The Right to Govern

This past week I found the article on the “kulturkampf” to be very interesting. I had always heard that throughout modern history, many people were taught to be wary of Catholics. From this, I had supposed that there were bound to be broad implications that were set into motion by this type of wariness. For instance, it was not until recently that in the United States people began to elect Catholics to powerful political offices. However, I had never really understood why it was that people did not trust Catholics, particularly in the arena of politics, until I read this article.
In the more broad sense, it seems that the people in Germany at this time did not trust Catholics for two reasons. First, they believed that because the church played such an important role in a Catholic’s life that it would serve as the predominant influence in terms of the way that he voted. The Protestants seem to have believed that every Sunday, the catholic priest would walk in front of his congregation, address them, and then instruct them on the ways that they should utilize their votes. And to many, this seemed to be an unfair advantage. The second reason for which the Protestants seem to have mistrusted the Catholics was the fact that, as a whole, the Catholics were less educated than the Protestants. This, coupled with the advent of universal male suffrage, resulted in a frightening situation for the more educated and wealthy Protestants. In the voting Catholics the Protestants saw the potential for the election of catholic politicians and clergy to the German government. And because the Catholics took their orders from the church, they believed that this constant mass-voting block would eventually result in catholic control of the German government. Furthermore, catholic children went to catholic schools and could be indoctrinated at a very young age to seek the eventual takeover of the government.
In a sense the Protestants felt that it was dangerous to allow the poor and uneducated people of the country to actually run the country. This is an example of honoratoren vs. mass politics. This is also an example of something that has existed throughout political history. Who is better suited to run the government? Which type of government works best? Obviously Germany had yet to decide what they truly believed, but it seems as if the issues at hand will provide for salacious tumult yet to come.

Too good to be true.

During this past week I found the article about the technical progress of women’s labor to be very interesting. What made it so interesting were two separate reasons. The first reason of interest was the fact that the sewing machine meant different things to different classes of women. Before reading the article, I had assumed that the advent of this machine would have been equally appreciated amongst all levels of society. However, I was surprised to learn that , for instance, a middle class woman would not be nearly as open about income supplementing activities as would a lower class woman for whom the job of mending and making clothing was entirely respectable. The reason that this struck me as odd was that it would seem obvious that any person who could add extra income to the family coffers would do so in order to provide a better and more stable life for their family. I suppose, however, that I was simply unaware of the negative connotations that came with making clothing, especially for such a low wage.
The second portion of the article that I found to be particularly interesting was the proverbial hole that was dug when one purchased a sewing machine. The fact that so many women now owned these machines coupled with the relative ease of use seems to have driven down the value of their work. As these machines were quite costly, it thus took a large collective of individual work in order to actually begin to make a profit from the investment. Worse still seems to have been the “hire purchase” system that was offered to many women who wished to earn profits with a sewing machine, but were unable to purchase one outright. For these people, after placing an initial down payment, they were forced to pay for the machine with monthly installments. However, because the wages for sewing were so low, the often could not afford to make these payments, and as a result they lost their machines along with all of the money that they had invested in to the machines. This seems to have been quite unfortunate because the very thing that these women had believed would help to make their lives easier ended up making their lives infinitely harder.