What is the appeal of the 50s housewife thing?

It's a pose - Kirsty isn't really trapped in the kitchen, she's a meeja personality.

Not having to go out to work

But also you were much LESS likely to get divorced back then. You could probably rely on your dh's income going forward. But the downside is that if you got a bad'un, you were more stuck with him - less openess, less help to get away.

I just think it's laziness. Why push yourself you be the best you can and gain a good job to earn money when a man can do it for you? I have friends, young women in their 20s, who ASPIRE to getting married and giving up work. If it works out for them, fine, but if it all goes down the shitter don;t come moaning to me when you've relinquished your financial independence. EVERYONE - man or woman, should aim to be the best person they can be.

Definitely think there's an appeal in the idea that life was simple - you were fixed into your role in life and nothing could really change that. You had your job, your family, your friends who all lived in the same area - very limiting, but so different to life today that I can see the appeal in a rose-tinted way.

As a woman, your job was probably looking after your family. Given that these days most women seem to be stuck with the double burden of a job AND looking after a family, that could seem appealing.

In terms of simplicity, job roles were simpler too. I don't even understand what half of my friends really do. And I think that makes some people depressed in a way, because, honestly, a lot of jobs are pretty pointless and we could do without them.

Also, the styles were pretty nice.

Ignorance is bliss?

Plus the rose-tinted spectacles.

It was the era of the availability of appliances and the invention of the "housewife". Propaganda after the war wanted women at home so that men could have jobs, so being a wife and mother (in the way we know it today) became a job in itself for maybe the first time.

I think it's a longing for a time when (as imagined looking back 60 years) things were simple, and people didn't have complicated decisions to make. You grew up and knew what your life would be like, and we have some notion that at the time, people were grateful. It was the day of "You've never had it so good"--after the depression and the war, with the welfare state and an expectation of progress, there was some truth to that. But if you think of a typical woman's prospects then, it really wasn't so cheerful.