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!

Yes, housing is a major issue. We’d need a major house crash though to right this and I can’t see any government allowing that to happen!

My boomer parents treated me and my brother the same growing up, and have equal pride in our careers (we're at a similar level of seniority).

Weird ageist generalisation, had to double check that this was FWR.
No OP, I think this is a your family issue, I don’t recognise it from my Baby Boom generation parents or even my Silent Generation grandparents, for that matter.

My experience is that life evolves and family members born around that time (just before the Boomers) have also changed their views as they got older. My parents thoughts on working are definitely that women should aim for a career now, whereas 40 years ago they didn't think it was important. My parents are divorced and when I was young my mum did almost everything around the house, but later on when my dad was remarried, he did the majority of the household tasks.
My own children seem to believe in marriage more than I do.

This technically was a girls’ school! There was a linked boys’ school, we were taught separately and breaktimes etc were separate, but we shared subject teachers and facilities like science labs and sports fields. DBro was at the boys’ school.

It was a very small rural private school and parental aspirations for the girls were that they would “marry well” - I was seen as odd and unfeminine by my peers for being ambitious. The school wasn’t a good fit for me at all.

Judging by FB most of the girls in my year did go on to become SAHWs to farmers, accountants, solicitors etc. And yes I do know farmers’ wives work hard but my point is very few of my old school friends have independent careers.

My parents are boomers so I know a lot - their friends, my friends' parents, PIL etc

I think because it was such a transitional period, boomers are very varied in their views.

I know women in that generation who had very high flying careers and take absolutely no shit hit also women in that generation who never worked and think working and not waiting hand and foot on your man is unfeminine.

So you mean men?

Women fought for rights. Equal pay, the sex discrimination act, countless barriers to legal and financial equality ( to hold a credit card not backed by a male guarantor for example).

But women now are still battling to win hearts and minds of men. MN alone demonstrates that huge numbers of men see themselves as optional help in terms of domestic work and childcare, and while they love the income their partner earns they don’t share the domestic load.

I’m a boomer, and before I retired last year I employed many women. Did all I could to be flexible and supportive of working women. But Utterly exasperated at the number of absences due to care of sick children where their child’s father was too important, too everything, to expect the same support from HIS employer, and he never took days off.

I am horrified by the misogyny and sexism I see in popular culture today. Ingrained in institutions like the Met. Boys enthralled with Tate. Women expected to give up safe single sex spaces.

If only it would die out with us dinosaur boomers.

People are individuals. I can’t understand the current trend to categorise and label whole sections of society as being all one and the same.

I was born in 1955 and of course this has a bearing on how I’ve lived and life’s opportunities but that doesn’t make me the same as others of my age.

Nature is a powerful force and motherhood is what it intended for us

I am also 61. I chose not to have children, so Nature's force was obviously a bit lacking in me! I married very late too. I also grew up in a household where both parents worked, as did most of my peers, so I really don't agree with you on your stance that it is best for children to have a stay at home parent.

This is a good illustration of how not all Boomers think the same or have the same life experience!

@foxandbee , perhaps you missed the bit where I said we should be able to choose?
You may disagree that nature intends us to be mothers but science will disagree with you. There will always be exceptions and I’m glad you’re happy with your decision.

My parents were that generation just too young for WW2 service. My mother did work and was quite independent before marriage. I recall that they encouraged my brother and myself to get a good education and get on in life. My mum did have this tendency to call me a ‘career woman’ and ‘feminist’. We didn’t have our DC until we were over 40. My mum assumed that because we’d had a long journey to parenthood and were thrilled to succeed after years of thinking we might not, that I would give up work. When I said I was going back to work, she was really off with me for 2 weeks. My dad was fine and subject was closed after the fortnight.

As a person in my early 60s I find being lumped in with ‘the boomers’ a bit odd. Yes, I was around for some of the 60s but I was a small child. There was nothing liberating about the very short skirts for kids, for example

@Greyrocked I forgot to add their childcare choices were different. So none of my older nephews and nieces went to nurseries full-time and some never went. They had a mixture of relatives, paid individuals - childminder/nanny share/au pair - and their parents looking after them.

I'm 67 so I fall into the latter end of "boomer". I've worked from the age of 17 and, for 10 years, lived and worked abroad. Both my parents (born in 1914 & 1919 respectively) were desperate for me to go to university. I didn't but I found my own preferred path instead. Most of my female peers either went to university or became career women through other means. The only real difference is that wrap around childcare/nurseries were almost non existent and you really had to be pretty wealthy to afford nannies, so there was a hiatus until our children were older.

I do think that generally attitudes are often class related. I believe the working classes were (and still are) far more likely to have an expectation that women will stay at home and deal with most things domestic. It's not just about the era in which you were born. To a large extent it's about education, enlightenment and socialisation.

My parents (late 60s) have always encouraged me in my education and career, I think under the 'women can have it all' notion. I do however also recognise the way in which 'have it all' has actually come to mean 'do/be it all'.

Small comments from my parents over the years have reflected this distinction. For example when my sister was on maternity leave and considering childcare options for when she went back to work, my mum said to me "No grandchild of mine will ever go to a nursery". Not quite sure what she thought the alternative would be other than my sister taking the baby to work with her, or quitting her job.

Also from my dad. I have joined him running the business he set up, with a view to him retiring soon. He expects that I will be able to have the same level of commitment to work that he has had over the years and that I will put work first (over and above family), as he has done. Of course he always had dinner on the table for him every night, but he can't see this and doesn't understand.

I suppose that's the difference in being state school educated in an inner city.

Incidentally a couple of my SILs, one a boomer and the other Gen X, were expected to do typical "female" jobs until they found a husband. They were both privately educated.

The jobs were to help them find the "right type" of husband.

My brothers don't fall into that category as their jobs relate to technology and their isn't an established career path.

mids2019 · Today 08:01
. . 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
Some of us Boomers are nostalgic for that myth, but it was real at times. One ordinary wage paying the rent or mortgage and buying the food for a family of four.

Bringing up babies was so much more time consuming and therefore that much more difficult to get work. Cloth nappies and no washing machine.

It's really odd to make sweeping generalisations about such a large and varied group of people. There are 14 million baby boomers in the UK aged between 60 and 78.

@ginasevern most working class women worked though. They did the jobs that make society flow but people don't count e.g. dinner ladies, lunch time assistants, cleaners.

There were a couple of mums in my year at primary school whose husband's made it clear they weren't to work at all where the men did working class jobs.

I'm a boomer. I find it deeply depressing when the contribution my generation made to feminism and minority rights is completely disregarded. For example, which generation first set up refuges for victims of domestic violence, to name but one. Has nobody heard of the 1970s? Of the AIDS crisis? Equal pay?
I've actually stopped listening to a parenting podcast that I loved because they have a section called "boomer parenting" devoted to listing examples of shit parenting apparantly typical of the generation.

My boomer siblings used disposable nappies on their children.

I was worried I was going to have to change cloth nappies as a teen but I was laughed at.

Incidentally that was the first time I heard judgement about the age of potty training. One of my nephews didn't get it until he was 3 but his parents were considered lazy for not forcing him to potty train sooner. There as his younger sibling was trained at 2.

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.

@mids2019 as marginally a baby boomer (although 10 years behind the real boomer generation) I think your premises are faulty, and your knowledge of feminist activism of the 1970s and 80s is pretty non-existent.

What you say says more about your family and its male members, than about the real strides that second wave feminists made in equal pay, maternity leave, naming rape in marriage, not shaming single mothers etc etc etc.

The fact that one man in your family doesn't agree with the equality of women says very little about a whole generation. And doesn't give due respect to the women who enabled your life to be more free.

My father has always supported me in my career and I know he's very proud of what I've achieved. I am the higher earner in our household but both DH and I work full time and split the chores 50:50.

However, every Sunday morning DF comes to ours and if he sees DH doing the ironing says, "got you working again has she?!" 😤

My point really was to show that Boomers have a variety of world views, just like every generation.

Greenham Common, Reclaim the Night, Spare Rib.

I think you're making unfair assumptions about people of a certain age thinking in a certain way. Most of my elderly relatives are a bit too old to be counted as boomers, but they are all absolutely in favour of women's equality and wouldn't want us to go backwards. It is ageist to assume that all elderly people are sexist.