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.

There wasn't much if any after-school care as there is today.

Also, no to little maternity leave entitlement.

You also have to look at the kinds of jobs women were doing.

The ability to be employed in a narrow range of badly paid jobs is not equality.

Woman also paid something which was called the married women's stamp which was not a good thing it turned out as it meant you would be reliant on your DHs pension. Not many women worked until DC were at school and then it was often poorly paid part time jobs

I haven't seen a link

as I said, there are a couple of links to the tables on the thread that give the stats along with age groups showing primary school children and the percentage of working woman both full and part time, with and without children

www.bris.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp78.pdf

This links to another study, gives maternity changes between 1974-2000 etc

page 20 chart B gives the simple rates for woman with or without
children in the workforce. page 32 hand subsequent pages has further graphs

Okay, the link you posted shows that only about 18% of women with children nine or under worked full-time in 1971. There was very little childcare so if people did work it was because grandparents were looking after children for a few hours or older children. In those circumstances if school shut, people would still be able to work. I don't think the graph showing part-time work tells you much as it is not clear what they're doing. My mother used to do market research interviewing for example. It was for a few hours a week in the evenings and it would count as part time.
www.employment-studies.co.uk/report-summaries/report-summary-women-labour-market-two-decades-change-and-continuity

Anecdote again, but back in the 1960s and 1970s I wasn't aware of any child I knew going to a childminder or having gone to a day nursery when younger. We didn't move in circles where families could have afforded to pay a nanny or au pair. Mothers who worked outside the home would have relied on other family members or neighbours or friends. Some of these would have been paid arrangements, a lot wouldn't. There was no regulation of childcare at all that I can recall.

The Dad might have taken charge if Mum was working evenings/nights/weekends when he was home from work. My Dad did this to a limited extent because he worked in retail and got a day off midweek to make up for working on Saturday. So on that day he did the supermarket shop (he could drive, my Mum couldn't) and after school he took us swimming, which gave my Mum a break.

The other way families managed if both parents were at work at the same time was giving the child(ren) a latchkey. Primary school children routinely made their way to and from school on their own from an early age. If they had a key they could let themselves back into the house and keep themselves occupied until an adult returned. A lot of older children would have been expected to get on with household chores during that time, including getting the family dinner ready.

I think it must be hard for younger people to get their heads round this now, but until comparatively recently it never occurred to anyone that the risk of leaving children unattended at home or letting them roam free outside for hours at a time was unacceptable. Everybody knew that some children would have horrible accidents or otherwise meet with harm as a result, but most wouldn't, and the children would learn resilience, independence and how to occupy themselves without bothering adults, who had plenty to get on with at home or at work.

One of the biggest changes in social atittudes in my lifetime has been the shift to believing children must be supervised all the time and no risk of harm is tolerable. It's massively reduced child deaths and injuries, but there has been a cost.

I think if a pandemic had struck in the 1960s and schools had shut nobody would have been anything like as bothered as we are now. It would have been more like what happened during WW2. Most children in cities were evacuated with their schools. The ones who stayed behind or drifted back fairly quickly had extremely poor or non-existing education provision and many never caught up.

I think if a pandemic had struck in the 1960s and schools had shut nobody would have been anything like as bothered as we are now.

I agree. I certainly don't think they would be worried about their mental health from not going to school either .Quite the opposite. A lot of children hated school and would have loved not having to go. I remember being delighted when schools kept closing during the winter of discontent.

50/60 years ago it was polio everyone was scared of.

But they didn't have Twitter or Instagram, etc. so no scaremongering and lies.

Agreed, @Belladonna12. Another totally unregulated area was schools. No Ofsted, no National Curriculum, no league tables, no performance management for teachers. Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools visited a tiny handful of schools each year and most teachers never saw an inspector in their entire career. In theory there was a Truancy Officer but in practice many kids rarely attended school and often stopped altogether in their early teens, and nobody did anything about it. Schools were often glad to see the back of them.

In theory there was a Truancy Officer but in practice many kids rarely attended school and often stopped altogether in their early teens, and nobody did anything about it. Schools were often glad to see the back of them.

I think there was an assumption that lots of children were just biding their time until they started work in a manual job. The school leaving age wasn't raised to 16 until 1972.

Oh yes. I was 11 then. I remember children in my year repeating the outrage they were hearing from their older brothers and sisters and other family members that they would have to waste their time hanging on in school for a few more months. For a while you could leave at the end of the term when you turned 16. It was a long time before that changed to the end of the school year when you turned 16, which obviously massively increased the chance that you might take a few exams before leaving.

I wonder if increasing life expectancy has skewed our expectations? 50 years ago would an increase in the death rate of those aged 80+ (and often with comorbidities) been seen as tragic and something worth destroying our society, mental health and economy for? Or would it have been seen as something obviously sad for the individuals and families affected, but not as the national crisis Covid is seen as.

Spanish flu, millions and millions dead over 3years of hell. Depression, depravity. Google. We are lucky, science has come a long way.

@Belladonna12 sorry but this was discussed further back, you've not read the chart correctly - its not terribly clear & you're not the only one to do this, the chart splits the full time and part time - you've just read the full time figures - its over 40% for the section not 18%

I think it must be hard for younger people to get their heads round this now, but until comparatively recently it never occurred to anyone that the risk of leaving children unattended at home or letting them roam free outside for hours at a time was unacceptable

It was acceptable. Otherwise, it wouldn't have happened.

50 years ago would an increase in the death rate of those aged 80+ (and often with comorbidities) been seen as tragic and something worth destroying our society, mental health and economy for?

The government wouldn't care if the only problem were a few people in their 80's dying a little early.

Restrictions are a result of pressure on public services.

I had Asian flu in 1968. I was a teenager and the only one member of my family to get it . I can remember feeling ill and I know that I passed out once when I walked to the bathroom but I can't remember seeing anything about it on the news .

I started school in 1963 and my mum took me for about the first week, after that I just walked to school with other DC, it was about 3/4 of a mile. When I was at primary school I was sent out to play in the holidays so I wasn't under my DMs feet, this was not unusual, I used to often take jam sandwiches for my lunch and went home about 5 or 6 o'clock for dinner

Social media has definitely dragged this on for longer in my opinion. If we only had the wireless we'd have no conspiracy theories etc

A lot of people would have died and hopefully more people would've listened. People seem really selfish these days which is sad.

Heaven forbid we actually act like we moved on and try and save lives. This isn’t the same world it was 40 or 50 years ago and this isn’t the same viruses we had before. Your post is silly and childish like a 15 year old logic of someone who just can’t be bothered any more.

The "Spanish Flu" after WWl, I understand, was devastating and killed millions. I don't know what people did except put up with it.

It would have spread more slowly as travel is nowhere near what it is now. We'd have had more deaths as health care would not have been as technical as it is now and it would have gone on for much longer as science wouldn't have been as advanced.

@DagenhamRoundhouse

50/60 years ago it was polio everyone was scared of.

But they didn't have Twitter or Instagram, etc. so no scaremongering and lies.

Not really, By 1960 the vaccine was pretty firmly in place and effective.