Cooking, cleaning and tending the family farm are all examples of work. As are making, washing and mending clothes. Teaching, nursing, bookkeeping, sex work and running a large household (or working in one) are also jobs. Helping to run the family business, whether a farm, a bakery, a church or a blacksmith, is working. Women did not just sit around embroidering things, and those who did sold their embroidery for money. You should also realise that all the men going to the office/factory every day is a recent development. My grandmothers both held gainful employment before world war 2.
Sure, but women still did all of those activities in the 50s. That didn’t change. And none of it is the same as holding a paid job. There were a small array of activities available to us, and we were expected to give most of them up upon marriage or at the latest pregnancy. And you couldn’t have a bank account or keep your earnings in any meaningful way. So the 50s were no different from the 30s or 10s in that regard, EXCEPT that women were entering the paid workforce in greater numbers than ever before, which is the opposite of your original point to which I am responding.
No, I am arguing with the fact that you said the that the 50s were a “blip” of non-work in women’s working history, when in fact, all the same types of work that had been available to women for hundreds of years continued to be available to them in the 50s. The whole point of the Domestic Housewife image was an artificial cultural push to get women BACK into the types of work you are describing, the pre-WWII style of work to which most women did not necessarily want to return.
Yes, there was a reactionary advertising push toward the Domestic Housewife image that happened in the 50s, but that was a direct response to the fact that in the 50s women were demanding to maintain the transition from home work to society work.
Cooking, cleaning and tending the family farm are all examples of work. As are making, washing and mending clothes. Teaching, nursing, bookkeeping, sex work and running a large household (or working in one) are also jobs. Helping to run the family business, whether a farm, a bakery, a church or a blacksmith, is working. Women did not just sit around embroidering things, and those who did sold their embroidery for money. You should also realise that all the men going to the office/factory every day is a recent development. My grandmothers both held gainful employment before world war 2.
Sure, but women still did all of those activities in the 50s. That didn’t change. And none of it is the same as holding a paid job. There were a small array of activities available to us, and we were expected to give most of them up upon marriage or at the latest pregnancy. And you couldn’t have a bank account or keep your earnings in any meaningful way. So the 50s were no different from the 30s or 10s in that regard, EXCEPT that women were entering the paid workforce in greater numbers than ever before, which is the opposite of your original point to which I am responding.
You seem to define work as holding a paid job outside of the home. I disagree with that definition.
No, I am arguing with the fact that you said the that the 50s were a “blip” of non-work in women’s working history, when in fact, all the same types of work that had been available to women for hundreds of years continued to be available to them in the 50s. The whole point of the Domestic Housewife image was an artificial cultural push to get women BACK into the types of work you are describing, the pre-WWII style of work to which most women did not necessarily want to return.
Yes, there was a reactionary advertising push toward the Domestic Housewife image that happened in the 50s, but that was a direct response to the fact that in the 50s women were demanding to maintain the transition from home work to society work.