Actually, I think my 15 yo OTP was Dagny and John. I was much much different then.

I don't think there are any zombies, because brains seem kind of thin on the ground.

I've been reading an interesting book about white settlers taken captive by Indians during American history. It's not been the easiest going, because it's apparently something written for the academic audience rather than a more popular audience, and I'm slogging through the formal socio-political analysis that was the standard in the early 90s. I don't know what style historian I come closest too, but I'm not convinced one can apply modern social thinking to events two hundred years past. (Which was my major complaint with "Colonial House" on PBS--people in 1628 had vastly different ideas about social roles than people in 2002, and bitching that you can't be a modern, fulfilled woman in the colonies is irrelevant.)

Anyway. The author found three major trends in the way the stories of the mostly female captives were presented. The earliest, from the first colonizations, were presented as stories of fortitude and survival against all odds, in reflection of the struggles of a new colony trying to survive in the wilderness. The second type, post Revolution, extolled women defending their families and homesteads by whatever brutal means were necessary, reflecting the recent war. The third type, covering the 19th century and Victorian thinking, focused on the Frail Flowers of Womanhood being confronted by dreadful threats to their virtue and gentility, protected only by providence and the occasional "civilized" Indian while the women waited for rescue.

Fortunately for my purposes, the author also included the tale of one woman who, when given the chance to go back to "civilization", decided to stay with the Senecas and the family she had with them, plus the story of a woman from Minnesota who was captured in a raid in the early part of the Civil War. The latter woman was generally well treated, but her primary protector was hung anyway becuase, well, he was an Indian and probably had done something worth being hung for.

It's an interesting study of how history is filtered through the expectations of society, plus showing the preferred portrayal of women through history. Still, I think the author makes too much about the actions of the writers of the earlier stories. She complains that the man who interviewed the woman who stayed with the Senecas said nothing about how she lived as a Seneca woman, made no records of her daily life or how she felt spiritually making the changes between white civilizaton and Indian life. Me, I figured the man didn't care. I may be misjudging him, but I doubt full anthropological concern was his primary motive, and I seriously doubt an early Victorian man was overly concerned with the inner philosophical musings of a woman, especially a woman who willingly chose the Heathen Savages over Proper Civilization.

I haven't read the book you're reading, but the first few chapters of Lies My Teacher Told Me deals with misrepresentation of - eh I'll call them Indians. It talks a bit about people running off to join Indians for several reasons. Slaves running off to join Indian societies as well as settlers, presumably some of them women. Sometimes it was because of the too rigid structure of colonial society, sometimes it was because there wasn't enough food, shelter etc. in the colonly etc.

Got it. Thank you Project Gutenberg and the search function. Chapter XVII:

I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes:

Connie I've only seen a part of Colonial House but that was when people were rebelling against going to church so the mayor changed the law. Then some lady came and wanted more rights/chances for them women and that pissed me off.

Yes, women's situations sucked in Colonial times but the whole point of the show is to live in Colonial times. There shouldn't be any changing the rules because you don't like the life.

Go team Hecubus...I didn't remember that. So, nobody else here wanted to be in love so hard it made them ill?(Maybe the Bayliss thing was the rule, not the exception.) Just me? Ok, then.

Yes, women's situations sucked in Colonial times but the whole point of the show is to live in Colonial times. There shouldn't be any changing the rules because you don't like the life.

They should have run off to join the Indians.

Wrod.

when people were rebelling against going to church so the mayor changed the law

Right. There were people in Colonial days who rebelled against compulsory church attendance, but it was from major league competing religious scruples. I suppose there were people who simply didn't believe, but the social pressures were such that they probably just attended and daydreamed through the entire service. Plus, religion was so much more in the minds of people. I wasn't much of a fan of the first governor of the colony, who was passing out the punishments on the colonists, but at least he was trying to follow the rules of the game as presented.

At the end of the program, some of the people who organized the entire project came in to evaluate the success of the colony. They gave them points for being potentially viable economically and for being supportive of each other, but they did point out that they weren't following the social rules.

The non-conformists got off lucky by being forced to sit in the fields. My Quaker ancestors of the time were publically whipped and sold into indentured servitude.

Go team Hecubus...I didn't remember that.

It's a throwaway image buried in the book. I don't know if I would've noticed it except one introduction pointed it out.

So, nobody else here wanted to be in love so hard it made them ill?(Maybe the Bayliss thing was the rule, not the exception.) Just me? Ok, then.

I'm trying to remember wanting to be in love before I was in love. I did have one image that seemed tantalizingly possible before it happened. I just wanted somebody to lay their head in my lap and I'd play with their hair. (Note: in its original conception this imagery was not particularly porny for location or hair-play.)