say that it was not gross, but it was an idea that was not unique to Marie but fairly pervasive in early C20th Britain. I have come across someone who was both a communist and a eugenicist arguing that Capitalism was causing the proliferation of the hereditary defect of glasses-wearing among the population, I have discovered men who were, one would think, the sort of men who would have been considered, by people who thought in such terms, eugenically desirable fathers, refusing to become sperm donors because of their very correctable defects of vision.
I also think there are still some attitudes/preconceptions around glasses-wearing - the association with intellectual rather than physical activity. I'm not at all sure we don't have some of the old women-wearing-glasses thing continuing to go on, though I'm thinking of films I've seen where the young woman putting on glasses signals her shift into to a more serious/academic persona. And certain instances - the one I think of immediately is Wesley at the beginning of Season 4 of Angel where from being a bespectacled bookish drip he has become a stubbly non-bespectacled brooding badass - there is also a male version of what happens when he takes off/puts off his glasses (is the ur-instance Superman/Clark Kent?). This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2741454.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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