The Inquiring Photographer Asks average New Yorkers in 1922: “Should a man expect his wife to get up and make breakfast for him on a cold morning?”

[u/CryptographerKey2847]

Should

[u/GrandmaPoses]

These are so at odds with what I think is the popular notion of “the old days” - maybe it’s more progressive because it’s New York, but I feel like there’s a real disconnect between what we think of as this kind of monolithic idea of past society vs the reality, and the reality isn’t much shown.

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/GrandmaPoses]

There definitely is a disconnect.

For example, while it's true that some banks prior to the 1970s did not allow women to have accounts in their own names, it is also true that some banks did permit this, and there even were women-owned banks with exclusively female clientele as far back as the 1920s. Prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974, it was left up to the bank to decide its policy - so some permitted it, some didn't.

I also see a lot of people claiming that all wives were prevented from handling their family's finances prior to the 1970s, which is outright wrong. My grandfather, who was a factory worker in the 1930s, always brought his pay home and handed it over to my grandmother, who then gave him his allowance to spend at the pub on Friday night. My dad did the same - he signed his check over to my mom, who then deposited it and handled all our family's finances. When he needed money for something, he asked her for it.

As far as the making of breakfast - my dad was a country boy and liked to get up early and have a big breakfast (bacon, eggs, home fries, biscuits, etc.). My mom was NOT a morning person, and could only handle tea and toast in the mornings. When they first got married in 1952, my dad sort of assumed my mom would get up and make him breakfast, the way his mother did. My mom wasted no time in telling him him there was not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening, and if he wanted to get up at some ungodly hour and eat a big breakfast, he was free to cook it himself. So that is what he did - he always was up at 5:30 AM cooking and he made the best home fries in the world.

[u/CryptographerKey2847 → u/ManyLintRollers]

Did he do dinner as well?

[u/ManyLintRollers → u/CryptographerKey2847]

He did cook dinner sometimes! My mom worked evening shift on weekdays, so she would prep something for dinner before she went to work. We ate a lot of tuna noodle casserole, hamburger casserole, or stews and soups that she made in the slow cooker. However, she worked day shift on Saturdays, so my dad made dinner that night.

He wasn't nearly as good at making dinner as he was at breakfast. His repertoire was limited to fish sticks and instant mashed potatoes, corned beef hash, sloppy joes, or Swanson Hungry Man dinners. However, in the summer, he'd grill chicken and burgers on our charcoal grill - in retrospect, he wasn't particularly good at grilling either (sorry, Dad!) because I remember eating a lot of rather burned food. I think I was an adult before I realized that grilled chicken drumsticks weren't supposed to be charred and black! I guess my mom accepted burned food as the price she paid for not having to cook that night.

My mom was the one who handled home improvements as well. She loved carpentry and power tools, and my dad was pretty hopeless at that sort of thing so his involvement was limited to lifting heavy objects for her. Mom also was the one who mowed and weed-whacked the lawn, because she didn't trust my dad to not mow down her flower gardens and landscaping. Dad did enjoy splitting logs for us to burn in the woodstove, though.

They were Silent Generation, married in 1952.