2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Fifties were a better time. We need to return to a better Democratic Party. [View all]Hekate
(90,683 posts)WW II solved the unemployment problem by putting everyone to work fighting the Axis. The men were drafted, and a lot of women went to work at "men's jobs" and became highly skilled at them. Factories were adapted to accommodate the needs of a female 24/7 workforce -- and there were childcare centers available.
Then the war ended, the men came home, and all the women were fired without notice. Childcare centers vanished as though they had never been. Women who had built skills -- gone. Women who had been widowed by the war -- gone. Women who had families to support -- gone. Seriously, those jobs belonged to men, and the men were home.
By the time I was a child in the 1950s women's contributions to the war effort had been forgotten except as an iconic instance of how our plucky women bravely helped in a crisis, but how it was well outside the norm of how women's lives should be. (I only found out that my mother's best friend had been a WASP flying military aircraft from the factory to military bases after she died in the early part of this century. I grew up believing that almost the only female pilot in existence had been Amelia Earhart.)
LIFE magazine (an outstanding visual resource, btw) portrayed working women as either unmarried "career girls" in big cities in the US or drudging peasants in impoverished countries. The contrast between America and the Soviet Union was drawn starkly. In the USSR wives and mothers were forced to work, and their children were forced to enter collectivized daycare centers from infancy on.
By the time I was a young mother in the 1970s, our history had been expunged so thoroughly that I had no idea that there had ever been subsidized or workplace childcare in the United States. In the 1980s as a working mother I scrambled for daycare -- at one point I started a committee to promote subsidized affordable workplace sites for childcare. It was about that time I learned about that little piece of US history.
I'm not trying to be mean to you, snowy owl. I admire your persistence and willingness to rethink some things. But history gets forgotten. And history that has been forgotten means laboriously trying to recreate things we should have built upon.