The great 1950s, as depicted in "Father Knows Best"

[DrDeth]

@Czarcasm

Are there any show at all in the fifties that represented this aspect?

Only one that I know of with a single Mother- It’s Always Jan, but a few with a single Father.

But what’s your point?

@Czarcasm

Working women (on television, the topic of this thread) earning anything remotely near what men earned and doing what men usually do?

Did they discuss pay on TV back then?

This thread is not only about TV shows.

@themapleleaf

But this doesn’t mean that all women and blindly accepted such a fate. There is numerous data to the effect that many 1950s housewives were very dissatisfied with the role that society had foisted on them (for fictional examples, think of April Wheeler in the 1961 novel / 2008 movie “Revolutionary Road” and Laura Brown in the 2002 movie “The Hours”); and many of them turned to psychotherapy, alcohol, and prescription drugs in order to cope.

This dissatisfaction culminated in Betty Freidan’s landmark 1963 book “The Femnine Mystique,” in which the author talked about the lot of women in society and shared accounts of dissatisfaction of actual housewives. This book more or less singlehandedly kicked off Second Wave Feminism, during which women started to fight for having fully equal rights with men. To put things into perspective,

[Czarcasm]

@DrDeth

But what’s your point?

That it was rare to the point of almost being nonexistent, so using it as a counterpoint is pretty much useless when it comes to how women were portrayed on television in the 50s?

[Czarcasm]

@DrDeth

Only one that I know of with a single Mother- It’s Always Jan, but a few with a single Father.

I just looked it up, and that is a very depressing “good example of a working single mother in the fifties”. War widow with a small child in a small apartment sharing with two other working women to try to make ends meet, while working as a struggling nightclub singer (wonderful example of what jobs were available for women back then, btw), and during the run of the show she tries, and fails, at her two main goals: getting a better job, and getting a husband.

[thorny_locust]

@Wendell_Wagner

most women knew that eventually they would get a full-time job.

Quite a lot of women did, at some point in their lives. But that’s not what was presented as normal, however normal it was.

The children’s books I was given in school all assumed that Mother was home, taking care of the house, waiting for the kids to come home from school and for Father to come home from work, so that she could feed them the meals she’d cooked them. I think @wolfpup is pointing out that in the same fashion the TV presented that as normal. Of course everyone knew that the actors playing those SAHMoms were professionals with careers — but that didn’t change the underlying message.

@themapleleaf

the early 1960s were still culturally very much in the 1950s. Sure, there may have been some first swallows of the change that was to come, but most people still behaved according to the confirmist, gendered, racialized, church-going norms of the previous decade. I would suggest – and someone correct me if I’m wrong – that the “cultural decade” of the 1960s began in 1963 (as said above, the start of 2nd-wave feminism, and then the Kennedy assassination, which sparked the onset of distrust in the government), plus or minus a year (the Beatles, who were very influential, were already a thing in Britain in 1962 but only crossed the Pond in 1964), and ended in 1973 with the end of the Vietnam War, which

Agreeing with that. A lot of what’s now thought of as the 60s was the late 60s into the early 70s; and some of the changes were for the most part significantly later than that.

@DrDeth

Note that women made up about a third of the total workforce in the 1950s, towards the end was the highest of course. But still, working wives were not rare.

Yes, but for the most part the types of jobs they had available were limited, and their work was considered subordinate to their husbands’ and less important (and less important than men’s even for those women without husbands), and was less well paid.

[DrDeth]

@thorny_locust

Yes, but for the most part the types of jobs they had available were limited, and their work was considered subordinate to their husbands’ and less important (and less important than men’s even for those women without husbands), and was less well paid.

Yes, true.

@thorny_locust

Agreeing with that. A lot of what’s now thought of as the 60s was the late 60s into the early 70s;

I found that what I called “60s music” was really 1965 to 1975.