Some of this was true everywhere, and still is true in many places (India comes to mind). Some of it changed at very different times in different US states, or in the UK, for example, vs. parts of the US. Some of it's class. Babe Zaharias was celebrated many decades ago, but she was not middle-class. The woman who is such a china doll she can't even walk in her usual going-out get-up is a marker of extreme male wealth/status pretty much everywhere. Working-class women have always had to work, both outside the house and in it. (I believe in some African societies they traditionally do the farming.) And as for "the Ivy League", it isn't monolithic: Cornell had some form of women's education from the 1870s IIRC, and what's Radcliffe?
Part of the problem with the Rethuglicans is myopia. Their state, their class, their religious values. We can't match them in that, but don't let's allow ourselves to do it at all. They demonstrate why it's wrong.
I was born in 1955 and unhappy as a child, and looking back, I think this is why. I had ambition, and girls couldn't be ambitious. It was sort of like being born in the wrong body -- I was okay with being a girl, but the rest of the world wasn't okay with girls. It was a status offense.
I was born in 1957, and I remember. And I oppose any and all attempts to return to what some conservative insists that time was like.
For me, the key image of the wonders of the one-car, one-breadwinner suburban nuclear family, was mothers slowly turning themselves into drunks, because their natural/God-given/good-for-society role was so incredibly satisfying and inspiring to them. (Those of a slightly higher class would have had prescription valium instead, and maybe some of those I observed were doing both, with the latter less obvious to a child.)
The other image from that time was an clothing ad "now she can join the man-trap set", with an image of a child too young to even be budding breasts - and my cousin who lived that pattern.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2019-06-01 01:34 pm (UTC)Part of the problem with the Rethuglicans is myopia. Their state, their class, their religious values. We can't match them in that, but don't let's allow ourselves to do it at all. They demonstrate why it's wrong.
M
no subject
Date: 2019-06-01 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-01 07:33 pm (UTC)For me, the key image of the wonders of the one-car, one-breadwinner suburban nuclear family, was mothers slowly turning themselves into drunks, because their natural/God-given/good-for-society role was so incredibly satisfying and inspiring to them. (Those of a slightly higher class would have had prescription valium instead, and maybe some of those I observed were doing both, with the latter less obvious to a child.)
The other image from that time was an clothing ad "now she can join the man-trap set", with an image of a child too young to even be budding breasts - and my cousin who lived that pattern.