Chastising a girl or punishing a woman is not a game. It’s very serious, and it won’t go off without a trace. Visible marks. Traces in the form of swelling welts and long-lasting bruises in the color spectrum between red, blue and green. And ultimately also traces in the memory that have a lasting effect. At least that is the actual intention of the whole action.

So let’s not kid ourselves. For thousands of years, children have been beaten with a rod if they didn’t parry. They were made naked so that the natural wood could develop its full effect. But a rod like this causes injuries. It cuts the skin, which then forms thousands of tiny drops of blood. You don’t even have to hit particularly hard to do this. You just have to do what every father, mother, teacher and educator did in the 18th century.

Until the 1950s, there was a cane in every German classroom. It was usually as thick as an index finger and not a day went by without it being used somewhere to give a youngster’s bottom a thick welt. A cane like this had an effect through every pair of trousers and every skirt, and there were teachers who hit hard so that the pupil stood up bent over in pain after the punishment and traces of blood appeared in their underpants because they had burst open after a short time.

Incidentally, girls were often even worse off. Not only were their skirts pulled up. They also had their panties pulled tight between their buttocks, so that the unfortunate girl received her spanking practically on her bare bottom. Girls were meant to be obedient, and sometimes you had to beat them into it with the cane.

Until the 1950s, ballet teachers used a riding crop to encourage the ballerinas of tomorrow to perform at their best. Ballerinas are usually petite women who dance light-footedly across the stage and are capable of almost acrobatic movements. Anyone who knows in what scanty clothing the girls completed their training can also vividly imagine what such a young thing looked like after a dozen blows with a stiff riding crop.

In the past, the riding crop was also used by the numerous stable girls who performed their laborious tasks in every riding stable. They usually chose this job out of love for horses. But it was not uncommon for them to have to deal with a bossy stable master who knew exactly how brutal a riding crop is, how it cuts mercilessly into the skin and what pain it causes.

In comparison, Grandpa’s good old leather strap is almost harmless. It leaves an impressive pattern of wide welts that quickly swell up and make the skin glow red. But it rarely seriously injured anyone. A leather strap is simply too wide for that and distributes the force of the impact over a relatively large area without causing too much damage. When applied to bare skin, the strap burns like fire. But after a few days everything was forgotten and it was usually only weeks before the next beating was due.

A real whip is a completely different matter. They come in a wide variety of designs, from the short and handy whip for domestic use to the braided Argentinian kantschu for rounding up herds of cattle. Their actual task has to do with animals. But in countries where a whip is always to hand, it is of course also used to teach a disobedient daughter a lesson or to remind an unwilling wife of her duties.

The reality of punishment, especially of women, adolescents and children, was and is anything but harmless. Nevertheless, the cane, the crop, the whip and a whole range of other instruments of punishment have been an integral part of everyday life for thousands of years. In Europe today, the use of these instruments is rather rare. But in many parts of the world, occasional corporal punishment is still the epitome of education and whole generations of young girls and boys continue to learn the meaning of diligence and obedience in this very memorable way.

In the western world in particular, many adults mourn the good old days when all was still right with the world. Back when men still showed responsibility and married a woman before they used her. And when women still knew that their place was at a man’s side.

Many a grandma today shakes her head when she sees how rudely the young brats behave on the school bus and thinks back to her youth, when there was no such thing. Back then, when a girl who didn’t know how to behave was slapped on the spot by an angry adult. Today, many a mother secretly wishes she could take a wooden spoon to help her lazy daughter to study harder and get better grades. And many a father, who was deprived of any educational rights in the 1950s, would love to beat his adolescent daughter with a leather strap if she doesn’t return home until well after midnight after a party.

But if you want to do that today, you have to emigrate and look for a country where not only the children but also the wife are brought up according to the tried and tested methods.

Impressions: Punishment as it really is

In Eastern Europe, rebellious girls are still dealt with as they were a hundred years ago. Today, all you have to do is cross a border and you end up in a world where the cane is still as commonplace as it was here several generations ago. Not only at home in families, but also in schools, in apprenticeships and in reformatories.