If this had happened 40-50 years ago...

[Swissrollypoly]

Do you think things would be different? Do you think we’d just have to get on with things as we wouldn’t have the means to work from home or communicate via Zoom or Microsoft teams etc.
Social media didn’t exist, so there wouldn’t be as much panic and scaremongering.
I just wonder how different it would all be, had it happened in another time period.

Salty - 50 years ago you would have had to be 62 to have been 10 in the Spanish flu pandemic, 70 to have been 18. That wouldn’t have been most people!

wowfudge

www.employment-studies.co.uk/report-summaries/report-summary-women-labour-market-two-decades-change-and-continuity These are some stats that suggest 20% of women with kids 5-9 were working in 1973.

You're right : women were working.
I'm right: most of them weren't.

I do think that for people with severe dementia etc, respiratory viruses can offer a kinder death

My MIL has advanced dementia and is also bed-bound (and has been for two years, she is 92). She lives at home and carers go in four times a day to look after her. No doubt they are taking every measure necessary to stop her getting covid, and no doubt she will receive the vaccine as a priority. But why? She has a miserable existence. She's not living.

one who is taken aback at how some younger people think we lived in the 70s and 80s

Yes it's hilarious. The one area where I don't think we were typical at all was that my mum not only drove, but had her own car. I didn't know many two-car families in the 80s. However, everyone else had a video recorder and it was 1989 until we got one! We did have a microwave earlier than most though.

You're right : women were working.
I'm right: most of them weren't.

you have pulled up stats for mothers rather than woman

find the stats for all woman working and not woman with children aged 5-9 years old in 1970

another male relative being incensed when apprenticeships in the factory where he worked were opened to women because they were taking jobs from men

My mum worked for Hartley's in Liverpool in the 60s and when you got married you had to leave because you were supposed to live off your husband's earnings. She had a friend who kept her marriage secret until she was pregnant with her first child so that she could keep her job for as long as possible. It doesn't seem possible in living memory, does it ? And Hartleys were a good employer, they really looked after their staff - goodness knows what it was like in other workplaces.

@mintkoala

wowfudge

www.employment-studies.co.uk/report-summaries/report-summary-women-labour-market-two-decades-change-and-continuity These are some stats that suggest 20% of women with kids 5-9 were working in 1973.

You're right : women were working.
I'm right: most of them weren't.

I think the chart shows 20% is for youngest child aged 0-4, for 5-9 it shows 60%? I checked because otherwise it's so different from the figures I posted (from another source) upthread.

Unless you're only counting the full-time figures as working?

I assume it's this chart from your link that you're referring to, apologies if not

gosh Im sorry I read it wrong - you had me fooled there @mintkoala
you've only put in woman working full time not included those working part time...

that means you're wrong and @mintkoala is correct

hardbackwriter

Ah, I didn't read carefully. 20% is full time. 60% includes part time.

@RosesAndHellebores

currently enjoying a badedas bath

Ooooer. I wonder what you are hoping the thing that happens after your badedas bath will be? Be lucky!

[I have recently relocated all my hellebores to a single border for more impact, I am aiming for a Sissinghurst effect, I have grandly and over optimistically called it The Helleborder]

[quote cathyandclare]@Belladonna12 - I should have specified there was a different attitude to death towards the end of life ( as was the case in the ward I described). [/quote]
I'm not sure if attitudes in general have changed although the government response at the moment seems to be different. I think that many of us still think that quality of life is more important than quantity towards the end.

Thing is we're not arguing about whether women have always worked (they have) but whether it would be easier to close schools in the 1970's as mothers were more available for childcare. So we really want more details about what sort of work women were doing and how that compares with now.

I was born in 1978, started school in 1982 and am 43 next month.

I grew up on quite a rough council estate on the edge of Liverpool. It was that bad at one point that Rumbelows etc refused to deliver electrical appliances as their vans would be targeted.

I don’t recall any of my classmates going abroad but lots of caravan/camping type holidays. We went to Butlins in Pwllheli every year with the wider family and in 1989 age 11 we went to Majorca, my first foreign holiday.

I also recall around 1988 that a boy in our class got a sky dish. It was the size of a golf umbrella it was a few more years before we got one.

My mum started work when I started secondary school and is still there today. My dad had a really good education and was always in work and we were lucky compared to many around us but i remember that absolutely everyone always had new clothes for Easter/whit/Christmas and houses were basic but mainly spotless.

My kids laugh when I talk about my childhood and refer to it as the olden days. I was telling my ds about when I was doing my GCSE’s in 1994 and using a floppy disc for the computer at school and had to Google it to show him what it was.

40/50 years ago seems a lifetime away but it’s really not. The biggest difference I can think of is no mobile phones/social media and I often wish we didn’t have them now.

@viques hopefully DH will have the coffee pot on . We had a percolator in the 60s!

My helebores are glorious.

In my town there was a bakers shop with a few orange plastic seats, that was "a coffee bar". There was also one cafe serving traditional food and tea. Great excitment when a place with a proper coffee machine arrived. People never ate out, there was nowhere to go. Everything closed on Sundays and Wednesday afternoon.
Pubs were plentiful but out of bounds for a 12 year old. Old men sat in them all day long, no food.
TV was basic and often a shared cultural experience.
People did venture out in cars and abroad as time moved on but they still returned to a basic structure once home.

48% of mothers worked outside the home in 1975, 72% did in 2015. I can't find figures broken down by age of child for the 70s though, on a quick look - presumably the number working with young children was considerably lower; in 2018 64% of women whose youngest child was two worked but 78% of women whose youngest child was 11 did.

Yes , it was very dependent on the age of the child .There weren't after-school clubs or other childcare though so the mothers that did work in 1975 generally had children they could leave at home after school or they did jobs such as teaching that fitted in with school hours. If children were preschool age mothers couldn't usually work.

Oh and I recall women wearing trousers was regarded as not the done thing, infact in my first job they were banned.

@mintkoala

Thing is we're not arguing about whether women have always worked (they have) but whether it would be easier to close schools in the 1970's as mothers were more available for childcare. So we really want more details about what sort of work women were doing and how that compares with now.

I think educated women were often teachers so they would have not worked if schools were closed. Other women generally only worked if the children could be left at home so they wouldn't have been affected by school closures either.

@plainviola people keep going on about how people did what they were told in the olden days of 40 years ago Asia we all went round doffing our caps to our betters. And there is plenty of evidence that they were neither more or less likely to rebel, just the subjects change over time as you would expect.

Many more would have died and there would be lots of longterm disability. We'd have seen charity collection boxes for caring for the longterm disabled from Covid as you used to for those disabled from Polio for instance.

People would have been very scared to get it, especially those living in crowded conditions, like they used to be of TB, the fear of being sent away to a TB hospital and convalescence home is one my mother's generation lived with.
We would have had more chance to treat it in isolation as we still had infectious disease outbreaks in memory and existing isolating wings or separate hospitals.
Lots of public places would have closed, as pools used to during Polio outbreaks for instance.

@randomer - yes I remember the trouser ban. And the bare leg ban!

[quote RosesAndHellebores]@viques hopefully DH will have the coffee pot on . We had a percolator in the 60s!

My helebores are glorious.[/quote]
Percolators made lovely coffee, and kept it hot, we had a filter one with a hot plate.

My hellebores are glorious too, I am sitting next to a small bowl of floating hellebore heads so I can enjoy their glory without having to kneel on wet earth in 0 degrees!

@PurpleHoodie

My grammar school ski trip was in 1970 to the Dolomites. Most of my year went, irrespective of their economic background, Somehow the money was found.

Ditto.

Classic State school however.

It was a state grammar. The younger classes had already gone comprehensive with our local sec modern

@GlowingOrb

People traveled much less 40-50 years ago. We wouldn’t be dealing with the same kind of spread. The consequences of closing the boarders to personal travel would have been much lower. Freight travel was still prevalent, but it was slower and more flexible to border quarantine.

We also lived in a world where women were just barely entering the workforce. That could have been stopped very easily if schools needed to close.

So no, I don’t think we would have just got on with it. I think the borders would have closed and if it got in, the men would have kept working and the women and children would have been forced to stay home. It would be just as much of a nightmare as now, but would impact society differently.

Agree with this.

Also people were far less entitled and would have followed the rules laid out by the government instead of stamping their feet and moaning about the fact they can do what they want.