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.

But if ALL the non boomers hadn't voted Tory then they wouldn't have got in. Less than 50% bother to vote

Probably because they’re not starting threads about every tiny little mishap.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. The initial post was about boomers benefiting then pulling up the ladder so others couldn't. I gave the example of austerity and Brexit.

And you keep saying about boomers voting Tory. But fail to understand that if all the " non boomers" didn't vote Tory then they wouldn't have got in.

Btw my parents were both boomers and neither of them EVER voted Tory. My dad was almost bloody communist he was so left wing. My mum was Lib Dem through and through

I think society in general have lost resilience, probably through lack of real hardship in a lit of cases

Yes I absolutely do think we've all gotten softer, men and woman. When I think the life my grandmother had, very few woman I know now would cope with it.

As I stated earlier, I didn't say that every single boomer voted Tory. I haven't failed to understand anything, I'm completely aware that elections are won by people voting.

My point was about boomers benefiting and then pulling up the ladder so other people couldn't. They've done this by consistently voting Tory and by voting Brexit.

The poster doesn't seem to get that. So much easier to blame those who bothered to vote than those who were too lazy to do so.

So many people here saying how resilient women were in days gone by. My mother and my grandmother took their own lives. So maybe they weren’t resilient .. they fell through the cracks . Perhaps if people were “softer” and more understanding it would have been different. But it stops with me , and I don’t consider myself hard as nails. It annoys me when people generalise that older generations were tough .. they weren’t, they weren’t heard maybe.

I'm so sorry for your loss.
Mental health treatment was a joke, they loaded women with valium excusing disorders as nerves and placed them in psychiatric wards if they spoke up.

I was just discussing earlier how hard life was for mam too, she was highly disorganised and childlike, prescribed nerve tranquillisers for too long, raising children was tough for her when we were young

Life was very tough. 💐

Without self resilience it was horrendous.

There seems to be less resilience in some quarters, yes. I wonder whether the decline of active churchgoing contributes. Always hearing about suffering, putting others first, sacrifice and service etc builds a certain kind of image of how your life should be with the redemption and reward at the end. Nowadays SM / 'reality' TV seems to have taken over and it projects a totally different version of how life should be.

There's more self focus, selfishness, jealousy and wanting instant gratification now. Life is inherently unfair and a lot of people don't seem to be able to cope with that.

I don't think we should all flock to church, far from it as I think organised religion is hugely harmful. I do think there's a vacuum though in role modelling how to be a successfully functioning adult.

This boomer thing. I was born in the last year of the boomer generation. I don’t vote Tory and I didn’t vote for Brexit. Didn’t go to university, don’t have a London house which has made millions and won’t get my state pension til I’m 67. I did, however benefit from good working conditions when I started working in public service in the 1980s, mainly due to strong unions at the time, and this does include direct benefits pension, some of which (pre 2014) is payable at 60.

And I bloody hate this term and all the venom it appears to invoke on MN. People of a generation are not all the same, and this is the case across all generations. I’m pretty sure there are more Tory voters amongst the MN elite with their £100k plus salaries than the thousands (millions probably) of older working class people.

I’m pretty hard as nails compared to my mum, so not in my family. An 80 year old is roughly my mum’s generation (she’s 75). Definitely looking at her and MIL and MIL’s 4 sisters who are similar ages, I would not say that my generation is ‘soft’ in comparison. All of them, by and large, have put up with abusive men, some with addictions, some with criminal records. I would call tolerating bad behaviour and abuse for an easy life pretty soft. It wasn’t for the benefit of children either, as several of them have stayed in or found new (more abusive) partners after their children were adults.

The ones who worked had loads of family help with childcare, so haven’t had to do the balancing act between work and childcare that my generation has had to do. My mum, for example, went back to work FT when I was 3 months and never paid for any childcare or holiday cover until I was 10 and she started to leave me home alone. My grandparents did everything.

Thinking of the 6 women above, 3 of them had houses given to them by their parents. One got a house plus a probably 100 acre farm. All gifted when they were young parents, so they never had to worry about paying a mortgage, which must have been a real help alongside the free childcare.

But still they were in a generation that didn’t really go off and see much of the world, MIL travelled a bit in Europe and Australia/NZ, as did her sisters, but certainly amongst my mum and her friends and family of a similar age, they haven’t seen much of the world and haven’t experienced people or life different from what they know and have always been quite anxious about anything new and different. My mum in particular doesn’t like to hear about anything that upsets her or is negative. Her generation wouldn’t call it a trigger warning, but she definitely prefers information is filtered for her so that it’s good vibes only.

Now, yes, do I think there are generations before us that are tougher. Those who went through the war years, who would be 100+ if still alive. Definitely. I don’t think it’s today’s crop of 70-80 year olds though. If anything, I think they probably had a pretty easy time of it, being young adults in the 1970s and 80s. Those were probably quite comfortable times relative to today.

I think I'd ask her what she meant before deciding whether or not I agreed with her. It's really not clear. Had she been drinking? Sounds a bit incoherent and random.

My DM is in her late 80s and certainly “went through the war years”. As a child she was bombed out of 2 houses (evacuated to the shelter and came back to find nothing left there), and then bombed in a 3rd house - had to be dug out of the rubble.

Amongst many other things, in the 70s she was dismissed from the job she needed to support her kids because a man “needed the job more”.

I don’t think she’d say she had “an easy time of it”.

My great grandmother was raised by her (did a bunk) fathers sister, no mother in sight after the birth, have never to got the bottom of that. Pregnant at 15 by the lad next door who was drunk out of his mind and fell down the altar steps at the wedding, vicar only went ahead because he felt sorry for her. Said lad violent and tight fisted, the few details I've heard (some of my Nan's earliest memories) were horrendous. No hope of escape, where would she have gone?

Umpteen children and sons in WW1, She apparently used to go out as soon as the telegram boy was seen in the street and wait on the steps until he'd passed. Sons came back, one a war hero but badly wounded. Towards the end of at the end of WW1 had another baby boy who died at 6 months in the Spanish flu in November 1918. Last baby at 52 (mentioned this on another thread yesterday) and lived to see him and another son go off to WW2 before dying of a cancer she didn't disclose until 2 weeks before it killed her. My gt grandfather had died a few months before, she refused to go to the funeral and threatened to haunt her kids if they buried her with him.

An awful life really, but she was a good mother, much loved by her children and my Nan remembered her beautiful voice as she sang while doing her (obviously numerous) household chores.

Was she hard? Probably. Was she strong? Certainly. I don't think though that she or the many, many women who had similar lives would want the same for their descendents.

Think there is a point here, to some degree. There are a lot more creature comforts, appliances and so on. I would counter though that most women now work outside the home, and many have retained the majority of household chores, childcare etc. In that respect, I’d argue modern women have it worse.

After watching a film called The Damned with the excellent Siobhan Finneran when I couldn’t sleep last night, your neighbour was probably correct. Life was much tougher in years gone by (for most westerners, anyway).

I think there were a lot of women of earlier generations who had frankly pretty shit lives, domestic violence that wasn’t ever challenged, stuck in bad marriages because divorce wasn’t an option for them, no hope of a career or anything beyond being a mother, lower expectations when it came to child-rearing generally (no one was talking about child mental health when I was a kid, yet we still had two kids commit suicide when I was at secondary school, 20+ years ago), bad healthcare. I think plenty of women back there weren’t ‘tough’, they just had no choice, same as when the chips are down, women of this generation have to get on with stuff. There are posts every day from frankly superheroes who are raising children with complex and very challenging needs, so I see plenty of ‘toughness’ in the women on here and around me generally. Women holding down high-powered jobs while being far more involved in the minutiae of parenting than parents were 50+ years ago.

I don’t think women have ‘gone soft’, I think women are now being raised to believe they are not just incubators and child rearers and that they don’t have to suffer in silence and have shitty lives and no aspirations. We expect more, as we should. Why should we ‘get on with things’ when the ‘things’ are stuff that can be shared elsewhere or done an easier way or whatever?

I’ve lived without a car, freezer, microwave, air fryer, central heating, automatic washing machine, dishwasher, deliveries, adequate income with 3 young children, father of said 3 young children when he buggered off to someone with £££ and no ties, help as parents dead.
Ive lived without a DV free life, without the ability to think of my needs because it’s always, always been about my family.
I’ve lived without all these things.
I’ll work till I drop as this life has left me with no decent retirement income too.

I am very, very tough. The fight is relentless and gets harder all the time. But I’m tough.

I look at my wonderful DILs. They’re all strong and tough. My sons married well.

I look at my DD28. She’s disabled. She’s tough. Strong.

As with everything- some women are weak, as are x
some men. Others are not.

boomers, as a generation, have had it much much easier than any generation in the past, and arguably easier than the generations coming after: most women got to retire with a pension at 60 (and even then that was if they worked after they got married), decent workplace pensions, affordable housing (either council housing or purchasing a house at an affordable price). Free university education, (some even had a grant for living costs), NHS in its glory days….

I think a woman in their late 80s is likelier to have had a much tougher life than a woman in her late 70s/early 80s

Definitely softer now but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I always think of my husbands Granny - had 5 kids in 7 years. Then husband called up during WW2 leaving her with 5 kids plus another on the way. Baby #6 still born but she had to just get on with it on her own as she had 5 other kids to look after.

Yes, she was forced to be hard due to circumstances but I bet that caused a lifetime of unspoken trauma.

She’s wrong.

She is of the generation that believes women should just put up with shit.

Today’s younger women refuse to do so and are labelled “soft” in response.

Have you been on MN long? There are numerous posts here every week from women putting up with shit, and they can't seen to work that out for themselves. Do you really believe we are living in an ideal world where DV doesn't exist? Do you really believe that all women are with men who do their fair share of the parenting, housework, etc.?