LOL!!! What a delightful and unexpected find this was.
I was watching a movie called "Tesla", about the inventor in Thomas Edison's time who was probably at least as great Edison, but who didn't get much notoriety until recent decades. I had heard of him a while back, when I noticed the name Tesla as part of a title of a friend's website -- which was really her inventor husband's website -- and she briefly explained who Tesla was. A few years later, I saw a documentary on him.
Anyway, when I watch movies with real people and/or events, I usually look them up afterwards to see how factual the movie was. Tesla the inventor got funding from the extraordinarily rich banker J.P. Morgan, and this current movie presented Tesla as having a friendship with Morgan's daughter Anne.
Researching Anne brought up the fact that she was a strong advocate for women's rights, and in 1912 she helped form the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (SPUG). Since women generally have less money than men, and yet are expected to come up with more grandiose gifts, the goal of the society was to protest the commercialization of Christmas, and in particular in that era how women were expected to give their male bosses elaborate gifts in return for workplace favors.
As someone who never thinks of giving a gift out of the blue, and struggles to find anything appropriate for a specific holiday or birthday, I love the idea of such a movement. Since, indeed, so many gifts are "useless", and only serve the purpose to say with relief, "At least I got them a gift".
SPUG was intended to be a women's organization, until former president Teddy Roosevelt became its first male member. Alas, it had a short life, because once the war broke out in 1914, the founders' attentions were diverted there.
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