Surplus and Animal sub -class – the history of singles makes single life look like luxury in modern times

Right now is the best time to be single. For centuries, marriage was the only norm and goal, says the non -fiction book Single all ages.

Single may sometimes feel dull. The cost of living alone is a burden on the economy, dating applications, and those who are wondering about the relationship are annoying. Families took the best holiday times and work flexibility. Lonely evenings at streaming are numb.

Karppinen-Kummunmäki has studied the history of women and girls and popular culture in particular. Fiction book * Single all over time *, published in late 2024, tells how the life of unmarried people has gone from the Middle Ages to the present day.

During that period, the family, or at least the family, has been considered more or less as a basic unit of society. And this has still not changed completely. The book and this article focus on relationships between heterosexual and men. Due to the lack of material, the role of gender minorities in history is more difficult to study and deserve its own work.

With dating apps, the fight begins to look like a light challenge when you are thinking about the position of unmarried, for example, at the beginning of the Middle Ages. At that time, at least not even a single family was not even an option.

In Catholic countries, one of the few ways to avoid marriage was to retreat to the monastery.

If the daughter wanted to be a nun, the family paid the dowry reserved for the marriage instead of the groom’s family to the monastery, after all, the maid became the bride of Jesus. For the sake of the dowry, the monastery was not an alternative to the daughter of the poor family.

Adult maid as well as boys

Old maid, age, old boy. Former Finnish names for the unmarried person have been reduced. The word old maid dates back to an agricultural -dominated society that was still strong in Finland during World War II.

If a young woman was not a daughter of a big house, she mostly went to the surrounding area. Until he got married or stayed in the eternal maid.

The unmarried man, on the other hand, remained incomplete, did not mature into a full man and the family, but remained a boy.

Money was the solution to this problem too. The daughter of a large house may have been thinking about the groom candidates for a long time, and even some of the illegitimate child from a random relationship. If the house was prosperous, one additionaluu for feeding did not hurt.

In all Western countries, for centuries, living alone has been considered problematic and undesirable, while familyization is an ideal. Especially the single woman became useless, even disgusting.

Flirting and alternative

In Finland, the elite of the regulators was small.

Elsewhere in Europe, trends in dating were easier to emerge, as a large number of people were mourned in social life. Of course, the world was watched in Finland as well.

In the 18th century, even some kind of flirting was lived in European nobles and wealthy bourgeois circles.

– It was an exceptional period, especially in the history of a woman. The era included a very liberal interaction between the sexes, says Karppinen-Kumunmäki.

Furthering and the posting of lettering between young women and men was still only intermediate in the 18th century. The final end of flirting was an old acquaintance: marriage.

Jane Austen himself even kept the marriage institution as a mockery. Austen’s father was a vicar who had access to the church books and the marriage register. As a teenager, Austen would make a few fake marriage. There has been no explanation for these acts other than pollution.

Paid work and my own money changed the status of singles

Industrialization and urbanization also began to decompose a social structure based on regulatory and origin in the 19th century. Through industrial production, new rich and new poor people’s class, employees, were born.

– The social class you happened to be born did not necessarily determine the whole life, but it was possible for people to improve their living conditions.

The work could be made to rise to easier and better paid work. This resulted in the fact that there was not such a rush to get married. She could also get along with her work.

Although everyone else was married, family life was not appropriate for teachers and nurses. Male and female teachers were expected to spend a chastity life without sex partners.

Women’s teachers and nurses were thought to take their care at work. Nor were married people not considered to have time to devote to the teacher’s vocation.

Some are more equal than others

How self-employed people and women have been treated has been a wave movement, says Henna Karppinen-Kumunmäki.

During the boom, there is usually a more liberal period. For example, in the 1920s, women began to drive a car, smoke tobacco and cut their hair short. Some went to work. Skirted beads rose.

Even Finnish magazines wrote about the phenomenon called Bachelor Girl. Such a woman lived in her beautifully decorated apartment and spent a time of work on the way. He may have kept invitations and visits them. You could even enjoy life as a bachelor girl until she became old.

The* Finnish Woman’s* magazine wrote in 1923 that the life of an old woman living alone is monotonous and cold. \”They are not used to giving love and therefore don’t get it.\”

After the recession, the attitudes became tightened in the 1930s and the beads became longer. When the men were unemployed in the downturn, they took their job back from the women.

The same thing happened during World War II. In exceptional circumstances, women were good for factories and many other men’s jobs. After the war, the time for traditional family values \u200b\u200bstruck. The number of marriages in Finland also rose to its peak – despite the fact that some men had fallen on the front.

There were few amusements during the wars, so correspondence became a popular pastime.

– Finnish girls were encouraged to write to soldiers on the front. And even if it had been mainly time, it was a relationship. The men met their letter friends on holidays, says Karppinen-Kumunmäki.

Sometimes the meeting was disappointing on both sides. For some, there was a nasty envelope.

– Love scams are not an online phenomenon. Wartime letters could tune in and try to benefit from another.

The centuries of single loneline meets home wife

Finally, the most traditional family values, said goodbye until the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. Early marriage, starting a sexual life only after the priest’s Amen, large families and women’s housewife began to decline until four to five decades ago.

– This will make it difficult to identify singles. There is no one common single anymore, but many different experiences of experience begin to form.

Before the crumbling of the uniform culture, it was time to see the most revolutionary invention in single life. Yes, the little pill that released people forced marriages for pregnancy.

The term single became established in English in the 1960s. It took its time as it swam in Finnish language with many other Anglisms in the 1990s. And it has stayed. Who could imagine the world anymore without singles.

Of course, all of this does not mean that since the 1980s, the singles have been completely ok and somehow even a desired state. The popular culture of our recent history tells his own stories that this was not the case.

Bridget Jones was a desperate 90s single, who was laughed at several books and films. *Women in the Single Life*series were trying and ended up in either marrying or a serious relationship.

According to 2022 statistics, 1.3 million Finns live alone. It is a greater amount than ever. Elsewhere, a new or actually old phenomenon pushes the surface. It has a new but old scented name: home wife, or Tradwife in English.