STILL TO BE FINISHED........
My mother in law is nearly 96, and it's astounding how the world has changed for women in her lifetime.
Added to that, her mother was 41 when she was born, which gives us a direct link back to 1879, someone who was grown up even before Queen Victoria died!
I started thinking about this when I looked at this website: https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2016/16/5-ways-the-world-has-changed-for-women-during-the-queen-s-lifetime which just shows a few changes which have occurred in The Queen's life time. They list well-known changes, such as the fact that we have our own money and can get loans, and we don't have to retire when we marry.
This set me thinking of others which I could think of. And this list seems to go on for ever .................
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| Symington's factory in about 1930 |
- women going into pubs, this was definitely frowned upon, even if they were in pairs or in groups.
- women driving was very unusual, they often didn't have the money to pay for lessons and upkeep of a car and it somehow gave the impression that they were not being looked after by their husbands.
- women going out to work was seen by many men as a reflection that they didn't earn enough and affected their feelings of self-worth (no mention was every made of the women's feelings of self-worth). So there certainly weren't women engineers and such like.
- swimwear, none of itsy bitsy teeny weeny bikinis in those days!
- parking tickets and traffic wardens and parking meters (1960)
- train network, no-one was more than a few miles from a station.
- make-up and cosmetics, wearing it, and types of makeup
- bras? invented in about 1910 but didn't really take off until the 1930s, gosh I could write a whole blog about bras and nothing else, so see these links for more information: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-17300619; and http://nannerl.typepad.com/blog/history-of-brassieres.html; and https://backinvogue.wordpress.com/tag/1910-1919/; and http://www.sfgate.com/style/article/Bras-a-century-of-suspension-3237587.php
- toothpaste came in powder form in tins when I was young
- no soft toilet paper, no kitchen towels, no paper tissues. Loo paper was like greaseproof paper (Izal was one make), or people just used torn newspaper, threaded with a bit of string and hung on a hook in the (outside) privvy.
- in 1920 women over 30 had recently been given the vote, so long as they were property owners or married to a property owner The vote for all women over 21 came in in 1928,
- In those days anyone having a baby out of wedlock was encouraged, even forced to give the baby away. Shame on the family!
- social security: even when I was young there was no housing benefit. Someone I heard of who had left her violent husband got no help from the state, even though she had two children. Child benefit (called Family Allowance) had been introduced shortly after WWII but only for second and subsequent children. It was granted to first children as well in 1976 (£1 for first child, 90p for others).
- nhs
- indoor water, many homes had no indoor water
- electricity, no universal
- indoor loo/bathroom. bathed/washed hair less often. Even in the 1970s the government was giving out grants to enable people to put in indoor bathrooms. (http://www.peoplescollection.wales/story/378120)
- washing clothes by hand.
- teenagers didn't exist, one minute you were a child, the next you were a mini grown-up. And you weren't considered grown up 'til 21.
- trousers, women never wore trousers in those days, first introduced in the 1930 and were considered very 'fast'.
- sport
- oral contraptive, introduced in the 1960s
- homosexuality was not legalised until 1967 for men, it had never been illegal for women as it was not generally thought that such a thing existed. So certainly no civil partnerships or same-sex marriages.
- heart attacks, lots more these, especially before heart transplants.
- literacy
- more car ownership
- fewer trains
- tarmaced roads
- body shape
- clothes all custom-made, couldn't buy ready-made items.Fashion all came from Paris.
- TV - the first TV was demonstrated in 1926 in Salt Lake City, by John Logie Baird (http://www.ksl.com/?sid=38285194&nid=1012&title=4-ways-tv-has-changed-in-the-past-90-years)
- radio. I can remember hearing that if a family had a radio there'd be a set of headphones, so only one person could listen at a time.
- censorship
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/1-shoes-and-rising-hemlines-how-fashion-has-changed-in-the-queen/
- penicillin and other medicines
- sellotape, velcro, plastic bags, nylon, photocopier, ballpoint pen, helicopter, aerosol cans, (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=249738)
| A bra of the times |
Fashion: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/1-shoes-and-rising-hemlines-how-fashion-has-changed-in-the-queen/
See also: https://www.savvywoman.co.uk/7017/whats-changed-for-women-and-for-money-over-the-last-90-years/
How life has changed in the past 100 years: http://www.techinsider.io/how-the-world-has-changed-in-100-years-2015-12
