House husbands

[belfastboy]

I was raised by a single mom from the time I was 10. She worked the afternoon shift (3-midnight) so she could be home with my infant brother and I became a 'latchkey kid'. I learned to cook and sew buttons and the holes in my jeans out of necessity. Cleaning I was somewhat deficient. I loved to eat and figured out that if I wanted to eat I better learn to cook something edible.

 

[Turnip]

…
And I’m sure every generation has their fair share of spoiled brats, …

Of course, every generation‘s got the youth it deserves.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One thing that's painfully apparent as we make our way thru the 1940s in the "Era Day by Day" thread is that the general perception of young people is always the same, no matter the generation -- every generation is lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it. We saw a moral panic sweep the country in 1942 -43 over the doings of a wave of "zoot suited delinquents" rampaging across society in the wake of a few high-profile incidents, including the murder of a junior-high math teacher in a school corridor in Brooklyn by a pair of young hoodlums, and the gang rape by a gang of youths of a teenager in the balcony of a movie theatre in the Bronx.

These were terrible incidents - the theatre rape and the subsequent trial, would turn your stomach as they did mine -- and the fact that the generation that witnessed these and many other incidents grew up to be a generation of parents that swore up and down that their *own* children were lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it tells you something about the way every generation finds a way to build the fiction of a "a better past" that it uses as a club to beat its present. The real past is always far more complicated than the fictitious past cooked up as a talking point by cynical political hacks.

 

[Turnip]

The „better“ past is one of the reasons I decided not to replicate myself decades ago. Just wanted to avoid hitting the world with another hooligan like i was as a kid.
The other has been from ecological considerations.

 

[belfastboy]

One thing that's painfully apparent as we make our way thru the 1940s in the "Era Day by Day" thread is that the general perception of young people is always the same, no matter the generation -- every generation is lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it. We saw a moral panic sweep the country in 1942 -43 over the doings of a wave of "zoot suited delinquents" rampaging across society in the wake of a few high-profile incidents, including the murder of a junior-high math teacher in a school corridor in Brooklyn by a pair of young hoodlums, and the gang rape by a gang of youths of a teenager in the balcony of a movie theatre in the Bronx.

These were terrible incidents - the theatre rape and the subsequent trial, would turn your stomach as they did mine -- and the fact that the generation that witnessed these and many other incidents grew up to be a generation of parents that swore up and down that their *own* children were lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it tells you something about the way every generation finds a way to build the fiction of a "a better past" that it uses as a club to beat its present. The real past is always far more complicated than the fictitious past cooked up as a talking point by cynical political hacks.

Ah, but at least I can read and write cursive....and drive a manual tranny.

 

[Edward]

One thing that's painfully apparent as we make our way thru the 1940s in the "Era Day by Day" thread is that the general perception of young people is always the same, no matter the generation -- every generation is lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it. We saw a moral panic sweep the country in 1942 -43 over the doings of a wave of "zoot suited delinquents" rampaging across society in the wake of a few high-profile incidents, including the murder of a junior-high math teacher in a school corridor in Brooklyn by a pair of young hoodlums, and the gang rape by a gang of youths of a teenager in the balcony of a movie theatre in the Bronx.

These were terrible incidents - the theatre rape and the subsequent trial, would turn your stomach as they did mine -- and the fact that the generation that witnessed these and many other incidents grew up to be a generation of parents that swore up and down that their *own* children were lazier, more ungrateful, more frivolous, less mature, and more in need of the iron fist of discipline than the one that came before it tells you something about the way every generation finds a way to build the fiction of a "a better past" that it uses as a club to beat its present. The real past is always far more complicated than the fictitious past cooked up as a talking point by cynical political hacks.

Woody Allen skewed that sort of 'golden age thinking' very nicely indeed in Midnight in Paris. Of course, as I discovered years ago when I published on legal content regulation and moral panic, it's as old as society. I went back to Plato in that piece, as memory serves, but probably Ug the caveman thought his kids were spoilt brats...

 

[tonyb]

It's often been said that working class women didn't care about feminism -- because they already knew they had the power in the family, and this is the truth. No woman in my family was in any way treated as "the fairer sex." They worked just as hard as the men did -- some in the house, others in factories, and in the case of my aunt, on the waterfront docks. But beyond that, women drove the decision-making process in the home far more than the men did -- the man may have brought home the paycheck, but when he walked in the door he handed it to his wife, and she had the greater say in the decisions on how it would be spent. The "lady of the house" bit was a middle-class suburban thing, and that was, even in the postwar era, only a small part of the bigger picture.

As far as househusbands go today, I don't care one way or another, as long as the bills get paid.

My mother was married at 17 and widowed with three babies at 21.

She remarried not long afterwards and had another kid, but I never knew of her not to hold down at least one job and often two. As I grew up I came to the gradual realization that despite my stepdad’s bluster and all that head-of-household nonsense the family was to the largest degree dependent on Mom’s income, which was far more stable and often larger than his.

The Old Man’s not quite redeeming virtue was his skill in the kitchen. He was quite the cook, who could cobble together a tasty meal from inexpensive ingredients.

I can’t remember a time when my siblings and I didn’t wash dishes and make beds and run the vacuum over the floors and, and, and …

In other words, there were few if any gender-defined tasks in my childhood home, and I haven’t lived with any since. Good thing, too, seeing how I’m a lousy mechanic and can’t be trusted with power tools.