>Re: "IMO that was grotesquely unfair" - Not really. Girls were happy to be raised to be that part of the family who stayed home after they were married. Even the school system pushed those values on them with cooking and sewing classes while you and I were taught the skills we would need to earn a living for a family by taking what we called industrial arts classes. Call it brainwashing if you like, but that is just the way it was back then.

I don't think it's that simple. Some girls were happy to be raised to be "homemakers"; others were desperately unhappy to be pigeonholed that way.

My grandmother was studying to be a lawyer when she married my grandfather. Instead of becoming a lawyer, she had 5 children in 7 years. While she was quite skilled in the domestic arts (she baked her own bread and created her own knitting patterns, among other things), she was miserably unhappy as a full-time wife and mother. She was much happier later in life when her children were grown and she had a full-time job.

Because our culture wants to remember that era as golden, we've built this Donna Reed/Father Knows Best image that the women loved it. But that's a terrible oversimplification. It's also worth pointing out that the era in question wasn't really that long. It's a 20th-century middle-class notion that moms stay and raise kids while dads go out and earn a living. In earlier times, every adult was needed to survive, and that was always true for the poor. As for the rich, they've never raised their own kids, but always paid others to do so.

Tamar