The thread about women working in factories during the war started me thinking.
...[ Oh no, here we go again.
]
There is usually a generation gap between parents and children, but I think it might have been more more dramatic if you were a female born near the end of WWII. Women joined the workforce in factories rather suddenly, but many didn't stay there after the war.
My mother quit and married my father in 1945. One aunt (father's side) stayed. I remember all the talk when she got involved in a dispute over equal pay involving the union. Some women began to realize they could do many things. The war experience surely set a trend for future generations---the beginning of the ruination of society.
One day a couple of years before she died, my mother and I were driving to the store, and she mentioned that she and my father would take long drives in the car, and maybe go for an hour without saying a word. What puzzled me was she acted like this was a *good* thing. I didn't say anything. Maybe she was just giving me a hint that I was talking too much?
During these holidays I've had occasion to think back about Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at my grandparents' house (mother's side). After dinner all the women would gather in the kitchen and clean up, we kids would go off and play, and my father, uncles, and grandfather, would sit in the living room and argue about important things.
I always felt like a misfit trying to get along with my mother's generation at home, and also in a competitive, somewhat male dominated, workplace. You almost needed a split personality, but I instead became sort of an average of the two. That didn't seem to work all that well in either environment. I guess many of us born during that time were what you could call "
transition period" types?
