Replies

How about you, could you help me understand?

The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom.

Can YOU tell me why this would start in the 1950s, when the women were still being housewives, dressing like women, not demanding equality...? Why the 50s? What were the women of the 50s doing wrong to make men want to abandon the social contract? What was wrong with 1950s women?

etty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963

Lessing publication dates 1950 to 1963 publication of seminal The Golden Notebook.

And more.

The communist French left bank had influence on postwar women especially college educated ones. Grenwich village and the modern art world were expressions of this influence. Women’s consciousness raising sessions were held in my affluent educated childhood suburb in mid 60s. Universities were biificated. Husband hunting grounds and career women power bases.

Look at the difference between the lives of Caroline Graglia and Ruth Ginsberg. Both same class at Harvard Law.

Can YOU tell me why this would start in the 1950s

It may well have started in the 1950s. Started means it wasn't yet dominant. I would also maintain that things played out differently in Europe than in the U.S., largely because of the disproportionate affects of the war.

You have a LOT of things going on at the same time, among both men and women. "Playboy Magazine" did start in the 1950s. Popular culture started glamorizing the "swinging single" life (e.g. Rat Pack).

That had happened before, but it mostly applied to the upper middle class and academic class in the U.S. (e.g. 1920s) and the old-money aristocracy in Europe. I think for the first time those fads leeched out through mass media and affected the general population for the first time.

The mass movement from urban life to suburban life reduced neighborhood and extended family influences. In some cases, resulting in consumerism contributing to a "search for meaning" that is painfully played out in much of the popular non-fiction flooding the markets in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even the '50s themselves may have been a continuation from where the 1920s left off (the Depression and WWII caused a hard reset). When clothing and hairstyles were purposefully rejecting norms of femininity and modesty. There were more female college professors in the 1920s then in the 1970s. (That by itself is not necessarily a sign of feminism, as exceptional and highly regarded female academics go back at least to the time of St. Gertrude the Great [13th century], but THESE female college profs WERE socialists and proto-feminists)

But if I had to boil it down, I think it comes down to increased wealth and modern conveniences combined with decreased practice of religion (or mainline religions getting lax), so that people who were no longer scrambling to put bread on the table, but still wanted happiness, looked for it either on hedonism (men) or in progressive social movements (some women). Movement to the suburbs also changed the dynamics, so that traditional societal influences of family also decayed. The lefties already had a foothold in mass media and academia, and that foothold grew into what we have today. While women today initiate more divorces, in the 1950s, it was largely comfortable men who wanted a new wife. A betrayed woman is much more likely to grab onto a new movement if she feels like she's been gypped. Unfortunately, feminism was the wrong answer to a question that needed answering.

That is just a partial off-the-cuff response. It would take volumes to come up with a full and mostly true response.