Subject: Re: Fox News Freaking Out

Also, dont complain. Days of two married parents, and only one needing to work - were racist patriarchy days.

Patriarchy for sure. My mom talked about one of her bosses, fluffing himself up, boasting his wife had not worked a day, since he married her. My maternal grandmother was pretty forward thinking, for her time. She demanded that each of her three girls learn a skill "so they would not be dependent on a man". My mom went to business school, and worked as a secretary. My aunt Dorothy was a teacher. My aunt Pat had a college degree in occupational therapy, tho she didn't work for long after marrying. To my uncle Dale's credit, he quit his electrician's job in Kalamazoo, because Pat was hired for an OT job in Cleveland. So they moved to Cleveland, for Pat's job, and Dale found a job wiring control panels on Electro Motive locomotives, then moved to Western Electric, also in Cleveland.

Thing is, prior to the 1950s, the wife/mother thing was close to a full time job. Doing laundry, with a wringer washer, and hanging everything up on a clothesline, then ironing everything, was an hours long project, that my mom and grandmother both worked into the early 60s. I was still washing dishes by hand, until about 30 years ago. I don't even want to think what it was like to clean house, without a vacuum. Things that used to take hours, I now accomplish by pushing a button, then going to do something else, while the machine does the work.

Then there is the attitude of the "JCs". When I started at the pump seal company, in 78, everyone doing work similar to mine was male. With the exception of a couple draftsmen in Engineering, women were restricted to being secretaries and clerks. I was still doing about the same level of work when I retired, but I was the token man in a field otherwise entirely staffed by women.

Steve