Thanks for the kind words.
Did you ever see the "Willoughby" old Twilight Zone episode ? Where an overworked, burned out ad executive dreams every night on the train home of the train stopping in a quaint, charming, bucolic fantasy of the 1880's called Willoughby and spending his life away from the rat race, away from the pressure, away from his selfish, greedy trophy wife's materialistic demands ? The tragedy was that you could see that he didn't belong in that office. But she did. She had the ruthless drive to be a bang-up exec.
There was a lot of that in the 1955-1965 popular culture. The bourgeous wife as virility sucking vampire, whose husband was nothing more than a paycheck to serve her "keeping up with the Joneses" status symbol consumerism. And I'll bet lots of men felt the husband in "Willoughby", like meal tickets whose best would never be enough. And what economic use was the stay at home wife ? What did she do but watch soap operas ?
A lot of marriages were ripe for collapse when the sexual revolution hit.
It's very important that conservatives try to understand what fuels these destructive movements (and stop looking at the past so idyllically). The clamor for "sexual freedom" and "no fault divorce" (both of which benefitted men more than women, but whoever said feminazis were smart) found its roots in human tendencies that have been with us since Adam and Eve.
Sometime in the next few days, I'll post a quote for you that I think excellent (I have to dig it out of the archives at home). The gist of the quote was that marriage wasn't nearly as awful as the leftie/feminists said it was!
>>>A lot of marriages were ripe for collapse when the sexual revolution hit.<<<
I might tweak that to say that a lot of individual men and women were ripe for embracing an ideology that exhaulted themselves rather than God when the sexual revolution hit. Chuck Colson had a great quote (paraphrased): "In the '60's, women were coerced and encouraged to act in ways contrary to Biblical principles." I look back and see that that was true. It wasn't just that men, through marriage, were oppressive; it was that women were somehow made to feel ridiculous for acting in a traditional manner (i.e. nurturing, building homes, monogomous, cooking, cleaning, etc). Women also upheld (for the most part) the social moral code -- you weren't a real red-blooded American male if you didn't try, but you weren't a good marriageable woman if you didn't stop them (that was generally the way the game was played back then). Mistakes were made, of course, but not nearly like today, which I wouldn't call "mistakes" anyway.
No, I never saw that TZ episode and I thought I'd seen them all! I understand your point, though. It's interesting to see how early on the ridiculing and dissing of American men/husbands started not to mention the encouraging of women to be like men.
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A lot of the suburban 1950s angst came about when the ethnic city neighborhoods broke down after WW II. The Veterans loans made it possible for people to leave the cities for the newly built subdivisions (Levittown, Long Island was the first of many.)
When people left these crowded inner city neighborhoods behind, they gained space & a lot of labor-saving devices, but left long-standing social groups. Some of these families had lived in the same city neighborhoods for generations. Entire extended families lived within a few city blocks of each other. Parish churches' bounds covered a few square miles because their parishioners were so densely packed into these row houses.
In this world, women were *critical.* They were the keepers of community life - when they weren't working inside their small row houses, they were outside - scrubbing the steps, visiting with friends and relatives, and most important keeping *watch* on everybody, their kids *and* others. People were poor, families were large, but there was a great deal of social cohesion.
When these families moved to the suburbs, often that connection was weakened. Families tried to recreate that level of sociability in the early suburban developments, but it wasn't the same as being "on the street" with people your grandparents grew up with. Everyone was from "someplace else," and sterile consumerism filled the gap. The long phase of suburban isolation had begun, and we're still suffering the effects.