Book Review: Time Traveling to 1983

Title: Time Traveling to 1983 

Author: Michael B. Allen

Date: 2023

ISBN:  9798367220841

Length: 96 pages

Quote: "Despite having a difficult first term as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the leader of the Conservative Party, won the election by the most decisive victory since 1945, with a 144-seat majority."

Feminism was working in 1983: Women were moving into top seats without even having to identify as feminists. Justice O'Connor had settled quietly into her job; it was Prime Minister Thatcher's turn to dominate the relatively pleasant news headlines of 1983.

I remember 1983 as a year when I didn't like reading the news. Most headline news stories were still about men. They were not about President Reagan's speeches being well received or Douglas Adams' books being hysterically funny, either, although those things were happening. The men on the front pages above the folds of newspapers were mostly violent criminals. And be warned--although this series of year-in-retrospect books is wholesome historical fluff, Time Traveling to 1983 does bring that back to life. Murders and terrorists, and hunting down the last surviving Nazis passed as the good news. 

Hello, newspaper editors? Nazis were not exactly pleasant breakfast reading, even if they were being arrested, back when they were alive. Nazis became an entertaining, even kinky, stereotype only after the real ones were all dead.

Then there was the Miss America pageant of 1983, the year the pageant lost all claims to respect. White pageant-watchers said ugly things because the pageant winner identified as Black. Black pageant-watchers totally failed to support her because she wasn't Black enough. 

Michael Jackson's song about this kind of thing came later. 

While other Miss Americas toured the country making sweet, vapid little speeches about their dreams of ending world hunger and making the world a happy place for all the little children, for a year, and then went home and had babies, Vanessa Williams caught hate until someone finally dug up an old nude picture of her and demanded that she be forced to surrender her crown, because Miss Americas were still supposed to be "pure" and nudity was not considered "pure." 

(In a college class, around the time Williams was being dethroned, we read sociological studies that showed that confusion about the difference between nudity and immorality was one of the odd assortment of things that define "class" in North America. If your grandparents had college degrees, especially if the women did, you understood that the "shame" of nudity in the Bible was a social, cultural thing. If your grandparents did not learn how to read, you probably took it for granted that all nudity led directly to sexual sin, because you did have enough sense of decency not to have thought in depth about the disparity between this belief and the effect actual nudity was probably having on your grandparents by that time. This kind of thing illustrates how "class" was a matter of culture, not income, even though many things associated with the upper class happen to be expensive. Both Jilly Cooper and Paul Fussell then wrote popular books with Class as their titles. I've not read either book in years but I remember them as interesting, apparently accurate on most points, and quite reliable guides to what was fashionable in what circles in the 1980s. And, yes, the more settled your position as either an intellectual or an heir to old money, the more likely you were to say that Vanessa Williams was a lovely girl whom people ought to leave alone.) 

Thomas skips ahead to tell us that in any case Vanessa had the last laugh. She's still known as a singer and actress, and whatever happened to the other cute chick in whose favor she resigned? The history of the Miss America pageant does list a few other winners who went on to do something with their education--Diane Sawyer, Lynda Carter, Lee Meriwether, and I suppose we should still count Anita Bryant--but nowadays people urge their daughters to qualify for scholarships based on actual academic work rather than body proportions.

Sally Ride and Billie Jean King made headlines in 1983 and belong in this book. Would they have been so popular if they'd been branded by "sexual identities" rather than their legitimate identities as Anglo-American women? Probably not, but we'll never know. In 1983 we still had a quaint custom known as minding our own business. The whole idea of women's using the title "Ms" instead of "Miss" and "Mrs" came from our idea that it was pretty rude to tell the world whether or not someone was married; that might be a matter of public record but it was not the first thing a nice person wouldwant to know. I miss that rule of etiquette, now. As a matter of public record, silence about Ride's, and King's, and Michael Jackson's, and other celebrities' sexual kinks was not death even for their careers. Silence was a chance for people to like them. 

His discussion of 1983 fashions may strike people who still have a few in their closets as remarkably able to overlook the influence of Diana Spencer, and his list of typical 1983 prices is less complete than the price lists in the earlier books in this series that I've read. Lists of 1983 movies, books, and music are thorough as ever. 

As before,. I recommend buying a printed copy so everyone can look at the nostalgic photos and reminisce. This review is appearing almost six months later than it was meant to appear, because the colorful photos take up a lot of memory and snagged not only in Outlook's spam filter but in its spam-deleting program.