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.
