No, let me explain.
In the "Last Stop, Willoughby" Twilight Zone episode the husband is not dissed at all. He is a caring, sensitive man who just plain can't handle a high pressure job but has to because his wife wants the high paycheck the high pressure job gives. He is a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown who turns to his wife for understanding but only gets, "suck it up, weakling". He wants to live in a simpler, quieter world. He is a man whose wife is bitterly realizing that she chose the wrong husband. He is not a ruthless predator and she can't make him into one. You can see that she has the ruthless ambition to have made a first rate executive and these two people are tragically mismatched. Neither really knew what the other wanted when they married.
I use this as an example of how the "deal" marriage of the 50's and 60's often didn't work for men.
The old Twilight Zones are *full* of these kinds of stories. So are novels of the time, like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" or Mary McCarthy's "The Group."
I don't think it was a "media conspiracy" - these stories were immensely popular because they *did* resonate with the people who saw/read them. People paid a terrible price (not immediately obvious in the short run) for that suburban tract house. In many ways it *did* change women from "producers" to "consumers," and nothing was worse in that era than to be considered "old-fashioned."
Not that it mattered, because by the mid-1960s the last of the middle class (with children) were fleeing the cities like rats abandoning a sinking ship, and the burnt-out wrecks (or gentrified condos selling to the retired) "alone are left to tell the tale."
Ah, I see.
The ideal marriage often didn't work for women either. In fact, I don't think there's such a thing as an ideal marriage. But I do think there's such a thing as choosing wisely, sticking together thro thick and thin, overlooking minor faults of your mate, etc.
Maybe there's something to the idea of holding off on marrying until you're older (say mid-20's vs. the late teens as was traditional)....?
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