Nope.
While it was great to have others cheering along, the fact remains that the creation of the tampon, and reliable birth control was the first leap towards victory for women’s liberation .
It then opened the door to the workforce … for women.
So, how many men actually WANTED custody of their children back in the day, anyway? I’m guessing that the number was essentially zero.
Anyway, when I started working at Target in 1980, I noticed that couples’ checking accounts almost always said “John or Mary Smith”, that kind of thing. I was told that this was so either could write checks, and also preserved the spouse’s right to the account in the event of the other’s death, among other things.
As someone who has devoted his life to researching and advancing the rights of children and youth, I can testify that this is far from the case. In more patriarchal times, a man would have had a vested interest in his children and how they were raised as they represented the family and would stand in line to inherit his name, title and property.
I suggest you read up on Caroline Norton, a 19th-century English aristocrat whose marriage broke down and who lobbied for a law allowing mothers custody of their children of tender years after her obnoxious and domineering husband denied her access to her children.
Sticking to England, in 1883, there was a court case Re Agar-Ellis [1883] 24 Ch D 317, where the husband did not want his wife to bring up their children Catholic. The daughter pleaded to the court to be allowed to spend the summer vacation with her mother, but the court ruled in favor of the father, who as I recall, proceeded to deny access of the children to the mother.
We are, of course, dealing with fathers who were probably of sufficient means not to have to do much to take care of their kids personally but would have been able to instruct nannies and governesses.
Okay, that makes sense.
I think it is important to remember that we are talking only about the middle class here. Working class women always worked outside the home, in factories, as ‘pink collar’ workers, nannies, waitresses, nurses, house cleaners, etc. The ideal of the middle class housewife whose sole function was to raise the children, cook, shop, and clean for her husband, who was the sole wage earner and had all the power, was only realized for a rather short period in history, mainly post WWII.
And yes, the great shift was mainly fueled by access to birth control.
From what I’ve read and seen that was very much a class thing - working class men would turn over their pay to their wives to run the household and get an allowance. It was better-off families where the husband controlled the money and gave the wife an “allowance” to run the household. My guess is that it’s related to the fact that poorer families have less discretionary income and the husband spending a few extra dollars on his own wants* would have more of an effect on a poorer family.
- And from what I’ve seen in those families, the wife didn’t get an allowance for herself. She’d get what was left (if anything was) after paying the bills, but the husband always got his allowance, even if she didn’t get a dime.
I worked at a Esso gas station when I was 14 years old. One of the other pump jockeys showed me how to order, what he called his easy free stuff through mail order. He would copy the names and CC numbers from our bad card list (supplied by the CC companies). He would order stuff from catalogs in the card holders name and CC number, then have the items sent to his grandmother’s house. He would snag the packages from his grandma’s porch before she came home from her job. He was caught shortly after that and was fired.
In the mid 70s my employer moved from London to Birmingham. The Birmingham site was an amalgamation of two factories and most of the workforce was local.
A few weeks after the move, on a Thursday afternoon, I came past the gatehouse and was surprised to see a number of women standing around. When I asked, I was told that it was wives waiting to collect their husbands’ wage packets.
In those days, the blue-collar workers were paid in cash, and Thursday was payday. The men seemed to accept that handing over an unopened wage envelope was normal.
Just another data point: my mother was never the primary earner in my parents’ marriage, and for several years, she did not earn at all, when she had very small children, and was also in school. Albeit, she did earn as a graduate assistant when they were first married, and later as adjunct faculty, and finally as regular faculty.
But she did control the household budget, and had my father on an allowance. She had herself on one as well-- that is, they each got a portion of spending money every month, based on needs as well as what was available. My father frequently ran short at the end of the month, while my mother usually had some leftover, which tells you all you need to know about the “why” of her being in charge of the budget.
The first time my mother was gone for a significant amount of time (in Prague, doing research), and my father was totally in charge of the money, she came back to credit cards maxxed out. I, at least, was 11 by then, and had a paper route, and was earning my own money, and my brother was too young really to need any. I made everyone’s lunch, so as long as my brother had a quarter every Monday to pay for milk for the week, he was fine.
However, from what I know, in Jewish households, it actually was fairly common for women to do all the budgeting and bill paying. The man (or “men,” in some multi-generational households) may have been the ones to go to work, but the check went into the bank, and then everything was left to the women.
I know my aunt has been in charge of the household finances her whole marriage, and she did very little work outside the home. She did some childcare for cash; she ran what would be called an “unlicensed,” or even “illegal” afterschool care program now, but at the time, it was more SOP, and really just sort of “ad hoc” in its origins-- it was certainly pretty good quality of care, and she didn’t charge much. She also worked part-time in the synagogue office once her children were grown. She took care of me more than my mother did, and my parents compensated her for it, although probably not what it was worth.
In any event, she did virtually everything that kept a household with four kids, plus a niece a lot of the time, and some other nieces and nephews occasionally, and later, foster children, and finally an adopted fifth child, running like a Swiss watch. It made total sense for her to be in charge of the purse strings, because anything else would have involved extra steps.
I know many, many Jewish households like this, though. There’s no stigma attached to a man who doesn’t control the money. In fact, and man who does his own finances in a really traditional household is almost like being a man who does all the cooking.
It’s part of an idea, I think, that women do mundane things, daily chore-type things, while men study Torah and Talmud. If a man is doing his own books, he isn’t spending the time studying.
Those are pretty old-fashioned ideas now, but there’s still a division of labor in a lot of homes that includes the women being in charge of the finances.
I think in regard to charge or credit cards, though, they were used for big purchases a lot, and big purchases were usually something that the husband had to be involved in.
Interesting that by using known bad cards he still got the merch. You’d think mail order outfits would have the same bad card lists and make the same checks that face-to-face retailers would.
Probably sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Soon enough he’d figure out which mail order outfits checked and which did not.
If the minimum wage catalog plebs where anything like me, they never actually checked the lists. I did at the start because there was a $25 bounty on confiscated bad cards, but after fruitlessly checking the first hundred or so, it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Someone on the other end of the phone wouldn’t even have that incentive.
True. But if I was running a catalog company and getting chargebacks I’d sure be interested in which of my order intake clerks wasn’t doing their job. Then again, perhaps in a pre-computer era it was just too much trouble to trawl through the files to see that clerk Elmer had 10x the chargeback rate of clerk Jane in the next cube.
I was born in the 70s and grew up during Reagan/Bush. My parents were I guess a traditional family that eventually came out of the dark ages. My mother managed the cash; my dad the investments. That changed over time, though, as my dad started aging and my mother insisted on knowing more about what was in those accounts and how to manage them in the event he got sick.
If you are asking how women managed to pay bills - cash. Checkbooks later. And as was said, sometimes store accounts.
If you are asking why that changed - because in the 1960s we started to realize (again) that women are people. And because of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Not credit cards specifically, but the successfully pushing the idea that women should be treated equally under the law.
I actually sat each of our 3 daughters down, when they were about 16 or 17, and had a major talk with each of them about credit cards, and interest, and payments, and debit cards, and credit scores, and checking and savings accounts and loans, and how banks work. It was something my dad did with me when I was that age, and it saved me many headaches later on in my life.
Born in 60. As I recall, my parents dealt mostly w/ cash. I remember being awed when I would go to the bank w/ my mom, and she’d w/draw some unfathomable amount like $300, and then split it w/ my dad. I have a vague impression of my dad at least having an AmEx, but I do not recall the specific situations when they used it.
So much was so different then. It was easier/more common to pay cash. At the gas station, someone pumped your gas. Many folk you dealt w/ had those change dispensers on their belts, and would pull out a wad of bills to make change.
I also have a vague recollection of my Ps writing checks, but I do not really recall who paid the monthly bills and such. I imagine it was my mom, but I was a clueless kid. I DO remember them spreading papers all over the dining room table once a year to do the taxes together. It was a clear sign that we kids should make ourselves scarce… 
One thing I DO recall, tho, was my mom canceling her account at Marshall Fields, because they would not allow her to have a card in her name, only as MRS Dinsdale Sr. I’d imagine that happened sometime before 75. She was always a pretty strong supported or ERA and such, tho she never worked outside of the home after being married, and never learned to drive.
One of the reasons but reliable birth control assisted just as much. Becoming pregnant was finally under their control and allowed them to enter the workforce that enabled them to establish credit to apply for a credit card.
Yeah, we all know men don’t feel emotions like love.
Jesus Christ.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my parents just had Wards and Sears cards to pay for things like school clothes, and when the washer broke, they used the card to pay for it. I remember my dad walking into the living room to give the card back to my mother, and when he saw me in the room, he started acting sneaky with it. I told him that I knew what he had in his hand, and it was OK with me.
They got major cards (Visa, MC, that kind of thing) later on, especially after we were grown and they started traveling.
One has nothing to do with the other- I know more than one man who loved their children but didn’t want custody for a variety of reasons, everything from "children belong with their mother " ( he was wrong- no child belonged with that mother) to others who simply wanted to continue the way things were when they were married - which was Dad got to do fun stuff while Mom made sure homework was done and dentist appointments were kept.