Critics say the Prime Minister is in an ideological time warp, but the time slot isn’t all that bad. The 1950s were one of the better decades. - Lawrence Martin, August 12, 2010
Well sure. If you were white, Christian, male, and right of center.
That was the era of the Cold War where anyone considered non-conformist was suspected of communist ties:
A Macleans magazine columnist described the paranoid atmosphere of the time: "If a housewife in Ottawa hears a knock on her door, it can be one of only two people. The milkman or the RCMP".
Racism was still ingrained into our laws and customs :
A Black carpenter and veteran of WWII was ostracized and his business boycotted until he was eventually forced to leave Dresden, Ontario because of his leadership to desegregate local restaurants and barbershops. His and other black families had been residents of Dresden since the 1850's. Until 1951, Windsor bars had separate sections called "jungle rooms" for Black patrons. In the 1950's, Joe Drummond, a Black resident of Saint John, New Brunswick, could not get a haircut anywhere in his own city. In 1954, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Grantly Adams, was denied a room in a Montreal hotel due to "regulations". First Nations children were routinely taken from their families and put into residential schools to "unlearn" their culture and language.
Women were generally viewed as appendages to their husbands:
The following guidelines (for a 1950’s housewife) appeared in a 1955 edition of Good House Keeping Magazine (follow the link for the full set, but make sure you have no sharp objects nearby):
(…)
• Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
• (…) After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
• Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
• Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
• Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
• Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
• A good wife always knows her place.
Homosexuality was considered a psychological disorder, deviant behavior, and a threat to national security:
"Fruit machine" is a jocular term for a device developed in Canada that was supposed to be able to identify homosexual people, or "fruits"…The fruit machine was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all homosexuals from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs.
Unwed mothers were ostracized. Abortions were illegal so unwed, pregnant women and girls faced the choice between an illegal, potentially fatal procedure (if they could even find anyone to perform it), or being stigmatized and ostracized for the rest of their life. The children were still referred to as bastards and stigmatized as well.
Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, illegitimacy began to be defined in terms of psychological deficits on the part of the mother.[6] …The dominant psychological and social work view was that the large majority of unmarried mothers were better off being separated by adoption from their newborn babies. According to Mandell (2007), "In most cases, adoption was presented to the mothers as the only option and little or no effort was made to help the mothers keep and raise the children."
...Unwed mothers were defined by psychological theory as not-mothers... As long as these females had no control over their reproductive lives, they were subject to the will and the ideology of those who watched over them. And the will, veiled though it often was, called for unwed mothers to acknowledge their shame and guilt, repent, and rededicate themselves."
Ahhhh…the 50s…sexually repressed, paranoid, mysoginistic, racist, god-fearin’, homophobic…yeah, that’s Stevie’s ideal time period for sure. Lawrence Martin gets that part right –
Do we have the makings of a new puritanism here? A Calvinistic comeback? The Justice Department has become the Conservatives’ priority department. There’s all that perfidy out there, so much that even the evangelical colleges have been getting economic stimulus grants. Onward Christian soldiers!
Harper: bringing Canada back…6 decades back. Because Father Knows Best.
8 comments:
Wow, have we come that far, only to look back over our shoulders to find this ideology right behind us and gaining? Funny, the advice to wives sounded exactly like a manual for training dogs. Is that how far we've regressed?
some people just pine for the good old days when they had lesser humans to kick around and make themselves feel more important. Just want to put some of us back in our place, under their boot. So hard to understand why they keep getting re-elected.
"In the 1950's, Joe Drummond, a Black resident of Saint John, New Brunswick, could not get a haircut anywhere in his own city"
I knew Joe Drummond (at least my family did) and he was an impressive man ... the black community of Saint John had been there since the major influx of 'loyalist American' - and he was proud of the continuity of community.
It is not specifically true that blacks could not get their hair cut in Saint John ... there was, at least one spot I knew of (we used to accompany a black friend down to the shop) near the viaduct on Main Street.
Even yet the point was well taken .... My mother was an RN. When a good friend and neighbour ours could not get his boy scout first aid badge as no one would 'test him', she, in disgust and indignation signed the appropriate papers.
Apparently the only one in town that would do so.
thanks, croghan. Details like that really help bring it home.
Ck didn't come to be until the late 60s; the psychedelic era, so all I know about is from watching reruns and having suffered my grandmother's old Pat Boone records, and of course, learning all about McCarthyism in High School.
Why did Lawrence Martin think it was such a great decade?
And why are folks only realizing this about Stevie spiteful now? He's talked about all this in his glory days of REform and NCC. People forget? Or they really wanted to believe he centered himself? Or they just like it?
Seems like the gloves are off and Stevie ain't pretending to be a centrist anymore. The sad thing is that media shills seem to believe that his retrograde policies sing to the average Tim Horton coffee sipping public. If this is indeed true, this country is lost.
Is it really even possible that 50% of the population, women, actually want the clocks turned back to the 1950s? Has the Real Women movement even reached anywhere near that traction? I know Steve the Vindictive is doing everything possible to shut up the voices of dissent, including women by dismantling the good works performed by the Status of Women department, but there must be lots of women out there who bristle at the concept of loosing all their long-fought rights, no?
Excellent writing and a beautiful blog!!
Our country is becoming an embarrassment....
thanks, Jim!
I don't know, folks...I doubt there are many women outside of that small percent like UNREAL women who really want to go back. I figure most don't look at what Steve's up to all that closely and if they do, it's just too hard to believe anyone could be as vicious as him. Also, the Libs aren't offering much of an alternative. If they did, we'd probably see a big swing.
Most polls show that the majority of Canadians don't want the 50s shit, so I think Steve needs to be exposed more and more. He's scary. Major ad campaigns needed - catchy stuff, lots of pictures showing contrast: what we have, what he plans, what we all stand to lose.
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