Getting Older, Growing Younger
Cartland
1984
Submitter: I love that Barbara Cartland’s most important take away from Birth of a Nation was how entrancing Lillian Gish was. I scanned a few paged of medical advice she gives as well.
Holly: I’m sure we all had this book in our public libraries in the 80s. You really can let it go now, though. The poor Dame passed away 16 years ago at 99 years old, which put her at 83 when this book was written. Move on to Suzanne Somers and Christiane Northrup for this demographic. Barbara Cartland could be their great-grandmother!
99? Okay, I’m impressed–though yeah, that doesn’t make the book any less dated.
I think I have this book. In one chapter, she makes the valid point that too much exposure to the sun prematurely ages the skin, but she blathers so insanely about the beauty of a pearly-white skin that you have to think she’s kind of racist (she tells an anecdote about Pauline Bonaparte having a black maid so she could enjoy the contrast of her milky-white skin against the maid’s as the maid helped her into the bathtub).
BTW, you do know, don’t you, that Cartland’s daughter was Princess Diana’s stepmother?
A little more exposition may be in order: Cartland prolifically churned-out popular novels about romance among Britain’s upper crust (from what I remember of a 60 Minutes interview, some of them may have been a little spicy in their original edition, but she later rewrote them to make her heroines unmistakeably virginal, or as she said in her posh accent, “pyoo-ah”). One time in a used bookstore, I also found a short biography she wrote about her brother Ronald, an MP who was killed in the war. It felt very much like “Chariots of Fire Goes to Parliament” (if you remember the Oscar-winning movie about the religious lives of a couple of 1920s UK Olympic athletes, one a Jew, one a Christian missionary). In that one book, she writes of herself in the third-person, and she mentions her two children, including her daughter Raine. Raine was Diana’s stepmom: she and her siblings didn’t like her very well; their nickname for her was “Acid Raine”!
Premarin was/is the one made from horse pee wasn’t it?
It *is*. They’ve been heavily advertising their vaginal cream lately in print and on TV
Pregnant mare pee to be exact. That’s why it’s called Premarin. Pregnant Mare Urine.
Hey, it works, and it’s not like they give it to you fresh from the horse. It’s not even the grossest thing medicine does. They now do human-to-human fecal transplants to get healthy bacteria into the guts of people with medical disorders of the bowels –
http://thefecaltransplantfoundation.org/what-is-fecal-transplant/
And they’re even looking into making it into a pill form to combat obesity.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/freeze-dried-poop-pills-being-tested-for-obesity-treatment/
Yep. The next step in weight loss might be swallowing pills made of freeze dried human poop.
I’d read about that https://danceswithfat.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/they-want-fat-people-to-eat-poop-now/ I’d rather be fat.
Can’t remember where I read it, but I did read that Premarin had more bad side effects/health risks than some other estrogens and that’s why it’s not as widely recommended anymore.
Goodness knows I fight the battle of the bulge, but when it comes to popping poo pills I draw the line
I draw the line at all of them. It’s okay to be fat 🙂
Unfortunately the mares used to produce Premarin live horrible lives, and their foals are often sent to slaughter. It’s a pretty nasty business.
The mares who supply the urine for Premarin are kept in tiny stalls in which they can barely move and given just enough water to survive so that their urine will be very concentrated. Their foals are taken away soon after birth (usually sold for slaughter) so that the mares will come back into heat and can become pregnant again right away. It’s a horrible business and needlessly cruel, all so women can weather the effects of menopause more comfortably.
Not name dropping. Dropping dropping. Excellent!
Yes, and the mares are pretty much imprisoned for most of the year, standing in stalls hooked up to catheters. They have to be pregnant for the hormones to be sufficient, so they are bred or inseminated every year, and when the foals come, the mares get only a little time to be with them. Then they are made pregnant again and imprisoned.
As for the foals, they were (and in some places still are) just byproducts and often sold to slaughter. Some operators, however, figured out that they could get more for the foals if they had a serious breeding program, and so more foals started to get chances at actual lives. But their mothers do not. When they are too old to reproduce, they are not usually retired but sold off — again, often to slaughter (a lot of these farms are/were in Canada, where butchering horses for human consumption is legal). And horses attractive to the urine business — large bodied ones — are also attractive to slaughter buyers. More meat per animal.
When it became clear a few years ago that these products were bad for you, sales dropped, and a lot of farms went out of business. Heaven knows what happened to all those innocent mares.
I think Cartland’s estimate of 90% of American women being on hormones was high, even in 1984. But I wish the excerpt had included that cure for car sickness — I have a dog who can’t travel LOL.
Name dropping at its finest.
Pharmacist here: Estrogen as a treatment for anything but the most severe menopausal symptoms fell out of favor, since it has an unacceptable increased risk for breast and endometrial cancer. Also, taking calcium is not generally harmful, but it is unlikely to prevent severe osteoporotic disease. It would not fix a dowager hump. I would leave the medical advice to your doctor instead of this lady, who seems sweet but uninformed even at the time.
I imagine the advice for motion sickness was for a wristband such as the “sea band”. Some people claim these work due to pressure on acupuncture sites, but evidence is lacking. Stick with meclizine. I believe this is considered safe in dogs, as well, although you should check with your vet.
When you say “Stick with meclizine”, I keep seeing it as “Stick with medicine” and I think you misspelled “medicine”
Even older folks who remember who Gish or Claudette Colbert are becoming rare, and neither has been alive, much less “still beautiful,” for a very long time.
I’m 58 next month and I sure know who Lillian Gish and Claudette Colbert were! Doesn’t anybody watch Turner Classic Movies? So often I see lists of “best this/that/t’other movie of all time” and whoever compiles the list assumes that “all time” (except for a few outliers like Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz or It’s a Wonderful Life) began with the first 007 movie
Next generation of “still beautiful” women: Sophia Loren and Lauren Hutton…
I’m 37 and know very well who Gish and Colbert are.
Which makes you a classic film fan, not a normal member of society. You might even enjoy my blog, which is dedicated to movies which have passed their 100th Birthday.
Thank you!
Like The Birth of a Nation! (And not the new film about a slave revolt that cops its title, but THE DWGriffith BoaN)
“Dream of a love like Romeo and Juliet”?? they committed suicide!!
Barbara Cartland is still a well-known personality, so there are people out there who will want to read this. But given that, in the ageing and beauty field, she’s mainly known for applying makeup with a trowel, she’s not really in a position to teach anybody about remaining young and beautiful. (Plus, of course, the medical-type advice is all pretty suspect.)