Cautious what you want for, nostalgia buffs
Blind nostalgia for the Nineteen Fifties afflicts many Individuals, a few of whom weren’t round to expertise that period’s crushing conformity and chauvinism. Regardless of. It’s sufficient, they are saying, that males had been women and men had been ladies. Everyone knew their place and the standard nuclear household reigned supreme.
But when that’s your best, why cease there? Why not return to the even fiercer traditionalism of the Nineteen Twenties as a substitute?
Whereas jazz-loving flappers with bobbed hair and “free morals” are the favored stereotypes of the period, most middle-class ladies within the Nineteen Twenties crammed their time with cooking, child-rearing, golf equipment, social gatherings, housekeeping, and recipe sharing.
My paternal grandmother, a 32-year-old housewife with two younger sons when Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, exemplified that conventional life-style. I do know this as a result of she left behind a binder stuffed with newspaper articles and bulletins, letters, private notes, recipes, occasion planning recommendation, birthday playing cards, and a protracted record of different ephemera.
The artifacts ship a transparent message. For all of the cultural modifications that outlined the Nineteen Twenties — be they a girl’s proper to vote, the emergence of girls docs and entrepreneurs, or standard movie sirens flaunting their…
