Nostalgia and the 1950's

Once again there are so many things to write about I’m having trouble picking any.  My husband just suggested that I write about oil prices.  That takes about three lines.  The Koch brothers own more oil and gas companies than any other conglomerate, and since they are so anti-Obama, it is easy to see the connection between escalating gasoline prices at the pump and the year that Obama is up for re-election.  I watch the TV pundits talk about the fact that it is ‘the speculators’ on Wall Street who are driving up the price of oil.  Well, duh!

Then there is the Republican party trying to take us all back to the 1950’s.  That is the decade that I graduated from college, got married, had the first bumper sticker on the UC Davis campus, “Joe Must Go”, referring to Joe McCarthy, had our first, second, third, and fourth babies, and my husband earned his PhD in Soil Physics.  I don’t remember too much about politics in that decade!  We also had a baby in 1960.  Vatican roulette, or the natural method of birth control. 

But I do remember that my application to the State Department was turned down because I was 35 pounds overweight.  That didn’t seem to be a problem with some porky men I saw pictures of working for the State Department at that time, however.  I could have gone on to law or medical school, neither of which really appealed to me, but other than that my prospects for a job were nursing, teaching or secretary.  Not much of an option.  And I had to be really careful about where I went or with whom I was seen because I had been indoctrinated to not be seen as ‘one of those women’.  I never really knew at that time of innocence what ‘those women’ did to be one, but then it was the 1950’s.

It was in the 1950’s that I also did a short stint as a social worker in Santa Clara County.  When a young Hispanic woman and her brother came in to see me with the complaint that her husband kept stabbing her and the local police department would do nothing about it, (Mexicans stabbed each other all of the time, was the excuse) the brother told me if I didn’t do something about it, he would kill the husband.  In my vapid stupidity I explained to him that I noticed he had on a wedding ring, and asked if he had children, and he answered in the affirmative.  So I explained that he had told me of his plans which would make it pre-meditated murder, which meant either the death penalty or a long prison sentence.  The couple left, and I felt very smug.  That night the unmarried brother killed the husband.  I quit my job and moved to another county.  I kept track of the case, and the unmarried brother was convicted of involuntary homicide.  Justice was done, sort of.

When my husband finished his course work, we moved to Reno, NV where he taught at the U of N while he finished writing his thesis.  That was the time that the United States wanted the winter Olympics to be at Squaw Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, but, Nevada still had a poll tax to keep its minorities from voting, and that was the only reason Nevada got rid of the poll tax.  It wanted the revenue from tourism.  Minorities were already prohibited from going into the gambling casinos for the general public, except as entertainers.  They had their own club, The Cotton Club.  That was good enough for them, the state said.

Contraceptives and abortion were illegal everywhere, inter-racial marriage was illegal in some states. There was the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, to guarantee women the same rights as men.  It still hasn’t passed even though it has been introduced in Congress every year since 1923!

There used to be an ad for a cigarette called Virginia Slims which was aimed at women.  “You’ve come a long way, baby!”  After this week’s uproar, and very rightly so, over Rush Limbaugh’s horribly disgusting statements to and about a young woman who was refused permission to testify before Congress about birth control not always being about contraception, but which can be medically necessary for some women, including her friend, I have only two comments to make.  One, we need to Flush Rush, and women have not come nearly far enough if he can get away with saying what he did.

I guess it depends on whether you are a minority or a woman if you have a nostalgic view of the 1950’s.  For us, it wasn’t so good.