There is an old adage that “History is written by the victors” but it’s more accurate to say that history is rewritten with each time the story is retold, just like a game of Chinese whispers, only with each telling morphed to suit the cognitive bias of the story teller.
You have to be careful when discussing previous eras not to lean too heavily on your modern perspective as in doing so, you risk completely misunderstanding the people, and events of the past.
No more obvious has this become than in the Information age. For the last decade or so, humans have been able to communicate faster and to a far greater audience than ever before. It’s difficult to even accurately analyse the electronic word even in the moment, never mind in the annals of time.
The rate of change in acceptable societal discourse and belief is changing at the rate of knots, the Overton Window narrows by the minute. People whose opinions would have been considered left of centre merely a couple of years ago are now considered not just right, but outside of acceptability. Take a look at the positions of someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, whom not so long ago was against gay marriage and illegal immigration and has since flipped 180 degrees but, if you’re being charitable, has adapted for a modern audience.
I pick on Hillary here, but she is in no way unique amongst the political classes and I do not think it is a bad thing for peoples opinions to change over time, although with most politicians it appears they will say whatever is expedient at the time, rather than having genuine changes of heart.
Sportsmen and women are being vilified for comments that they may have made on platforms like Twitter when Twitter was a niche environment, a decade beforehand. The comments are often isolated from the context and intent of their younger selves, but they are no less forced to apologise for something that may have seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I see myself as being lucky to have grown up before this technology evolved. I think if millennials and their precursor generations are being honest with themselves, I don’t think there is a single person that would pass the purity testing that we now have.
If our perceptions and views of the world have changed so dramatically just in the last 10 years alone, just think how much more different our ideas are now compared with the average 1950s family.
If you deviate, even slightly, from the current cultural positions on sex politics, it’s not uncommon to come across slurs such as “you’re living in the 1950s”, as if the maxim is valid in-situ for actual counter evidence to biological facts.
This stimulates me because of the fragrant mischaracterisation of the period by generations that have no genuine understanding of life in the 1950s. The typical conception is that the period was a miserable time for women. That sex roles were austere and that only the work of brave feminists from the 1970s emancipated women from what was claimed to be an oppressive state.
I do not believe that this interpretation would be recognisable for a lot of those that came of age in this era and in the rest of this article I will explain why.
That is not to say that there isn’t a modicum of truth to the position. To understand the 1950s, you really have to understand what came before. It is certainly true that sex roles were more restrictive than they are today, and it’s also true that the early 1950s had an air of austerity, turning to prosperity and growth and the decade proceeded.
In Britain, for which I will lean on heavily for my analysis, food rationing was still in place until 1954. 383,700 British military personnel died in the Second World War from 1939 – 1945, 450,900 if you include civilians too. To put that into context, the male population in 1939 was estimated at 22,099,700 so the loss was in the region of 2% of the male population. Compare that to the rate of deaths from covid of 0.245 (population 68,393,741, covid deaths 167,927 at time of writing).
When you factor in the impact of those fortunate enough to survive military service, and the injuries both physical and psychological, it is easy to understand why many view the period as somewhat grim, but this does not tell the full story.
In 1948, the National Health Service was formed, making free at the point of use Healthcare available to all UK citizens for the first time. We take it for granted now but at the time it was a radical proposal. Not only did it provide healthcare for the sick, including maternity services that have led to huge declines in child mortality, it also became one of the countries largest employers, employing an estimated 68,000 nurses and 11,700 doctors at the start.
The notion that women were confined to the kitchen sink is simply not true. In fact, there was such a shortage of workers in the UK that men and women from the commonwealth were invited to the UK en-masse. This was the windrush generation.
Elsewhere, old Victorian slums were being cleared and entire new cities were being built at pace. This process started after The Great War and continued following the Nazi bombardment from the Second World War. Indoor toilets, electricity, hot running water were becoming the norm for the first time and also more affordable for average working class families than at any time prior or since.
When people say that “you want things to go back to the 1950s”, to be honest, if I compare the affordability and quality of housing stock from this period to the crisis we have now, whereby even professional workers are unable to afford to live in a growing number of cities, it’s difficult to see this as a negative proposition.
The 1950s was perhaps the birth period of the teenager. Go back to the Industrial Revolution in Northern working class homes and what you will find is children having to work, either down mines, in factories with little health and safety or as chimney sweeps. Child mortality rates were high, disease was rife, abject poverty was the norm. Every member of the typical working class family had to work. We only stopped sending women and children down the mines in 1842 due to the number of accidents. The accidents continued, but somehow more acceptable when the losses were adult males. There was, however, a certain but limited amount of sympathy for the widows left behind.
The periods where a married man’s income alone was enough to purchase acceptable housing and a wife was free to concentrate on children and domestic duties (1930s and 1950s-1980s) were not oppressive at all, it was liberation from a hand to mouth existence. This was the halcyon period for the middles classes
The high employment rates of the 1950s and technological advances vastly reduced the amount of time common chores took. Imagine what life would have been like without refrigerators (1940s), gas ovens (1920s), vacuum cleaners (1930s), automatic washing machines (1930s), lightbulbs (1809), running water (1930s), central heating (1930s), televisions (1928), telephones (1876).
I alluded to the birth period of the teenager. 1950s teenagers actually had disposable income and there were new exciting venues such as record shops, ice cream parlours, discos, cinemas. Compare the freedom 1950s teen had to teens now and you will see that it was a time of great opportunities and little parental supervision. Imagine what it must have been like to go and see acts like Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Drifters, Cliff Richard, Roy Orbison. The list is never ending.
If you had a choice to live at any point of time up to the 1950s, I think it’s safe to say you would have chosen the 1950s. In fact, according to research, people reported being significantly happier in comparison to anytime since.
Of course, some things have changed for the better since the 1950s but the period certainly does not deserve it’s position in the public zeitgeist as oppressive to women. Sometimes more choice can lead to greater uncertainty and unhappiness.
For the vast majority of people these days it is no longer possible to afford a roof over your head on a single wage. This is one of the bad side effects of expanding the working market to women. Women were told that being forced to work was liberating and that looking after children and being provided for was oppressive, yet so many women today yearn for a family and come to the realisation that their fertile window is much narrower than they are now made to believe, and for a lot of women that isn’t liberating, it’s devastating. The comfortable lie about being able to “have it all” has become a millstone of pressure and expectation around the necks of lots of women today. They are either left with maternal guilt over having to leave their children in the hands of strangers or their unrealistic expectations of relationships are leaving them dissatisfied in their relationships or unable to find a partner at all.
For men, the choice in the 1950s was work or work. The choice now is exactly the same but society has lost gratitude and appreciation for that sacrifice and with no incentive to progress, little prospect of owning their own homes, little chance of finding a woman that hasn’t been poisoned by misandrist lies, they’re turning their back on adulthood and staying in a perpetual state of adolescence where quick fix dopamine hits replace goalsetting and striving for status, and you know what, you can hardly blame them. You can’t expect to constantly tell men that they are the problem in society and expect them to wilfully give up their freedom for the benefit of the alleged victims of their oppressive nature. It’s a bit like calling your electorate deplorable and expecting them to vote for you.
I’m not optimistic about the future as our bastions of knowledge swap the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of safety. The relationship between the sexes has never been more strained, which only makes it easier for governments to remove rights from individuals as the dependency on a welfare state takes over from the nuclear family, many commentators are beginning to see the resemblance between the current state of play and the fall of Rome and it is becoming increasingly difficult to counter those observations with hope.
Society has regressed in many ways since the 1950s, and I say this as a millennial with no “lived experience” of the period so it’s not a case of rose tinted glasses and nostalgia misguiding my thoughts but yes, I absolutely would happily reset society back to the era that held so much promise, if only to make sure future generations would not be coddled with the safetyism that has left them choosing feelings over objective biological facts.
Before people assume the wrongs of 70 years ago, I would suggest they look at the ills of today and a good place to start would be by reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray.
Rant Over 
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