In the wake of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, a bunch of women left their husbands, headed into NYC, and got jobs at publishing houses or magazines. They had to fight to be taken seriously. They were put in secretarial roles instead of writing roles. Or they were editors that shepherded men through the process of writing their brilliant books. Or whatever. It was only a select few women in the overall total of the US population, white, college-educated. Still, it was significant enough that it gets mentioned in feminist histories.
At any rate, all I can think of now when I consider that history is, wow, there were jobs. And when they got those jobs, they could pay for a little apartment in the city. I don’t think those jobs exist anymore. Maybe they didn't really ever in significant numbers. Maybe it’s just that the women who did that all wrote books about it.
But I do know friends whose fathers died and so their mom got a job at the library and with that managed to pay for the mortgage and bills when combined with, I don’t know, a pension or something.
My Mom had lots of jobs. She would generally work at one for two years, maybe longer, get tired of it, then get a new job. And these were all part time jobs. She could always somehow find another part time job when she wanted one.
It’s not like that now.
I know that the Post-War economy in the United States was an aberration. An outlier in human history. We were more prosperous than any other country in human history by several magnitudes. It was never going to last forever. But it would have been nice if it hadn’t been smashed all to bits in the Eighties.
Whatever. I’m sitting on a pleasant porch. A male robin was just sitting for a bit on a wire just outside the window. He was yammering about something, then flew off to, no doubt, work on the nest he’s building. That’s what male robins do this time of year. I know a fair amount about what robins do in the spring, as longtime readers know.
Now I have to build a nest, a bit late in the season. I mean, I have built a nest, really. A social nest that I have been tucking myself into for a while. I’m sitting now on a great porch, listening to robins squawk and cats meow, eating lentil & rice snacks from Trader Joe’s because I have good friends. That’s my social nest.
But shouldn’t I have something more solid? Is that a possibility at this point? Is anything solid in this insane country?
I have no answers, only snacks.