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Growing up, The Music Man, starring Robert Preston, was one of my favorite movies. I don't know what about it really drew me, just that I loved to watch it. I watched the remake with Matthew Broderick and didn't like it as much. I like Matthew, don't get me wrong, but I honestly feel he wasn't the best person for the role of Harold Hill. A local college did a production of it that same spring and I felt that Harold Hill was better than Matthew's. Anyway, I was listening to the soundtrack earlier and really paid attention to the song Marian and her mother sing when she tells her mother about Harold following her.
"When a woman has a husband and you've got none, why should she take advice from you?"
For the first time, that line and what it means really registered with me. This goes against the grain for me, to think that a woman needs to be married in order to have any sort of authority on any subject, but it's a perfect example of the mindest in 1912, before women's suffrage. A single woman was nothing, an outcast. A married woman, on the other hand, was everything. I'm not a feminist by any means, but I've been taught to be independent, to think of marriage as an option and not a requirement. I probably would be considered an old maid by those standards and I'd rather be an old maid than unhappily married and unable to do what I want to do when I want to. I'm very glad to be living now and not in the 1910's.
"When a woman has a husband and you've got none, why should she take advice from you?"
For the first time, that line and what it means really registered with me. This goes against the grain for me, to think that a woman needs to be married in order to have any sort of authority on any subject, but it's a perfect example of the mindest in 1912, before women's suffrage. A single woman was nothing, an outcast. A married woman, on the other hand, was everything. I'm not a feminist by any means, but I've been taught to be independent, to think of marriage as an option and not a requirement. I probably would be considered an old maid by those standards and I'd rather be an old maid than unhappily married and unable to do what I want to do when I want to. I'm very glad to be living now and not in the 1910's.
thoughtful