Another well thought out piece here. I like the way you give some references as links. Thanks.

I agree that there is no going back and no one sane man should want to. The 1950s were just a blip in history, a transitional time when great prosperity and technical advancement met with an old system where an man and a woman divided their labour to keep the family.

By the 1950's there was actually already little need for such a great division of labour. A transition was already happening. Families were shrinking, so a woman was only needed in the home for a few years when a few children were small. There was a car that would take her to the shops. A refrigerator that would cool the larger amount of perishable food she could buy in one go and transport in the car. She had a vacuum cleaner, maybe a washing machine (or access to one in a launderette), she had a gas or electric cooker not a range that needed to be fired up and kept burning. She actually had very little to do. She was enormously privileged compared to any generation of women before or since because she had all of this and her husband's job earned plenty enough and the economy was growing and new consumer products were coming out every day, holidays were affordable and so on. It was a time like no other.

If women today look back on this they are looking at an unrealistic time. Today to have this, you have to marry a pretty unique man -a rich man who has already made it and will take you one when you have not really shown any aptitude yourself yet. He is not likely to be a man you grew up around as to have made it he must be older, so how is he to know if you are really worth the commitment, especially when the penalties for divorce are so high for men today.

One observation I would make is that actually it is still more possible than men and women like to think for a family to live on a single income. For whatever reason I seem to have ended up with housewives. Perhaps I am just too willing to please? But for whatever reason I have lived with 3 proper "housewives" (only legally married the first of course because I learned my lesson then). I am a pretty low income blue collar tradesman. It works out fine if you are prepared to live more like a family might have in the past in certain ways -no holidays past pretty local camping trips, few new clothes for kids, few optional school trips, few meals out, all food home cooked, heat the house with wood, only use the boiler to heat water, shoot a lot of wild meat, buy no alcohol except as presents for others, that sort of thing.

Like this it is actually very possible these days to live as a sole provider for a family on a low income. I pay myself well under $30k a year and keep a household on it. I personally miss very little that others have. I only wish I could travel more. Otherwise, I have all I need and the internet brings me all the knowledge of humanity for the price of a connection. BUT and I put it in capitals because its a big but, you have to get a lady who sees it that way too. None of the ones I have had have ever really bought into it. The present incumbent certainly is very jealous of what other women have and harps on about how she has messed her life up by becoming a poor housewife (not that she has done anything about stopping living for free). She does a bit of cleaning and a bit of gardening and keeps all the money for herself while complaining that she has messed her life up. What she means is she wishes she had not chosen a man like me who actually thinks that wearing old clothes is a virtue because it shows moderation and valuing internal things that matter not external appearances. If we were both to be honest; find her shallow, she finds me a disappointment.

So, while it is perfectly possible to be a housewife and still live better than most women did in the early 20th century, it will not be to the taste of most women. A double income gives you so much more power to consume and to be seen consuming. Life off one income, please yourself off the other. What is there not for a girl to like when the man will shoulder most of the burden of provision and you will be the one with the power to spend?

Today's women don't want to try any more for their families. Its all about her and finding herself, about first world problems that need "therapy" and not about being a successful female who raises strong young. Men have given up too since the women are not worth it. A real traditional wife wanted to build a strong family. Today's trad wife wants to do nothing. She wants to keep the home she wanted to keep anyway, buy the clothes she wanted to buy anyway, take the holidays she wanted to take anyway but do it on someone else's labour. She is a parasite not a help mate.

Jesus. First feminists glamorized divorce. Then they glamorized single mothers. And now they're glamorizing becoming a porn star to feed your kid you got from fucking your teacher?! I mean, if the patriarchy ever did this to women, they would be howling from the rafters and jailing every man in sight. I guess telling women to find a man, stay home, and raise some kids is oppression, but telling them to sell pics of your butthole to random dudes in India and Saudi Arabia in order to afford diapers is liberation. It seems that being a feminist means never having to acknowledge hitting rock bottom.

Roger Ebert had a movie term to describe movies whose premises or central conflict were so weak that in the real world, they'd be solved in 5 minutes (like horror movies where the kids just had to turn on the light, or run away from the forest instead of into it, or a romcom where if the two characters just talked for 5 minutes, everything would be cleared up). In this case, in the real world, her problem would be solved in 5 minutes: McDonald's is hiring, they pay above minimum wage these days, and certainly far more than the average onlyfans girl makes.

But a movie about a single mother trying to make ends meet by working 2 jobs at McDonalds and WalMart wouldn't land on AppleTV with glamorous stars portraying her life. At best a documentary to be quickly forgotten in some obscure film festival. No, to be worthy of millions of dollars spent to glorify you as a liberated hero, you need to really fuck up. You can't just be a single mother living with her parents. You need to further annihilate your future chances of a decent life by permanently placing pictures of your vag in the ether, forever available for future college admissions officers, employers, and romantic partners (not to mention your kid's future classmates) to find and recoil from.

That's what it takes to get a feminist to endorse your life as a shining example worth glamorizing. Got it.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, a while ago, I wrote about those supposed golden years of the 50s: https://www.forums.red/p/whereallthegoodmenare/268190/what_feminism_forgot_the_glass_floor_is_far_more_important_t

tl;dr: that golden era was very, very short-lived, a product of a unique set of circumstances (namely the destruction of most of the industrial world outside of the US by WWII, as you mentioned, the rise of unions, and household technology), and even in those days, plenty of women had to work (~30% of all women). This was the era, after all, of female schoolteachers, nurses, secretaries, etc.

Outside of those so-called golden years, women worked their asses off just like men (albeit in different tasks). What we're seeing now is basically a reversion to historical norms, and pining for that brief historical outlier isn't going to bring it back.

That said, part of why it will never come back is because women's expectations of what a "housewife" life will be have also expanded. Men expect that if they marry a housewife, she will raise the kids, cook, keep a tidy home, etc. That is, she will still be spending time working, but those tasks will be unpaid work like childcare, household stuff, etc. while he brings the money for the family.

But a modern woman doesn't feel that way. A lot of these modern women expect that being a "housewife" means the man brings home enough money for an expanded life (expensive cars, vacations to europe, a mansion, designer clothes) and enough to outsource domestic duties to an army of nannies, house keepers, cooks, etc.

IOW, ask these women who pine to be a housewife if she's planning on scrubbing the kitchen floors, like the housewives of the 50s did. What you'll usually find is that their expectations aren't to live like a 50s era housewife, but rather a 50s era lady of the manor. That class of the idle rich still exists, but it is now, and has always been, exceedingly small.

That linked image of the lamentations of a newly minted 30s female doctor is doing a lot of work in what is left unsaid: female doctors are leaving the field in droves, or drastically reducing their hours. Of course, the only way they can do this is by marrying a rich husband (either a doctor in a more lucrative specialty like surgery, or an entirely different field altogether like tech or finance). But because they're a doctor, they're not looking to retire to a plumber who can provide a small house (average house in the 50s was < 1000sq ft, and they would raise 4 kids in it) (https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes-decade-by-decade.html) that she'll have to clean and maintain while taking care of the kids. She expects a large house in an expensive neighborhood, private school for the kids, nannies and house cleaners for her, expensive cars, vacations, and clothes, and of course, enough left over to pay her school debts and fund a retirement. Even if she intends to stay in fulltime medicine, that's a lot of burden on a man, doubly so if she wants to become a "housewife".

And of course, if you're a man who can actually provide that life without needing your wife to contribute, then why would you be interested in a 30-something woman (who will likely still demand to be treated like an equal due to her degree, regardless of the fact that she explicitly sought to marry someone better than her) when you will have hot 20-somethings scratching each others' eyes out to get to you?

life has been stolen

No, you gave your body away to a man whom you were not married to. That's not stealing on his part, it's stupidity on yours. The "next girl" seems to have done things better, and of course now you're bitter that the man you tried to enslave has somehow escaped the plantation. More than that - he seems happy with his wife, which makes you seethe with hatred.

I find it hilarious that women will swear up and down that her "past does not matter" while also claiming that men "stole" something by having sex with her. Which is it, ladies? Is virginity something valuable, or not? If a woman's sexual past does not matter at all, nothing of value has been lost.

On the other hand, if you admit that you did lose something of value, you concede your own fault in giving it away so easily to the dastardly thief. Again, nothing has been "stolen" if you gave it up willingly.

I'm ok with it right now

Press 1 to doubt

they used me

In a relationship of any kind, there is "using" going on all the time. That's not unfair, it's how life works. Give and take. A man offered you attention, validation, and most likely all sorts of luxuries you could not have afforded yourself. You were more than willing to make the trade for... whatever you offered in return, which turned out to be a net negative for him.