Since when do you have to be conservative to be nostalgic?
Ah yes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
On this topic, I invite you to perusea previous thread and some required reading.
But how do we know many of the marriages were themselves not “wanted”, but forced upon the teens by the fact of an unplanned pregnancy?
Yeah, I know, it’ll be argued that nowadays she’ll just have the kid out of wedlock or abort… OR she will have used birth-control. Since to me a shotgun wedding is NOT more moral than any of these other outcomes, I don’t see the 50s superiority.
Threadkiller, (nice name BTW) conservatives are by no means the only people who are nostalgic. What I’m talking about is a certain kind of nostalgia that just suddenly struck me: an attitude not so much of “didn’t it used to be great” as “Society is going to hell in a handbasket”.
I really don’t think society is going to hell in a handbasket, it seems to me that we are striving to advance and I wouldn’t go back for anything.
Thanks for the links, Cervaise. I’m gonna have to see if I can find that book at the library tommorow.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz for those who don’t follow links.
Uh, are you looking at the same as Constitution as I am?
Woah, now. Masturbation and being “sex-obsessed” aren’t the same thing. Are you saying that it’s somehow worse that we acknowledge that (shocking as you may find it) people masturbate? Would you rather that we were still telling kids that masturbating would make them go blind?
This is exactly why I can’t understand nostalgia for the 1950’s. It’s not that I love seeing sex on TV, I simply am glad that it’s allowed to be discussed, rather than having completely asexual couples (with separate beds) and not acknowledging that masturbation is normal. I’d rather that people understand what VD is and how you can contract diseases and get pregnant.
Hamish wrote:
Ah, yes. The glorious days long past, when everybody knew their Armor Class and hit points, an average person only had a one-in-three chance of opening an unlocked door, and hyperinflation drove retail prices so high that it took 7 gold pieces just to buy an ordinary hooded lantern.
Of course, if you could find a Monty Haul D.M., you’d have plenty to be nostalgic about…
I think fluiddruid brings up an excellent point, and one that was echoed by my mother, in a conversation inspired by the movie Pleasantville. It isn’t that horrible things didn’t happen in the 1950’s… it’s just that you didn’t talk about it. Life was lived in fear of what the neighbors would think, and woe betide the person who falls outside societal norms.
Can you imagine a national scandal about clergy molesting children happening in the 1950s? Court cases are revealing that there are priests who started preying on children at that time; why did it take fifty years for this to come out?
You just didn’t talk about those kinds of things.
Horrible things thrive in the darkness of ignorance; it’s sometimes unpleasant to have things hauled into the light of day, but knowledge gives us power over them.
As someone doing a degree in Criminology right now, I can assure you that life was much more violent in the “good old days”…
I grew up in the '40s and '50s. Started a career and a family in the '60’s and 70’s, worked, raised kids in the '80s and '90s. I’ve enjoyed them all, I miss some things about those days, I don’t miss some things. I’ve seen a lot and learned a lot and I’m happy to be just where I am and hope to be around to see more.
In her book “It Takes a Village” Hillary Clinton mentiones how great it was when she was a kid because the whole neighborhood could help raise the kids.
I think maybe some of you are negative thinkers. When you think of the 50’s you think of all the bad things and none of the good. When I think of the 50’s, 60’s, or any other decade I tend to think of what was good about them rather then what was bad. That isn’t to say I think everything was peachy and I certainly think we must remember what was bad. It just isn’t the first thing that pops into my mind.
Marc
How can one be glad of the world, unless one is flying to it for refuge?
Pfft. We aren’t trying to be negative for the sake of it. The effort made in this thread is a REBUTTAL of 1950s nostalgia. (1950s “fetishism” in the OP.) It is a perfectly valid response to the myth so irritatingly propagated by the article cited in the OP and elsewhere.
Of course it’s full of negative remembrance. Why? That’s HOW one rebuts nostalgia for a fictional or falsely-positive remembrance. But we’re not “negative thinkers.”
See, here’s some good things I remember. I remember an era when[ul][li]the goal of gender equality was closer than ever before;[/li][li] racism was more unacceptable as it ever was;[/li][li]health standards and prosperity were at unprecedented levels;[/li][*]education and knowledge were more accessible than could be previously imagined.[/ul]Oh, wait. That was the 1990s. 
I myself have always wondered about this nostalgia thing-it seems to me that humans remember mostly the good things, and forget the bad. I’ve always wondered why the 1890’s were the “gay nineties”? (This is true even outside the US-in France, this decade was the “belle epoque”. If you read a little book by Otto Bettman (“THE BAD OLD DAYS”), you would swiftly realize that the 1890’s were a horrible time to live:
-people died from tuberculosis, cholera, and yellow fever
-no social security, no old age pensions-if you survived, old age was mostly grim poverty
-crime was RAMPANT-probably worse than today!
-you most likely lived and dies within 20 miles of your birthplace-travel and vacations were only for the very rich
-fresh food was a luxury-most people made do with stale bread and nearly spoiled meat!
On the other hand, I think the 1950’s were a time of great optimism-sometimes I think people today are excessively gloomy!
Are you talking about the 1890’s or the 1490’s? The railroad was in full swing in the 1890’s and you certainly didn’t need to be wealthy to take advantage of them. In the 1890’s there was more opportunity to take advantage of travel and leisure then there was just 30 years earlier.
And fresh food being a luxury? Again the railroad played a large part in bringing fresh food from the farms and into the cities. Refridgerated boxcars made it possible to even transport meat over a long distance without spoilage. As for the bread, well, they did have neighborhood bakeries in the city. I wouldn’t doubt it if they got fresher bread then most of us find at the supermarket.
That isn’t to say the 1890’s ruled. I just think you’re mistaken about rotten meat and lack of travel. Rotten by our standards maybe but at the time it wasn’t half bad.
A slight bit of speculation:
There could be a little common ground here. While the 50’s might not have been as good a time to live as the 90’s, the difference could be the pervasive optimism and sense of control during that period, both as individuals and as societies. Quite a bit has been written about how the war had energized the United States, as had the completely different relationship people had with their government. While I don’t want to reduce everything to politics, and wasn’t alive at the time, it implies that there was a sense that Americans and America could do anything they wanted, that America’s leaders would light the way forward, and that the future was bright. You’d get a job, you’d advance, and your loyalty to your company would be rewarded by your company’s loyalty to you. The media could be trusted. Even if there were problems now, they would be solved down the road.
Contrast that with the 90’s. The Vietnam war and decades of “problematic” governments going back to the 70’s or possibly earlier had robbed the country of its innocence and trust in its leaders. Although Communism’s threat was gone, people on all sides of the political spectrum believed that they were largely the tools of impersonal forces: either the lying and thieving government, greedy profiteering corporations, sensationalistic (or “biased”) media or the harsh vagarities of the market. Plus the millenium loomed; Y2K and religious millenialism added a slightly apocalyptic tinge to society.
A lot of this is probably just the difference between earlier coverups and modern openness, but I don’t think that’s all of it. I think it comes down to the national mood, and despite material improvements and the “wonders of the internet” (snicker) the 90’s just wasn’t as optimistic a time.
But then again, I could be wrong.
JRDelirious:
Well, I’m not interested in getting into an abortion debate now, so let’s just talk about the ones who would in any case have carried the baby to term. You really don’t think it is more moral to make both responsible parties dedicate themselves to taking care of the child as a single, structured family unit than to make the child grow up with one parent and if he or she is lucky get either a support check or occasional visits from the other? You don’t think there’s some higher form of morality attached to sacrificing one’s immediate happiness for the sake of obligation? Well, I, and those who are nostalgic for such things, do. If we disagree on those issues, so be it.
fluiddruid:
Well, at the same one as the US Supreme Court of 1973 looked at. Seriously, that’s not really a debate for this thread, is it?
Hardly, but do you think that sex humor in mainstream entertainment is conducive to children gaining a healthy understanding of sex, or do you think it just leads to a light-headed, giggling, immature attitude about the whole issue?
Expressing disgust at the sexualizing of popular culture is hardly incompatible with conveying a realistic, healthy attitude about sex to children.
Chaim Mattis Keller
December, I just read the entire run of the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the country’s leading black newspapers, for the 1950s. (I’m a research assistant for a history professor.) I can assure youthat minorities were not content and that many of them did speak out about it.
A series of articles written by Pauli Murray for the Afro-American sticks in my mind. She was arguing that blacks needed to get the hell out of the South. The thrust of her argument: “The Jews didn’t leave Europe and look what happened to them.” And when you read the paper, with the almost-weekly news of lynchings and police brutality, you can see where she’s coming from.
“women were practically property,”
In the 1950s?!?! :rolleyes:
Already by the mid-19th Century (1850s and '60s) old laws that said a woman could not own property on her own and that her father or husband was her legal guardian :eek: were replaced with laws stating that adult women could hold property and enter into contracts in their own right.
By the later 19th Century (1880s or '90s), millions of women went to the cities to work in office and retail jobs, in addition to the “traditional” women’s jobs like nurse and schoolteacher. In large cities like Chicago, hundreds of thousands of young women lived on their own and supported themselves financially. The modern institution of “dating” (less formal courting, no chaperones) that some people believe started with the automobile in the 1920s was actually in full swing in the “gay Nineties” cities. (Hey! Maybe that’s why they were gay! They were finally going on dates. )
It’s true that the jobs considered “suitable” for a woman then were limited by our standards, and that it was a social expectation that a woman would eventually marry. But it is also indisputable that millions of women in 1900 or 1925, never mind the 1950s, were living on their own (not married or in their parents house), supporting themselves, and choosing their own husbands.
It may not seem like much of a statement, but a woman in 1895 Chicago was measurably freer, both legally and practically, than a woman in 2000 Kabul.
Whoa, sex was just not a part of the comedy of The Honeymooners which was mostly a funnier extension of the Don Ameche-Frances Langford skits featuring The Bickersons.
What do you mean the male leads are unable to control their masturbation? People-pleasing, can’t-say-no, gotta-be-included George Constanza won that contest!