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!

My mum used disposable nappies for all of us - she didn't even know how to use cloth nappies and found the whole idea pretty gross 😂

She also had her own sitting room and just left us to it. In the summer we just got chucked out to play in the garden and round the street. Bollocks was childcare more time consuming in the 80s. I'd say it's the opposite. There's more pressure now to spend a tonne of quality time with dcs (rightly so) and get them to plenty of activities too if you van afford it. Stranger danger is so much more well known now and there's no village raising a child. Most mums don't have that many mum friends they see regularly as they're all at work, a lot of us move to big cities for work etc and have no family support. I'm not all woe is me, but when people say "oh but childcare is easy now compared to then" I say Bull.Shit.

Putting aside your offensive use of the word "boomer", don't assume that everyone that was born in the same period thinks the same. So some will be as you suggest, OP, and some won't.
Similarly, not all younger people are enlightened - you only have to read the comments on here from women whose young husbands still think a woman's place is in the kitchen and the nursery.
People are complicated and different - at every age. There is no need to stereotype.

My dad has made the comment about why have children if you're never going to see them, and I put him straight about that - given that he was out of the house before 7 and often not back until after 9.

On the other hand, they've only ever been supportive in my career choices (and fashion choices - my mum gave me a buzzcut in my teens for example). They had a traditional setup on the face of it for various practical reasons (location, number of kids and their needs), but I know my mum resented it, and as soon as we were old enough did the education to become a teacher, and throughout my childhood it was instilled in me that if there was something I really wanted to do, we would figure out how (and this was pre-internet, so no small promise).

My (ex, not) PILs were much more traditional in their outlook - it did scandalise them a bit that I had kids with their son without marriage, that I didn't baptise them, that I insisted on keeping working and refused to do everything domestic. But they weren't nasty about it, just found it odd.

This 100%

It’s not about what generation you are. It’s about the conditions you grow up in that shape your worldview.

There are women right now on MN threads with new babies who are living like Victorian housemaids. This is because their upbringing told them that women were for fucking and cooking and men earned the money and could do what they liked. So many families still are like this.

And more scarily, so many actually think this is the natural order of things…

But that was your family.

My family, back in the 80s, were busy teaching me and my dsis that girls could do anything that boys could do, that we had agency over our lives and that we should always stand up for our rights.

They also taught us to stand up to racism, homophobia etc. And yet, somehow, they are now routinely presumed to be sexist and racist dinosaurs merely because of their age?

I'm very sorry that your elderly family members have such backward views. There will be plenty of others like them, but there are plenty more like my parents too.

Boomer does cover a range of years when social customs changed greatly. There is a thread about things that were common but seem weird now. Attitudes to smoking feature prominently.
Many jobs were so much more physical than they are now which tended to influence thinking and career choice.

And I actually did use cloth nappies and wipes with mine who are now 9 and 6 years old

Yes @CurlewKate the almost wilful ignorance of some young women nowadays is a bit disturbing. They seem awfully complacent, but squeal when things don't go their ways.

Most of my grandparents were Victorians or Edwardians. One of my grandmothers was in the first cohort of women to graduate from Oxford. Ambitious girls have been a given in my family for 3 generations & almost a hundred years.

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

My grandma was born in 1920 and used to tell me all the time that women wanting an equal career where shooting the selves in the foot. She said everything will get more expensive and it will become necessary to have two full wages to run a household. She wasn’t wrong and I think we would all have a better standard of living if it wasn’t true.
I also think we constantly come across people with opposing views on issues like this and it can be generational, but there is no need to let it become a massive issue.

I remember when my Dad (a Boomer) who is otherwise lovely and supportive of me and my career was genuinely surprised I wasn't handing in my notice in my job as soon as I got ENGAGED. This was 2013!

God, this thread is depressing.

Who do you think fought for equality resulting in the Sex Discrimination Act 1977?

I agree. I'm 69 and don't recognise what OP are saying among people I know.

Not my experience. The boomer women I know were first generation career women who strongly prioritised education to college level and the pursuit of a career first, before motherhood for their dd’s.

my df was a strong, dominant figure who took pride in being able to do anything as well or better than my dm, supported her independence and ours - he’s set a very high bar for the men in my life.

But I think the men of his generation tended to fall into two camps - regressive, entitled chauvinists or supportive allies of women’s liberation. My gf who was of the war generation was a huge advocate of women’s rights too.

I think SM is a much bigger source of regressive backlash against women’s rights - there’s a huge amount of influencers with a background in high demand religion pumping out images of perfect homes, aesthetic families, homeschooling, housework hacks, bread baking, prairie dress wearing nostalgia and it’s absolutely insidious. But it’s not boomers generating this content.

DH's best friend really wanted his wife to stop working when they had kids and be a housewife.
He's born in the mid 70's so a child of boomers.

His mother was a very posh bohemian artist type. I really don't know where he got the notion from!

But predictable.

I worked in the DHSS in 1975 and the demotion thing had stopped by then. Many women were deterred from progressing to a higher grade because above EO grade as a civil servant you could be sent anywhere in the country. Women whose husbands were the main breadwinner couldn't uproot themselves so easily. There were women in higher grades though and there was equal pay in the Civil Service by this time.

I wish the Women In Revolt exhibition at Tate Britain was permanent and visiting it part of the school curriculum.

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

Makes a change from a lot of men nowadays who expect women to work AND put all their energies into child rearing.

Elderly? Is anyone Elderly a boomer. How many of the people being referred to on this thread are actually the silent generation and not baby boomers. The oldest baby boomers are 78, the youngest are still working.

I'm generation x, child of silent generation and this is reminiscent of my upbringing. Most baby boomers I know are far more enlightened

DM got married in 1972. People did get moved about, including her, but at her grade in the DHSS that generally meant from the Rotherham office to Barnsley etc, so manageable. DF also worked in the same office (she was his supervisor initially) and got moved around a fair bit but always commutable. The furthest was a secondment to Leicester.

Still no question of her staying on post-pregnancy in 1979 - she resigned as soon as she got her positive pregnancy test from the doctor, as was standard. Happy to accept that what happened to a junior manager in a local office in Yorkshire may not reflect what would have happened to somebody senior in London, but that was the situation where she was.

Is there any chance people can just stop using the term 'boomer?' It is awful. Ageist and pejorative. And before anyone pops up to inform me that it's just a descriptor, I have never ever heard it used in anything but a negative way and always to generalise and stereotype, as if people from that time period all think and act the same way.

Ascribing certain qualities to every member of a group is lazy, reductive thinking. People are individuals.

Ex-MIL is from this generation. She is a complete misogynist and has these views.

My parents on the other hand, same generation, couldn’t be further from it.

I don't think just because someone is from a generation they are a certain way, I think it very much depends on how you were bought up individually and the influences around you, rather than sweeping generalisations because someone was born at a certain time.

Ageism and sexism in one thread.

Way to go.