The past is a different country.

Sarah Hoyt has a nice rant about several things, not the least of which is the wrong-headedness of people who think that they can judge what was best for people who lived in a different time and place.

This means that women who thought – at the time – about other women getting the vote and shuddered might have had a point. They foresaw disaster if women got the vote, and – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT – though we know they weren’t right (the minor thing with prohibition excepted) THEY HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING THAT. Anyone who’s been through college should be self-aware enough to realize that. The past is determined, the future isn’t. We are their future. They had no way of being sure how things would go. They were entitled to their doubts and their second thoughts and by having them they showed NOT that they were puppets of the establishment, but that they were thinking human beings. Even if they were wrong. Hindsight is twenty twenty.

"Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy," says Robert Louis Wilken.