For the mastodonts from the 60s

[Rob C]

Perhaps political labels don't matter in this instance. I believe that there can be little valid argument, beyond the purely financial one of need, that having the wife remain at home to bring up the kids and hold the fort while the husband is out earning the family's keep makes sound sense. There's little doubt in my mind of the veracity of the belief that behind many a successful man not born to millions, there's an even greater woman. The power of a stable home behind one cannot be overemphasised.

Once that belief is broken, all sorts of aberrations come out to play, perhaps the greatest being the belief that everybody can have it all. I don't believe that anyone can, male or female.

If people want to have children, then they owe it to those children to be there for them, not send in a substitute, an in loco parentis figure who may be entirely unsuited to the task. Alternatives? Yes, keep your pants on at all times. If a couple wants to, but can't have children for whatever reason, that's unfortunate, but it releases them from some responsibilties and opens them to yet other opportunities as compensation.

I can understand the lure of work for people of either gender if they have great qualifications to exploit and enjoy; there is no doubt that a two-pronged income source offers greater wealth and financial stability if it lasts, and that the work itself, for those so qualified, often brings its own reward in the doing, money quite apart. However, does that hold for the grunt worker? I seriously doubt that. That person's need to have both partners work to assure survival is a far remove fom the rosy, cosy world of self-fulfilment of the highly educated.

I spent maybe ten years in a factory before being able to cut loose, four of them on the shop floor and the rest in the company's photo-unit. In both places, that five o'clock bell was the doorway to heaven. Talk about love of work doesn't travel downwards. It sounds terribly on-message for management, but that's where the pretence ends. And I can vouch that the working women that I saw on those shop floors were as far from the ideals of femininity as you can find: they were brutalised into male competitors, running the gamut from being foul-mouthed to sexually predatory. The office girls, however, were sweethearts.

Women forced to work and exist in some dehumanising, male-dominated circumstances seem able to survive only by competing on their terms and scaring the hell out of them.

So yeah, I think that having both partners working has led to two main things: kids are growing up estranged and a little more wild than they would have been; financially, not a thing has been gained, because the market drives prices up to meet the available spending money. In '74 my brand new Humber cost me around £ 1200; today, the cheapest Mini I could buy in Spain costs € 17,900

https://www.mini.es/es_ES/home.html

which, at todays Brexit-inspìred collapse in sterling, at an exchange rate of 1 : 1.12, would cost me £ 15,982. At the time of my Humber, the Mini cost about half the price of the Humber. In '72 my Submariner was listed at circa £ 100 and today, on the Intenet, you can see it for about 12-and-a-bit grand. The bloody replacement strap runs in at € 1200, which I refuse to pay. If that doesn't prove to anyone that price rises to meet available cash supply, then possibly nothing ever will.

That nice period of stay-at-home wife and working husband had one helluva lot going for it.

In some ways I look upon the 60s as a great period of optimism and possibilities, but it also ushered in a huge wave of discontent and confusion that has never gone away.

[KLaban]

First to note is that this link is written from an American perspective. Mostly, they do it and see it differently over there.

It's also important to realise that the surprise expressed by the writer at the way women lived in the 50s and 60s is also an American take, and though I have no way of knowing (deep fake news, old photograph of gorgeous lady?), it strikes me she is not of first-hand familiarity with those decades, at least not as an adult woman.

I could give reams of first-hand home truths about all of this, but suffice to say that the world was not full of weeping, conflicted women desirous of spending their days in an office or on a factory floor (or an office one, come to think lf it), which the writer must imagine was the case.

Higher education has almost always been dependent on family financial possibilities, and I know people who scorned my wife's education as a waste of parental money because she'd just end up as somebody's wife etc. but fortunately for me, her parents thought otherwise, and so we met. Education is never wasted - up to a point - but it doesn't have to be the only thing in life for which to strive. Likewise work. There are all sorts of desires, ambitions and interest centres that people desire for themselves. For every female executive I am sure there is the perfectly content woman who simply wants to bring up her children and provide a comfortable family home. I see bugger all wrong with that. That's exactly the stability that has helped many people find the possibility of building up a business, and when the woman at home has the education that allows her to be perfectly confident when dealing with some of the jerks that the husband is pretty much forced to bring around for drinks or dinner, then her role is even more important.

As for forcing women onto companies via the "quotas" concept, people should be free to hire whoever the hell they want to hire. There are as many men who feel left out, disadvantaged, overlooked, unpopular etc. etc. as there are women who feel the same. The reality is that life has nothing to do with fairness, with something being your turn, or even your divine right; you have to accept that you don't rule the world and that almost everybody else thinks they should have your job if yours is better than theirs. Putting on a skirt does not mean you are putting on special privileges, though of course, I do think you should be able to expect respect as a person, exactly in the same manner as anybody else.

As I said, I could write a novel on this topic but have no such intentions, you'll all be pleased to realise.

:-)

Had a change of heart, then?

;-)

[Rob C]

Had a change of heart, then?

;-)

Nah, the novel remains locked away in Possibility Land!

:-)

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Nah, the novel remains locked away in Possibility Land!

:-)

Better that than to end up on the liberal Index Librorum Prohibitorum 

[KLaban]

Better that than to end up on the liberal Index Librorum Prohibitorum 

Publication of the list ceased in 1966.

Yeah, another result for the 60s!

;-)

[RSL]

Perhaps political labels don't matter in this instance. I believe that there can be little valid argument, beyond the purely financial one of need, that having the wife remain at home to bring up the kids and hold the fort while the husband is out earning the family's keep makes sound sense. There's little doubt in my mind of the veracity of the belief that behind many a successful man not born to millions, there's an even greater woman. The power of a stable home behind one cannot be overemphasised.

Once that belief is broken, all sorts of aberrations come out to play, perhaps the greatest being the belief that everybody can have it all. I don't believe that anyone can, male or female.

If people want to have children, then they owe it to those children to be there for them, not send in a substitute, an in loco parentis figure who may be entirely unsuited to the task. Alternatives? Yes, keep your pants on at all times. If a couple wants to, but can't have children for whatever reason, that's unfortunate, but it releases them from some responsibilties and opens them to yet other opportunities as compensation.

I can understand the lure of work for people of either gender if they have great qualifications to exploit and enjoy; there is no doubt that a two-pronged income source offers greater wealth and financial stability if it lasts, and that the work itself, for those so qualified, often brings its own reward in the doing, money quite apart. However, does that hold for the grunt worker? I seriously doubt that. That person's need to have both partners work to assure survival is a far remove fom the rosy, cosy world of self-fulfilment of the highly educated.

I spent maybe ten years in a factory before being able to cut loose, four of them on the shop floor and the rest in the company's photo-unit. In both places, that five o'clock bell was the doorway to heaven. Talk about love of work doesn't travel downwards. It sounds terribly on-message for management, but that's where the pretence ends. And I can vouch that the working women that I saw on those shop floors were as far from the ideals of femininity as you can find: they were brutalised into male competitors, running the gamut from being foul-mouthed to sexually predatory. The office girls, however, were sweethearts.

Women forced to work and exist in some dehumanising, male-dominated circumstances seem able to survive only by competing on their terms and scaring the hell out of them.

So yeah, I think that having both partners working has led to two main things: kids are growing up estranged and a little more wild than they would have been; financially, not a thing has been gained, because the market drives prices up to meet the available spending money. In '74 my brand new Humber cost me around £ 1200; today, the cheapest Mini I could buy in Spain costs € 17,900

https://www.mini.es/es_ES/home.html

which, at todays Brexit-inspìred collapse in sterling, at an exchange rate of 1 : 1.12, would cost me £ 15,982. At the time of my Humber, the Mini cost about half the price of the Humber. In '72 my Submariner was listed at circa £ 100 and today, on the Intenet, you can see it for about 12-and-a-bit grand. The bloody replacement strap runs in at € 1200, which I refuse to pay. If that doesn't prove to anyone that price rises to meet available cash supply, then possibly nothing ever will.

That nice period of stay-at-home wife and working husband had one helluva lot going for it.

In some ways I look upon the 60s as a great period of optimism and possibilities, but it also ushered in a huge wave of discontent and confusion that has never gone away.

Beautifully said, Rob, and right on the money. My wife, Autumn and I both thank God that she was able to stay home and bring up our four sons while I was bouncing from war to war. Then, when the four were flown, she put together an art gallery from scratch and did remarkably well at it. After that she became a successful desktop publisher. Nowadays she does all sorts of word-oriented work here in our retirement community.

The final chapter of the success story: My oldest is a successful software engineer doing development work for whomever he chooses to do it for. Next comes an attorney who, after spending several years as a partner in one of Denver’s largest firms, put together his own, now very successful, multi-lawyer firm in Colorado Springs. Third, a now retired businessman who, with a partner, put together a company dealing with hospital finances that finally sold for a bundle. Fourth, a now retired engineer who built a large environmental engineering firm in Colorado Springs with a yard full of trucks and projects up and down the length of Colorado and into Wyoming and New Mexico. He finally shut down the company, found jobs for all his employees, and sold off the company’s assets because he didn’t want the company’s reputation to suffer under an uncertain buyer.

I’m not sure you can do this kind of thing nowadays. Most of my grandkids have two-worker families. There’s just no way around it, and the down side is obvious even though my seventeen great-grands are being cared for properly in a physical sense. Kids need a mom – a mom who’s there for them – and our Western society now suffers from a possibly fatal lack of that connection.

[KLaban]

I wouldn't dream of suggesting what camera a woman should use let alone suggesting the career path or child raising path she should pursue.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

[email][/email]

I wouldn't dream of suggesting what camera a woman should use let alone suggesting the career path or child raising path she should pursue.

Fair enough... and a personal choice.

However, haven't women done exactly that throughout history? Suggesting career paths or family-issues paths for men? And mostly quite forcibly and successfully.

[KLaban]

Fair enough... and a personal choice.

However, haven't women done exactly that throughout history? Suggesting career paths or family-issues paths for men? And mostly quite forcibly and successfully.

I dare say they have but that doesn't change my position in the slightest.

I'm not conceited enough to think that my subjective opinions are fact, which, I admit, could well qualify me and my opinions as unsuited to forum discussion.

;-)

[John Camp]

That's an interesting theory - is there any sociological scholarship built around that?

Certainly there was the "need" to reintegrate men into the workforce in the postwar era, but I'm not sure I'd label that a "liberal" or "conservative" impulse, but rather one driven by practicality, with a hedge toward deference shown to the men returning from war even if it need be at the expense of the women who were critical to the wartime economy.

Yes, there's a lot of scholarship around it, but it wasn't post World War II, it was during the labor organizing era in the 19th and early 20th century. In the 19th century, many former farm women were working in factories (especially fabric factories of various kinds -- weavers and so on) along with many children. The resulting child labor laws and the push to get women out of factories specifically came from the left -- the labor unions -- which were fighting the endless supply of cheap labor in the later 19th century. Another reaction (from middle and upper middle class women) was the rise of the so-called "Cult of Domesticity" in the 19th century which glorified the role of homemaker as the person who held a family together. That was a reaction of the corporate push to get more women into factories. There was still a strong sexist element in all of this, of course -- women were cheaper than men, and in mechanized factories, just as efficient.

[Rob C]

[email][/email]
Fair enough... and a personal choice.

However, haven't women done exactly that throughout history? Suggesting career paths or family-issues paths for men? And mostly quite forcibly and successfully.

Such pressures were partly why my last few years of secondary education had me abandon art as a subject, where it had previously been one of my stronger and favoured ones.

I do understand the school and parental points of view, that art was most unlikely to offer a successful career to anyone. The limitations and prospects were almost always going to be those of becoming an art teacher, whereas engineering, law, medicine etc, had a much greater and more realistic potential of leading to a comfortable and successful professional life.

That understood, it becomes impossible to blame family and school for their, at the time, decisive inputs, because they were as they were for the pupil's greater good as well as for the school's public relations appeal with high numbers of public exam passers in the "right" subjects.

What I would add, though, is that geography plays one helluva big part in all of this: had Glasgow, the entirety of northern Britain, for that matter, been able to support the magazine and advertising industry that London and her surrounds did and does, then opportunity would not have been lacking nor photography such an unknown occupation beyond the visible manifestation of it as chronicler of hatches, matches and dispatches, hardly an attractive choice for a creative mind. The few non-social photography studios that did exist were an almost guarded secret, and pretty hard to discover. Once discovered, the money propects for an employee bore out the school's misgivings! The only way out of poverty employment was going to be self-employment, and an even more difficult route to survival.

Yet, how can one dispute the logic of centralisation of such industries as press and advertising? One can't. It is what it is because it works.

[KLaban]

Such pressures were partly why my last few years of secondary education had me abandon art as a subject, where it had previously been one of my stronger and favoured ones.

I do understand the school and parental points of view, that art was most unlikely to offer a successful career to anyone. The limitations and prospects were almost always going to be those of becoming an art teacher, whereas engineering, law, medicine etc, had a much greater and more realistic potential of leading to a comfortable and successful professional life.

That understood, it becomes impossible to blame family and school for their, at the time, decisive inputs, because they were as they were for the pupil's greater good as well as for the school's public relations appeal with high numbers of public exam passers in the "right" subjects.

What I would add, though, is that geography plays one helluva big part in all of this: had Glasgow, the entirety of northern Britain, for that matter, been able to support the magazine and advertising industry that London and her surrounds did and does, then opportunity would not have been lacking nor photography such an unknown occupation beyond the visible manifestation of it as chronicler of hatches, matches and dispatches, hardly an attractive choice for a creative mind. The few non-social photography studios that did exist were an almost guarded secret, and pretty hard to discover. Once discovered, the money propects for an employee bore out the school's misgivings! The only way out of poverty employment was going to be self-employment, and an even more difficult route to survival.

Yet, how can one dispute the logic of centralisation of such industries as press and advertising? One can't. It is what it is because it works.

As an illustrator my agent was loathe to have any artist on his books who wasn't within one hour commute from central London.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

chronicler of hatches, matches and dispatches

 

[Robert Roaldi]

Three pages so far and I don't think I've seen a post from a woman. Echo chamber anyone?   

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Three pages so far and I don't think I've seen a post from a woman. Echo chamber anyone?   

You know, God created women purposefully different than men. For the purpose of this discussion, it means women are much less gearheads when it comes to photography, or interested in measurbating, two activities that are bread and butter of this site. Besides, they are smarter and know how fruitless are these discussions we men are so happy (or stupid) to waste our time on.

[Rob C]

You know, God created women purposefully different than men. For the purpose of this discussion, it means women are much less gearheads when it comes to photography, or interested in measurbating, two activities that are bread and butter of this site. Besides, they are smarter and know how fruitless are these discussions we men are so happy (or stupid) to waste our time on.

Slobodan, you've made a couple of good points there, but have you stopped to consider that, without nipples, boobs too would be pointless?

It behoves us to be grateful for such mercies and protect women from the nonsense that happens in the marketing sections of all enterprises. To illustrate: my wife and I were down in England getting a calendar through print, and the printer's rep who was handling our print commission plus another chap from the company hosted us to dinner. As we sat there, getting more and more pissed, I noticed that my wife was getting more and more amused. Eventually, the two hosts cut through the small talk and propositioned me with a calendar photography project they wanted to quote for to another of their clients.

When the evening was over, I asked my wife why she'd been having such a tough time looking serious; she told me that men were so bloody obvious, that the entire night had been a lead up to asking me to do something, and why in hell is it so hard for men to take the straight route and just ask, without all the nonsense? I suppose they just wanted to have dinner on the company...

We need more briliant women doing important things. Today, peeling me a grape would be a good start.

;-)

[Telecaster]

It'd be nice if Western societies could stop see-sawing between extremes and recognize both that 1) women tend to be better than men at raising children, in terms of both skills and temperament, and 2) many women are best suited for, and interested in, life tasks other than child rearing. Our desire to enforce conformity where variety is the natural state of things is both counterproductive and futile.

-Dave-

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Amen, Dave.

[KLaban]

It'd be nice if Western societies could stop see-sawing between extremes and recognize both that 1) women tend to be better than men at raising children, in terms of both skills and temperament, and 2) many women are best suited for, and interested in, life tasks other than child rearing. Our desire to enforce conformity where variety is the natural state of things is both counterproductive and futile.

-Dave-

Nailed it.

[RSL]

No question about it, but it ain't gonna happen.