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.

At least it's the generations who kicked off the trend of women going to work that are now old and having some of the higher covid death rates so at least they're getting their just desserts

I was thinking that, yes.

The whole idea is so fucked up I can’t even.

@TheKeatingFive

At least it's the generations who kicked off the trend of women going to work that are now old and having some of the higher covid death rates so at least they're getting their just desserts

I was thinking that, yes.

The whole idea is so fucked up I can’t even.

Yep, wonder how long "women, know your place" is going to stick around for

This is crazy - the idea that feminists 50 years ago should have been carrying out a pandemic risk assessment or something:

“We demand equal rights, equal pay and financial independence!”
“That’s all very well Carol but what if there’s a global pandemic in 2020 and one of the mitigating measures is closing schools? Who will look after the children if we’re all out doing paid work?”
“Fair point Linda, let’s forget the whole feminism thing. As you were”

I was a fulltime working mother in the 70s, my mother was in the 50s, my granny was in the 30s my great grandmother was in the 1900s/1910s. Are working women really that new? Admittedly with great grandmother it was because she was a widow with 4 kids so it was work or the workhouse.

Let's not forget that fifty years ago women couldn't get a mortgage in their own name/their earnings didn't count when a couple applied for a mortgage. I don't know about 50 years ago but I know my greatgrandmother got a mortgage and bought her own house over 100 years ago, she was a widow with 4 kids. As my granny told it she saved every penny in some sort of mutual aid organisation, bit like a credit union I think, and then bought her little house where my mum ws born. She was a working class woman.

It would not have spread the same because we didn't travel as much plus people would have followed the rules better. We also had less CEV people because life expectancy was lower and people had less chronic severe illness because it killed them. Part of the reason for high death rates in the developed world is that we keep people alive (and with quality of life) so more longer with severe illness.

@ancientgran

The women in my family have been working for a long time as well. I can't speak very accurately for pre 1900 because I never thought to ask my older relatives about anybody that far back, but as far as I'm aware the women were working in mills even back then.

I think some people have taken the framework of a very middle class family and applied it to everyone. I think for working class families the women have pretty much always worked. How could they afford not to?

Let's not forget that fifty years ago women couldn't get a mortgage in their own name/their earnings didn't count when a couple applied for a mortgage. I forget how old I am sometimes. Just realised I bought my first house 48 years ago, our mortgage was either 3 times DH wage plus 1 year of mine or 2.5 times joint income. Not sure if that had changed from 2 years earlier but definitely the case in 1973, it was with the Burnley Building Society which was later taken over by a bigger building society but I can't remember which one.

@ancientgran

One of my grandmothers worked, the other didn't. The work available to most married women was either factory or hospitality. Many jobs like nursing, teaching or secretarial expected you to resign on marriage or first pregnancy until the 60's, some insisted on it.

@StopSquirtingBleachOnCaneToads That is true. One thing I remember from childhood was to make sure I had my own income. My granny told the story of her wedding in 1919 I think. They got married on the Saturday, had no honeymoon and granddad back at work on the Monday. She had left her job on the Friday as she was expected to. Apparently he finished his breakfast and got ready for work and said, "You can have anything you want, you just need to ask." and off he went. She went to her old employer and back to work. When he got home she said, "I can have anything I want with my own money as I have gone back to work."

Feisty women in my history.

@movingonup20 Most working class women did work in factories or hospitality or domestic work. As StopSquirtingBleachOnCaneToads said people tend to focus on how the middleclass lived and forget that working class women always worked. My family lived in Londonderry, women were often the family wage earner in linen mills and factories when there was no work for men.

When I left secondary school in 1974 a lot of the girls left school and got jobs in the shoe factories (Northants) or packing jobs, but if you took your O levels then office jobs were common, I did 2 years of typing and shorthand at school in readiness for this type of job. It was very much mens jobs and women's jobs then and women's jobs weren't very well paid.

@ancientgran it's the same in my family - my mum worked from when I started school in the late 1970s, if she'd had childcare she would have returned sooner, my nanna worked running the family shop which had originally been set up by her mother (my great nanna). In my working class family, women always worked in one way or another. One was the licensee of a pub which she ran with no input from her husband who worked elsewhere. Quite a few also over the last 100 years were widows or abandoned by their husbands so of they didn't work there was no money for the family.

It's totally facile to suggest that women not being SAHMs has contributed to the current situation, especially given that not that many women were SAHMs anyway. Even when I was at school in the 70s and 80s, most of my friends mums worked once their children were at school, or did piecework type jobs from home.

@TheKeatingFive Well there’s a new way of bashing working mothers, got to hand it to you. hmm if you had read my posts properly you would see that I said most women now have no choice.

if you had read my posts properly you would see that I said most women now have no choice.

I did read your posts. You blamed women wanting to work 40 years ago.

No @TheKeatingFive I didn’t blame them , obviously they didn’t have a crystal ball. Something can be factually true without apportioning blame.
If there were the same number of sahm’s as there were in 1980 it would have been much easier to close schools for all but the vulnerable and key work fees. Schools would not have needed to stay open to provide childcare/support the economy.
What I do blame them for however is the rise in house prices so in most areas of the country you cannot buy without two incomes. Also the general costs of family life being very difficult to afford on one income. Being a sahm is now a luxury few can afford.

This is what you actually wrote

So many extra lives lost because women a generation ago wanted to “have it all”

Sounds a lot like ‘blame’ to me.

What total dicks women are for wanting financial independence.

@TheKeatingFive yes extra lives have been lost because they wanted to have it all. As I said factually true, clearly I don’t think they considered a pandemic when making that choice.

During polio outbreaks (pre vaccines) people strictly quarantined and, according to contemporary reports, the fear in affected towns was palpable. No social media required.

The idea that you can ignore a highly infectious, dangerous disease is a modern one. The reality of 'getting on with things' in an old-fashioned way involves a lot of quarantining, social deprivation and burying. Don't confuse stoicism with indifference.

[quote AldiAisleofCrap]@TheKeatingFive yes extra lives have been lost because they wanted to have it all. As I said factually true, clearly I don’t think they considered a pandemic when making that choice.[/quote]
You're still blaming the women and for 'wanting it all' - where was the sentence in your post about men not cutting down their work days at a similar rate to keep the same overall income and give them time to help with the children? Or the sentence blaming (mainly male) large business owners for not putting wellbeing over profit and paying wages to match rising costs? No, you just wanted to blame women.

What about men ‘wanting it all’?

What’s their role in all this, do you think?

What about the government's decision to abolish all controls on the housing market? Back in the days @ancientgran mentions, there were limits on how much you could borrow strictly linked to income, and the result was house price inflation was nothing like as high as it became from the late 80s onwards. We can blame Mrs Thatcher for that one. Her government also abolished rent controls and presided over the sell off of council houses with no reinvestment of the proceeds in new social housing.

This all led to the dire position we're in now where very few people have a secure tenancy at an affordable rent. This is particularly tough on families with children who need security and stability and whose finances are really stretched.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

No idea when Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams were introduced. Conference calls were a thing 10 years ago, weren't they?

Conference calls were a thing around 20 years ago, although a fandangle to set up and use. Video conferencing came in not long after that but involved using specialised companies for the purpose and being given a PIN code to input at a specified time. As I remember, Skype was the first universal provider that made video conferencing much easier for all. Microsoft Teams and Zoom are more recent inventions.

@ancientgran

Let's not forget that fifty years ago women couldn't get a mortgage in their own name/their earnings didn't count when a couple applied for a mortgage. I forget how old I am sometimes. Just realised I bought my first house 48 years ago, our mortgage was either 3 times DH wage plus 1 year of mine or 2.5 times joint income. Not sure if that had changed from 2 years earlier but definitely the case in 1973, it was with the Burnley Building Society which was later taken over by a bigger building society but I can't remember which one.

In the mid 80's these income multiples were broadly similar for a mortgage. I recall eyebrows being raised when we requested 2.5 times joint income even then. Can you imagine that now?😮 Attitudes changed about 20 years ago though when the property market boomed : 2.5 times joint wouldn't have got you a one-bedroom flat.