Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

[Stanley Doble]

filthy, poorly maintained, run down, unpainted hovels. I remember a short story from the twenties about a paint salesman. His business card bore the motto "Hire a good painter - good painters use white lead - white lead lasts".

Even then, lead was not used in all paints. The more lead, the more expensive the paint. Cheaper houses, or the kitchens and back rooms of expensive houses, would be painted with calcimine, a water based lead free paint.

The worst would be old houses, once the homes of the rich, that had been redecorated with lead paint several times before being converted to apartments or rooming houses and allowed to deteriorate, with peeling paint on the baseboards. You have to eat the stuff to get the lead. With gas, I thought breathing the exhaust was enough to pick up the lead.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The worst would be old houses, once the homes of the rich, that had been redecorated with lead paint several times before being converted to apartments or rooming houses and allowed to deteriorate, with peeling paint on the baseboards. You have to eat the stuff to get the lead. With gas, I thought breathing the exhaust was enough to pick up the lead.

Ingestion is the primary exposure route for inorganic lead, such as that found in paint and pigment, but airborn particles from paint are found in almost every environment where lead paint is present. It's especially a problem for children, who engage in hand to mouth contact far more often than adults. Furthermore, for whatever reasons, children absorb lead at a much higher rate than adults. Organic lead, such as the TEL in gas, can be absorbed directly through the skin. One need not even breath the fumes.

 

[vitanola]

filthy, poorly maintained, run down, unpainted hovels. I remember a short story from the twenties about a paint salesman. His business card bore the motto "Hire a good painter - good painters use white lead - white lead lasts".

Even then, lead was not used in all paints. The more lead, the more expensive the paint. Cheaper houses, or the kitchens and back rooms of expensive houses, would be painted with calcimine, a water based lead free paint.

The worst would be old houses, once the homes of the rich, that had been redecorated with lead paint several times before being converted to apartments or rooming houses and allowed to deteriorate, with peeling paint on the baseboards. You have to eat the stuff to get the lead. With gas, I thought breathing the exhaust was enough to pick up the lead.

Kalsomine was used on plastered walls, and in cellars, but was seldom if ever used on woodwork in the last century, whereas even cheap ready-mixed paint in the post-1915 period
Had a rather high lead content, as did clear varnishes, which contained Litharge.

More recent studies of children with high blood lead levels suggest that the principal source of lead is the soil outside these children's homes. Similar soil lead levels are found in the neighborhood of lead refiners (auto battery recyclers), smelting plants, and major highways of the 1950's and 1960's

 

[LizzieMaine]

Lead poisoning -- commonly known as "painter's colic" -- was extremely common among "walldogs," the sign painters responsible for the signs seen on brick walls in most every town and city before the 1960s. The paint used in these signs had a very heavy concentration of lead, which absorbed into the bricks as well as into the men who painted the signs -- that absorption into the bricks is the main reason so many of those signs, some well over a century old, are still visible today.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Lead is present in relatively minor amounts in the earth's crust, almost all of it as lead sulfide (the mineral "galena"). Pretty much all of the lead in the environment, both organic and inorganic, is a product of human activity.

 

[Stanley Doble]

In Europe, experts have traced the downwind signs of ancient Roman lead mines and refineries by the lead in the soil. It can hang around for a long time.

 

[p51]

How about all the plates with markings that contained lead? It was going on into my lifetime, I remember my Mom finding out a Campbell's Soup bowl we had with markings for the company had lead so she made a huge deal about nobody eating out of it (yet, she kept it). As a little kid, of course I didn't understand why. The bowl wasn't old, either. I guess this would have been sometime in the early 70s, probably about 75 or so...
From this, I can only assume that plenty of fine china from back in the day might contain lead.

 

[HudsonHawk]

How about all the plates with markings that contained lead? It was going on into my lifetime, I remember my Mom finding out a Campbell's Soup bowl we had with markings for the company had lead so she made a huge deal about nobody eating out of it (yet, she kept it). As a little kid, of course I didn't understand why. The bowl wasn't old, either. I guess this would have been sometime in the early 70s, probably about 75 or so...
From this, I can only assume that plenty of fine china from back in the day might contain lead.

Yes, most fine porcelain china from back in the day had lead glaze. Unless you eat on it every day, it's likely not an issue, but still, it's there.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I heard of a family getting sick from drinking their orange juice out of a pitcher with lead glaze. Apparently the acid in the juice draws the lead out of the glaze or dissolves it. The pitcher was made in Mexico, this was in the 1960s.

 

[ChiTownScion]

One thing of the Golden Era that was not cool at all: limited career options for women. Women have always raised their kids while holding down jobs, but from all that I've read it was more in the realm of dealing with an economic hand that had been dealt by circumstance rather than a young girl planning out a professional career from Day One and determining that she really had all options open.

Seems that at best all a really bright woman had was an Either/Or option: either be a wife and a mother, OR choose a career......and the career options were not all that wide. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, of "Cheaper By the Dozen" fame, raised eleven kids as a widow while working as a self- educated industrial engineer, but she was an extremely exceptional person.

And yeah, I know all about those Rosie the Riveter days of the Second World War, but as soon as the guns fell silent, women were essentially told to stand down so that a vet (by implication, a male) could have a job. The sexism of the Era was the downside of the perceived chivalry that was part and parcel of that Paradise Lost.. a paradise that really never existed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That began to change in the thirties with the rise of a generation of "business girls" who had firm career plans in mind all along. Broadcasting was an especially fertile field for these women, with quite a few women holding influential positions in network radio, on both sides of the microphone.

Working-class women, of course, had always held jobs and raised families -- the percentage of married women working outside the home had been rising steadily since 1900, and actually declined only slightly for a year or so after WW2 before beginning to rise again. As you say, this was largely economic circumstance, but with America having been an overwhelmingly working-class country until the late fifties, the idea of *anyone* having a "career" instead of a clock-punching job was very much the exception across the board. And the women who returned to the kitchen after the war were largely middle-class or upper-middle-class women -- working class women kept the same factory jobs they'd held before the war. There was never any rush of demobilized servicemen applying for jobs packing sardines or wiring radio chassis.

Chivalry, and all its glossy appurtenances, for what it's worth, was far less prevalent than its modern advocates imagine. The average man of the Era was far more William Bendix than Ronald Colman. And the average woman was far more Patsy Kelly than Donna Reed.

As always, I recommend Stephanie Coontz's eye-opening study "The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap" for a hard-social-science examination of the realities of family life and the role of women before and after WW2.

 

[Fading Fast]

One thing of the Golden Era that was not cool at all: limited career options for women. Women have always raised their kids while holding down jobs, but from all that I've read it was more in the realm of dealing with an economic hand that had been dealt by circumstance rather than a young girl planning out a professional career from Day One and determining that she really had all options open.

Seems that at best all a really bright woman had was an Either/Or option: either be a wife and a mother, OR choose a career......and the career options were not all that wide. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, of "Cheaper By the Dozen" fame, raised eleven kids as a widow while working as a self- educated industrial engineer, but she was an extremely exceptional person.

And yeah, I know all about those Rosie the Riveter days of the Second World War, but as soon as the guns fell silent, women were essentially told to stand down so that a vet (by implication, a male) could have a job. The sexism of the Era was the downside of the perceived chivalry that was part and parcel of that Paradise Lost.. a paradise that really never existed.

I agree with everything said here and love that today, with caveats that not everything is perfect today, most young women can have almost any career they want / have the ability to have and raise a family. The fact that it is hard to do both is not, IMHO, always some kind of sexism, sometimes it's just reality for both men and women working and raising children: Work is demanding and raising a family is demanding and doing both at the same time is hard.

Okay, but the real point of my post is that - and remember, I agree with all the above said ChiTownScion - many women did do both and well in the Golden Era. I know two examples (one my grandmother) and, in her case, she was very accepted in her work place. And the same holds for the other example I know. In some communities, woman weren't kept out of work roles or denounced for working and raising a family, but I think these two examples are just that - examples of situations that don't fit the dominant model of the time.

For me, knowing these two women when I was growing up, seeing them as business women and seeing them accepted in their work and social worlds, made it harder for me to see the prejudices and stereotyping most women faced because my immediate and formative experiences didn't fit the dominant cultural view.

That's it - no big point to make other than my one-off experience was atypical and it took me a while to see the bigger cultural problem.

 

[fashion frank]

The Volstead Act October 28 1919 a day that will live in infamy ( no wait that was FDR) .
That's right folks on this day in history they turned off the taps and shut the doors on your favorite watering hole !
The ramafacations were huge and led to the rise of guys like Al Capone and organized crime.
Would like to get everyone's thoughts on the Volstead Act and how it impacted America . It did not go into effect until December of that year but this is the day it was passed into law.
All the Best Fashion Frank

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polop...allery_1200/prohibition-era-new-york-city.jpg

 

[Dirk Wainscotting]

That began to change in the thirties with the rise of a generation of "business girls" who had firm career plans in mind all along. Broadcasting was an especially fertile field for these women, with quite a few women holding influential positions in network radio, on both sides of the microphone.

Not much change though. Neither in the thirties nor much later were there women in prominent positions. A woman working in the media would have been an actress, a lightweight announcer, a 'script girl' a costume mistress etc. Very few producers or directors or executive positions. Famous examples to the contrary can't disprove a wider reality.

Working-class women, of course, had always held jobs and raised families -- the percentage of married women working outside the home had been rising steadily since 1900, and actually declined only slightly for a year or so after WW2 before beginning to rise again. As you say, this was largely economic circumstance, but with America having been an overwhelmingly working-class country until the late fifties, the idea of *anyone* having a "career" instead of a clock-punching job was very much the exception across the board. And the women who returned to the kitchen after the war were largely middle-class or upper-middle-class women -- working class women kept the same factory jobs they'd held before the war. There was never any rush of demobilized servicemen applying for jobs packing sardines or wiring radio chassis.

Largely true, though I am quite certain that after the war men would have been taken on for certain jobs in preference to women. The reason for hiring women in a lot of cases would have been the ability to pay a lower wage, that change has only recently started to change. Definitely true that middle-class women returned to housewife duties and also took to part-time home-based enterprises like dressmaking or garment repair. A working-class woman (then as so often now) could have a job alongside being a housewife. My working-class grandmother astonishingly also squeezed dressmaking into her free-time!

 

[Stanley Doble]

I only know of one book or study on the effects of Prohibition and that was Booze by James Gray. Based on contemporary evidence, the effects were almost entirely positive. In fact he got into the subject because when prohibition came in he was a small child with an alcoholic father and his memories told him prohibition was a God send, which was the opposite of what you hear today. So he did the research and found out his childhood memories were not playing tricks.

http://www.amazon.ca/Booze-When-Whiskey-Ruled-West/dp/1895618606

"James Gray, one of western Canada's finest social historians, was born in Whitemouth, Manitoba, in 1906. He worked for the Winnipeg Free Press for many years and went on to edit several other publications. In 1947, he relocated to Calgary, where he worked with the Home Oil Company for twenty years before retiring to embark on a new career as a historian. He passed away on 12 November 1998 in Calgary at the age of ninety-two.
During his life, Gray received numerous awards, including the Alberta Order of Excellence (1987), the Order of Canada (1988), and the Pierre Berton Award for "distinguished achievement in popularizing Canadian history" (1995). Gray also penned a rich legacy of award-winning and best selling books, including The Boy from Winnipeg, Men Against the Desert, The Winter Years, Booze, and Red Lights on the Prairies. "

 

[HudsonHawk]

I only know of one book or study on the effects of Prohibition and that was Booze by James Gray. Based on contemporary evidence, the effects were almost entirely positive. In fact he got into the subject because when prohibition came in he was a small child with an alcoholic father and his memories told him prohibition was a God send, which was the opposite of what you hear today. So he did the research and found out his childhood memories were not playing tricks.

You should check out Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Not much change though. Neither in the thirties nor much later were there women in prominent positions. A woman working in the media would have been an actress, a lightweight announcer, a 'script girl' a costume mistress etc. Very few producers or directors or executive positions. Famous examples to the contrary can't disprove a wider reality.

On the contrary. In radio, especially, there were a great, great many women in positions of considerable authority. Bertha Brainard was the head of programming at NBC from the late twenties until her retirement in the mid-forties. Janet MacRorie was the head of continuitiy acceptance -- essentially NBC's chief censor. Judith Waller went from the director of programming at WMAQ in Chicago during the 1920s to the program directorship for NBC Chicago, and is best known for being the woman who brought "Amos 'n' Andy" to NBC in 1929. Diana Bourbon of Ward Wheelock Co. was one of the most respected producers in the industry -- and even bent Orson Welles to her will. Regina Schuebel went from writing copy for the Milton Biow agency to running her own production house. Anne Ashenhurst Hummert was the co-owner and chief producer of Air Features, Inc., the largest independent production company in broadcasting prior to the rise of television, and singlehandedly controlled the majority of daytime serials on both NBC and CBS. The daytime serials she didn't control were owned and controlled by other women -- notably Irna Phillips and Sandra Michael, but there were plenty of others who owned and produced programming both daytime and nighttime -- Gertrude Berg, Myrtle Vail, Georgia Backus, Yolande Langworthy, Noreen Gammill, Fayette Krum, Peg Lynch, Jean Holloway, etc. etc.

Women also held key roles at every level in the American Federation of Radio Artists, broadcasting's most powerful labor union, from the day it was founded in 1937 with labor lawyer Emily Holt serving for nearly a decade as its first executive director. Actresses Lurene Tuttle and Virginia Payne were especially formidable figures in AFRA politics, with Tuttle having been one of the union's chief organizers on the West Coast, and Payne filling the same role in the Chicago unit -- Payne, best known for playing the role of "Ma Perkins" for twenty-seven years, eventually became the national president of the union, the first woman ever to hold a union presidency in the history of American labor.

There were many women connected to the ownership of stations from the twenties onward, from big-time city operations to small-town one-lungers. Radio had a strong reputation during the 1930s as the business most friendly to women, and a close examination of "Broadacasting " magazine, the industry's chief trade publication during these years, will back this up.

I strongly recommend Donna Halper's book "Invisible Stars: A Social History of Women in Broadcasting," which thoroughly and methodically documents the place of women in broadcasting before the television era, and also how their contributions have been minimized by poorly-researched histories in the years since.

 

[Dirk Wainscotting]

Are we to blame then the poorly researched histories for women still believing that men run the entire show?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not sure what you're talking about here, but in terms of American broadcasting, there were significant changes in the postwar era in the structure which dominated program production. Networks consolidated their power over the broadcasting schedule, greatly reducing the power of independent production companies, and this forced out many of the women who had headed such companies during the 1930s. The Hummert organization sold out to CBS after networks phased out daytime drama, without having made significant inroads into television, where, for the most part, production was dominated by networks or soap companies, not independent production houses. Anne Hummert retired a multi-millionaire, But Irna Phillips and her protege Agnes Nixon remained very prominent figures in broadcasting well into the seventies, with Nixon still active into the 21st century.

I think the main reason people don't know about these women is that broadcasting history has been very, very, very poorly documented -- most of the earlier histories were either corporate-authorized histories designed to embellish the specific reputations of such capitalists as David Sarnoff and William S. Paley, or lighthearted nostalgia romps which weren't concerned with anything deeper than the name of the Lone Ranger's nephew's horse. And most of those who have written about radio down thru the years have been men, who prefer to spin the story their own way. A few of the women noted above wrote biographies or studies of the roles of women in radio during the radio era itself -- most notably Judith Waller, Gertrude Berg, and Ruth Adams Knight (the head of the archival department at NBC-New York from the thirties to the seventies) == but those books have been out of print for decades, and are generally unknown to anyone who hasn't made the effort to dig deep in search of the facts. It's only in the last twenty or thirty years that women have entered the broadcast-history field in any serious number, and nowdays it's women who are doing much of the serious research in the field. Lost history is being recovered.

By way of full disclosure, I myself have been deeply involved in the study of American broadcast history since the late 1970s. You'll find my name in the footnotes for many of the current books on broadcasting subjects, and I've published here and there.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Are we to blame then the poorly researched histories for women still believing that men run the entire show?

If they had interviewed my grandmother (born 1901) or my mother's aunts (born in the 1880s and 1890s) they would have gotten an ear full.

You don't hear of women being an oppressed minority anymore. I used to like pointing out that women make up 51% of the population. That makes them an oppressed majority. They don't like you saying that, it makes them look dumb.