^^ This was my experience, too.
In case the above is not clear, my issue is with the way the past is presented in the media - often slanted for a certain agenda, or written by people who don't know what they are talking about.
If I offended you, I apologize. That was not my intention at all.
This brings up another easy-to-overlook factor and that is the sheer number of children running around in the fifties. This was after all the baby boom generation. Every house seemed to have 2, 3 or more children in it. When we went out to play we were never alone, there was always some kind of group. If anyone got hurt or in trouble it took only a minute to run to the nearest house and get someone's mom.Originally Posted by LizzieMaine
Today with all the moms away at work and an average of less than one child per marriage, and a lot less married couples, no wonder suburban streets look deserted. Maybe it's not such a bad idea to keep the kids inside, out there it is a lot lonelier than it used to be.
Last edited by Stanley Doble; 07-03-2012 at 02:01 PM.
Previous to the 1950s, many people in the US lived on farms, nearly a third of the population during the early 1930s. (That's compared to less than 2% today in the US.) On a farm, there is a lot of work, and when it comes to certain tasks, they just have to get done. Prior to the 1950s, there was gender based work, but it was not as strongly divided as it was portrayed in the 1950s. Men helped with the washing. Women helped with the milking. They had to. Although you had 2/3 of the U.S. population living in cities and towns (not on farms), the farming sector was a large enough part of society to influence the general culture.
Then you get the 1950's, a period (in the U.S. at least), where you had a generation of returning soldiers that needed jobs and a generation of women who had realized they could do just about every job men could do because they had done them. Young unemployed men are restless. Part of what fueled companies (and government's) desire to portray the "magical housewife" was to put the women in their place: out of the workforce. Combined with fewer home-based or family-run businesses, this meant that women were more and more removed from the workplace, especially in traditional male jobs. (Its important to note that because of the baby boom, women, particularly married women with children, made significant strides in keeping their nursing and school teaching jobs, just because there were so many children.)
Then you get these companies pushing products and labor saving devices. So suddenly it was not good enough to clean your home once a year with the whole family pitching in (where the term "spring cleaning" comes from), but you have to do it every week. Which of course, your husband can't help with because he's got a commute and a full time job. Suddenly your clothes have to be clean everyday and you have to iron your sheets.* And all sorts of stuff that companies pushed to give women more busy work- which, of course, keeps the women from getting restless. Or so they thought.
What I'm getting at is that the image of the 1950's housewife was carefully calculated and constructed to be impossible to meet. I strongly believe that a segment of society was extremely fearful of the women's liberation movement that started with the suffrage movement. The sad thing is that they won enough that many people think that all women back then were that image.
(*Note: There is nothing wrong with cleaning your home every week, wearing clean clothes everyday, or ironing your sheets or even wanting to do these things. There is something wrong with making women feel inadequate as people if they don't have a spotless house or ironed sheets.)
Progress: Going from being able to "hear a pin drop" to "can you hear me now?"
RE: the car thing, my grandmother (who was very much a 1950's housewife) would drive my grandfather into work once a week, do the grocery shopping and other shopping (back then, it meant multiple stores) and then pick my grandfather up from work at the end of the day. My grandmother drove most of her life. (They lived in a rural area with no public transportation).
The U.S. Baby Boom (roughly 1947-1964) is defined as the period of time when the birthrate for women of child bearing age was at or above 3.0 children. Before that time I believe it was below 2.5. You had two generations of women (the WWII generation and the generation which came to age after the war) caught up in "baby hysteria." So lots and lots of babies.
Progress: Going from being able to "hear a pin drop" to "can you hear me now?"
For what it's worth I would like to offer another opinion about women being pushed out of the workplace after WWII in order to make way for men returning from the war. Just about everybody was glad that the war was over, and that the men had come home safely at last (at least most of the men in the USA). Many of the jobs vacated by women were just not all that much fun anyway -- working a punch press, light assembly, riveting parts together, packaging and shipping, and the like. Mostly, for people working at that level, jobs were a crock and a pain then, just as they are now. All that I am saying is that a lot of the women that I knew were happy to be out of the workforce, and had never bought into the myth of "the magical workplace" as the holy grail of human existence.
Last edited by Angus Forbes; 07-03-2012 at 03:48 PM.
There was a sharp division between middle-class and working-class women during the postwar era. Working-class women had worked long before the war, and they continued to work after -- the Suzy Homemakerification of culture had a lot less to do with them than it did with the middle-class. Many of these women had worked in manufacturing long before the war -- the entire electronics industry, for example, was dominated by women on the assembly lines, as were the textile trades. Here in Maine, the fish canneries were always staffed by a predominantly-female workforce. None of this changed after the war.
Last edited by LizzieMaine; 07-03-2012 at 04:36 PM.
The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. -- William Jennings Bryan
I disagree with the idea that there was some kind of campaign to keep women out of the work force in the fifties. Quite the opposite. Women working in factories and other traditional male jobs was commonplace during the war years. Once the war was over women quit these jobs with a sigh of relief and got married. Same as after WW1.
What was different was that in the fifties women were encouraged to work after marriage. I know that among my older relatives, at that time, it was a disgrace if the wife worked. It meant the husband could not support his family and was most likely a drunk, a bum, or a cripple. Going to work, taking in washing, or renting out rooms to boarders were the last resort.
In the fifties this all changed. Suddenly there were women executives and professionals, and the 2 income family was fortunate because they could afford the new tailfinned car, the new split level house, automatic washer and dryer, and all the other luxuries denied the old fashioned stick in the mud families.
Again, this was all sharply divided along class lines. Women were very common in the manufacturing sector before, during and after the war. All that changed during the war is that *middle class* women went into industrial jobs.
There were many female executives before the war as well. The broadcasting and advertising industries had a great many women in significant positions during the 1930s -- radio, especially, had a very significant female representation in the executive suite, and most of those women were married.
The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. -- William Jennings Bryan
There was kind of a drought of new families during the depression because a lot of people simply could not afford to get married, set up a home and have children. Then during the war years so many young men were overseas. When the war ended there was a boom in marriages followed by a baby boom. Millions of people wanted nothing more than for things to get back to normal and have a normal life.
Then somehow during the sixties and seventies getting married and raising a family went out of fashion. So now the baby boom generation looks like some kind of anomaly where it can easily be explained by the social, economic and political forces of the times.
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