When photo editor Geoff Hansen and I started a throwback feature on the Valley News Instagram almost two years ago, we of course noticed the ways that the Upper Valley has changed visually.
Geoff wrote about that last month, when we launched this new monthly showcase of Valley News archival photographs in print. You’d be hard-pressed today, for example, to recreate the 1975 Valley News photograph Geoff once found of a farmer bringing in corn along Route 12A in West Lebanon.
Beyond that, we also noticed how dramatically the language we use to describe photos — and the people in them — has evolved. That’s evident in how the Valley News used to describe girls and women, with examples aplenty as we looked through photos for the month of June (for this edition, we chose the year 1969) and high school graduation season.
Take the caption that described “two pretty members” of Hanover’s graduating class. That kind of reductive description would not pass muster in 2019, but that’s how we identified two nameless girls in 1969. Another graduate that year, from Woodstock, was described as an “attractive lass.”
Outside of graduation, “five pretty misses” were candidates for the Lebanon Alumni Day Queen, and spectators enjoyed a “crowded parade route with attractive girls.”
The examples go on, and it didn’t get much better with age: Women were generally identified by their husbands’ names, such as in the photograph of a party for Mrs. Edward Butler, a distinguished teacher whose first name we did not print.
Of course, none of that was unusual to most people in 1969, but language evolves with us. It’s a good reminder for us to consider: How does the language we use in the media impact how we understand each other? And can we predict what kind of language are we using today that will seem outdated — or even offensive — 50 years from now?