to wish I was a 1950s middle-upper class housewife?

[cruikshank]

I reckon it would be great. No need to work. The husband does all that, in the city, and maybe bothers you once a year for marital ghastliness. And you have STAFF. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to do the gardening. You'd see the kids all washed and ready for bed for a couple of minutes in the evening. Your days could be free for doing embroidery and playing the piano and shit like that. As for nights, well, you'd have to eat dinner with the husband but then he'd go off and smoke his pipe somewhere while you read a book. And you wouldn't have to wash up! Sounds a lot better than trying to fit 48 hrs worth of activity, working, ferrying around, cleaning, cooking, washing etc into 24 and then congratulating yourself that you've 'got it all'. Bah.

Some people live like this now in the likes of Chelsea and Fulham

I like fifties frocks but I don't really DO servile so suspect I would be rubbish. But maybe the fantasies of actual leisure time are the important bit?

Plus people didn't shower daily. Which was probably the REAL reason my nan was so shocked when she finally found out what a blow job was after asking my dad at the age of 78.

My nan used to joke about how good she was at blow jobs. But then she was off having extra marital affairs in the 40's and '50's so that's probably why.

They thought too much bathing was unhealthy though LaQueen, so you'd be living very dangerously!

I don't think daily baths were uncommon for the upper classes in the 19th c, men and women. How clean you could afford to be was definitely a marker of social class.

Would rather be an upper middle class stay at home mum of today as another poster said. Could meet my friends for lunch, go to the gym, ride etc whilst my cleaner kept my beautiful house immaculate and I wouldn't have to lower myself by taking my husbands shoes off when he came in from work!

It sounds as if the majority of posters here were not around in the 50s, considering the strange ideas a lot of you have .

That good wife guide upthread for example would have been the 50s' equivalent of today's fancy TV cooking programmes - something you watch/read for entertainment but bear no relation to real life.

As for no contraception and marital duty being obligatory. If both those facts were true how come most families in the 1950s had a couple of kids just as they do today? Condoms, cervical caps, vaginal caps, spermicide, all very common in the 50s.

I was a teenager in the 50s and oral sex, for example, was hardly an unknown…..just because today everyone likes to blather the most intimate sexual facts all over the web or in gossip doesn't mean 50s middle class women were all shrinking violets. They just understood the word 'discretion'. Most had survived incredibly tough times in the war (when "illegitimate" babies were 10 a penny by the way). 50s women were survivors.

Mind you, posters are right about the pretty frocks though I spent most of the 50s' in blue jeans - rolled up to just below the knee.

Sorry to bring a blast of reality to a light-hearted thread.

My mother lived like this in the 1970's.

Dad was a diplomat, mum got a dress allowance and an 'entertainment allowance'. 2 servants in the house (when we lived abroad), plus driver, gardener. Mum's job was to look nice (she did) and host parties for my father's job. She'd buy crates of fags and put them in little silver boxes around the sitting room, and the servants would wear white gloves to serve drinks.

She'd have a rest in the afternoon, then be up wearing a nice dress, hair in an elaborate bun, smelling of L'Air de Temps, with a slick of bright lipstick, to greet my father when he came back from work. They'd sit and drink a G&T together (bought on a tray by the servant, with a small bowl of crisps) on the veranda before dinner.

She did a bit of charity work and a lot of visiting other diplomatic wives. Played Mah Jong, shopped.

T'was a lovely life and she and my father were very happy together. We were at boarding school getting emotionally fucked up during most of this, but they had a good time.

She thinks I've got it hard now compared to her.

I have a friend in RL who goes on about wanting to be a posh 50's housewife. Apart from all of the male control stuff being bad enough, didn't women also have to use those weird sanitary towels with loops and belts? No thanks!!