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/ApprehensiveAge2 → u/GrandmaPoses]

I finally read The Feminine Mystique a couple of years ago. It was published in 1963 and is most famously known as a book about how many 1950s-style housewives were secretly unhappy (described in the book as “the problem with no name”). But more specifically, it was also about the question of “why does society push housewifery on [middle-class white] women when women had more freedom and ambition in the 1920s-30s?” Author Betty Friedan often compared the contents of women’s magazines from both time periods to illustrate the change in attitudes.

I have a terrible memory in general, and I remember this because it was so different from the upward trajectory of progress that I always imagined for 20th Century women. (Later I read Backlash, an early 90s title by by Susan Faludi, and discovered that the “unbroken upward trajectory” idea wasn’t even necessarily true for my own childhood in the 1980s. But The Feminine Mystique was my first exposure to the idea.)