To ask whether we could ever go back to what it was like in the 50s-70s?

[myblueheav3n]

I mean in a financial sense more than anything, although I know it wasn’t perfect. I only have a very superficial understanding of it all, but as far as I can tell:

• Affordable housing, and a lot of social housing for those who couldn’t buy.

• Liveable wages for unskilled jobs and good opportunity to work your way up in whatever your profession was. Plenty of work available for young people.

• Education was worth a lot more, e.g. now a university degree is minimum for a ‘decent’ job, and not even that is really guaranteed either.

I had more but after thinking about it for a while they’ve slipped my mind In general it seems like it was better, and people who grew up during these periods generally did well for themselves.

Apart from everything else mentioned, the social housing was appalling.
In the '50s, I had to share a bedroom with my parents until I was 9.
2 rooms + a kitchen, shared loo with 6 other people, no bath.
DF had a good job, but accommodation was difficult to find.

I think the issue with degrees is that it's a not far from a Ponzi scheme with universities and schools leading young people to think all of the now more obtainable degrees are equal and make every graduate employable.

Many degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on now and employers know that.

op, do you know what a closed shop was? and how you got work in these unskilled industries where wages were bountiful?

Genuine question @myblueheav3n why will being married improve your situation?
You’ll presumably still earn the same,have the same frustrations. You can’t expect a man or marriage to save you or make you more fulfilled
Marriage isn’t a magic wand or a panacea

I grew up in a council house too.
We had ice inside the windows in winter.

I grew up in a mortgaged house and we had ice inside the windows

I think only 10% went to Uni so that's why jobs needing a degree paid well.

@HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee Because then there’ll be 2 wages and therefore double the money, but I don’t really want to get married and therefore am struggling on my single wage.

@teenytrees

I was born in the early 1960s and experienced most of these...

Would you also want to go back to:

• Married women forced out of work?
• Women openly treated as sex objects in the workplace and legally paid less than men?
• Girls not allowed to study the same subjects as boys in school?
• Abortion against the law?
• A boring range of food choices (eg no olive oil)? Although we might well come back to that with a no deal Brexit

Erm..I think you have your dates wrong for some of this @teenytrees

I was born before you.

You could get abortions with 2 dr's signatures.

Married women were not forced out of work (that applied to some professions years back but given most of my female teachers were married in the 1960s, I think you need to learn your history.)

Girls could study the same subjects as boys- I opted for woodwork and metalwork not typing.

I think you are confusing it with the 30s and 40s.

@HeelsHandbagPerfumeCoffee

I’m not saying the council house situation was bad,I grew up in a council house I’m simply saying access to mortgage was rare and involved being deemed suitable

People didn't need to buy anywhere though, did they? There were millions of council houses and rent was cheap. People lived in the same house for decades and it was their permanent home. If they wanted to move, they looked on a list to see if there was another family wanting to exchange, either size or location. It was easy.

Then (ooh, let me think)... some bright spark decided to sell all the council houses off and use the money raised to build more. Except they only did the first half, didn't they?

@ivykaty44

I grew up in a council house too. We had ice inside the windows in winter.

I grew up in a mortgaged house and we had ice inside the windows

Me too.

My first home as a child was a flat with no hot water and an outside lav.

Beat that :)

I'd like to return to a simpler time. Not sure what era as I wasn't around in the 50's - 70's so have no memory. I do think society is selfish, materialistic and greedy though and that could do with reigning in.

I haven't read this thread beyond the first few posts. I was born in the early 60s so have first hand experience of some of the period mentioned.

The 70s were very different from the 50s.
-Abortion was legal

• Pill existed, transformed family planning and enabled the 'Permissive Society' in the 60s - sex outside marriage no longer a huge taboo, pregnancy of an unmarried woman no longer automatically led to her baby being adopted at birth
• Gay men over 21 could have sex and it wasn't illegal any more
• Divorce was easier
• Social security benefits for single parents existed
• Maternity leave and pay had been passed into law
• There were laws about equal pay for women and against discrimination on grounds of sex and race
• Trade unions still had a lot of power - many thought far too much, hence Thatcherism in the 80s
• Social housing - lots and lots of it available, not necessarily in great condition, but it was affordable
• Rent controls existed, lots of people renting from private landlords had a fixed rent that couldn't be increased and a secure tenancy
• House buyers could get a mortgage on the strength of a fixed multiple of salary (with deposit) - from memory, for couples it was 3 times salary of higher earner within couple and 1 times salary of lower earner - there was nothing like the house inflation there is now, so most people on an average income could expect to buy a home once they'd saved with a building society for a couple of years
• We didn't have full employment (unlike the 60s) but there were plenty of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs for the majority of the population who left school at 15 or 16 with no or minimal qualifications
• Final salary pensions were the norm
• Zero hours contracts unknown, employment rights stronger than they are now
• Slowly but surely more teenagers were staying on in education beyond leaving age - 15 in 1970, increased to 16 in the early70s, to end of year in which you turned 16 later on, so more chance of taking exams - number of kids taking A levels or other qualifications steadily going up, ditto those going on to further or higher education, no student tuition fees payable by students, grants available for living costs (no loans) - decent apprenticeships available, many employers paid for apprentices to do HND or degrees on day release alongside a decent paid job

There was a lot wrong in society in the 70s but we've regressed from then in many ways since.

@JinglingHellsBells abortion was decriminalised in 1967. I think I'm probably older than you.

@JinglingHellsBells it must have depended where you lived.
My mother had to get married because she was pregnant with no access to abortion and then had to give up her job as a secretary.
I wasn't allowed to do metalwork or woodwork at school, it had to be sewing and cooking. There was even a separate entrance for boys and girls at our school, woe betide you tried going into the wrong one.
I'm not imagining this stuff, I experienced it! I heard about the abortion issue from family (not my mother who obviously wouldn't want my brother to know she married because there was no other option).

My mum worked and had a career all throygh 60s and 70s and two children. She was working class left school at 15. My dad keft school at 14 and ended up the MD of a company.
They bought their house in the 50s when they were both in what would now be minimum wage jobs (wasnt then) and it was a 3 bed semi large with a good sized garden.

I'm not sure that housing was any more affordable back then though. I didn't know anyone who owned their own property.

I was born in the 40s. Food rationing didn't end until 1954, don't think you would like that much. Mum did the washing in a big drum thing and then had to put it all through a wringer. One day she didn't remove her fingers fast enough and her arm disappeared through the wringer. It broke her arm. No central heating, tv black and white two channels, no mobile phones or computers, manual typewriters, no social media, no computer games, a bath once a week in a tin bath in front of the fire, no showers, in the 1950s, my DF bought a car, it was the fourth in our road - plenty of parking then. At school the head teacher terrified everyone by roaming the corridors swishing a cane looking for wrongdoers, children amused themselves and if they complained they were bored, would invariably be given housework to do. Going out for a meal was an extra special, once or twice a year treat when children were expected to sit at the table and talk with their parents, no overseas holidays, My first weekly wage in 1960 was £6.10 shillings. I gave £2 to my parents for my keep and the £4.10s paid for my clothes and going out at the weekend.

When I bought my flat in the 70s the interest rate was 8% and at one point it rose to 15%. At that point I had to rent out my bedroom and sleep in my living room to be able to afford the mortgage.

I had a brilliant childhood despite all the above. My DF was not as is often described on here. He did his fair share of housework and childcare when he was home

OP, it's obvious you are not talking from reality but looking through rose coloured glasses.

@myblueheav3n I do need to strike a cautionary note,marriage won’t save you, or dispel your frustration. You’ll simply be married, not necessarily more fulfilled. If you chose to share monies, yes potentially more money between two of you..but so what?

I’d advise any woman against joint monies, yours is your money. Don’t depend on a man. Any man picking up on your reasons to marry will have a unbalanced dynamic as he’ll be presumed to be bringing money to the partnership

But what if we had society as it is now, except with a good stock of council housing, more manual jobs, university degrees that get you somewhere, decent wages.

Good stock of Council housing would need public funding. In the 60s, standard rate of Income Tax was 33%. More manual jobs won't happen unless manual labour is cheaper than machines - we're getting better at making machines.University degrees "got you somewhere" because with only 5% going to university, a degree showed you were in the top 5%. Noways it shows you are merely in the top 50%.

In the 50s and 60s it wasn't a matter of post-16 education being for the few - school leaving age was still 15, so a large proportion left without any qualifications, simply because they left before the exams happened. And there were two sets of exams - O-levels for grammar school children, and the newly introduced "Certificate of Secondary Education" for secondary moderns - which was largely discounted by employers which is why the two were finally replaced by the single GCSE system.

Don’t do this. Every era has its problems, we have to face ours.

70s/80s Britain was a much poorer country, in economic deadlock and on a steady decline. Deeply racist, sexist, homophobic. Education worse than now (whatever any one tells you, it wasn’t measured) - far fewer went to university so lower ops. Grammar schools had pretty much ended so social mobility no better than now. Nuclear threat, 3 day week. Etc.

@myblueheav3n

I mean in a financial sense more than anything, although I know it wasn’t perfect. I only have a very superficial understanding of it all, but as far as I can tell:

• Affordable housing, and a lot of social housing for those who couldn’t buy.

• Liveable wages for unskilled jobs and good opportunity to work your way up in whatever your profession was. Plenty of work available for young people.

• Education was worth a lot more, e.g. now a university degree is minimum for a ‘decent’ job, and not even that is really guaranteed either.

I had more but after thinking about it for a while they’ve slipped my mind In general it seems like it was better, and people who grew up during these periods generally did well for themselves.

What????

You clearly weren't alive then!

Affordable housing.? Is that what slums and sub-standard housing was called then? And working class people like my mum and dad cohosh even get bank accounts neutral they didn't earn enough money, so mortgages...? Who could get a mortgage? Maybe help from a building society, but that was for a minority. Liveable wages for unskilled jobs? Are you insane? My dad worked hard having had to leave school at 14 to support his widowed mother and siblings. He worked hard all his life and we were dirt poor. He and my mum scrimpted and saved to support our education so that we wouldn't have to live like that.

I could go on, but I don't have time. You are living in cloud cuckoo land of you think that those were the days of plenty. And it's pretty insulting too. There were no streets paved with gold, and most people lived and died with almost nothing.

[quote CaptainMyCaptain]@JinglingHellsBells abortion was decriminalised in 1967. I think I'm probably older than you.[/quote]
So it wasn't illegal in the late 60s.

JinglingHellsBells

it wasn't meant as a game of who had it worst - I certainly knew my parents weren't poor. We had inside bath and loo

not having central heating and then having ice on the windows was common in many homes and not just social housing

Then (ooh, let me think)... some bright spark decided to sell all the council houses off and use the money raised to build more. Except they only did the first half, didn't they? My memory was that Councils were specifically forbidden to use the money raised from Council House sales to build more Council houses. The point of the policy was to create more home owners, not to make it easier to rent.

[quote teenytrees]@JinglingHellsBells it must have depended where you lived.
My mother had to get married because she was pregnant with no access to abortion and then had to give up her job as a secretary.
I wasn't allowed to do metalwork or woodwork at school, it had to be sewing and cooking. There was even a separate entrance for boys and girls at our school, woe betide you tried going into the wrong one.
I'm not imagining this stuff, I experienced it! I heard about the abortion issue from family (not my mother who obviously wouldn't want my brother to know she married because there was no other option).[/quote]
@teenytrees I was at grammar school from 1966. Many female teachers were married and some had children.

The marriage bar for married women (teachers) stopped in 1944.

I did sewing and metalwork/ woodwork. I think we were allowed to 'try it'.

Yes boys and girls had separate playgrounds and that's not a bad thing.