September 29, 2025

Today for women’s history was all about consumerism in South Korea, all I’ll say is that I struggled with writing the weekly blog post for this one as the piece I was given, while not a hard read, was just a pain to add to my plot due to how I was building my previous two characters. I had to create a new woman just to keep up momentum.

The lecture began with popular media and apartments. Apparently 1/3 of the population watched movies; weekly magazines became popular as they weren’t a thing before as a source of entertainment. Apartments were a state endeavour to create affordable housing. It was basically inevitable that the working class in large cities like Seoul would move into apartments as they were priced out of getting individual houses. People complained but the government built them anyway.

To portray apartments as desirable, a lot of popular media centred around apartment living. The movie Woman in Apartment (1969) showed apartments to be places for privacy and love affairs. Woman Who Wanted an Apartment (1970) tried to portray apartments as upper class. Apartment living was also shown to be the modern way of life, alongside having a car and sunglasses.

Seems like this is where the lecture ended. Sorry it was so abrupt but thats all I wrote in my notes. Let’s move on the seminar which was all about the perception of the police and the RCMP. Full disclosure, I did not speak at all during this seminar.

We began by discussing the first reading, which is by a guy name Macleod. He wrote that the role of the police was to bring an eastern identity to western Canada, not purely British. They wanted to make themselves distinct from Americans. Police were also mediators between the settlers and the Indigenous. They also brought centralized law and ensured the settlement and economic exploitation of the west. They were essential to establishing culture and making sure that the settlement process was lawful. The evidence used in this writing was from police records, called group 18.

My professor asked us what the issues with this are and people said there were biases. He stated that there is difficulty with the rampant skepticism that permeates our current era, we are so distrustful of government documents. But I guess these police records are trustful. He then asked us what governments seem to be the most concerned with and he answered that they are most concerned about money, all the time. Throughout the readings money is always a factor. I noticed that and was very annoyed.

The next work was by a person named Betke, who questions Macleod. That’s why we had to read it. This is a trend in this class, where he assigns all of us to read at least two pieces that essentially address each other, mostly in contradictory ways. Which is nice in a way as it gets students thinking more as I have noticed that many of my “peers” tend to just repeat what they read rather than think critically about it. When my historiography professor made us watch the bar scene from Good Will Hunting, it really stuck with me due to how accurate it was.

Anyway, Betke uses patrol reports and writes about how the Police role in western Canada was less about criminality and more about doing check-ins on crop quality and livestock. They would also send in veterinarians and fight fires. Police would also help those who were ill, aided in childbirth, and dealt with food shortages. According to my professor, the cops still do this in rural Canada today.

The purpose of the police was to ensure the success of settlers and settlement. They are an assimilative force, and the biggest crime they enforced was related to alcohol and morality. They also checked in on abuse in the home and “improper sexuality.”

It was also stated that the welfare state represented paternalism. With that my professor told us that the libertarian in him does not need the state to be his daddy. I made note of this because I thought you would all find it a bit entertaining and a little odd. This evolved into a conversation about my area’s police and the prosecutor’s office. There was a dispute about not prosecuting crimes is politically advantageous for the prosecutor. Sorry for the repetition of words but I do not know how to write that any other way.

There were a few other readings but only one is really worth mentioning here. It is a piece by William Baker, I want to give the name of the article but it might give too much away. The student who chose to present on this reading summarized it as a labour dispute with a Coal Union. The RCMP believe that the workers were at fault and were seen as a drunken mob, but the Coal company did not want any bloodshed. The Miners saw the Mounties as enemies. The RCMP exercised restraint when dealing with the strikers and did not want to escalate violence. They were just responding to the actions dealt by the workers.

Baker brings up how the police were serving public good by maintaining order, they acted as mediators between the miners and the company. Class conflict was mentioned, the police can be seen as pro-state and company violence. The student brought up Marx and Engels here, but they are never mentioned in the piece which I think was the wrong move on Baker’s part. Anyway, the conclusion was that anyone who stands against the building of the new West is an enemy of the RCMP. Funnily enough this student has stickers of Cheburashka and Gena on his laptop.

Anyway, class ended after this presentation and I headed home.