Thank you - this is so affectionately portrayed. Perhaps we do romanticise the past, but it was still a simpler and more innocent time, I believe (apart from those VERY guilty spanking parents and teachers of course, but who'd change them, eh?)

Your article had a certain resonance for me Corncrake as I am of a certain 'vintage' myself. How right you are when you say for some people corporal punishment was the norm, it was, it was part and parcel of everyday life and something which happened to yourself or friends and no big deal. Your references to how things were back then when there were no fridges or central heating, BRRRR, I remember it well. Outside lavs, back yards, clothes boilers, mangles, I could go on and on. Scrumping, bonfire night on the bombie with a proper bonfire, lemonade powder and Saturday morning at the local flea-pit. Nostalgia maybe but such fertile ground for spanking stories and yes, you're quite right, my all too regular spankings hurt like blazes. I've been lucky enough to have two strolls down memory lane today and I'm a very happy chappie. Thanks a lot.

A very well written and interesting article. I love the touch of humour, especially the 'vintage' comment. A really enjoyable read, thank you :)

I suppose the concept of nostalgia involves a certain rosetintedspectacleness. Certainly the picture of England in the 1920s or 1930s, for example, involves a lot of village greens for a country already overwhelmingly urbanised, and very rarely back-to-back houses in towns with massive unemployment. Now for me, nostalgia is about the 1960s - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Spike Milligan, small town teams winning the football championship, Thirteen Years of Tory Misrule (slogan), student protest, a repulsive old Fascist in power in Spain...ah, those were the days!

Maybe in due course spanking stories will reflect the grittier side of the twentieth century. After all, Victorian stories often feature things like the domineering master of the house, the grim-faced factory owner, the intolerant squire

It's natural to long for the past--it seems we always view it with a fondness, despite the hard times. I might not consider myself 'vintage' yet (although my kids certainly do!), but I too look back on the days of old with longing and nostalgia, even if spanking wasn't yet a part of it! :)

Interesting reflections. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks Corncrake. I agree that old movies and stories set in the past certainly do have a delightful and romantic charm about them...and even better that spankings were quite commonplace back then!

What an interesting article on nostalgia memories. Yes...spankings were commonplace. For me, they were often spoken about but I only heard of two given and , of course, I had received plenty myself. Each one was terribly long and extremely painful. This was routine. The idea of "timeouts" did not exist. In reality, my spankings were as good as many of the stories written in The Library.

I hope to read many stories from "The Golden Age of Spankings". It was in my opinion a better time. The teenage girls and young ladies were wearing more exciting clothes. They had always skirts or dresses, slips or waist slips, garter belts or girdles, stockings with seams and decent panties. The age of majority was 21 in Europe and America and most people believed in spankings for older tenagers.

Interesting article and I suspect there are many who, like me, prefer to be frozen, metaphorically-speaking, in a time when ladies did not wear thongs or even tights (pantihose), and most certainly did not have images etched in ink all over their bodies! I wonder if people in the future will look back on the spanking scene of today with any warm sense of nostalgia? Somehow I doubt it.

I remember a time, when neighbours would say, that a girl was terribly spoiled, with no more reason, that they had never seen her mother as much as boxing her ears.
When parents would say.: "You probably deserved it, if not this time then earlier" if the child dared tell he/she had been beaten in school.
When even apprentices risked being treated like that.
No wonder all children felt that all adult persons were their natural enemies.
The only nostalgia I find is when a person for the first time links sex to spanking. That can happen in any age, historical or personal.

Ah nostalgia! I think you´re correct; we do look at our past through rose tinted spectacles.

I remember eating spam sandwiches on a particularly rough crossing from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead on the ferry, and it was many years after that before I could bring myself to eat them again!

And yes, spankings did hurt, especially the gym shoe from the headmaster!

Thanks for reviving some memories with this lovely article.

I certainly agree that stories set in times past are highly entertaining. Most commenters on this subject are looking at it from a UK perspective, but the genre is rich with possibilities for US writers too. Take any era, the roaring '20's, the 19th century West, the post war 1950's and you have possibilities galore, unhampered by the politically correct/feminist/nanny state shackles of today which makes it harder to conceive plausible story lines.

The nostalgic age for me, would be the Victorian or Edwardian age. That particular period of time, was when truly the master of the house, had a right to corporal punish naughty female's in his household be they feminine 'upstairs' or 'downstairs' folk. Yes, a wife, daughter, maid, governess, female cook, nanny, were subject to be birched or caned, when they were found to have erred in their household duties. Yes, their dress, or skirt, would be raised, their bloomer's taken down, and punished on their naked rear ends. And rightly so.

What I neglected to say first time round, when reading this, is just how beautifully written it is. Your carefully worded, affectionate style glows with your love of the details of those old days.

As a pre-war baby I remember some periods with nostalgia, but definitely not my schooldays, of which I shall have something say in a future Wellred article. I don't think I gained anything from the corporal punishments handed out in school, in fact quite the reverse. In spite of everything, today is a good time to live.

Those of us old enough to remember past times are getting older but all of us contain vital memories of that time which should be recorded somewhere, so why not in this Library. The late 50's and 60's really stand out for me, there were pressures and hard times but I still think I would rather be young then then nowadays. I would love to be young, that is true, but the stuff this present generation has to put up with is much harder in my opinion then I had too. Thanks for the memories.

Terrific article, nostalgia is an excellent reference for so many, the old school days, the teenaged brat, the scamp who receives their comeuppance. It feels good to all.

Well, today even nostalgia isn't what it used to be, since I think of the 'good old days' as being in the sixties and early seventies--and images of the twenties and thirties aren't memories for the vast majority of people, but merely ideas/impressions gained from books, periodicals and movies for the most part.

IME there's generally a tendency for individuals and even societies to put on their 'rose-tinted glasses' to view the past, even if they experienced it themselves as children or young adults--memory can be rather selective.

Still, I enjoy history (and therefore historical settings) a great deal myself--but almost all of my quite limited 'historic' writing is set during or around World War II, a time period that understandably isn't perceived too positively... --C.K.

I grew up at a time when the doors were always unlocked and close neighbors walked in unannounced. I was on the same party line as my best friend and knew the milkman, the iceman and the coalman by name. Same with the mailman. Next door neighbor raised chickens and wrung their heads off right in the back yard on Sunday mornings. Guess what was for dinner? That was the late 40s. I was a young man in the 60s and 70s and that was the greatest time to be alive in this nations history. Jobs galore, hot cars, psychodelics and free love, amongst other things. Then one day, the music stopped ... Bye bye.

Corncake,

Your writings on spankings of a past era brought back memories. Growing up in a small town spankings were common place but we got over them and behaved better. Those were the 1960's and early 70's and though our parents probably would be horrified that we discussed such things and compared punishments including with girls that is exactly what we did.

This is a thought-provoking article, We need to be very careful when writing nostalgia because experiences between generations are so amazingly different these days. Simple things can't be assumed. My grandchildren have never seen thousands of sights that were part of everyday life not long ago. We could name them all day: Phone booths, tape recorders, milkman, typewriters, bench front seats in cars, the principal's paddle...

Suppose I wrote a scene from my childhood living room. It would have my parents on the couch, and us kids lolling around on the the floor. We would perhaps be enjoying an episode of the Lone Ranger on the console...radio! Now how would I make my grandson,understand that scene? I just recently discovered that he doesn't know what a radio is! He lives in a world of videos and I-pods.

We even have that problem writing non-nostalgia. Think about today's everyday sights that will soon become history, and perhaps incomprehensible to future readers; newspapers, the postman, wired telephones...

Yes, I love nostalgia, but we must continually figure out how to write descriptions that remain relevant to future generations.

This was a great article, Valerie. I think TTWD set back in time are some of the best and not to be forgotten to quickly. Reminds me back in the days of Betty or Bettie Page.

B.

Great Article

I think we do romanticise the past. When I went to primary school it was pretty common practice for the teachers to spank the students, it got cracked down on when I was in grade 5. They sometimes talk about bringing it back, but I'm actually rather conflicted. I can see that there are kids who could benefit from a whack or two across the backside, but there's also the potential for teachers to abuse the privilege. I don't set most of my stories in any specific time, but I seem to use this strange idealised mixture of the 1950's, combined with some modernity. Good look back on days gone past.

To those of us of a certain age, its the 50s, 60s,70s,maybe even the 80s that we look back with nostalgia on, not the pre-WWII years.A time when girls started wearing short shorts and mini-skirts and bikinis and the shorts kept getting shorter-remember hot pants?
Imagining the spoiled teenybopper going over
Mom's knee, mini-skirt up, for the hairbrush. Or a group of skinnydipping, potsmoking hippie girls having to choose betweeen bending for the paddle or going to jail. Or the husband like was in a letter to Mr spanking his wife for wearing hotpants in public.
Of course there was the disappearance of movie and TV spanking, unfortunately. We never got to see Maude or the Golden Girls, or Laverne and Shirley, or Daisy Duke or Charlies' Angels get spanked. But we could look at the Sports Ilustrated Swimsuit Edition and picture Christie Brinkley getting spanked in her backless one-pece g-string suit.
Yes, I enjoy stories written before my time, but I feel I identify more with timess I have lived in.

My favorite era was the Jazz Age. I loved the clothing, the short flapper dresses, the first step into short haircuts, whiskey from speakeasies . It was a time of transition in art and music as well.The Jazz Age was the time of erotica, Annais Nunn, Henry and June, the tropic of cancer and James Joyce stream of conscious writing that rocked the world. I do prefer spanking stories set in modern times, because spanking these days is a bonafide kink. I know very few under 30 who were spanked as children, Parents are more proprietary now.If a neighbor spanked someone's child without permission, he could easily be arrested. I am attracted to stories by Rachel Gordon, Her's catch the flavor and naughtiness as well as spanking as erotica.

I enjoyed your article, I do not remember reading this when it was first published, but I'm delighted to comment on it now..
IC

Yes, this probably does say something about the age and background of the readership. For me, I really only enjoy a spanking story if it is almost....almost credible. Maybe not in the contemporary here and now, but at another (earlier?) time and in another place.

I love history, It's always been my favorite subject. But I understand all to well how fallible people's memory's are, which is why I take even stories that are purported to be true or realistic with a grain of salt. I still love stories set in the past though. The reason I like stories set in the past is that I can let my imagination run loose. There are all sorts of things in my fantasies that I find it impossible to envisage happening today but I can imagine happening in the past. Do I really think they happened? No, but I can imagine it happening and that's whats important.

I was a pre war baby ( by about 6 months ) Having lived out the fear of V1s ( which I remember seeing) V2s ( which I saw the effect of and which blew out all our windows) I entered a post war childhood in a wonderful period for a boy. Bomb sites to play in . Roads clear enough of traffic to cycle anywhere in. Adults compensating for the horrors of war by their kindness and gentleness. Corporal Punishment was just another somewhat exciting challange to pit oneself against. In my experience in those days of black and white values, if as a boy you broke those clear cut rules you were spanked one way or another, and then the slate was wiped clean. No suspensiones. No earnest discussions with parents who usually knew nothing about it. Life was just so simple - and then when we left school, full employment; more jobs than people to fill them, I am so glad to have lived when I have.

I have read this before, but unfortunately did not comment on it. Actually, I love nostalgia and can really connect with this type of story, and really enjoy reading it. I am actually getting to the point where I really love talking about it. My sister and I talk all the time about "when we were kids" and "the good old days when life was so simple". We grew up in the fifties and sixties and to us those were the "Happy Days". However, when I think hard back on it now, I was really not all that happy. I had worries and problems then and terrible teenage angst. We didn't realize it at the time, but money was tight,and we all started babysitting and doing odd jobs at very early ages to help buy school clothes and supplies. As you can tell, this article really made me think. Really thought-provoking. Thanks for writing this.

Growing up in the 1960's I most fondly recall the comic books, cartoons, movies and television shows (including those from earlier decades being shown outside prime time in syndication or Saturday morning matinees) with a multitude of spankings and threats of spankings almost none of which had the dark and sinister musical background that divorce lawyers and political activists with a vested financial interest in breaking up our families and alienating us from our culture have made the standard Hollywood cliche for the last 50 years. Spankings used to be a moment of comic relief from violent or sexual tension like the curtain call in "The Bad Seed" or Elvis dealing with Jenny Maxwell's suicidal teenage angst that he didn't want to have sex with her in "Blue Hawaii" or Ricky putting budgetary constraints on Lucy's compulsive overspending of his salary. It was not treated as something anyone should be sent to jail or lose custody of their kids over which is like hanging pickpockets or stoning blasphemers inherently unjust because the potential harm of the act is vastly exceeded by the harm of the retaliation. Spanking favors the bigger and stronger but it used to be often used as a check on abuses of power by the rich and clever as well, For example, in films like "Public Deb No. 1" or "Blondie Hits the Jackpot" you had the classic spoiled rich girls getting people fired unfairly and getting spanked for it with the approval of their family. Obviously most lawyers hate the idea of spanking as an out of court settlement because they don't make any money from it. When the Spencer Spanking Plan was first published, let's note, divorce cases fell dramatically taking lots of money out of lawyers' pockets. The ethical golden rule for most of the legal profession's secular ethics seems to be whatever helps lawyers get a larger share of everybody else's money will always be right in their eyes and anything that keeps their hands out of our pockets is their secular definition of evil. One of my ancestors was a founder of Yale once considered the finest lawyer in America. I understand and respect our legal tradition and most of the changes we have made to it over the centuries seem reasonable and beneficial but I think it's dangerously naive to imagine our laws haven't been corrupted in some ways for the benefit of lawyers as well. Lawyers are professional con artists after all. They make vastly higher incomes than the rest of us by manipulating people and most of them are for sale to the highest bidder because their higher incomes tend to attract the greedy and unprincipled. For that reason nostalgic tales of the past can be healthy explorations of alternative cultural norms whose strengths may be beneficial to us and whose weaknesses we may now have remedies for. After all, America and all our principles of democracy came from the study of ancient cultures like Athens in an age where the invention of the printing press made educational growth achievable for only a tiny segment of society back then available to most citizens. I enjoy historical nostalgia but what I personally find even more interesting is alternate histories where the author edits the past into a more romanticized version which is sort of a trip to Disneyland. Detailed historical accuracy isn't everything, :)

This article made me remember and consider the past. I found the comments interesting. For most people in Europe of North America life is materially better now than it was in the 40's through the 60's. In addition, medicine and dentistry are better. I'm not sure about education. Young people learn more science and maths, but they seem to be limited to what can be turned into a 'good paying job'. The notion that education should also be about understanding one's society and enabling one to make a contribution are notions not much valued to-day. As for punishment, spankings, like weather, were part of life. They were sometimes very painful and not infrequently undeserved. We look back and put a glow on things, and remember those which gave us pleasure and pride. Thank you, Corncake.

Hi - 'The past is another country, they do things differently there.' Especially true of spanking which could be threatened and delivered openly, a time before we all came to know that it has such strong sexual aspects.

It's better now, less shame, more openness, more erotic spanking for sure but the past, especially 70s and before, is the prime setting for our tales.