In today’s class discussion there seemed to be an underlying tone regarding the letter by the man getting ready to divorce his wife. People look at figures in history and judge them by today’s societal norms too often. I’ve always believed it a foolish practice. We cannot look at a person from the past and say what a horrible person he or she is without looking into the context in which they exist. Cultural norms are different, laws are different, and most importantly the idea of life and humans as a species has changed throughout history. The concept of civilized has changed dramatically, and we currently lived in the most privileged era of human history where simple tasks and problems might have been life altering in the past.
I think its always important to judge a person by the time and cultural in which they existed rather than to our ideals of how one should be now. It is easy to demonize a historical figure for portraying what we say is sexism or misogyny now to what was the norm of the cultural in which they were alive was. In all fairness to the writer of the letter, in his cultural times she was actually in the wrong, and he in the right.