More children lived with both their parents in “the olden days”. I think that was something that was pretty unambiguously “better”.
Wasn’t the (un)employment rate calculated using men only? I do know that until the mid 1970s, only a husband’s income was used by many financial institutions when it came to mortgages, etc.
“Back then”, it was also not unusual for the woman to not work outside the home, but her husband had two FT jobs. In addition, she may have contributed to the family income by selling eggs or vegetables, doing custom sewing or photography, looking after other people’s kids, etc.
I do agree that it was “easier” to get a job because all you had to do was walk in and fill out an application (until about 10 years ago) and not have to go through 10 layers of algorithms only to find out that they never got yours after all.
Not if they were living with miserably unhappy parents who did not want to stay together, but did because they had to, for any number of reasons. Go back a little farther, and you’ll find just as many kids who had just one parent, or no parents at all, because the parents had died from diseases nobody gets now, or we can treat if they do, or in accidents that wouldn’t happen now because of safety regulations.
THe one solid thing that I know was different : obesity! Everyone, young and old, on average, was ~30 lbs lighter or more. This affects me today because as a man who has a strong preference for skinny women, I face immense competition for the women I prefer. So much so that I’ve found it more expedient to just take dating trips in Eastern Europe because my odds in the USA are abysmal. The numbers are just too against me. (the number of rivals I would be facing for the kinds of women I prefer, the fact that I’m a little below average height which knocks me out of the running for most of them, and so on)
On the other side of things: there were less good things you could even buy. You had a television. And 3-5 channels and later a VHS player.
No internet, no netflix, no personalized channels, no HD quality, tons of ads, a fuzzy picture, stereo sound at best, no voice assistants. If you wanted to read a specific book you better either already have it or hope your local library/bookstore has it in stock, or you’d have to wait.
Want to talk to someone? Better get to like your neighbors because that’s all you got.
Also you were shortening your lives by a solid 10 years with that cloud of toxic cigarette smoke. And there were probably more active pedophiles then than there are now, you just didn’t know how common they were.
VHS players would be much, MUCH later…like 20+ years (they were commercially available in the US, IIRC, in the late 70’s). And those would have been really expensive, so not something any but the richest would have initially. As for channels, you have to consider something else…at that time, they didn’t even have those channels on the air 24/7. This would, again, not happen until the 70’s…as I kid, once we COULD get a TV, I recall stations going off the air at night still.
I don’t think people today can really understand what it was like for everyone during that time.
As for employment, sure…during (at least part of) that time, there was essentially full employment (for white males) in the US. We were still one of the few games in town, after all. But most of that work was soul crushing manufacturing that was dirty and dangerous, so not sure how this is viewed as a plus. I agree that the obesity thing was a differentiator. The US had been under fairly stiff food restrictions, including meat, butter and sugar, and the labor was a lot less sedentary then, so folks were, indeed, thinner (though not as much as folks in other countries during this period). But they weren’t healthier, despite that and despite their diet being better than today. But that’s one I hadn’t thought of.
Well. when she was a teen a local farmer went on trial for the murder of a traveling salesman. The dude had messed with his only daughter, who was kind of slow, like Forrest Gump. He got acquitted by the jury of his peers, probably because they thought the molester had deserved it. But he lost the farm because of the cost of the lawyer. This would have been about one hundred years ago now.
After having watched that movie “Best of Enemies”, which was set in the 1970s, I’m thinking the best thing about the “olden days” was that people could take off from work for ten days without worrying about losing their jobs!
I know the film was fictionalized in a lot of ways (before anyone scolds me for taking it too seriously). But still, the film reminded me we haven’t always lived such crazy busy lives.
They had gros michel bananas, which are considered superior and are now almost impossible to get.
In many states, there were anti-miscegenation laws. I think that puts away the notion of good-old days right there. I think it’s possible people were happier, it’s also possible they just bitched less, because of cultural norms and their lack of our near infinite outlets for said bitching.
If you could magically be transported, you might be happier, but you would be so for a shorter life. And only if the magical transportation erased all memories. If you were transported with memories, you might make some great bets and strike it rich, but you would be missing an ungodly amount of things that make present day life, well, better.
Any time before the old days ended, and I mean not to long ago, by internet standards, when people moved away, they moved awwaayy. Maybe never see them again, always a possibility, but generally you didn’t hear from people for a long time. Telephones came along and everyone would gather around for a long distance call. Everyone got ten or twenty seconds to say, Hello. How are you. I am fine. Nowadays, the kids have all split to Idaho, but we face time every day. See the grandkids growing up in real time. Yeah I miss the old days.:rolleyes:
The iron lung races were fun. We would switch them over to battery power and race them in the hospital hallways.
We knew every family on the block and visited with them regularly. There was the retired lady next store who lost 3 fingers in a bottle cap accident. She had a museum shelf of memorabilia of all the places she’d been and would tell me about them if asked.
We didn’t lock our doors since everybody knew everybody else. it was a defacto neighborhood watch.
Because the whole town was basically a neighborhood watch I was able to ride my bike to kindergarten by myself.
My city made a swimming hole next to the reservoir. It had a sand bottom and the walls were built up of logs. It was cleaned by flushing it and refilling it with water from the reservoir. It had a dock with a diving board on one end.
streets were paved with tar which bubbled up in the summer heat. We would pop the bubbles with our bare feet. Mother’s weren’t too happy with the results.
Every winter they would make a skating rink in the city park. At age 4 I wore skates with 4 blades per skate. They were like the old strap on roller skates only with blades.
Nobody had a lot of money. Vacations were a trip to a relative’s house. It was the journey that was fun. Stopping at places like Niagra falls or the world’s largest something-or-other.
Picnics at the beach best described a family fun weekend. the cost was gas and that was probably 20 cents a gallon. The food would have been leftovers.
to say life was simpler back then would be an understatement. We didn’t need money to have fun. We could turn an empty egg crate into a toy and one of the joys in life was licking the cream off the milk cap. Mom was the final arbiter of who’s turn it was.
OK, Jonas Salk made one of the above statements a lie.
Easier for a non college graduate to get a job and actually have a decent standard of living.
Come, now: not too much Internet in the 1930s or 1950s or whenever we are talking about, but you got your telephone, you got your pen pals, you got your ham radio, or you could simply leave your house and go hang out at a cool club with cool people.
Other literature from even farther back (Horatio Alger novels, anyone?) supports this notion. Although most jobs had very little or zero contractually determined paid vacation time, if you had a good relationship with your boss, it was not that unusual to be allowed to occasionally take a few days (or even weeks!) unpaid leave with the understanding that the job was still yours when you returned.
Here, for example, is the exchange one young protagonist employed as an artist for a comic weekly paper has with his employer:
“When do you want to start?” “Ask your employers to hold your place for you”! Of course, this is a work of fiction too, but it was probably realistic enough that readers of the era wouldn’t have found it implausible.
This isn’t to deny, of course, that the paternalistic employer-employee relationship of those days gave bosses much more explicit power and workers very few explicit rights. But nonetheless, the institutional culture of many workplaces back then gave even low-status workers (as long as they were considered good and reliable) a degree of autonomy and cooperation (at least occasionally) that would strike most of today’s workforce as almost utopian.
The US federal Government sponsored scientific research for the heck of it was pretty good too.
Thanks for the great responses thus far everyone.
For clarification, I wasn’t just asking about the 1950s, but about any historical time period - could be ancient Rome, could be all the way up to…say, 1980 or 1990.
**Magiver’s **post also reminds me, it seems that there was far more free-range parenting decades ago than today, where helicopter parents predominate.
Born in 1951.
Good things:
True about those without a college education being able to get good jobs. My father didn’t go to college because his mother was poor and he had to work. After coming back from the war he was able to get a good job at the UN and make enough to buy a house just before I was born, and let my mother stay home with me. Money was tight, but it was doable. On the other hand my mother, who did have a college degree, would never make as much as he would and him staying home was not even considered.
Layoffs were infrequent, except for defense contractors.
Most jobs were really 9 - 5. No internet so no email to check, and you couldn’t really write anything at home.
I don’t know this for sure in the 1950s, but when I started to work in 1980 companies had not yet shaved every penny of overhead, so there were enough people and resources to get things done without working 11 hours a day. And you could go on vacation and not be expected to check your email.
For some things not so great that people seem to think were great. I walked to school by myself - and a guy in a car drove up near me once and told me he was my father. I wasn’t the only one to have this kind of experience. The pedophiles were out there, but it was hushed up.
My friends and I knew all about juvenile delinquents in the late '50s. Those JD movies didn’t come from the mist. I don’t know how big a problem it was, but people did freak out about it, even without local news pushing it.
Leaving your house unlocked depended on where you were. I know someone who left their house unlocked in the little town in NJ I lived in in the early '90s. There were plenty of places you couldn’t do it in the '50s.
Maybe more two parent families, but I agree they didn’t have to be happy two parent families. And two of my friends lived with a mother only. It was considered shameful, and the reason for this situation was not discussed.
And it is nice to have the net and DVDs etc, but I never missed something far in the future.
Back in the olden days, when I was a child, all my friends had two parents. Divorce was spelled instead of talked about. No one got one. Of course, I was a kid, and everyone lied to me about stuff like that. There were divorces, and marriage breakups less formal. Dads were sometimes “away on business” for long times. Occasionally deceased parents would miraculously return to the living, too. My extremely white bread middle class family happened to be a Cleaver Family standard.
The fact that I assumed the same to be true of my neighbors, and classmates was rose tinted fantasy. Years later I found out about some of the exceptions, but I had to create one first, before I really heard about them.
Hearing people talk about the 70s as long ago pretty much seals the deal for me considering the “good old days” being some sort of golden age. Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Acid tripping free love junkies, dropping out of . . . pretty much everything, and those folks had kids!
Come back to us, Barbara Lewis Hari Krishna Beauregard!
Tris
“We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent.”
I’d call this pretty extreme.
This too.
As for kids being in danger at school, what about this?
Or this?
The book referenced in the footnotes is half about the kidnapping and murder, and the other half is about the missing money and the terrible fates which befell the people believed to have stolen it, and is every bit as interesting (in a morbid sort of way) as the original crime.