It irks me when D/s blogs on here glorify and romanticise the 1950s~ as the kind of ‘golden era’ of marriages – back then, women didn’t consent to submission, there were no formal written agreements. Women were EXPECTED to be submissive in marriage – shouldn’t submission in a relationship be a free and conscious choice? The choice NOT to submit simply wasn’t considered a valid one + marriages only lasted longer because divorce, for a woman, was considered ‘taboo’.
(submitted by: Anonymous)
(submitted by: Anonymous)
The tradwife thing does nothing for me… I have no interest in siring anyone’s 2.4 kids, and Daddy likes a good little earner.
But devil’s advocate mode = ON.
You are correct, there was nothing golden about the ‘50s. It was a time of simmering civil strife, espionage and half-baked diplomacy with the Russians, and rampant racist paranoia among elected officials. And they still had polio. (Basically, imagine if 2022 stopped taking Adderall and started wearing hats.) The ’50s are the last place I’d go in a time machine.
But part of the reason kinky people sometimes view the marriages of the time as idyllic is because a lot of the people who lived through them saw it that way. Not Betty Friedan, obviously… misery was often the silent partner of housewifery at its height, no question. But a lot of women were quite content with their lot at that time. Tens of millions of them felt fortunate to lead those lives, lives their mothers would have coveted. You can’t erase them or the satisfaction they took in their choices.
Were the ’50s a good time for women as a whole? No, of course not. Did the decade’s norms conceal and/or perpetuate toxic households? Fuck yeah. But I can see what was hot about the marriages. I can understand the appeal. If you could fit the mold, it was a wonderful time to be alive, and some people will always love to fit a mold.
As should be clear by now, I have a mold allergy.