Have women become soft

[peeweehill]

Hear me first ive just got in from having a chat to my neighbour shes almost 80 really sweet lady known her for years.
Well we was having a natter while she was waiting for her daughter to arrive (she`s going away for the weekend) and i said something how society has changed a lot and how far technology has come.

She agreed it was all for the best and how we would of loved it back in the day. She then said the biggest thing that she as noticed the most is that women are getting softer.
I said what do you mean she replied with we all used to be tough as nails now most are gone soft.
Before i could reply her daughter arrived she said catch up when i get home on monday.

Now im waiting for monday lol😆
It got me thinking have us women got softer.🤔
Some of what i read on MN i think she may have a point i think i dont know.
What do you netters think.

Yes, having read another thread today where the OP couldn’t possibly look after her own two children alone for 24 hours without drafting in help from her parents.

That said, of course we only ever hear the outliers, in either direction.

It depends on what you mean by 'soft' really.

I think the majority of women I know (including myself) tend to toughen up during and after menopause.

Must be the lack of giving a shiny shit hormone 😁

Are you soft OP? I'm hard as nails tbh, can't talk for anyone else.

I think both men and women are more open about their emotions but I don't think that means they are soft. The keeping it all in and being as 'tough as nails' probably led to a lot of explosions of anger at home towards wives and children. I think it's better all round to talk about emotions and deal with them in an appropriate way.

I do think life was harder back then, especially for women, so perhaps they were more resilient than they are now. Depends on what you consider to be 'soft' really.

I suppose living without a car, fridge/freezer, microwave, air fryer, central heating, washing machine, dishwasher etc. made life a lot harder. As did the non existence of supermarkets, Amazon Prime, mobile phones. I think we've all gone "soft" not just women! I take soft to mean along the lines of being used to all the comforts that modern life brings and limited experience of physical domestic hardship.

I think women carry more of the mental load and responsibility that children and men used to be more responsible for.

Men are much softer than women.

Do you mean capable? Women have always been capable.

So there's some that aren't. Nothing new there either.

I think there are a lot of soft women that don't know how to cope and get on with it when life throws shit at them, yes they would have been absolutely fucked in my grans generation, no I am not one of them.
More concerning is perhaps the number of soft men.

Everyone has gone soft, women included. It's the natural consequence of an easier life. You're only as 'hard' as you need to be.

My mother would have been about that age if she were alive. As a young child she had to carry buckets of coal to heat the house. She also had to wash the walls of coal dust regularly.

my grandmother shared a bed with 4 siblings and left school after year 8 to work plucking chickens.

my teenager has a part-time job, teaching rich kids at the same private school program she attended as a child while I worked ever so hard at my highly paid job from my home office.

I understand why they think we are soft.

I’m not. I’m know I’m tough as nails because I wouldn’t be fighting through chronic illness if I wasn’t, but from the outside, my life looks really easy.

This.

But also, I think connected, is the shift to not taking personal responsibility. People expect things to be sorted out for them because for whatever reason, it's not "their fault".

People just used to bloody put up and get on with things!

I thought of this when I saw the thread title. In fact that whole thread made me think that there is a wave of snowflake parents out there. Threads about how two adults are needed every evening to make tea for a toddler and put them to bed etc.

My gran is in her early 80s and has had a lovely pretty easy life. My grandfather was pretty well paid, they bought a house on 1 salary, lived abroad for a spell, raised two kids with her as a sahm, she had lots of hobbies, was close to her family and had a good support network, always had good health, still does in her 80s. She would say herself that she has been blessed. What makes you think people now automatically have an easier life?

The bar for men is so low that why can’t women occasionally step down. Except they are criticised for it.

I’m not.

i’m disabled following an accident where my foot got mangled and I’ve lived with the pain from it for 11 years now and continued working until 2 years ago and got my kids through their teen years (one autistic and adhd so no walk in the park) and got divorced from my husband after he physically asssulted my daughter during Covid and I had to call the police to get protection so me and her could leave our family home with a suitcase each.

go on, tell me I’m soft after all that.

I think some people are happy to be as soft as they can get away with. The moment you know you don't have the luxury of being soft is when the shit hits the fan and you look around for help and realise the only functioning adult with the balls to step up to the plate is you.

I think everyone has gone soft! We have it a lot easier these days so no need to be hard as nails, most people live a comfortable life and aren’t going out doing backbreaking work for a pittance. Personally wouldn’t consider myself soft, DH is away a lot with work and I wrangle two young DC by myself alongside work and running the house.

I think that’s not true:

• women still have challenges, just different ones
• theres more openness and through the internet women find out they’re not alone and others are struggling too. And that there are ways to find support rather than put up with it and just accept. That doesn’t make them soft.

Yes and no. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

My grandma was the toughest, most resilient woman I’ve ever met, but I’m sure she didn’t choose to have to raise 10 children and work 3 jobs til her 70s.

I do think people are a lot less resilient than they used to be, partly because children are no longer taught to be resilient, many parents and the education system fall over themselves to shield them from unpleasant experiences. Failure is reframed to protect feelings and anything people don’t want to deal with can be shut down with claims it is ‘triggering’ or ‘offensive’. The past decade or so has also seen a mass pathologising of normal emotions, everything is now framed in terms of ‘mental health’ when, in fact, life is often difficult and being unhappy/anxious doesn’t necessarily mean you have a mental health problem.

Nothing better exemplifies the infantalisation of young people than university students being given ‘trigger warnings’ for pictures taken in war zones when 100-odd years ago British teenagers were fighting in the trenches. Obviously that was horrific, I’m not saying it’s what any teenager at any point in history should be doing, but you can see why elderly people think people today are soft.

It’s relative though isn’t it, my grandmothers had a lot of hard work and domestic drudgery at home… but balancing mentally hard and harrowing jobs outside the home such as frontline nhs jobs during covid requires a different sort of stepping up and having to be tough. (I know women did this during the war as well).

Is it just that you get to hear peoples inner thoughts online that makes you think this though? Most people I know navigate life just fine with no need for 'trigger warnings' or any of that chronically online nonsense. Loads of people were on benzos in the 60s and 70s to cope with 'normal emotions'.

Working life for police officers, social workers, prison officers and medics is pretty hard