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To: otness_e
one of the people interviewed (the one who was a flight attendant for several years) made it seem as though women weren't allowed into the medical professions or science professions at all. Isn't nursing (and by extension, air stewardess, her explicit profession) a medical profession and requiring medical and scientific training? I find that claim hard to believe, that she was barred from the medical community.
I have to tell you that in fact women were traditionally not considered candidates for professions. This is a fact. The only two professions which were open to them were nursing and teaching. And nursing as a profession did not exist prior to the Civil war era. Women didn’t get the vote until less than a century ago. These things are true. The fact that teaching was so close to being the only profession open to women had the effect of subsidizing education; women who would have undertaken more seriously regarded roles in society took up teaching instead.

In fact during WWII the US Army had a codebreaking operation in Washington, and one of their covers for the secret operation was the fact that women were doing all the work, so it couldn’t possibly have been serious work of interest to spies. Meanwhile, of course, the women were straitly charged against giving any hint to the outside world of what they were doing.

In thinking about the charges against Roy Moore, they boiled down to the fact that he spent his 20s in Vietnam, and came home and took interest in unmarried girls. Well, guess what! In my HS class it seemed as if 95% of the girls were married within a year of HS graduation. Granted that that was a few years ahead of Vietnam - but also it was Pennsylvania, not Alabama. IOW, not every woman who was unmarried at age 30 ever would marry. And altho he ended up marrying a divorcee, it would have been understandable indeed for him to not have considered divorcees his primary market going in.

That relates to “women’s place” exactly how? Girls learned housekeeping skills by mentorship from their mothers - and realistically, a girl wouldn't have to be 20 yo to have learned as much as she was ever likely to about housekeeping skills without being in charge of them herself. And the same is not true of a man, who needs a college degree or other technical training/experience to qualify to support a family. Thus there is nothing really strange about a 30yo man taking interest in a teenaged girl. It has always been typical for grooms to be older than their brides.


28 posted on 01/01/2018 7:30:58 PM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (Presses can be 'associated,' or presses can be independent. Demand independent presses.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Like I said, I really fail to see how she wouldn’t be applied for the medical profession during that time since... well, being a nurse IS IN the medical profession. It’s kind of the point of being a nurse, to be able to provide medical needs to someone prior to a doctor’s visit, not to mention first aid if someone is undergoing injuries or medical problems in the air. Not to mention first aid and medical training is actually required during the fifties to become an air stewardess anyways (at least until the late 1950s when they dropped that bit).

And I don’t deny that women probably had few opportunities in professions (many of them weren’t even interested in those kinds of professions anyhow barring the ones listed, or even if they were, they also had some sense of family unity and respect towards their husbands especially if they came from a culture that looked down upon men who couldn’t provide for their families), or that women weren’t allowed to vote until the 1920s. I’m just saying that it makes zero sense to claim they were specifically barred from entering the medical and science professions during the 1950s, since you kind of need some knowledge in medical stuff and science to even BE a nurse (now, pre-Civil War, I can understand since nursing as a profession didn’t even exist yet as you said). Besides, it’s not necessarily rare for women to be in the work force by that time. My paternal grandmother briefly worked at IBM regarding cataloguing while my grandpa was fighting on the German Front during WWII, and she did a good enough job that they even considered giving her a permanent job at it. She refused, due to respect for her husband (my grandpa was of norwegian descent, and it would have resulted in him being looked down upon if he was not the breadwinner).


29 posted on 01/01/2018 7:44:55 PM PST by otness_e
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