Bizarre Things People Really Believed 50 Years Ago

If you remember the 60s, you probably weren't there, as the saying goes. It is a good thing we now have youtube videos to remind us of what we missed while "taking a trip without leaving the farm".

Tony
 
Robert59 said:
The sixties were a strange time.
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So much embellishment.

The one that caused me to see red, was the marriage in the 60's blip.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

- Women (a majority of women) stayed home back in those days, they were fulltime housewives/homemakers.

- Men worked fulltime outside the home, in other words they brought home the bacon.

Now that I have the above established, marriage equated to the forming of a union between two people, a couple, and so that's the way it was, as a stay-at-home mom/homemaker/housewife, it was the woman's job to keep the home running smoothly, the children taken care of, and put food on the table. That is what marriage was.

It was a fulltime for both involved, working outside the home (fulltime) for the husband, with the wife pulling home-front duties fulltime.

Too bad couples have gotten away from such, because the way I see it, it made for better and closer families, children were raised more proper, people had manners, and there was structure in homes, unlike today.

The kitchen or dining room table in the 60's, seated entire families, not just one or two people (or none) like today. Sitting down together (as a family) to have a meal in the 60's, was the norm.

Marriage was about both people pulling the load, not one, and that's why so many marriages today don't make it, because from all that I hear and read about, everything is "too hard", or "I can't do that", or "I won't do that", and the list runs long.

It boiled down to priorities, plain and simple. If you were looking to get married, you knew (as a woman) what was expected of you, and you had better not complain about it.

I have been a fulltime stay-at-home mom and homemaker/housewife from day one, and I'd be ashamed of myself if my husband arrived home from work to nothing on the table in the way of food, just as I'd be ashamed and embarrassed to let my end of the agreement go to the point of allowing dirty laundry to stack up, dirty dishes to sit unwashed in the sink, and not keeping my appearance up, because I was too lazy to.

Marriage is a job, a fulltime job, and yes, it takes work, which I gather many people of today either A, have forgotten about, B, don't realize or know about, or C, don't care about.

Seeing the high divorce rate today tells me everything I need to know as to how people think of marriages as being, and what they don't want marriage to be.

There are a lot of once-sided marriages out there today, and today's generation of women could stand to take more than a few lessons from marriages in the past, specifically the 60's, as difficult as that may be for some women to digest.
 

Well, as long as we're making generalizations about us Boomers.......

My mother had to go to work in 1957 because my father's business went bankrupt. Huge social black eye! Actually, she loved it! Turned out she was a dynamite secty/receptionist for a local company, they adored her. Pretty soon she was making more $$$ than my father, so he......made her quit. Heaven forbid his ego should be damaged.

So I grew up thinking it was normal for women to work. And in fact, the best advice my mother ever gave her daughters was, "Make sure you can always support yourself. Never depend on somebody else to take care of you."

My eldest sister was a renowned local photojournalist who started her own art gallery and was very successful at it.

My middle sister became an ICU nurse, then decided to go for her graduate degree. She skipped doing the Masters program and went straight for the PhD. She and her daughter got their PhDs within weeks of one another; my sister's thesis was in epidemiology.

I chose to be an administrative asst - a fancy name for an exec secty - and worked in insurance, banking, and financial services. All of which was really helpful for teaching me how to do financial planning and retirement strategies, which enabled my spouse and I to both take early retirement at ages 56. We've been married for 46 years, very happily.

I LOVED working, and met some great people who are still good friends. And actually, I out-earned my spouse for the first 15 yrs, LOL. He likes to joke he had to transfer to another dept. in a new position to surpass my pay!

Marriage to me means a partnership of equals. One person working or both persons working, makes no difference. Both have equal responsibility to one another. You don't get a pass in my mind, just because you have to schlep off to work at 7:30 a.m. - and vice versa.
 
Lethe200 said:
Well, as long as we're making generalizations about us Boomers.......

My mother had to go to work in 1957 because my father's business went bankrupt. Huge social black eye! Actually, she loved it! Turned out she was a dynamite secty/receptionist for a local company, they adored her. Pretty soon she was making more $$$ than my father, so he......made her quit. Heaven forbid his ego should be damaged.

So I grew up thinking it was normal for women to work. And in fact, the best advice my mother ever gave her daughters was, "Make sure you can always support yourself. Never depend on somebody else to take care of you."

My eldest sister was a renowned local photojournalist who started her own art gallery and was very successful at it.

My middle sister became an ICU nurse, then decided to go for her graduate degree. She skipped doing the Masters program and went straight for the PhD. She and her daughter got their PhDs within weeks of one another; my sister's thesis was in epidemiology.

I chose to be an administrative asst - a fancy name for an exec secty - and worked in insurance, banking, and financial services. All of which was really helpful for teaching me how to do financial planning and retirement strategies, which enabled my spouse and I to both take early retirement at ages 56. We've been married for 46 years, very happily.

I LOVED working, and met some great people who are still good friends. And actually, I out-earned my spouse for the first 15 yrs, LOL. He likes to joke he had to transfer to another dept. in a new position to surpass my pay!

Marriage to me means a partnership of equals. One person working or both persons working, makes no difference. Both have equal responsibility to one another. You don't get a pass in my mind, just because you have to schlep off to work at 7:30 a.m. - and vice versa.
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A pass on what?
 
I'm not sure it counts as 'bizarre' but when I started school, in Geography they taught us that the South American and African coastlines were just a coincidence that they looked like they'd fit together. We had, I think, a hazy idea that God did that. I don't know when the mid-ocean ridge and sea-floor spreading was discovered, but apparently the knowledge hadn't filtered down to Missouri elementary school teachers in the 60s.
 

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