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It is not the way I saw life... I was not even alive then!
My relatives who lived through the '50s were living in reality. They knew the good and bad of each decade and they said the '50s was their favorite. The Cuban missile event was not even in the '50s!
They were not hiding under tables waiting for the bomb to drop. They did their daily activities. They did not "stay home and near their families." My parents made quite a few trips from California to New Jersey and New York to visit relatives.
Speaking strictly about the fifties, it was one of those times when most people had known far worse and seem much loss and with it done, they were seeking peace and quiet and security. They wanted to have a stable marriage. They wanted their children to grow up in surrounded by family and their parents. They wanted normalcy. The time was very much one of minimizing all the drama. They didn't want to question politics. They wanted to know tomorrow would be like today.
What broke this was the generation who didn't remember the war and mass death and horror. They (us) wanted more than comfortable security, but challenge, and new ideas and experiences. The older of my generation started out in that age, and the youngest didn't know any of it, but still wanted *more*.
The fifties were puncuated by moments. Everyone celebrated those first two free polio vaccine clinics. To this day I remember how we drove to the place and stood in line for our shots. I had no idea why my parents were so thankful, but didn't know that more people contracted polio in 52, year I was born than any other year of the epidemic. I had a good friend who had had it and was 'damaged'.
And while the drumrolls were not so loud then, by 62 we had Cuba, which reminded everyone who'd lived through the war of what could be, and even those of us who didn't. I remember being a small kid and knowing there were things in the world like the bomb which could end everything, but it didn't have the gritty reality that it did for my parents. But for them it was background noise. For my generation it was the last curtain waiting to drop.
I'll remember the fifties as a pleasant time from the point of view of a child, but I think my parents would have a much more complex view of it. As an adult who's had kids grow up I can see a better view of how my parents might have seen it.
All living things seek the same: food, water, shelter, oxygen and life. If you transport me back to the 50s you had better provide it and watch what I do with it if I don't want to starve to death. Back then if you graduated from high school, unless you were a complete jerk you were almost guaranteed a job, or you were trained in a trade, if you didn't go to college.
I was born in 1948. I was old enough to know what my mother went through and how she was discriminated against. Even a preteen child knows on an instinct level.
Would I have wanted to be a adult woman back then? Absolutely not. It has difficult enough coming of age in the 1960's which was only the beginning for women's rights.
Just finished watching "The Apartment" which was filmed in the late 1950's.
Obviously a work of fiction but enough of truth woven in....
Yes, some women had crappy jobs that paid nearly nothing. But then again it *was* a job and they were out of the house. How many supervisor of elevators much less elevator operators of either sex do you find today.
People were having affairs both men and women. Yes again, the women were anything from secretaries to floozies, but no one was forcing them and they seemed to be having fun.
Many are looking back on the 1950's from the view point of modern time living. Women and men who actually were living through the period often didn't want what they had not got. For both sexes of a certain age just to have gotten through WWII and came home to have a spouse and family was reason enough to be grateful.
Post-war America though having its share of problems was on top of the world. We were the largest superpower in the world left standing. The US economy was booming, and slowly perhaps too much so for some things were starting to change.
It may come as a surprise to the OP but employment rates outside the home for women in post war USA were quite high. Some women married or not needed to work, others did so for personal enrichment.
Yes, there were plenty of "I wear the pants in this house" tight fisted SOB husbands. But many others realized in order for the household to move ahead the wife had to work. So she did.
OP needs to realize there isn't a single thing going on today that didn't happen back in the 1950's. Gays. lesbians, trans, pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, divorce, etc... you name it and was going on.
Seems like the 50s would have been a pretty great time to be a woman. Since the tax rates were so much lower, most families could survive on one income, women rarely HAD to work. Granted it was much tougher as a man in those days-jobs were tougher and hours longer.
Posts like this show the braindead stupidity of people in this age of the myth of female oppression.
Fact of the matter is living in the 50's would be probably 100X worse and more dangerous for a man than a woman. WW2 ended 5 years ago, there is still universal conscription, the korean war is raging and vietnam will start very soon. Somehow in peoples pea-brains they get this idea that women who were "forced" to cook and clean (despite the existence of female congresswomen and high officials) with microwaves and laundry machines were somehow horribly oppressed by those privileged males dying in the jungles of some third world country.
This is what happens when a society gets it's history from fictional TV shows like madmen and stark mad feminists in libral universities.
Not to even mention the unreal workplace fatalities those privileged males enjoyed in steel mills and contruction sites back then. I had a teacher who worked as a maintenance guy/bodyparts collector in a still mill 50 years ago, he talked about guys getting splattered by equiptment like it was funny.
Completely sick ****er he was, it made me nauseous just hearing how casual he was about it.
I was born in 1948. I was old enough to know what my mother went through and how she was discriminated against. Even a preteen child knows on an instinct level.
Would I have wanted to be a adult woman back then? Absolutely not. It has difficult enough coming of age in the 1960's which was only the beginning for women's rights.
You poor baby. While the boys your age were getting blown up, burned alive and shot to pieces in vietnam you had "difficulty coming of age".
Posts like this show the braindead stupidity of people in this age of the myth of female oppression.
Fact of the matter is living in the 50's would be probably 100X worse and more dangerous for a man than a woman. WW2 ended 5 years ago, there is still universal conscription, the korean war is raging and vietnam will start very soon. Somehow in peoples pea-brains they get this idea that women who were "forced" to cook and clean (despite the existence of female congresswomen and high officials) with microwaves and laundry machines were somehow horribly oppressed by those privileged males dying in the jungles of some third world country.
This is what happens when a society gets it's history from fictional TV shows like madmen and stark mad feminists in libral universities.
First, given that the question was posed TO women, then considering the acceptable choices for women vrs later is very valid. My mom could have been one of the first female animators for the 60's cartoons but Dad didn't approve of women working. She never said to him but I could tell she had regret. That's a cost whatever you use to compare it. I think most women today would not tolerate the normal fifties husband. It's not 'forced' by some threat, but when its the society norm in a time when everything was very regimented, its still in part 'forced'. Yes there were some women who had surpassed it but not generally. Generally women were supposed to be good mothers and wives.
Yes, men could end up in Korea. My dad did. But it was the time of the returned hero and exsoldiers got a lot of advantages too. Many probabaly got a chance to start over because it was the thing to offer those who were ready to start a new life every opportunity, and many had incidental skills which got them into new technologies.
And microwaves.... they didn't get common until the 70's. In the 50's the only home with a microwave was the Home of the Future in Disneyland, which also had a home computer and integrated system for controlling heat/cooling and lighting. But it was just a model.
My son was born in the early 80's. He hated that some of his favorite vegies couldn't just be microwaved but you had to waste all that time cooking.....
LIFE in general was harder for men and women in the fifties. But it was less hard than it was in comparison to women's opportunities, which were lacking.
Speaking only of my expereince, it seems like my mom and her sisters all were trapped in bad marriages in the 50s with either abusive husbands or deadbeats. And since divorce was frowned on, they really did feel trapped - not because they necessarily wanted to be chemists or doctors, but because they felt like they had to stay. Whereas I've always felt that I can get divorced and I don't care what my family or the church thinks. I think some people were happy in the 50s, but I think a lot of bad stuff happened behind closed doors, maybe esp. to women and children, that got shushed up.
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