Interesting as always, thank you, Sarah! Reading the trad wives article you link to, and the mention of the 1950s being a supposed golden age for trad wives, reminds me of the letter I found when I cleared my late parents’ home a couple of years ago. My mum wrote to my dad in 1954, wondering whether they should break off their engagement. She laid out all the doubts she had about the kind of wife she was expected to become. Would they be able to eventually afford any domestic appliances? Would she be able to cook, with the help of Mrs Beaton’s Guide to Household Management? She never did fit the mould and the letter was a kind of portent of what was to come, though they had such a long marriage. I was touched to find he’d kept the letter.
Thank goodness times have moved on, though the pressure now is to be able to do everything well.
I wrote a long detailed response… which disappeared 👻
Anyway, I think Susan Furedi flagged this phenomenon in “Backlash ” The Women involved in 80s era anti-feminism were very clearly not staying at home making pie.
I loved Janice Turner’s scathing comment about Stella Creasy turning her maternity leave into ‘stations of the cross’. Brutal .
Having kids does (inevitably) require compromises to your ambition. It limits long hours, travel, work socialising/ networking etc. It might be quite a lot for some young women to give up that level of ambition for the mixed blessing of children.
I remember that knitting blog spat! And to think that now we've moved on to fight for our right to knit accidental swastikas
Interesting as always, thank you, Sarah! Reading the trad wives article you link to, and the mention of the 1950s being a supposed golden age for trad wives, reminds me of the letter I found when I cleared my late parents’ home a couple of years ago. My mum wrote to my dad in 1954, wondering whether they should break off their engagement. She laid out all the doubts she had about the kind of wife she was expected to become. Would they be able to eventually afford any domestic appliances? Would she be able to cook, with the help of Mrs Beaton’s Guide to Household Management? She never did fit the mould and the letter was a kind of portent of what was to come, though they had such a long marriage. I was touched to find he’d kept the letter.
Thank goodness times have moved on, though the pressure now is to be able to do everything well.
I wrote a long detailed response… which disappeared 👻
Anyway, I think Susan Furedi flagged this phenomenon in “Backlash ” The Women involved in 80s era anti-feminism were very clearly not staying at home making pie.
I loved Janice Turner’s scathing comment about Stella Creasy turning her maternity leave into ‘stations of the cross’. Brutal .
Having kids does (inevitably) require compromises to your ambition. It limits long hours, travel, work socialising/ networking etc. It might be quite a lot for some young women to give up that level of ambition for the mixed blessing of children.