SusanofO -> RE: 1950's Household (9/3/2006 9:26:56 PM)
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The disadvantage to a woman in the 1950's (or sooner) was that she didn't have any economic parity with a man. She couldn't get a bank loan in her own name, she had to have a male relative as a co-signer. I remember seeing "Women wanted" and "Men wanted" in the classifieds for jobs - and the women's ads were always limited to things like: Secretary, clerk, teacher, nurse, nurse's aide, maid, cashier, etc. - and they really were paid a whole lot less than men, and it was legal. Everyone thought it was normal. The fallout to this was that if a woman was married to a wife and child beater (non-consensual beating, of course) who was alcoholic and gambled his paycheck (if he even had a job) at the race-track, for example, she really was just kind of stuck - because she couldn't support herself on half of what a man made, much less take her children with her. People in miserable marriages really were forced to grin and bear it - and you couldn't tell the neighbors, because everyone gossiped all the time. I remember there was a divorced woman on my block when I was a little girl, and all of the housewives were shocked because she 1) Worked and 2) was divorced. It was equated, somehow, with being a sleaze, if female. And in grade school, the one girl in my fifth grade class of 45 kids who had divorced parents was more or less shunned because of it. Some parents even wouldn't let their kids hang out with her - it's as if she had a disease they were afraid their own might catch, somehow. It was sad. I was nice to her, mostly because I was intrigued by her name, which was Venus (and she really was absolutely beautiful, but it didn't matter, her mom was a "sleazy divorcee'"). Racial bigotry was also rampant, and everyone seemed to think that was just fine, too (except my parents didn't think it was fine at all. My mother waltzed us out of a Wooloworth's store in 1964 because it still had "Whites only" lunch counters. I sat on a stool at the "Colored only" part, (I couldn't read yet) - and the waitress yelled at me for it, and my mom got mad and yanked me off the stool, told the waitress she was an idiot, and we never went back there). I always loved her for that. I told that story at her eulogy, and my dad cried,and my sisters bawled their eyes out. Yes, the 1950's (and even the 1960's) had some drawbacks. I remember an uncle telling my sister (who wanted to be a lawyer from the age of 8, she was addicted to watching "Perry Mason" on tv) - "girls can't be lawyers" at a family picnic, and nobody said a word about that (except my father, on the way home. It ticked him off, because he knew my sister was smart. He also had no sons, and he knew we were all bright as any guy, and encouraged us to do whatever we wanted from day one). He told her right then if she wanted to go to law school, he'd make sure she did, if she studied. Remarks like that didn't bother me as much, because I wasn't interested in a "traditionally male dominated" field like law or medicine was back then. For a long time, I wanted to be an art teacher in an Elementary school. - Susan
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