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. Irrespective of. It’s sufficient, they are saying, that males have been women and men have been girls. Everyone knew their place and the standard nuclear household reigned supreme.
But when that’s your excellent, why cease there? Why not return to the even fiercer traditionalism of the Twenties as a substitute?
Whereas jazz-loving flappers with bobbed hair and “unfastened morals” are the favored stereotypes of the period, most middle-class girls within the Twenties crammed 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 life-style. I do know this as a result of she left behind a binder filled with newspaper articles and bulletins, letters, private notes, recipes, get together planning recommendation, birthday playing cards, and a protracted record of different ephemera.
The artifacts ship a transparent message. For all of the cultural modifications that outlined the Twenties — be they a girl’s proper to vote, the emergence of ladies docs and entrepreneurs, or common movie sirens flaunting their…
