That's the teaser on the front page of the NYT for an article with a different headline, "The Conservative Conspiracy Against Women’s Progress Is Real" (by Jessica Grose).The article says nothing about the 1970s. I do see a reference to the 1960s: "The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid." The 60s were 60 years ago, and the article does call the report "a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change."
Usually the 1950s are selected as the era of the traditional wife and the 1960s represent the exciting period of changing gender roles. The 70s were the heyday of feminism. These decades feel quite distinct from each other to me, a person born in 1951. Jessica Grose was born... when? Maybe to millennials, the 50s, 60s, and 70s seem like one big chunk of boomer oldness.
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66 కామెంట్లు:
Maybe to millennials, the 50s, 60s, and 70s seem like one big chunk of boomer oldness
It may be worse than that. At a recent wedding I was mingling with the men and women their mid twenties and saw people only carving out their own thing without any reference to the past, just getting shit done, kind of calm and maybe a little . stoic. The photographer ten months pregnant with her second, maybe not yet approaching thirty, snapping away in her chuck taylors. One of the bridesmaids with one in a wrap, two months, both quietly fulfilling their duties. It was hopeful…but I saw no evidence of them thinking of the anxieties of you oldsters at all…
One truly memorable thing from that era was the bra-burning protest of Miss America, and that was really nothing more than a one-time photo opportunity, even though it's commonly remembered as a pivotal moment. It was, and still is, pretty rare to see unfettered boobs in public, as much as men would prefer it.
I never really thought much of the movement. My mom was a school teacher and worked really hard at it, while raising the kids and doing most of the home-making, too. Most of the moms in our neighborhood worked, some wage-earners, some careerists.
Confused? Consider your source.
Jessica is always wrong carry on
“ The 70s were the heyday of feminism.”
The heyday for feminism was the Obama era. More females than males in college. More females in corporate executive positions, especially in Human Resources. Most importantly, it has led to the AWFL phenomenon.
Nothing Heritage puts out is any good. They had some civil war over their leader not criticizing Tucker Carlson enough. Its a play-pen for their rich donors.
In any case, its had to put "Women back in the kitchen" while telling everyone we have a labor shortage and must import millions of immigrants every year.
Something has to be done about the birthrate, not just in the USA but in Europe and Japan. Countries cant survive if your population isn't replacing itself. How you do that is not my area of expertise. I do know women are driven by fashion and money. If the media was bombarding them with endless stories of how great it was to be married with kids, as opposed to being single and having "sex in the city" they'd probably change.
Most spoiled, ass kissed human cohort in history bitching about nothing.
What a disgrace.
What’s a woman?
It took Grok 2 minutes and 3 seconds, but it says Jessica Grose is 43 years old.
You know right.
Heritage is where vought. Homan and co were sequestered along with many voter id like spakovsky were sequestered
What we experience personally is more real than what we read about. Something that happened in the 1970s isn’t really real to someone born in 2000. And that person, going only from what they read/saw in a movie, will sound foolish to someone who lived it. Extrapolate—Vietnam war, JFK assassination, Cuban Missile Crisis.
Can we address the results of the 19th amendment yet?
Now that the 1950's dream of a house in the suburbs and a full-time Mom who stays at home with the kids is no longer possible, why not both parents each working half-time outside the home to support a family with children? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
I agree with Althouse's take on the decades. I was born in 1955.
You can't expect headline writers to use math correctly and subtract.
--- Countries cant survive if your population isn't replacing itself. How you do that is not my area of expertise.
Very sorry to read that, RC! There are books that could help.
The progressivist belief (held religiously) is that historical change must only be allowed to move in one direction. That's what ultimately makes them totalitarians.
"One big chunk of boomer oldness" would make a good motto when you get around to changing it.
Come now, sir - more like One Big Chunk of Boomer Hotness! CC, JSM
In the first half of the sixties, the fifties were living their last days. In the second half, the seventies were being born. JFK shot in late '63 changes the mood of the fifties that is then asserted in the '68 conventions. College girls go from skirts to jeans, from crossing their legs to the pill. A brave new world is coming into being, a braver older one is sliding into the irretrievable past.
It was, and still is, pretty rare to see unfettered boobs in public, as much as men would prefer it.
My experience recently is different: I appear to be surrounded by unfettered boobs (and the young women who are sporting them), and I don't really think men would prefer that these boobs go unfettered, though not being a man, I will defer to those who are. The thing is that, like the similarly unattractive phenomenon of women of any age wearing leggings the color of their skin so that they look as if they are "Daffy Ducking it" in a friend's memorable phrase, the unfettered boobs I'm seeing are too large to look good in the tops the girls are wearing - they sag, not from the young women's age but from their (the boobs', not necessarily the women's) size.
Jamie, I am not seeing anything wrong with anything you just described. CC, JSM
Women were happier and healthier in 1976, and even the crazy ones weren't so toxic. Cars were already getting less interesting, but rock music was still solid.
Tweaking government programs isn't going to get the ideal society the author would like.
Although I do get startled by flesh colored leotards in the gym. It makes me think for an awful second that I wandered into the women’s locker room.
I also am intrigued by the completely non-supportive bikini tops a lot of weightlifting girls wear in the gym. They aren’t doing anything bounce-inducing, so they just cover the minimum. Of course they are the first ones to mace me for noticing.
On the other hand, the serious runner girls wear heavily constructed jogbras, but also as the sole outer garment on top.
So back to the 60s - it’s my impression that the bra is a relatively modern invention. Women of my grandmother’s generation (born about 1900) didn’t wear them, in part because they didn’t run. The Greatest Generation seemed to wear them for cosmetic reasons, to maintain the look of a young nubile. The boomer rebels mostly didn’t run, and when they bounced around in the throes of free love, hands were available for support. So they ditched the bra in rejection of what they thought was the demand of the male gaze. Then the Title IX generation realized they needed to strap em down for field hockey or soccer or whatever. Sound about right? CC, JSM
So when lots of women opt for traditional family life, that's not women choosing to live differently from your typical 1970's feminist whore. No no, that's a conspiracy by the patriarchy to undo years of social progress. Everything they observe must be fit into their pseudo-reality.
What kind of person has a Wikipedia article but the article doesn't say what year they were born? Seems like a throwback to a time when etiquette demanded not mentioning the age of "a woman of a certain age."
Bad timing for a hit piece. Heritage just imploded over internal bullshit and this is just mocking the still-warm carcass
We notice the bounce syncopation that occurs when a woman does not wear a brassiere. It's like the difference between the music of John Philip Sousa and George Clinton.
She started with jezebel in 04, right after she graduated from brown
Wikipedia article gives her college graduation year and links to NY Times wedding announcent with her age that day.
There was a brief shining moment in the 1970s when it was fashionable for a woman's nipples to be evident through their tops. There were even bras which had a segment cut out so the nipples could protrude, yet providing needed support.
@Althouse, that same article says Grose graduated from Bfosn but does not state what degree she earned. Did she even earn a degree or did she drop out?
At any rate consider the likelihood that, having attended Brown, she is unaware that sixty years is greater than a half century (a half century being 50 years, for the benefit of the Ivy League grads reading this).
I am aware from personal experience that in the early 1970s it was thought to be okay to discriminate against women because “women can’t do …” or “women are just taking jobs away from men who need to feed their families.” By the end of the decade that was gone and good riddance. But what was good about that time was that the women who took the jobs still had to be able to do the jobs. That would change, and we’d see the rise of female engineers who couldn’t do calculus, much less partial differential equations, and female firefighters without the strength to carry someone from a burning building. Jessica might like the status quo, but going back to the days when getting a job meant you were expected to be able to do the job would be a step forward.
As with nude beaches, those who would look good don't and the ones that do, shouldn't.
This is why the Times is an islahd of misfit toys
1976 - It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I graduated from high school, and my dad died in his sleep shortly after. I guess he felt his job was done.
Keep women affordable, available, reusable, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence aborted, sequestered in sanctuary states. Transhumane progress.
Away from la la land, men and women negotiate and reconcile as adults do. Life is not so short and raising our Posterity is the hardest job you will ever love.
Why not go back a century when it all started. The 1950s were just a backlash against the 1920s. And the 1980s were a backlash against the 1960/70s as personified by Alex P. Keaton
And as for the unmarried woman, she no longer had to explain why she worked in a shop or an office; it was idleness, nowadays, that had to be defended.
"With the job— or at least the sense that the job was a possibility— came a feeling of comparative economic independence. With the feeling of economic independence came a slackening of husbandly and parental authority. Maiden aunts and unmarried daughters were leaving the shelter of the family roof to install themselves in kitchenette apartments of their own. For city-dwellers the home was steadily becoming less of a shrine, more of a dormitory— a place of casual shelter where one stopped overnight on the way from the restaurant and the movie theater to the office. Yet even the job did not provide the American woman with that complete satisfaction which the management of a mechanized home no longer furnished. She still had energies and emotions to burn; she was ready for the revolution."
---‘Only Yesterday An Informal History Of The Nineteen Twenties’, Frederick Lewis Allen (1931)
The 1970s were when mothers went to work leaving the latch-key Gen X to fend for themselves in the afternoons.
Except for Disco, I loved the 70s. Some great rock was created, and the culture was trying with some success to get everyone on the same page. The 60s call for love, peace and tolerance finally had some success in the 70s, because it was sincere, and less a power play, as it was in the 60s and again later.
"I live with my husband and two kids in Brooklyn."
Interesting - at least her birthrate didn't decline. Graduate in 2004 means probable birth year is 1982.
IRC, Michelle goldberg used to write about how icky children and marriage were - and how women should be out there toting M16s, and being corporate CEOs - and then got married and had a kid.
Of course I was only 11 in 1976, but i don't remember the late 70s as being any different in terms of women staying at home then in the 80s or even now.
Latch key kids like me in the 70s were still boomers.
Most of the Moms I knew as a kid in the late 70s went back to college or went out and got jobs as Real estate agents or whatever after their kids got into high school. The girls in our class were planning to be lawyers, doctors, etc.
IN the eighties the late, lamented Spy magazine did an issue on the Seventies, The WIde Decade. It was hilarious. Many photos of famous people dressed in the ridiculous fashions of that era.
My mom worked 25 years as a heavy steel welder starting in 1961. She would never consider herself a feminist. She worked everyday in a factory, but still considered herself a housewife with four kids. She simply did both. She went to work looking like a man, but after getting home, she showered, put on a dress, did her make up and looked like every other woman the rest of the time. She was widowed 3 times and married four. She always had her own money. I think she would tell you she had a great life full of fun. No time wasted.
BFD! Modern feminists and other progressives support Muslims who want to send all women back to the seventh century.
DiscoLou likes 1976.
The best things about the 60s happened in the 70s.
"Comparing their natalist dreams to the creation of the nuclear bomb suggests that they believe they can achieve their goals only through destruction."
That is some solid deepthink. This is why the Times is the newspaper of record!
"This comes after other attempts by the Trump administration to withhold or cancel Head Start (which provides free child care for children 5 and under from low-income families) funding all over the country in 2025."
Head Start, whatever you think about the results it produces is about preschool education not "free child care."
At lease notionally so.
"What was so bad about 1976?"
The answer is 1776.
AI: "The year 1776 is most notable for the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, marking the birth of the United States as a nation free from British rule."
It has nothing and everything to do with... you guess it. Richard Feynman.
The main thing about the feminist movement is how it enabled government to screw woman. Back in the 60's and 70's it was possible for a couple to buy a home and have kids with one paycheck. Now for the most part two checks are needed just to afford a home and children and to earn enough to pay the taxes to support single mothers with multiple deadbeat baby daddies. To add insult to injury, how many of these working moms have massive student loan debt to get jobs that don't enough to make the student loan a sensible investment. Oh well, at least in '76 I was 20, making money, chasing girls, no debt and didn't worry myself with too much with what was going on at the time. It's a shame that so many young people today can't have that youthful freedom.
At least up through the '70s, Feminism was largely about women. Between then and the '90s it became exclusively about leftist political power (cf., William Jefferson Clinton).
It was a great decade for music. Everything from prog rock, heavy metal, hard rock, folk rock, funk, punk, the beginnings of new wave. . . .tons of great stuff.
Women reported a greater index of happiness in the 1970s compared with today, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. And much less happy than men. I have a few ideas about why that might be— that feminism sold generations a lie about the feminine nature, that the workplace could fulfill us.
The rise in Gen Z trads are a backlash.
My first wife was a Womens Studies graduate from the U. of Minnesota, class of 1973, so I think I had a handle on 70s feminist Zeitgeist. It took her a while to figure out that she was not cut out for marriage, and for me to agree.
I married my beautiful bride in ‘76… a great year for us.
The 20 year stretch from 63 to 83 saw culture metamorphosis after Birtg Control followed by Drugs and sexual revolution ending with AIDS Rpidemic. Those were the crazy times.
Station to Station and Songs in the Key of Life were released in 1976. That makes 1976 a good year regardless of what else happened.
What year did the Pants Suit emerge? We can trace the start of The Decline to that year
To have been born in 1982 is to have grown up after the Revolution and to have only the haziest notions of what life was like before. You may know what was gained, but never considered what was lost.
“My first wife was a Womens Studies graduate from the U. of Minnesota, class of 1973, so I think I had a handle on 70s feminist Zeitgeist. It took her a while to figure out that she was not cut out for marriage, and for me to agree.”
My college GF graduated that year. Yes, a feminist. But I take full responsibility for teaching her to not wear a bra. B cup, so never really needing one. It was really fairly easy - I was trained to take a woman’s bra off one handed, and could even do it through clothes. Getting her to open the door for me was maybe even easier - we’d walk up to a door, and we would keep talking, until she opened the door.
Then, after I graduated (72’) she ended up with another music major, and they have been married for over 50 years now. She was the talented (admitted to Juilliard for grad school), but she put him through a PhD instead.
Biggest memory of 1976 was a free concert, on the Mall in DC, by the Beach Boys, on the 4th of July. Spent maybe 6 years in DC, and hated it.
"Once we get out of the 80s, the 90s are going to make the 60s look like the 50s."
That old college girlfriend was a feminist. And gave up a real career for a less talented guy’s career. My partner of more than a quarter century now is an anti-feminist. She is proud of the fact that even at 50 she could get a line of guys to vie for the privilege of mowing her lawn (in August in PHX). Her job was to give her husband a beautiful home (she was in Architectural Digest several times) and raise kids. Wouldn’t want anything else - she turned down serious opportunities to become a star in Hollywood, or a model in NYC. Mostly for raising kids, I think. Raised 3, 4, 2, and now 4 kids (ranging now from 35 to 55).
She still goes ga-ga over babies. The other night we were out with her daughter, two oldest grandkids, and first, so far, great grandson. So, at some point, she wanders away from the table, to go to the bathroom. Didn’t come back, and we were starting to worry. Then saw her across the room, with someone else’s baby. She knew that she was at the wrong table, because that baby wasn’t as cute as her great grandson. But had to play with the baby anyway.
So, I will remind her that they are cute and fun, until they become teenagers. And she retorts that she loved those years too. Of course, it isn’t just teenagers. My daughter’s daughter is already in the Terrible Twos, maybe six months early.
It's telling that while women's objective economic and social status circumstances have improved dramatically since 1976, their responses to subjective happiness research suggests they are feeling worse. This is consistent with my belief that, once basic human physical needs are satisfied, our happiness thermostat continually resets to promote survival by increasing our sensitivity to potential threats, both real and (especially) imagined.
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