Let us not hijack this thread into a silly game of “I can make sillier sexist comments than the last guy”, OK?
[ /Modding ]
I also believe we were something of a militarized society after WW2, and that this enforced more conservative attitudes toward culture, authority, and gender roles.
Of course, since living history now pretty much begins with WW2, the past seems to have been pretty much always like the 50s to us, just with less prosperity.
But in the 60s it’s possible that there was just enough of a sense among more liberal-minded folks that this was not really what society ought to be about. So the question has to be asked: how much of the 60s sprang out of the pure unawareness of youth?
That’s brilliant.
WWII also shook things up a bit, though, as it required women on the Home Front to get out of the kitchen and into the factory, and even blacks suddenly found themselves in high demand as soldiers and workers.
What do you mean by “the” working parent? How did the house get clean, the meal get hot, and the kids get put down for a nap? Give the dad that did all of this and more some credit. His homemaking is work too.
Teach me to do that. I have the reverse down pat.
FinnAgain, you win a prize for being the first to remember that women were not so happy in those perfect days of yore.
Yo, Starving Artist! You can’t fool me. You are much nicer than they will ever know. Pax.
:dubious: You ain’t foolin’ us, ladies. Only reason we leave the “housework” to you is the elves won’t deal with men!
Indubitably. 
On the other hand, plenty of things are a lot cheaper now. Here are some 1950s TV prices - black and white console models are half the price of today’s flat screen high def models in constant dollars, and way more expensive if you adjust for inflation. Cellphones may cost more, but long distance today is basically free, which it wasn’t back then. You now buy phones, you don’t need to rent them, which also saves money. Houses are bigger, true, but that is driven by two income families, and relatively inexpensive condos were not as common back then.
BTW, I agree with you about the community benefits of women at home. I lived in a town in NJ with a lot of people working in research and relatively many women staying home, and, since they were well educated, doing all sorts of great things for the community. The problem is that in the '50s women were restricted from working for the most part due to society, while today women are restricted from not working if they choose to by economics.
I wasn’t alive in the fifties nor did I ever live in an exclusive balck community, but weren’t blacks closer knit in their communities back then?
It’s a given that many things were bad for blacks, but it is also arguable that in some areas things are still bad for blacks even with supermajority social acceptance. Something has to be better than the gang violence in inner cities, right?
While blacks have made great gains, it also seems they may have lost something too.
I’m thinking seriously about starting a “classic posts” thread (has it been done?) and starting it with this one.
So some goods are cheaper. What many say are “core values” are gone…have we traded those values for consumerism?
I second with how much women can benefit the community. But I want to ask if there wasn’t a factor involved with women staying at home in the fifties that had to do with being satisfied with less, in acknowledgement of your words “if they choose to by economics?” I’m thinking of the overkill that has become standard in American living. In the fifties, smaller houses and 1 car and 1 T.V. was the standard, and now its a whole lot more.
Even someone like me who barters for nearly everything, I have a much greater standard of living than the fifties.
That’s right, the Reaganites did it.
No, SERIOUSLY, very good point, very good indeed.
That was a good post, utterly dripping with irony…
I’d nitpick you though, Zoe, for the overgeneralized “women.” I tend to believe that when the women aren’t happy nobody is happy, and I sure can’t believe nobody in the fifties was happy.
I have a personality that is optimistic about people in general, and while I am not trying to deny that there were certainly some pretty bad things going on about how women were treated, I really want to believe that a majority had decent husbands who weren’t nearly as awful as the stereotypical wicked husband ruling the house with an iron fist.
Women didn’t have it so bad in the 50’s and 60’s. In fact, most adult women of that time were resentful of the women’s rights movement and felt it was screwing things up for them. Plenty of women had jobs, and the only ones who had to get their husband’s permission to open a checking account were the ones whose husband had to pay the bill for what his wife bought. Yes, the notion that a husband couldn’t “rape” his wife did exist, but it’s not like all across America men were happily raping the shit out of their wives with impunity.
There are men in society today who rape women and treat them badly and yet somehow their behavior doesn’t define the current age, so why does ill treatment of women define the 50’s and 60’s? I’ll tell you why - politics. That’s the way revolution works. You focus on a small number of injustices, magnify them all out of proportion in order to get people all het up so they’ll support whatever cause you’re trying to promote.
To hear feminists of the time tell it, men were all happily going off to their jobs in the morning, where they lazed around telling jokes with their buddies and enjoying three-hour, three-martini lunches, then waltzed in the door at night demanding that dinner be ready the instant they walked in the door.
The reality is that most men then, as now, reluctantly got up every morning and headed out to slave away at a deeply unsatisfying job in order to try to keep a roof over their families’ head and hopefully get ahead so their families could live better and their kids could go to college. Men were routinely ruined financially by divorce and invariably lost custody of their children, no matter how badly the wife in the relationship may have behaved.
In short, things then were much as they are now, in which both parties either worked things out and stayed together or got divorced. But marital relationships in those days were hardly as feminists of the day and certain people around here would have you believe (Zoe exempted, of course. Frankly, if more liberals were like her, I’d have a lot less problem with liberalism. But I digress…;)). A man couldn’t treat a woman that badly without suffering huge hits in divorce court, and besides most men didn’t want to treat their wives badly in the first place. To hear feminists of the day (and certain SDMB types now) tell it, no one was in love in the fifties - marriage was all master/slave and that was all there was to it…a notion which is as ridiculous as it is wrong.
The thing that invariably gets lost (or ignored) in these discussions is that civil rights and women’s rights could have been achieved in any of a number of ways without also creating all the problems we have today. Those two issues piggy-backed the counter-culture revolution but were in no way the impetus for it. Great strides in both areas had already been made, and more progress could have been made without screwing up virtually everything that was good about society in the process.
The counter-culture revolution was about immaturity, selfishness, freedom from responsibility, hedonism, and the notion of ‘relative morality’ - the ridiculous idea that societal standards should be abandoned and everyone should be free to decide for themselves the proper way to behave…an idea that is responsible for many of the societal problems we have today as way too many people will behave every bit as badly as they are allowed to.
In short, it was society as immagined by a huge number of immature, drug-addled 16-to-22-year-olds - who, typical of that age, thought they had all the answers. And it was already in full swing several years before the women’s rights movement movement began, and decades after civil rights efforts had already gotten under way.
And you are correct as to the way of life in most black communities in most parts of the country. I had occasion through my work to spend a fair amount of time in black communites during the mid-to-late sixties, and while black people most certainly were relagated to second-class status outside those areas, life within them was virtually identical to life in white areas. People worked at their jobs, went shopping, got their cars fixed, went to the movies and to the doctor and basically lived the same way that white people did. This is illustrated by the way black people were dressed during the civil rights demonstrations of the early-to-mid sixties. They dressed just like white people of the day, and within the confines of their own part of town, they lived the same way too.
Now, none of the preceeding paragraph is to be construed - as it undoubtedly will be by current-day apologists - as support for the idea that segregation was a good thing. But it does show that it was a great deal easier for black parents in those days to raise their children free from the negative influences of the drug, thug and street culture that prevails today. Black parents didn’t have to worry that their daughters’ dates were thinking of them as bitches and ho’s. Or that their sons were growing up thinking it was cool to treat women disrespectfully, deal drugs and carry weapons.
Virtually nothing good came from the type of thinking that typified the counter-culture revolution. Civil rights was practically a done deal by then, and womens’ rights came after the fact. And what we’re left with is a society like I described upthread, in which the fabric of society is irreparably torn and virtually nothing works the way it should.
And then you know what people around here take away from it when I say things like this?
That a lack of politeness in society is my main compaint and I remember an Ozzie & Harriet way of life that never existed. :rolleyes:
Cite?
What are you talking about?! It’s responsible for none of our present social problems. Drug abuse was prevalent way before the Sixties, and the rest of the things you are thinking of are, putting it mildly, not problems.
A more accurate statement would be to say that both parties were ruined financially by divorce, although the ruin was generally felt more acutely by the wife, who rarely had the ability to earn anywhere near what her husband earned, especially if she’d been staying at home with the kids.
In the past and now, the world and this country were and are filled with mothers struggling like hell to feed their children in the absence of fathers. And far too frequently, the absence of any kind of contribution from fathers.
And yet another GREAT thing for Now vs. The Old Days is the fact that men are increasingly wanting to share or have full custody of their children, and courts are finally coming around to the idea that gee, Dads are not all incompetent boobs incapable of caring for their kids and awarding joint or full custody.
Got some Citey McCitage for that bit of fanciful history?
You appear to be asserting that drug-addled hippie culture influence was well established before the women’s movement, unless you screwed up your typing somewhere.
And you are wrong.
Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” kicked off what’s known as the "Second Wave" of feminism in 1963. In 1963 kids were still screaming for the Beatles, who were still wearing suits. The free-for-all you decry didn’t really get rolling in a really big way until about 1967, and those nasty hippie values didn’t really start infecting the larger culture in a meaningful way until the 70’s.
Nope, as just demonstrated.
And you may not appreciate an open society where people can be themselves without being shunned as freaks, but you are evidently in the minority on that. Thank god.
Not listened to much Blues, have you? “Bitches and ho’s[sic]” is one thing, “cut you and drink your blood like wine” is another thing altogether…
It depended on how much the husband earned. But women were routinely granted alimony payments that lasted until they died or married again, with child support payments on top of that. Plus they usually got the house and the better of the two cars. And like I said, women almost always got the kids no matter what.
As it happens, you’ve hit upon one of my major complaints about post-'68 America. As a percentage of society, which version of America do you think had or has the greatest number of children growing up in struggling single-parent homes, unsupervised and undisciplined, often without the barest necessities of life and doomed to lives of asking “Fries with that?” or crime? And what do you think happened to cause that shift?
Well, with regard to Friedan, one book does not a revolution make. Most of the counter-culture behavior I decry was taking root in '66, blossoming in '67 and '68, and had attained full-blown idiocy by '69 and '70. Yet, IIRC, bra-burning, man-hating feminist demonstrations and the attitudes they spawned didn’t really get rolling until around '71 or '72.
No, most civil rights demonstrations had concluded by then, and most important civil rights legislation had been written and passed into law by then. Take a look at the Woodstock crowd and tell me how many black people you see there. The counter-culture revolution was all about music, drugs, long hair, funky clothes, doing drugs, having sex and cohabiting without responsibility or regard for the consequences (i.e., the kids and single moms which were the precursor to the ones you were just talking about), etc. It was all about indulgent hedonistic behavior, and in the beginning never gave a thought to either civil rights or women’s issues…save for the freedom to be promiscuous in the latter case.
Well, frankly, I do have to say that I think a society in which children grow up in stable two-parent homes, get properly educated at school, and aren’t bombarded with negative, harmful images and ideas coming right and left through the entertainment media and where adults behave and live responsibly for the most part is vastly preferable to a society laden with freaks. But honestly, objections to the the freedom to be a freak would be at about the bottom of my list regarding the harmful effects that liberalism has inflicted upon this country over the last forty-five years.
And on preview, the apostrophe was for clarity, MrDibble. My understanding is that apostrophes are called for when the plural would otherwise be confusing: i.e., hos. And no, I haven’t listened to a lot of blues, though I’ve liked very much most that I’ve heard. So, is it your contention then that most black parents of the 50’s and 60’s were concerned that their daughters’ dates might turn out to be knife-wielding vampires?
I wonder why the belief that “the good old days were better“ is often met with such widespread ridicule or even outright animosity. Surely most people can agree that there must be some things that were better then.
I think there’s been plenty of agreement that some things were better, I think most of us have agreed that the modern world definitely lacks civility and I mourn that a great deal.
But there’s a difference between appreciating that there were things that were better in the past than today is different than dumping on today as a horrible cesspool of human decay unfit to wipe the butt of yesterday.