Thanks to the fervent refusal of the English language and its users to employ use of the words “thee” and “thou” I can not be sure if you are asking in general or specifically asking me that question.
To address it personally I must awkwardly admit that I did not refresh my memory of the book itself. A friend of mine owns it and I’ve read it before (25 years ago) and still remember the main thrust of the book.
I must say that I only posted about it to let folks know about a book on the subject of this thread. I didn’t plan on wading into the details of it. But this is the Dope so anything’s fair-game! I do not remember that very interesting point you mentioned:
According to the description of that book, “the period to which this term is most often applied [is] the years from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900’s.” I did not realize that this specific era was what the phrase “the good old days” referred to.
I didn’t realize that either. Looking at it that narrowly sorta changes the discussion. I myself think of the “Good Old Days” as some nebulous concept of whichever chronological period the speaker/author personally designates to put up on a pedestal.
Now I really want to re-read it. Writing about it from the perspective of just one era, “from the end of the Civil War to the early 1900’s”, as “The Good Old Days” is quite interesting to me.
Another thing that I think helps make the old days look particularly rosy was the Hayes code. If what you know about the Good old days is based on watching the movies and TV from the time then:
There were no drugs
There was no premaritial sex
the Police were always good and decent
Criminals were irredeemable (none of this society’s to blame nonsense)
Our country was the greatest
Every family had a mother and a father, unless there was a tragedy and one of them died.
All the black people were happy in their jobs as maids, porters and muscians
Basically, who wouldn’t want to live in Pleasantville
The supposed idyll of “Pleasantville” was masterfully deconstructed in the film Suburbicon.
Here’s just one example of how rotten the 1950s and early 60s could be under the surface. This was the golden age of commercial aviation, and one of the most glamorous jobs was for a young woman to become a flight attendant, or as they were called in those days, a stewardess or airline hostess. But having this job came at a price. Typically, the airlines had many rules for stewardesses, among them such things as retiring when you were 25, resigning if you married, and not having children. I read in one book that circa 1960, there was a Pan American stewardess who was a single mother. She kept this a secret for 3 years. Then the airline found out (I wonder how? Did they have people who spied on their stewardesses?) What do you think they did? They gave the woman these options: either be terminated, or put the child up for adoption! Can you imagine a business making such a request of a woman? That is not virtuous! That is satanic! So much for the good old days!
As a human being, I wouldn’t want to be alive to experience any year before 1968.
But even during the Hays Code time, nostalgia existed! See “A Stop At Willoughby” from the Twilight Zone. Nostalgia existed back then, and exists now.
Look at all the Westerns back then. Did people really want to go back to a time where they could be shot dead in the street? Not really. But they didn’t really have to go back and get shot, and the hero won the day, so those were good stories.
Plus there was plenty of film noir etc. during the time reminding people of evil present day things.
Written in '74, where people still remembered pre Great War.
Yeah, so long ago all the grandparents remember is the good stuff.
It makes sense since in 1974, that was when peoples grandparents were old.
Yeah, and those sound silly today. But they werent so silly back then, as it wasnt considered a career, so much as a way to “meet a good husband,” and experience some travel etc while doing it. But I knew several back in the late 70’s and getting married was not taboo at all. Remember, it just became okay for women to have cool jobs- so as to find a good husband". yeah, that seems silly and bad now, but many women were on such a quest back then.
Here is a blog about it, for the 1960’s, with those silly rules, but she has found memories. And the rules about getting married changed quickly, as she notes.
Have you read the requirements for a male shopworker in the early 1900’s late 1800’s?
I’ve shared this story before, but my mother was a stewardess for United Airlines from 1960 to 1963, and that was absolutely the airline’s policy at that time; she had to “retire” from being a stewardess just before her 23rd birthday, because she was getting married.
But, one of her roommates/colleagues at United was among the stewardesses who were involved in forcing the airlines to change those rules in the 1960s; said roommate wound up making a career of being a flight attendant, and did so despite getting married, and having several children. So, yes, by the 1970s, those rules were long gone, and it was absolutely possible to make an actual career out of being a flight attendant, while having a “normal” family life. as well.
Trivial by comparison, perhaps, but there was a BBC TV show of that title imitating music-hall style performances of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, and with the audience all dressed up in the appropriate clothes. It started in 1953 and ran for 30 years, so I suppose you could say the term applies to “now minus 70-100 years”. Some people over here might look on the 50s that way, as a time of economic improvement and recovery from WW2 but from today’s perspective, in many ways that was a mean and pinched society - and no-one would really want to relive the 20s to 40s.
I cant find it but it was like 12 hour days six days a week, no marriages, , etc etc. Get there early to clean, then leave late to help with the totals.
The draconian rules about youth, attractiveness and availability of “air hostesses” weren’t set up like that for the benefit of the female employees, to facilitate their “meeting a good husband”. Their purpose was to lure the (male) paying customers by suggesting erotic opportunities:
This unsurprisingly resulted in a lot of sexual harassment of stewardesses by passengers (with, unsurprisingly, no extra compensation for the employees for the implied sex-work part of their jobs). As this article notes (in discussing the infamous Eastern Airlines “Presenting the Losers” ad, showing a bunch of pretty (white) girls who allegedly didn’t meet the airline’s stringent criteria for “her face, her make-up, her complexion, her figure, her weight, her legs, her grooming, her nails and her hair […] her voice, her speech […] her personality, her maturity, her intelligence, her intentions, her enthusiasm, her resiliency and her stamina”.
The old days were a lot better for me because I was younger. Should be the same for almost everyone. Other than being younger the good old days were only gooder for select people, not everyone. And there were exceptions even for that, in the good old days common medical problems struck haves as easily as the have nots.
I do not remember that very interesting point you mentioned: