Are women happier than they were 50 years ago?

Question

Are women happier than they were 50 years ago?

Answer 1

Oh they say 50 yrs ago that 1 in 5 women worked out side the home.

Jobs - work in the 1950's. The 1950's: It was more a manufacturing and agricultural age, rather than the present day information age. There were more blue collar jobs and less white collar occupations --more manufacturing and food processing; lot more smaller farms all over the country. There was more need for secretaries, receptionist and support work. Typing pools in big offices mainly women typing letters, contracts, things that computers generate now. Presently, the computer has truly reduced that kind of work.  http://home.att.net/~boomers.fifties.tee...

http://www.immaculata.edu/Academics/Depa... shows us that us women back in those days did more than just lie on our backs and shoot out babies like torpedoes.

Women had plenty to do back in those days. They had their clubs and meetings to tend to.

Women’s groups in the 1950’s: There were lots of women’s auxiliary clubs. These organizations provided such things as money raising activities, and service.  http://home.att.net/~boomers.fifties.tee...

1958

Two years after its founders first met, La Leche League is officially founded to educate women about breastfeeding and its health benefits. During the 1950s and 1960s, breastfeeding went out of fashion in the United States.

1960

Jerrie Cobb is the first woman in the U.S. to undergo astronaut testing. NASA, however, cancels the women's program in 1963. It is not until 1983 that an American woman—Dr. Sally K. Ride—is sent into space.

Liza Redfield is the first woman to conduct an orchestra on Broadway. She leads a 24-piece orchestra in The Music Man.

http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0907019...

Of course to be sure parts of life back in those days was not easy, but they lived their lives according to the knowledge they had.

Answer 2

Some are, some aren't. I know that if I lived 50 years ago and had little to live for but my husband and children, I wouldn't be living at all.

Answer 3

Yes, and by a longshot!

Get this:

"Women’s ...median age at first marriage was 22 in 1890,

dipped down to 20.1 in 1956, and by 1998 reached 25."

http://www.clasp.org/publications/teenma...

So 50 years ago, getting married and makin' babies was pretty much women's only entre choice on the menu of life.

Answer 4

I'm pretty sure I'm happier now than I would be if I were born 50 years ago. Now I'm not expected to get married and have kids, which is good because I don't want children.

Answer 5

Its certainly more liberated now, I'm glad I'm young now as opposed to then, I don't know what I would have done for kicks.

We have got to a point where a western female is told she has the right to do what ever she wants and if it goes wrong she will be rewarded, and granted victim status, regardless of the cost to society, but it is taken for granted.

Answer 6

Definitely, birth control was practically non existant back then. Women rarely went to work and couldn't even if they wanted to.  

Answer 7

I agree with sister hobo, for me personally I don't want children and back then for a start there wasn't proper contraception, and women that didn't have children were considered strange.

Also now we have so much more access to different jobs, travelling, knowlledge hobbies etc.

Answer 8

I am, considering I wasn't alive 50 years ago :-)

Answer 9

i am definitely. everyone can do what they like now instead of being forced to do things just cause everyone else did and this applies to both men and women.

Answer 10

I thought you said you were only 47 Kleines?

- No they are not happier.

Answer 11

Both my mother and my grandmother were alive 50 years ago, and both of them have told me how fortunate I am to have grown up post-women's liberation. My grandmother has told me so many horror stories about the days before hormonal birth control, and the days before women were allowed to deny their husbands s*x. She told me that when she  was growing up she had a friend who's mother had 12 children because her husband always wanted to sleep with her and she couldn't tell him no or she'd be thrown out onto the street and left destitute (He was a physically/emotionally abusive a*****e, and it was during the depression. So saying no was not an option.) She walked 27 blocks, in Sacramento, in the summer time (and it's like 105 degress in Sacto in the summer), to beg her doctor to give her a diaphragm. He told her no because " no good woman wanted to control the number of babies she had" or some such nonsense, and so she walked the 27 blocks home and when she got home, my grandma and her friend were playing in the living room and the friend asked her mom, "What's wrong?" and the mom collapsed into tears and didn't stop crying for three hours. She went on to have three more children because she couldn't obtain birth control, and finally her husband died. Ah, the days when the Comstock laws were in effect.

And contrary to popular belief, it was only the white upper-middle class who got to do the whole Dad at work Mom at home thing. Everyone else was working. Mom, Dad, everybody. My grandmother worked retail for 50 years, the entire time she was married. She told me a lot of her friends worked outside the home too.

My mother told me that she had friends who's mothers stayed in abusive marriages because divorce would have left them in poverty, since job prospects for women were abysmal back then. My mom said that when she was 18, she couldn't obtain a credit card unless she either got married or had her father cosign for the credit card. She couldn't buy her own car unless she paid in cash, because no credit company would give her a loan unless she was married.

Seeing as I can and have done some of the things my mother and grandmother could not do (i.e. obtain birth control, get a credit card on my own, and take out a loan without my dad or hypothetical husband cosigning for me), I'd say I'm much happier to be a woman now than I would have been 50 years.  

Answer 12

I suspect that both men and women are less happy than 50 years ago.

The things we think are supposed to make us happier might actually be the things that make us less happy. It's great that we have freedom of movement, but this freedom has turned our society into a transient one in which community and familial ties are very weak.

Answer 13

it's individual, it depends on the personality of a women.

i personaly wouldn't be able to live like women lived 50 years ago because it's a life of a slave and i like to be free to make my own choices and not have my entire life planed out as soon as i'm born.

but it's also a lot of hard work and desitions you have to make on your own, and some women don't like responcability, they like to be taken care of, even like to be victims (this is a fact, i know a few of that kind).

i know if someone tried to make me live iside 4 walls all my life being nothing but a slave that can also be used as baby factory, i'd kill him without a second thought!!!

but that's just me

Answer 14

Not judging by the amount of moaning on here, and on the Marriage and Divorce section.

Answer 15

No way. I would love to go back to a time when I would be respected for doing the right thing and raising my own children.

Answer 16

Nope.