Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Get serious.

I am.
Mary Anne — (archived)

Why did women go into the workforce in such numbers if we were all so well-valued in the home?

You don't have to go back to the 19th century to find two out of the three things I mentioned there. We have people living who remember the first national election in which women were allowed to vote.

I can't prove with numbers that women were beaten more in the 1950s because such things were not considered crimes so much as family disagreements, so there were no accurate counts. (In the same way, we don't know as much about birth out of wedlock because so many girls went to visit their aunts.) I can tell you about black eyes, strange bruises and odd burns, though, which as a girl I would see and hear about in people's kitchens in ways you would not have experienced. One didn't talk about such things. One didn't embarrass the family by calling the police. One didn't have the family breadwinner locked up over such a thing -- the lady of the house wasn't working, so who would pay the bills if he was in jail? What a bunch of clumsy people women are, walking into doors and falling down stairs.

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