Text in 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia
Beauty Contest, Atlantic City, 1925
A CENTURY
What is a century? When the Supreme Court decided, in June 2022, to overturn Roe v. Wade, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the state would revert to the Texas statute Roe v. Wade had invalidated, a 1925 law that criminalized abortion for both women and providers. For the question of reproductive rights, then, a century was time for the pendulum to swing back to exactly where it had been in Texas a hundred years earlier, almost as if no time at all had passed. The Taliban in Kabul, too, have erased, at the level of law and policy, any gains women there had made over the previous century. A century can mean nothing.
But in the hundred years since 1925, technologies scarcely imaginable have become central to our lives. Transatlantic flight was barely possible in 1925; we now have not just a web of passenger and freight flights moving almost five billion passengers a year, but moon landings, space stations, Mars probes, a network of communications satellites, weapons systems that can fly halfway around the globe to annihilate the entire population of the earth in minutes. A century is also the time it took to go from the very first laboratory-based television transmission to the global universality of the medium, not just in our homes but in our pockets. And in terms of human memory, a century is the amount of time it takes to eliminate virtually every bit of eyewitness testimony to any human event. Aside from the handful of people from each generation who live past 105, all historical evidence, a century out, is documentary.
A century is enough time to completely reorder large parts of everyday social interaction—how people communicate with each other, for instance—and it is not enough time to reorder other large parts of social interaction—although a few people have argued that we have seen a decrease of total violence (per capita) in the world, we have daily evidence that we are as brutal to each other as ever.
A century is long enough to institutionalize women’s rights in some places but not long enough to do so globally. It is long enough to recognize the civil rights of all in some countries but not long enough to establish equal rights in most of those.
A century is long enough to install basic environmental laws and regulations and to see many rolled back. A century is long enough to understand climate change and global warming and not long enough to slow it down.
A century is marked by uneven change.