Anomie In The 1800s

Anomie can be brought about by soaring aspirations that make us unhappy with the life we currently have. Those who had aspirations were generally women, men had rights and could participate with work and at home duties. Males also were seen as superior. Women aspired to get out of the house, join the workforce, and become a person who can support themselves or their family. During arranged marriages, women wanted their choice and to be heard. Their aspirations of a better life out from under a man who sometimes abused them, were crushed. Even when rights shifted to women, such as supplying their own dowry or not having to pay on a date, they were still under control of parents and men. It was a way to make them feel they were closer to their …show more content…
What needs to be focused on about the Frankfurt school is the role of the media. The media looked at two aspects; marriage and sex. In the middle ages, everything about marriage was public, including the wedding. Details of marital disputes were everyday fare. The main source of information was the church. The church acted much like tabloids today. Church officials use to track down participants in marital disputes and then hounded them for details of their sex lives. After hearing the details, they would often become partisan advocates for one party or another. Today, when marital disputes happen, they unravel in public or feuding spouses detail their grievances on television. What is different from then to today is that people now see doing this as a deterioration of standards of decency. They also tend to want to talk about a time when couples didn’t air their dirty linen in public. Although, there has never really been such a time. As much as marital disputes are interesting, the media takes a liking to sex. During the 1900s, popular culture became saturated with sex. What started it all was the sexual revolution. More and more people began to stop condoning sex and realizing that both sexes have urges that are very natural. The advertising industry were the first to discover the appeal of a proactively posed woman. In 1910, the government instituted film censorship because silent movies contained too much sexual innuendo. During the revolution, the role of women changed and how they learned it was directly through the media. Nancy Cott suggest that “sex appeal replaced submission as a wife’s first responsibility to her husband.” (pg). Like mentioned previously, these women learned for the big screens while watching movies on what sex appeal was and how to achieve it. Women also studied family roles, how to get the most out of marriage, and sex roles from their favorite TV shows, articles, and books. During this time