I have a theory about our nation's misogyny which may be too simplistic, but keeps coming back up in my mind.

[wnylib]

64. I think that's definitely a factor in both WWI and WWII.

Last edited Thu Jan 2, 2025, 10:49 PM - Edit history (1)

After some successes in women's rights by suffragettes in the 1800s and early 1900s, the movement was suspended during WWI.

As the western territories in the US became states and Native Americans were confined to reservations by the end of the 1800s, the "Old Wild West" became glorified in the early 1900s with tales of conquests by heroic strong men.

During WWII, society accepted women in a broader variety of jobs "for the war effort," while men were off at war. But when men returned, women were expected to stop working outside of the home and tend to housekeeping, children, and being social assets for their husbands in their jobs and in the community. (Poor women, widows, divorcees , and many women of color still worked out of necessity, but at lower pay.)

War veterans had access to funding for college and upward mobility became a theme for young families in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Women were expected to be appendages of their husbands, entertaining their business and community contacts, keeping a perfect home, using whatever intelligence and organizational skills they had for running a smooth and stressfree household.

That period of the late 1940s and all of the 1950s coincided with the development of TV. A large number of programs were either westerns or sit coms.

The westerns picked up on the old Wild West myths from the late 1800s and early 1900s of heroic, conquering men. They featured patriarchal families like the Cartwrights of Bonanza, cowyboys like in Rawhide, rescuers like the Lone Ranger. The heroes were highminded, ethical strong men constantly in gun battles with bad guys and Indians (one and the same in most scripts),and brought civilization and "the American Way" to uncivilized wildernesses. Women were dependent on them for protection while they confined themselves to "female things" like cooking and tending children. (Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke was an exception.)

The mythical images in those westerns were about as realistic as the portrayals of the West in Blazing Saddles. In reality, the women worked side by side with the men, plowing, planting, and harvesting. They learned to use guns when their husbands were away. And they still raised the children, cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and made the family's clothes, or mended and altered the few store bought ones that they had. They learned to use home remedies without a doctor in rural areas. They birthed their children alone if the husband was away, or depended on help from Native Americans that they befriended.

My husband's aunt once showed me a letter that her great grandmother received in the 1800s from a family friend who was a missionary in the Kansas territory. He wrote that the Indians were the civilized people of the West. They had well established customs and courtesies that they had practiced for many generations. They regarded honesty and integrity in their dealings very highly. They were more spiritual and faithful in following their "Pagan" religions than the White settlers and frontiersmen were in following their own religious teachings.

He wrote about settlers as ruthless, cruel, greedy, dishonest, and generally lawless. For many of them, being married homesteaders with families did not settle them down. He concluded that the kind of men who were attracted to settle in the West were social misfits who could not abide by common decency rules of civilized people, so they sought "open spaces" to live as they pleased.