The proper conduct of a housewife in 1950....

@hawkeye10,

How many fish were there?

Don't you think an animal would have taken one and gone off to eat it? Unless cats have it with fishponds as foxes do with henhouses...
It could have been a flock of hungry birds though...

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@hawkeye10,

Setanta wrote:

Don't you remember being a teenager?

I do, but I wasnt this mysterious kind of teenager that does stupid and dangerous things for no good reason at all, and they were thus always a mystery for me.

Mame wrote:

Oh, and I was dared to eat the formalehyed eggs from a fish were dissecting and I did - kids are stupid.

Did it only taste painfully horrible or did you also get nasty side-effects?

Cyracuz wrote:

I remember seeing a show on tv about all these career women who had chosen to focus on becoming something.
They had all worked their asses off, but then the time came when they wanted to start a family and have children. The only problem was that they weren't able to anymore. They had gotten too old and had no more eggs. And they were raising hell about their rights to have children. Saying things like "why didn't anyone tell us?".

Some just take it too far..

People seek richness to be happy, but they oftenly seem to forget that at some point, and spend their lives killing themselves for money, forgetting that there is no point in being rich if you dont have enough free time to be happy =)

hawkeye10 wrote:

Quote:
Why would you say that?
because you labeled how things were back then as a joke when I pointed it out. My claim that we had home EC in schools so that girls could grow into successful women is not funny, it is how it was.

It IS funny, and also how it was.

Unless you think the way it was was a tragedy, but thats taking it too seriously =)

hawkeye10 wrote:

Quote:
No money
No food
Got that, but no fish....found out today that something has fished ALL of the goldfish and koi out of my pond.....

Buy turtles! Turtles are indestructible and immortal! (pretty much)

The only problem is that they are incredibly good at scaling and digging under things, so containing then is kinda difficult.

My brother has had a pair of small turtles for over ten years now.

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@Phoenix32890,

Phoenix32890 wrote:

Oh well, I suppose that cultural change evolves slowly!

My kid now has "FCS," which I think is Family and Consumer Science. They've mostly focused on food so far, (recipes but also healthy/ unhealthy, etc.) but they will be doing sewing and various home-ec-type things. (Her whole class attends, 4th-grade girls and boys.)

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This thread has become totally bizarre. Manored, you're a weirdo. In high school, we would have considered you a hopeless nerd.

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@hawkeye10,

Quote:

Even well into the 60's girls were going to college for no other pupose than to land the right man, getting a man was everything.

Absolutely. The standing joke was that young women went to college to get their M.R.S. degree. The reason that they went to college was that the brighter men, with the better futures (translation: earning power) were to be found in colleges and universities.

Then, god forbid, if the girl did not catch a husband, and became an old maid (anyone remember THAT expression?) she could become a teacher, stay with her parents, and bring in some money into the house.

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@Phoenix32890,

Phoenix32890 wrote:

Quote:
Even well into the 60's girls were going to college for no other pupose than to land the right man, getting a man was everything.

Absolutely. The standing joke was that young women went to college to get their M.R.S. degree.

Oh man.
I remember in 1981, there was this girl Hazel, who dropped out of college like one month before her graduation, because she was engaged.

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@chai2,

Oof. Wonder if she ever went back. In my experience, it has been women who went back to school more than men who did.

I have a male friend who finished university but didn't graduate because he failed to pay his library fines. He is a writer/electrician. Decades later he decided he wanted to be a substitute teacher, and paid the damned fines, or at least dealt with the university.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

This thread has become totally bizarre. Manored, you're a weirdo. In high school, we would have considered you a hopeless nerd.

Yeah, probaly.

So, pouring dangerous chemicals down drains was a form of assuring your non-nerdness?

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@manored,

No . . . and this is where you depart from normality. It's hilariously entertaining, because it's dangerous, because it's forbidden, and because the eventual consequences are unknown. Ordinary teenagers get off on that kind of thing.

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I am sitting here at 5:45 wondering if my wife will be home before 8 pm. She does work hard, I'll give her that.

I've been here on the computer trying to get a job.

I'm wondering what frozen dinner to heat up. Wife never eats at night, so nothing to worry about there.

I lived in the 50's. I saw Ozzie and Harriet on the tv, but not at home.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

No . . . and this is where you depart from normality. It's hilariously entertaining, because it's dangerous, because it's forbidden, and because the eventual consequences are unknown. Ordinary teenagers get off on that kind of thing.

Oh.

Bastards =)

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Yeah . . . we were . . . and we had a great time, too ! ! !

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During the fifties, I would watch a lot of the quiz shows. Often, the contestant was a woman. The introduction would go like this:

Master of Ceremonies- Oh hello Mrs. Jones. I see that you are from New Jersey. And what does your HUSBAND do?

The implication was that it was the husband who completely supported the household. If a woman did work, it was for "pin money".

Does anyone remember when the classified ads were divided into, Help Wanted-Male, and Help Wanted- Female?

Does anyone remember that when a young woman went to college, she was advised to learn typing, as most woman graduates started careers sitting at a typewriter?

Until the middle 70s, if both husband and wife worked, the banks would consider only the husband's income for a mortgage. The reason was that the woman might become pregnant, therefore her income was not stable. A law changed that.

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@Phoenix32890,

Sure I remember help wanted ads being divided to male and female..

My mother the studio secretary and, later, decorator's assistant, back in the twenties and early thirties, made sure I taught myself how to type in early high school.
It was useful for typing reports when I got my first job at sixteen (after school and both weekend days). That was in the fifties too.

In the mid seventies, I was the one with the serious job; we weren't married when we looked for a mortgage, and we were buying in a "redlined" area. Talk about three strikes. Good old Allstate took a flyer on us.

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The proper conduct of a housewife in 1950....

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