How we got in this mess.

When someone says they want to go back to “the good old days”, they are inevitably referring to this 1950s cultural ideal that was manufactured in the post World War II American society. This culture was devastating to queer communities, and supremely oppressive of women’s rights. It is no wonder that this spawned the intense feminist backlash of the 1970s.

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

my crazy take is that you can't really understand american gender roles unless you understand that they're basically a reactionary backlash / trauma response to the events of world war 2

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

like we keep on pointing out "these aren't actually traditional" "the world didn't work like this at any time in history" "what are you even talking about"

but we're missing the idea that yes, actually, *all this shit* was invented at a specific point in time, aka 1946

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

because world war 2 was this social disruption beyond imagining--women in factories, women in the workforce, women in the army and the air force and the--

the entire nation mobilizing to reach out to the other side of the planet and and incinerate people, cities, nations--

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

then it all ended and everyone came home and there was a *very* explicit nationwide push to make things ""normal"" again, ""safe"" again

to take all the things--all the POSSIBILITIES--that had come roaring out during the war and stuff them as far back in the closet as possible

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

there was this immense reactionary backlash, women fired en masse "to make room for the boys," forced into domestic lives, forced into forgetting what recent events had so very proved was possible

to create out of whole cloth a reactionary dream-world in physical reality

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

(also side note this story is absolutely inseparable from the integration of the military and the beginnings of the civil rights movement--the "suburban wife" lifestyle was a reaction against both an incipient feminism and an incipient civil rights movement)

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

and indeed more strongly the whole idea of a "housewife who doesn't work" is itself built on the extremely weird social-economic conditions (aka immense prosperity) prevailing after world war 2, aka the united states being the only industrialized nation not in complete ruins

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

this patriarchal fantasy was never a "necessity," it was a *luxury*

but it was an essential part of the fantasy that it was necessary--natural--and so its partisans retrojected it uncaring onto all of human history

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

but then we get to the boomers

the boomers *grew up in the fantasy*

due to their demographic predominance their strangehold on politics has endured for so very long that all the rest of us are still forced to relive their childhood nostalgia for their parents trauma-fantasies

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

basically, this except for gender roles:

xkcd.com/988/

DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES @BreeNewsome

Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @perdricof

That’s also specific to white women of a certain class. Poor & nonwhite women were never in position to be stay at home wives & that post-war ideal of white femininity relied heavily on poorer women acting as domestic laborers in other ppl’s homes… 1/

DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE, REFUND OUR COMMUNITIES @BreeNewsome

…It was more so about expanding a status typically reserved for wealthy white women to a larger population of middle & working class white women as a marker of the nation’s prosperity. I’ve never known a generation of women in my family for instance who didn’t have to work. 2/2

Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton @sarahhbickerton

@BreeNewsome *nods* and then, of course, those poor and non-white women (and their families) were judged and found unworthy, because they didn’t match the models of supposed ‘good families’ that those privileged single-breadwinner households with SATM, and were penalised further for such.

Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton @sarahhbickerton

@BreeNewsome The application of a supposed ‘standard’ for a ‘good’ and ‘right’ family modelling that was predicated on privilege, which thus of course (and one could argue by design) reified itself by denying others access to that standard.

Jeanne Merchant @jsoniatmerchant

@perdricof @RomancingNope My maternal gmother was a post-war housewife, a role made possible by my gfather’s generous salary as a PE teacher & the availability of extremely underpaid African-American women hired to be cleaners/child care, women whose sacrifices are unacknowledged in the 50’s nostalgia BS.

Gillian Brunet @gillian_brunet

@perdricof Here’s the backlash as illustrated in an October 1942 advertisement from Electrical Merchandising magazine. It’s pretty evident that many men spent the WWII years fantasizing about pushing women back into the kitchen.

angela petrollini @dorotheascloset

@perdricof From a fashion standpoint, women in the 40s were wearing pants and sturdy shoes (even heels were chunky and often wedges), shoulder pads, etc. In 1947 Dior introduced the "New Look"- impossibly tiny waists, billowing full skirts and stiletto heels. /1

angela petrollini @dorotheascloset

@perdricof The 50s ushered in a look that accentuated the "ideal" feminine form and used discomfort to create it. Women were forced into the kitchen in dresses and heels and makeup and coiffed hair, all to make returning men feel better about the fact that in their absence, women could /2

angela petrollini @dorotheascloset

@perdricof what they did. It was almost a punishment. Women were expected to accept the role of subservience and be perfect, pretty and obedient when her husband got home from work.

Fully Vaccinated 5g Otterthing @LutrisOtter

@perdricof Also, how the medical establishment reinforced this by heavily medicating women to make sure that they were passively going back to the household to be at the beck and call of the man who owned their house.

"Mommy's Little Helper" was a travesty.

Mommy’s Little Helpers was the colloquial name for Diazepam, aka Valium. It was the best selling drug from 1969 to 1982, despite becoming a Schedule IV controlled substance in 1970. The nickname was popularized by a Rolling Stones song about the drug. Housewives across the nation were tranquilizing themselves so that they could handle the stress and anxiety of running a home without any help from their asshole husbands.

Trill @txbaddie23

@NursedroidIG11 @lacunalingua_3 @dorotheascloset @perdricof *had to look up the drug, I don’t take any medications or know about drugs* so they were numbing themselves to fit this narrative?! So why does the older generation hate the young generations for wanting to express themselves and be paid what they deserve if they went

kasden ahod @NursedroidIG11

@txbaddie23 @lacunalingua_3 @dorotheascloset @perdricof They used the valium to stuff it all down and be robots like they were told. So everyone after them has to fuck themselves in the same way (i paid my dues you do too kinda bullshit)

Lukashenko delenda est @Buckeroo303

@NursedroidIG11 @txbaddie23 @lacunalingua_3 @dorotheascloset @perdricof "Maybe if everyone who comes after me plays through the same sick fantasy as me, then maybe, just maybe, it'll mean I didn't waste my entire fucking life doing what "society" expected of me, rather than become the person I wanted to be."

It's really quite heartbreaking.

Christina Batstone @cbatstone

@perdricof This is also when PMS as we know it became a dominate social narrative. It is very effective to cast women as emotional, unpredictable, and irrational for 1-3 weeks a month when you're trying to kick them out of the workforce and leadership positions.