Does Modern Society Unfairly Portray the 1950s?

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LumineDiei said:
or your mother or sister didn’t,
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I guarantee that they did. If a person believes that sexism never happened to his mother or sisters or wife or daughters or female friends, it is because they never told him about it.

It happened then and it happens now. The laws may change, people may become more aware of it, but it still happens whether people (men) want to believe it or not.

This is 2019. My daughters are runners. Do you know what they talk about when they come back from a run? They talk about if they didn’t get cat-calls, whistles, and comments from strange men. For them, the absence of unwanted attention is worth mentioning.

But let’s decry how women standing up for themselves has ruined the boys club.
 
Zach said:
Everybody could safely hitchhike.
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Yes. Sometimes my brother and I would hitchhike to school. In grade school we walked or rode our bikes. In high school we would walk, but sometimes hitchhike, since we lived quite a ways from the school.

When my brother and one of his classmates were 17, they somehow got parental permission to hitchhike to Chicago one summer to visit an uncle who lived there. They hitchhiked from KC to Chicago, got to the uncle’s house, but then moved into an apartment and worked in a warehouse for the summer. I was a little irked that I was not allowed to go with them.

At the end of the summer they hitchhiked back. The second guy who picked them up was a Protestant minister. He told them that he was not going as far as KC, but when he got to his destination he told them that they could take his car to get the rest of the way home, and he would come down to pick it up again in a few weeks. And that’s how they got back. Sure enough, the minister showed up at our house a few weeks later to get the car. We all visited for awhile and then he left.
 
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Great story. My aunts told me how they would hitchhike long distances. Even females could safely hitchhike.
 
Zach said:
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Dacinom:
Black community didn’t have equal rights, people with disabilities were locked up in institutions.
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True but lots of people with mental illness are on the street homeless today. And many black communities are worse off in terms of violent crime, gangs, drugs, poverty, out of wedlock births, no fathers around, abortion. Someone brought up lynchings. While there were still a few in the 1950s, compare them to black on black homicide today. In fact there are more blacks killed every year in the US currently than there were by lynching from Reconstruction to the 1950s.
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One cannot validly justify institutionalized, legally sanctioned discrimination and persecution under any circumstances. To try to rationalize it with the equivalent of, “Those people weren’t so bad off back then. Sure, one of them got lynched once in a while, but as long as they knew their place everyone got along fine,” is simply not worth arguing against.

“Sure, they weren’t allowed to use our swimming pools, but on the plus side they avoided getting polio.”
 
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Pointing out the in some ways it’s worse today isn’t justifying anything. To say otherwise is to shut down any facts and opinions that don’t fit a narrative. Another example is saying that many slaves had a better nutritional diet than many northern factory workers isn’t justifying slavery. It’s pointing out that things weren’t great for many people at the time.
 
You keep coming up with the same sort of comparisons and they just don’t work. They really come across as pseudo-justifications. Like, if you can convince yourself that some other people have/had it worse, then you can feel better about it.

That’s not the way life works.
 
One other item I want to add…
Society was more Christian then as a count of church goers and their stating their religion on polls. However, I also think more people today are informed of their faith better due to being able to consult the internet.

Sure, plenty of people today are still uninformed on many points of their and others faiths but I think the number of those much better informed is due to the availability of that information. Even fifteen years ago many Christians didn’t know much of anything about a faith other than their own. Many still don’t but it’s better than it was!

The internet may be blamed for turning so many away from their beliefs but the increased knowledge has its upside, too!
 
People in this thread have been pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of the 1950s compared to today. If you are saying I am justifying the negative in the 1950s because I’m pointing out the negative today, then I can turn around and say you are justifying the negative today by discounting comparisons. Then we might as well shut the conversation down because we are more focused on guessing each others motivation than on exchanging opinions and facts.
 
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on_the_hill said:
The movies are really popular among mid-life female audiences, but I don’t know any mid-life women who actually live that way.
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Probably because they’ve already been kicked to the curb. Besides at mid-life, many women find it difficult to handle the alcohol. Some that once drank like fish can’t handle half of a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
edwest211 said:
As it applies to the 1950s, it cannot be more unfair or less biased.
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I was fortunate to know a multitude of women who played the role of Rosie the Riveter during WW II. Every single one of them said they were happy to be out of the factory and back in their homes working to take care of their husbands and children.

They certainly did not “want it all” by punching a time clock for a 40-hour weekly paycheck while chasing the needs of their husband and children.

These women were incredibly strong and were happy identifying as the female gender. They gotta kick out of the 50’s shows that they considered to be entertainment because Hollywood wasn’t portraying what actually happened in everyday life. They seemed to love being grandmothers and then great-grandmothers. Boy, I sure do miss these ladies and their wonderful spirit!
 
JimG said:
I pretty much’s enjoyed the 1950’s. We spent a lot of time outside, worked in the garden and did chores. Kids spent more time outside than inside. We wandered around the neigborhood, and sometimes around the whole city. No cellphones, so we carried some change to use a payphone if we had to. But in practice that never happened. Only one car in the family and it was probably being used by mom or dad or brothers, so we had to fend for ourselves.

TV was in its infancy and there was nothing objectionable. No internet, no porn. No angry young men shooting up stores or schools. Got books from the library to read.
Dad worked in a factory, mom had a succession of jobs and didn’t have much trouble getting them. We only had one Catholic neighbor and she was a convert; no RCIA, she took instructions from a priest and became Catholic after a few months. Archbishop Sheen had one of the most popular TV programs.

Confessions every Saturday, Mass on Sunday. Spent time visiting our aunt and uncle in the Missouri Ozarks every summer. That side of the family was all Baptist, but we all got along. There were few organized activities but lack of organization was fine with me.
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Nothing objectionable? No Honeymooners glorifying and making a joke of the horror that is domestic violence? No white men in black face minstrel shows passing off crude racial stereotypes as entertainment? No June Cleaver insisting that it’s not good enough for women to simply do all the housework, but they’re falling short as women if they don’t glam it up in pearls and heels the whole while as well?
 
‘The fifies is bad because of _____’
‘But today is bad because of _____’

Guys, the world was always a mess since The Fall. The sins of one era doesn’t mean that another era was good. Why can’t we just acknowledge that 50s wasn’t peaches and cream, and that we still have issues today?
 
The Fifties . The era of duck and cover. We would all survive a nuclear attack if we hid under our desks at school. The Cold War. My aunt being the only woman at law school besides the secretary. Black women who supported their families by cleaning houses because the jobs when men came back from war went to white men first.
Those were the days.
 
Good one Lea. How was the 1950s in Singapore?

Besides the 50s lifestyle that people are talking about here have more to do with the United States.

I bet if you were in South Korea at that time, the 50s would have been a time of war and devastation. Hardly ideal.
 
repentant2 said:
Unmarried women should remain in their fathers homes.
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Not allowed to vote, not allowed to sit on juries, not allowed to live on their own.

Yup

You are proposing that women be treated by the law as permanent minors.

One country comes to mind that already does this.

Saudi Arabia.
 
From Casti Connubii
  1. This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs. But it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.
Notice the bolded part.

The fact the people like you seek to disenfranchise fully half of the human race is why feminism is alive and well and here to stay.
 
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Did you conduct a poll?

How do you know most young women are train wrecks?
 
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