It's kind of like dirty, but it's made it more powerful for me.
>> Well, I think there's also a power relationship there that's the same.
It seems like a lot of the women in New York who were,
you know, partners to these powerful men, the
women who were, the Mrs. Bowens and whatnot.
They didn't, you know, part of their job as the head of their household and
as a person of status in the city was to sort of be an evangelist.
You know, Christi, I couldn't have. I mean, Christianity and God was
such a big part of you know, of the conversation in every single
household in, in the places where Mary likely worked, you know,
that they were part of Christian homes and at the women were
giving pamphlets out and sort of quizzing their staff on, on their
beliefs and have they come around to believe what their employers believe.
And I imagine Mary, because she was smart
and literate, though no one knows how she learnt
to read and write as well as she did, just sort of going with the flow and then,
you know, as soon as the door's closed, just rolling her eyes.
So, you know,, who knows if that's true.
Maybe she was more reverent than I'm imagining her.
But, I imagine that power relationship to be pretty much the same.
You do what you can to get paid, and then you, you know, get through it.
And she actually liked her work, which was a bonus.
But I don't think she liked the part, or in my imagination she didn't like
the part where she was having to
ascribe to beliefs that she didn't necessarily have.
>> I think in a lot of ways that speaks more to the, the
culture of that time as opposed to even just the faith of the religion itself.
That this was something that was so institutionalized,
or so ingrained in the way that things happened.
Where everyone just sort of seemed to just do what they do because it's
what they've always done and without stopping
to actually even think about, you know,
what's being you know, set forth as the way to be without
any sort of, I don't know, like justificational relational aspect to it.
I can see why someone like Mary would sort of resist
that, because, she seems to be someone who is very much
a business woman in a sense and if something doesn't make
sense to her she's not going to jump into it right away.
>> I'm very much a grown up, is how I imagine Mary.
And
I think a lot of the relationships between employers and their
staff at this time was a lot like parents to a child.
Like this is how you act, this is how you
behave, this is when you come in this is when.
And you know to keep their jobs and support their own families they listened,
you know, and they were dutiful and they let themselves be taught, you know,
in the way that I think was part of, of the arrangement, and part
of the relationship, you know, in addition to the actual tasks they were doing.
And I
imagine Mary, you know, didn't really need that relationship
in her life, because she was already a grownup.