you often hear people harking back to the 50s and both nostalgic and comparative ways and I think that there is something to that especially if you just sort of look at the surface but fundamentally I think we're really in a very different time and the analogy of the box that you mentioned I think is is really quite perfect there was a box for everyone and it was pretty tight there wasn't a lot of room to move in there was a box if you were a woman there was a box if you were a man there
was a box if you were a teenager and a child a young adult and there were rolls you had to play at every stage depending on your age your gender your class primarily a man was supposed to be responsible with a capital our responsibility fell so heavily on men and on some level we forget because our view good or bad of that era has focused so much on women's roles we forget that there was no shared responsibility the notion of the family wage the notion of the breadwinner the notion of the head of the household
the father was supposed to be in charge in control taking care of everyone it was true of course that one of the roles of the woman was to take care of the emotional needs of the man but it certainly wasn't true that there was any other well that's a really good question the mother worked only in a supportive economic role the mother worked to enable the family to achieve a standard of living that perhaps the father couldn't do alone so there was this myth on the one hand of the self-sufficient breadwinning father and yet this
was the time for the first time in the in the nation's history that a vast minority of married women were in the paid labor force it was a huge number compared to anything ever come before and everyone was doing it and on some level no one was talking about it men felt embarrassed and guilty if their women were working women insisted that they were really career homemakers and just held the job on the side either to supplement the family income or for a little diversion when the children were in school a lot of these jobs
were part-time they were very rarely put in the terms of careers a lot of white middle class women talked about the home making role as their primary career and used that word quite forcefully but what this meant for the man was that even though he was supposed to be the breadwinner and taking care of everyone here were all these wives out there working because the breadwinner really couldn't do it alone it was the big deep dark dark secret that everyone knew about and everyone was living with so that was one piece of the male role
that was really I think problematic for a lot of men another part of the male role was was the sort of discovery of the daddy in the 50s there had always been fathers but daddies were sort of new and the popular culture everywhere was telling men how to be dad's how to help out when the babies were little teaching them how to be the child change a diaper give a bottle when dad comes home it's his turn then there was also be a Chum teach your kids how to fix the car show them how to
work in the basement which in a funny way assumed that men had all of these skills which of course they didn't necessarily have but somehow they had to acquire them to be able to transmit them in a very gender specific way to their children I think the 50s particularly was a really hard time for men a hard time for them to find any emotional connection within their lives to anything that they did work was by and large either very routine or very high pressured where the the emphasis on success and on bringing home enough money
to be able to achieve the standard of living that was expected at the time was very very powerful very intense and from what men were saying at the time in their deepest most innermost private thoughts to themselves was why am I doing this and the answer was for their families and there's a lot of evidence of this and it's very moving and poignant and it's very hidden because you didn't have writers like Betty Friedan who talked about the male mystique but you did have men who responded to Betty for Dan's book who said hey what
about me this hasn't been easy for us either and so I think the daddy role the family man although there were pressures there too and it was again it was one of these pretty small boxes where men didn't have a lot of room to maneuver it was at least a place where there was room for some emotional satisfaction where there was really some room for from a real connection to other people a real sense of belonging a sense of need how many men felt really needed on their jobs they had work to do but when
they came home there was a place where there was really some connection some emotional community that they could feel and I and I think raising children and being the daddy was an important role for a man I wouldn't downplay it I'm not sure very men at the time many men at the time were very good at it or that they really knew how to do it very well or had much time for it but I think that when men talked about working hard to support their families I think they meant that and I think they
meant it in more than an economic way parents gave their children two different kinds of messages one was the stated and explicit message and the other was a kind of subterranean message and I think if we want to talk about the seeds of the 60s and 50s the subterranean message was somewhat more powerful because what children saw was the dissatisfactions in their parents they saw their parents saying one thing and expressing something different they saw that the fathers were not that all happy with their success their affluent lives they're playing by all the rules they
saw that their mothers were even less happy with the kind of boxes that that they were expected to survive within and be happy with him when a lot of women and men who grew up in those families are asked about their family lives you'll hear some strange things as I'm sure you have which is things like well I grew up in the typical suburban family my father worked hard and brought home you know the paycheck and we lived pretty comfortably and my mother was a full-time housewife and that seemed to suit her but when I
was in high school my mother had a nervous breakdown and that kind of thing comes out over and over again the kind of hidden side drugs we think about drugs as a 60s phenomena but middle-class American housewives were drug addicted throughout the 50s barbiturates tranquilizers alcohol anything to try to relieve and ease the pain of these of these enormous expectations on women to be happy and this very very narrow confined existence the parental generation wanted self fulfillment through personal relationships they wanted self fulfillment through sex they wanted self fulfillment through having children and the route
they thought to get to that happy state of personal bliss was to get married young so then you could have this kind of sexual ecstasy in your relationship and have children that would fulfill you and have that warm romantic hopefully excited relationship stay with you for the rest of your life by the time the children came of age the same goals were still there but somehow the children saw that it hadn't really worked for the parents they still wanted exciting sex just like their parents had they still wanted fulfillment through those close relationships between men
and women or between women and women and men and men the idea of what made an erotic satisfying relationship was no longer defined as marriage necessarily maybe later perhaps with children but if they like their parents we're looking for sexual excitement and personal fulfillment through a relationship and a rata sized personal relationship what they dropped was the marital imperative but obviously they didn't drop it forever and most like their parents eventually got married not once but maybe twice or three times I mean they certainly didn't lose interest in marriage they did it a lot
