Boomer generation - expectations of women and attitudes towards marriage

[mids2019]

In my family experience it seems to me a lot of the boomer generation who supposedly lived through a great period of sexual equality and liberation are in reality quite conservative and borderline misogynist in their attitudes towards woman, marriage and careers.

for instance a now elderly family member who worked his while life in engineering with a male team harbours a desire for a society where men could support a family and women didn't need to work to put all their energies into child rearing. I don't think he like a in reality the concept of the career woman and I think this article has influenced his daughter. Other elderly family members talk of my daughter's growing up and getting married as if that was somehow the sole goal of young women's lives.

I have reasonably clever daughters and it is concerning when they mention career direction and the family member loses interest.

I think there is a discomfort from some of this generation about the results of opening doors to women and they harken back to the 50s/60s where female professionals were more of a rarity and there were far more housewives.

Will these attitudes pass with the boomers passing!

There was definitely a period of liberation but it wasn't equality.

My parents were boomers and my mum had a tough time in the workplace. Women were really discriminated against. My dad thought of himself as enlightened and compared to his parents he was but compared to the newer generations he really wasn't

Perhaps the boomer you know are like this but the boomers I know are not. They have all actively encouraged their children of both sexes into education and careers . And have sons who take on their share of housework, cooking and cleaning.

It says more about your family than society in general I'm afraid.

Also got to say the elderly generation are lovely people but there seems to be reluctance to comes to terms of women being on an entirely equal footing with men. There is a nostalgia for a perhaps non-existent past where women worked for a few years after school, for married and found relatively unskilled work that flexible around child care (or not work at all). Thoughts about female careers seem to be an afterthought with relationship and marriage prospects being the be all and end all of a woman's life.

I have this in my own parents well parent my dad far less than my mother. My parents married in 1968 and always from day one had a very equal marriage. Both worked, both changed nappies, had free time etc. I grew up in a household where everything was shared and spent a lot of time with my dad as my mum would often be working evenings so she was around for us during the day. She would be out cutting the grass while my dad cooked and washed up and vice versa.

Yet as an adult my mum has said things like one of the reasons I was divorced from my 1st husband was because I didn’t iron enough shirts and more recently that she thinks it is the woman’s job to buy all the birthday/Christmas cards and presents. Ignoring the fact that we both work full-time and actually dh has more flexibility in his day to go to a shop and do this kind of thing.

The thing is my dad does not think like this at all and the attitude is totally alien to what I saw growing up with everything being shared and some
jobs being allocated based on skill levels. Honestly
think my mums mind would be blown if she knew my dh was the one who cleaned the bathroom can’t remember the last time I did.

@Spirallingdownwards

Mhave it was a generation of flux? I think at least in my experience some in this generation (not necessarily professional) welcomed many of the advances in women's equality superficially but at a deeper level still had respect for older household models of man = bread wonder woman = child rearer.

insist the elderly are unsupported as such but don't seem to have the enthusiasm about female careers as mens'.

You do know that being born within a certain date range doesn't define you, any more than your star sign? Of course people whose job it is to interrogate demographic date can observe statistical trends but these only point to several percentage points difference here and there in people's opinions. Not a cohort of clones.

I'm so sick of all these ridiculous generalisations about 'boomers'.

Also, they didn't live through a great period of sexual equality and liberation fgs. Equality? Not at all. Liberation? Well, yes, liberation from some of the worst excesses of sexism, such as rape within marriage being legal. But still more confined, on the whole than today. The only exception I can see is that gender stereotyping has become way more aggressive again after a brief relaxation in the seventies. But that is just a strand within a larger nexus of oppression

This is the thing again that is in conflict with my mums behaviour. She did encourage us into education and careers and made sure my brother was capable around the house and praises the fact that my sons will leave home knowing how to look after themselves and dd is strong and independent. We are just supposed to do all those things as well as ironing shirts (I am still bitter can you tell?) and buying all the bloody birthday cards.
oh and if I’m on the phone to her when she gets in from work I better go so I can greet him and get his meal sorted.

Sorry I want trying to generalise but I do think I can see a slow change of attitude towards women through the gneratiions. One thing I have noticed was that in the 80s it was a lot more acceptable to be openly sexicist....One now elderly family member openly said women shouldn't work when children are going and no one bath d an eyelid.

@mids2019 , I’m 61. In my opinion there have been many positive changes for women since I was young and I’m happy for younger women if pursuing a career is what they want. It’s not what everyone wants though and I do worry that we’ve created a society where young women feel that they can’t choose a more traditional role. Nature is a powerful force and motherhood is what it intended for us. Unfortunately even if being a stay at home parent would be your ideal an awful lot of families need both parents working. My personal view is that this is not what is best for the children but one has to take into consideration that a frustrated and miserable mummy wouldn’t be good for them either.
Equality, in my opinion, doesn’t mean that everyone has to be exactly the same but that everyone’s contribution has equal value and that we have choices.

I don't think it's unreasonable to lament the end of the family wage. If one person used to be able to support a family, and now it takes two, that's wage depression. And we are objectively worse off.

As for attitudes to women generally- I agree with the PP who said they are the generation of flux. They made and experienced changes but it was new to them. Perhaps they feel ambivalent about how it played out.

I realise I sound really anti feminist here. And I'm genuinely not. Just trying to think how it would feel to experience the social shifts they've lived through

I think that you are generalising from your own family experience. I'm a boomer and I was massively encouraged by my war generation parents to go to university and have a career. My dad was an engineer, but it didn't stop him encouraging his daughter in the same way as his sons. My mum gave up her career to raise a family but she was also a powerhouse in terms of education and supporting us. I don't recognise the attitudes you describe in my boomer siblings or my husband and friends either.

I have male friends/former colleagues born in the early fifties and I’d say that this is not really true of them - but we work in a female-dominated profession so maybe my view is skewed.

Also maybe it’s a class thing. DH belongs to a physical golf club, and a society that plays across the county at up-market courses. At the local club in our lower MC area the women/wives of male golfers all seem to work or have worked up to retirement age and beyond; when I go to the society dinners I am always asked “and do you work, dear?”.

However I also don’t think that the sexual revolution equalled equality at all. Yes, women gained some rights and freedoms but sex stereotypes persisted, and are still persistent today, even amongst the young. There are so many threads on here from millennials bemoaning the fact their boyfriends won’t propose to them, or who have blindly become unmarried SAHMs, or are amazed by women who can put up shelves, or who think the man should pay on the first date. I see so many identikit young women (millennials and Gen Z) teetering on high heels, locked into some strange societal expectation of what it means to be a woman that I simply don’t recognise.

So no, I don’t think we need to be in a hurry for the old folk to die.

What do you think 1960-1980s feminists were fighting against? 1960-1980s men. Watch Working Girl or 9-5 and see what attitudes to women in work were like in the 1980s.

Honestly I know Gen X and Millennial men who don’t like having a woman boss, don’t think women are as intrinsically intelligent as men, and think childcare/parenting/housework is woman’s work. It’s just misogyny.

My parents sent me to private school to maximise their chances (in their eyes) of me having a good career. Yet a few days before my wedding she took me to one side and told me that once I was married I'd have to make more of an effort to look after my partner and stop expecting him to share the domestic load 50/50. I honestly think she was ashamed to have raised a daughter who refused to do the ironing.

It’s really very tiresome when people that should know better lump entire generations into the same mindset. My 87 year old mother worked her entire life until 77, had her own house and career and expected her daughters to as well.

My careers teacher in the 80s, had this idea for the girls. I was told not to bother with university. What I needed was secretarial college so I could get myself a 'nice little office job for a couple of years' until I got married and had children.

When I think about it now, it's outrageous isn't it? He was such a misogynist. The girls were just breeding stock to him.

Absolutely this!

Choice is what is important.

My dm is 89.
She had dc v. young and then trained to be a nurse and MW.
I’m a boomer and don’t have any friends who gave up work permanently to stay home with dc. We were all juggling work and dc.
I think it’s your family tbh.

However women have definitely suffered due to the expectation that they will carry on working and a partner’s wage therefore is often not enough to support a family. I liked the security of knowing that dh’s wage was enough, just, if necessary.

I wonder if in 100 years women will look back and think how awful it was that the young women of today were expected to do it all, be it all.

My older siblings and some of their partners are boomers. The women earn equal to it more than the men.

The men were expected to and did look after their own children so their wives could work as well. They tended to work around each other as the women tended to do NHS roles. This is because we tend to come from large families where older siblings of both sexes looked after younger siblings.

One of my brothers is disappointed in his daughter's career choice as she isn't meeting her potential while the others are happy with their daughters choices as they are equal or better than their sons.

My experience/family sounds very similar to yours, OP.

It’s apparently fine for me to work and contribute half of the household income, as long as it doesn’t impact family life in any way, and as long as no balls are dropped.

As a woman in her late 40’s, I feel like our generation can have it all, as long as we’re prepared to do it all. Luckily I picked a decent DH and we work as a team most of the time.

And yes, NABALT. The majority of those in my life are though.

My DM is a boomer and worked full time from when I was seven years ago, I thought she was stitched up doing most of the stuff at home and commuting into London. She also got shafted in her two divorces and by taking the government advice to opt out of paying National Insurance as a married woman.

I deliberately chose to be a SAHM, for me it’s all about choice.

I’m a boomer, (born 1958) and working class.
My parents encouraged me to study and have a career but that wasn’t the norm. I went to local grammar school, the careers advice given to boys was to aim for accountancy, law, engineering, medicine etc. Girls were given advice to do nursing or teaching, skills “that would come in useful when you have a family”. Women still had to give up work when they married in a lot of cases.
The whole attitude to women was that marriage and a family was the goal to aim for. Single women, and women with careers were few and far between (other than teaching as you could get time off with children in the holidays).
Working class women of course had to work day in day out (eg in factories) as well as cook, clean and look after the children, often helped by family members and friends, and there were many latch key kids. My mum used to let herself in the house, prepare the dinner for the family, and do her own laundry at aged 11.

The reality is life today is making massive strides - backwards - with a young generation of boys idolising the likes of Andrew Tate.

The boomers I know aren't like that.

Tbh honestly, there's a shred of a point in there. Women should be able to have careers but we've made that happen by pretending all the other 'housewife' work didn't need to be done, which is probably bad for everyone. Life is much more stressful with two partners working ft.

It's also a shame you can't live on a single salary any more. My ideal would be two partners working part time but you wouldn't manage a mortgage on that in most places.