Why the 1950's?

[YPestis]

Why is the 1950's such an idolized period? It's not just fundies who cherish that period. Many mainstream conservatives and fundie-lites also harken to that "golden decade". I know nostalgia is one reason but it can't account for everything. There were other periods when moral values were just as conservative, if not more so, than the 1950's.

Checking off the various decades, I deduced a couple of secondary factors that also comes in to play. It was a prosperous time for America, with no wars or Great Depressions. The slew of TV shows and books propagated the myth that society didn't suffer dysfunctions. Mental illness and domestic abuse didn't exist because society never talk about it.

It was also a homogenous era. Racial and religious minorities were marginalized. There was no religious conflicts because everyone was perceived as Protestants. There were no racial strife because everyone was white.

But that can't be the only reason for this 1950's fixation, right?

Recently, I'm starting to think that the 1950's are valued by conservatives not just for it's perceived moral values, but also because the culture stressed conformity and a certain blandness. It seemed a period of paradoxes. Women were encouraged to stay home despite having gone to work in factories during the war. Minorities were treated as second class citizens by the very country they defended with their lives. Men were expected to marry and start families, otherwise people thought him strange and companies didn't find him dependable. There seemed few outlets to complain about these injustices. Is that why fundies seem so fixated on that decade? Was it because people lived such seemingly wholesome lives and society ostracized those that didn't conform to its standard?

Perhaps that's what the 1950's were really about. There's a stress on uniformity, on black-and-white thinking which fundies cherish, and which fits in with their world perspective. I offer that the only way society can operate like the 1950's with it's uniformity and pre-set gender/racial roles is to have a conformist culture. How else can we prevent smart, independent gals from having careers? Or gay men from engaging in same gender relationships? Or blacks from demanding equal treatment? I see similar trends in East Asian societies where women are still regulated to secondary roles, and Mormon society where gays are still sidelined. These cultures still stress conformity, and because it does, those that don't conform to societal norms suffer in silence or find themselves marginalized.

Fundies like the 1950's not just because they agree with the morals of that time but also because society expected people to conform to their standards, not the other way around. The 1950's are idealized because everything was orderly and no one stepped out of line (it seemed). Only....that uniformity hid the pain and anguish people suffered, the private hell endured. And the uniformity that seems comforting to some, may feel like a prison to others. Any thoughts?

[Deleted06]

The 1950's...I was born in that decade. All the moms on my block were housewives, now known as Stay At Home Moms. Most of the moms there wore dresses all the time, every now and then my mom wore pants. Tuna casserole with crunched up potatoe chips on top was a popular dinner. My mom had her hair done every week, she had hair tall enough to Reach To Jesus.

Was Leave It To Beaver set in the 50's? That show irritated the crap out of me. June did her housework in a dress, heels, and pearls. Ward looked over the mail when he got home from " the office." And Wally & The Beave were so damn polite. Not like the kids I knew!

[RosyDaisy]

This boggles my mind. My grandparents and parents lived in near poverty. Their lives were nowhere near "Leave it to Beaver" status. Seriously, fundies need to be forced to see what life was really like in the 50's.

[Artemis]

I think one reason people idolise the 1950s is because they see the visual images propagated by the media of that period and take them as an example of what life was actually like, rather then a media-idealised vision of what society was trying to get back to.

They assume that the pretty picture of Dad, Mum, and two adorable children, with Mum wearing a pretty frilly apron and cooking in her lovely modern kitchen while the children play peacefully together and Dad walks in through the door in his suit and hat were a reflection of how things really were, not how the social pressure of the time was trying to constrain them to be.

They do not understand that the images represent social engineering, not social reflection.

I can’t obviously comment on the USA, but in the UK during WWII we had a pretty poor time. Families were broken up by conscription of the available age men to fight in the war; women were drafted into the munitions factories, or expected to work on the the land. They became much more independent. Many women had to work and look after families: they had to be independent financially, and deal with aspects of householding that had maybe always been seen as male preserves before. They wore utility clothes, and yes, they continued to experience pressure to be ‘feminine’ but a lot of the styles were less restricting and more practical. Women attained nearer to equality than they had before simply because the country could not have functioned without them with half of its workforce dying in France, Germany and the Far East.

After the war there was a good deal of familial dysfunctionality as men were demobbed and came back to a society that was no longer the same. Women were booted out of the workforce in large numbers to make spaces for returning soldiers, and that caused a good deal of angst (for both genders). They were, in many cases forced to give up the financial independence and also, of course, the familial independence they had won by dint of being de facto heads of the household during the war.

In order to return men coming out of the army to productive work, to sweeten the pill of loss of financial independence for women, and to force social compliance to the earlier model of men heading the household and going out to work, and women being domesticated at home, newspaper articles, women’s magazines such as Good Housekeeping, the nascent television service and similar media focused very heavily on the joys of returning to domestic life – joys that a lot of women did not feel (hence the enormous rise in prescriptions for anti-depressants and tranquillisers and the ‘bored housewife’ issues with all their consequent psychological misfunctions).

So the myth of the ‘Good Housewife’ of the Fifties was created to return society to a social order it had been jolted out of during the war, and I think that a lot of fundies, looking at the images from that time, and not knowing the history behind them, do not understand them in their social context – as propaganda weapons in a social war – but see them as ‘this is how things used to be’, and as a real depiction of life in the fifties.

In reality of course, once the genie of women achieving financial and social independence by having to be in the workforce was well and truly out of the bottle, there was no stuffing it back in again. Women who had held down men’s jobs in munitions factories and on the land, working just as hard and achieving results just as good, were not going to go back and sit tamely at home enjoying catering to their headships, and having to ask for money to buy sanitary pads.

Hence, in many ways, the rise of feminism – after that brief period when everyone perhaps settled back down into the status quo ante bellum with an exhausted sigh of relief, women realised that they were being sold down the river on the joys of domesticity routine, and started understanding that actually they had been better off with their independence despite the war.

Fundies, of course, have been trying to return to that illusory domestic Golden Age ever since (hence the Fifties slant to many of the articles on homemaking and homekeeping). They are generally so ignorant of history, they don’t seem to understand that what they take to be a statement of ‘what was’ was more a plea for ‘what we want it to be again’.

This is a fairly simplistic account with very little shading and some generalisation, just for the sake of stating a case as briefly as possible, but I have done quite a lot of research on the issues as they interest me, and they are well documented. If you want just one book that encapsulates the changes in the way women began to think during this time, I would suggest you read Nella Last’s Diary. It’s really interesting how detached she became from her domestic routine, how impervious to her husband’s domestic demands, and how independent in her thought and actions and decision making because of her war work - and her experience was repeated all over the country.

[Avalondaughter]

Was everyone really a housewife in the 50s?

My college-educated grandmother had a job in the 50s. My grandfather sold life insurance and often worked evenings and did the shopping, cooking, and school chauffeuring. Many of my grandmother's friends and relatives had jobs. My mother-in-law, a bit younger than Grandma, but still an adult in the 50s, also worked, including after marriage and children. My grandparents were pretty hard line that my mother go to college.

Is it an ethnic thing? My grandparents were Catholic. My MIL is Jewish.

[shesinsane]

To illustrate the irony of idealizing the 1950s, let's look at the tv show Father Knows Best. The show featured a stay at home mom, a princess teenage daughter, a model son, and cherubic little daughter Kitty, all supported by a loving and wise father. When the workday portraying the perfect family was done, the actress who played Kitty went home to an alcoholic mother and pedophile father. The reality is that families were just as fucked up then as they are now, but the fictional perfection of the tv show is what people focus on.

As Artemis pointed out, during World War 2 the men were off fighting and women had to leave their homes to work in factories, and once they had a taste for independence (and maybe learned the world wasn't as awful as they'd been taught) women didn't want to resume their homebound supporting roles one the war was over and the men returned. The 50s was an attempt to return to the days of women ruling the home and men ruling the world. Even though the soldiers came back from WW2 with shell shock, they pretended they were fine. Even though they enjoyed working, women left their factory jobs and pretended staying home all day was just as fulfilling. Minorities were economically confined to the wrong side of the tracks, the mentally ill were locked away in asylums, and everyone pretended to be happy. Some of the things there are support groups for today were nothing but shameful in the 1950s, only discussed in whispered tones and never acknowledged in polite society.

I guess what I'm saying is that in the 50s everybody tried so hard to be perfect when in public that the tv and news we have to look back on doesn't reflect the 1950s, but the idealized version people aspired to. Today people cling to the those best-case-scenarios as if that's what really happened.

[GiggleOfGirls]

I think it's also a case of most people living today not having been old enough in the 1950s to really remember the rough spots. Memories are also easy to gloss over.

That's really interesting about the ads from that time period being designed to placate women who had a taste of freedom during the war and now were stuck back at home. I've not heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense.

[Guest Anonymous]

I was being lazy and only scanned the original post. The 'no wars' thing doesn't sound like a thing. Wasn't the Korean War in the 1950s (1950-53?)? Also, there was the Cold War and the fear of communism, and nuclear war, etc.

(Sorry if this has already been covered).

[famof4]

My mom (born 1944) is sure she never farted (passed gas) until 1970.

I think people remember history the way they want to remeber it. The glossy picture perfect shows and happy family photos are in front of us while History books are left to remeber the " yucky" parts of history. Some history books even forget the yucky parts.

[tankgirl]

I think what has been said is very much tied to why this decade is so idealised. But then you also have good ol' McCarthyism coming in too. The idea of seeming happy, godly, patriotic, and perfect was not always just about fitting in, it could also be part of protecting yourself. This era also pushed the Christian God to the forefront in America. This created a lot of tension and demand for people to fit in for fear of being seen as an outsider, and fundies love conformity.

So in many ways I see why they idealise this era. You have shiny Propaganda of Domestic Womanhood in magazines and on TV, standards rules keeping movies and tv, pure and clean, no one was gay, unChristian, but maybe those few Jews around the corner, people smiled and were happy, kids listened and never did wrong and it was all swell. Well at least all the media we have that fills in missing memories for those who livedit and were too young to remember it all or those who never lived it.

But the fun part is seeing how clearly jacked up it all was with McCarthyism, Jim Crow laws, Gay bashing, sexual and child abuse, women's rights and more by looking at the 1960's if the 50's had really been so swell, the 60's would not have been what they were, that is the most telling in the end.

Sorry my device hates me and its a bitch to edit on.

[teddybear]

This thread reminds me of this Family Guy episode.

hc2g1gEJ-64

[AVENues]

Why the fifties? Because of the wonderful, black and white, out of tone educational videos. "Homosexuals will kidnap you", "How to be well-loved by others as a woman", "How to behave at your workplace as a woman" etc. Tear jerkingly adorable... :roll:

Now that we talk family guy, here's one example as to why the fifties: they had an imitation of a fifties video, called "women in the workplace". It is not on youtube. (copyright issues maybe)

But here is one gem:

(I only like the dresses from the fifties. The mindset is downright dangerous - and all that right after the world war?)

[kiwimusume]

(I only like the dresses from the fifties. The mindset is downright dangerous - and all that right after the world war?)

This pretty much sums up my view of the fifties. Cool outfits, horrific mindset. Thanks to the people who wrote about the history surrounding it - I never knew that before.

[AVENues]

I have found an entire chain of gems, called "Weird old shit"

A whole big bunch of old shite. The comments crack me up.

goldpants504 3 months ago

"How can you say no and still keep your friends?" Telling them to go fuck themselves might work.

People are hilarious.

[kiwimusume]

I have found an entire chain of gems, called "Weird old shit"

A whole big bunch of old shite. The comments crack me up.

goldpants504 3 months ago

"How can you say no and still keep your friends?" Telling them to go fuck themselves might work.

People are hilarious.

That one you linked to about Barbara and Helen is making my eye twitch. :evil:

[jenny_islander]

The first nationwide TV broadcast aired in 1951. I think that's significant. Advertising and programming saturation reached a whole new level in the '50s and common nostalgia for those images is partly nostalgia for the naively wholehearted acceptance of those images. It's harder to achieve that mindset today on a national scale because the medium is no longer so shiny and new.

I think common unawareness of just when we fought the Korean War is also significant. People talk about World War II, people talk about Vietnam, but people don't generally talk about Korea. Korea wasn't in the script. We were supposed to be prosperous and live peaceful lives at home and get rich, dammit, not freeze our butts off in a place that most people didn't even know somebody whose ancestors were from there!

[Wolfie]

Was everyone really a housewife in the 50s?

My college-educated grandmother had a job in the 50s. My grandfather sold life insurance and often worked evenings and did the shopping, cooking, and school chauffeuring. Many of my grandmother's friends and relatives had jobs. My mother-in-law, a bit younger than Grandma, but still an adult in the 50s, also worked, including after marriage and children. My grandparents were pretty hard line that my mother go to college.

Is it an ethnic thing? My grandparents were Catholic. My MIL is Jewish.

No, not an ethnic thing- my protestant maternal grandmother and her mother both held down jobs by choice, and my paternal lapsed Catholic grandmother held down a job by neccesity, but she loved the independance and never remarried, though she had a long term boyfriend who asked a few times.

[IrishRose]

No, not an ethnic thing- my protestant maternal grandmother and her mother both held down jobs by choice, and my paternal lapsed Catholic grandmother held down a job by neccesity, but she loved the independance and never remarried, though she had a long term boyfriend who asked a few times.

My great aunt never married and was college educated in the 20's! She had boyfriends, but was very independent. She was a personal secretary for Dorothy Lamour. My grandma on the other hand (her sister) never worked outside of the home. She was also married at age 17.

[Conuly]

It was a prosperous time for America, with no wars or Great Depressions

Well, there was that little thing in Korea, wasn't there?

But I think it is simpler than that. These people were mostly children in the fifties. The media wasn't entirely uncynical then, but they were not exposed to this because they were children. And they still want to be children, ignorant and safe.

[FloraDoraDolly]

The 1950s had cool cars. Sure, they were gas guzzlers, but they looked awesome. When I see those classic cars on the road, in museums, or at auto shows, I always think, "Wow! I'd love to have a car that looks like that!" I never feel that way about today's cars, not even the most expensive ones. They all give me a meh feeling, not a wow feeling.

The 1950s had good toys, too.

[GiggleOfGirls]

The 1950s had cool cars. Sure, they were gas guzzlers, but they looked awesome. When I see those classic cars on the road, in museums, or at auto shows, I always think, "Wow! I'd love to have a car that looks like that!" I never feel that way about today's cars, not even the most expensive ones. They all give me a meh feeling, not a wow feeling.

The 1950s had good toys, too.

Amen to that! I like 1960s cars too....