Cautious what you would like for, nostalgia buffs
Blind nostalgia for the Fifties afflicts many People, a few of whom weren’t round to expertise that period’s crushing conformity and chauvinism. Regardless of. It’s sufficient, they are saying, that males had been women and men had been ladies. Everyone knew their place and the normal nuclear household reigned supreme.
But when that’s your preferrred, why cease there? Why not return to the even fiercer traditionalism of the Twenties as an alternative?
Whereas jazz-loving flappers with bobbed hair and “free morals” are the favored stereotypes of the period, most middle-class ladies within the Twenties stuffed their time with cooking, child-rearing, golf equipment, social gatherings, housekeeping, and recipe sharing.
My paternal grandmother, a 32-year-old housewife with two younger sons when Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, exemplified that conventional way of life. I do know this as a result of she left behind a binder stuffed with newspaper articles and bulletins, letters, private notes, recipes, celebration planning recommendation, birthday playing cards, and an extended checklist of different ephemera.
The artifacts ship a transparent message. For all of the cultural adjustments that outlined the Twenties — be they a girl’s proper to vote, the emergence of ladies docs and entrepreneurs, or standard movie sirens flaunting their…
