I’ve long condemned the use of memes in most cases as they are typically dishonest, or have to grossly simplify complex reality. Take this meme with it’s “once upon a time” tone that in the 50s taxes on the rich were higher and the average family could own a home, a car and afford to send their kids to college on the wages of one earner — the husband in memes.
It’s all bullshit.
THE NOSTALGIA FAIRY TALE
I find it highly appropriate it opens with the tediously overused phrase of fairytales, “Once Upon a Time, “ simply because this is all a big fairy tale.
Now, while anecdotes are not evidence, allow me to first touch on family anecdotes because those are the first thoughts that come to mind.
In this meme we see a happy suited dad off to the office while mom and child are waving good-bye. For a left-leaning meme it sure seems filled with images they ought to find problematic. It certainly is a sexist image with mom stuck at home with house cleaning and child care. And, as strange as that is I just don’t get why dad is opening up the passenger’s door to drive off to work. The meme represents only a fraction of 1950s American households. The “typical” Ozzie & Harriet scenario it depicts wasn’t quite as widespread as the meme implies. We won’t even mention how the meme seems to assume that back then people were all just white!
Prof. Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were — American Families and the Nostalgia Trap noted one of the most persistent anti-feminist myths, once this meme reeks of — “ is that 50 years ago women who stayed home full time with their children enjoyed higher social status and more satisfying lives than they do today.” Coontz, in Harvard Business Review, argued this…
…longing to reproduce an idealized piece of history. When people are collectively nostalgic about their past experiences as members of a group or as inhabitants of an era, rather than individually nostalgic for their personal experiences, they start to identify more intensely with their own group and to judge members of other groups more negatively. They become less optimistic about their ability to forge new connections — and more hostile to people perceived as outsiders. When such nostalgia gets politicized, it can lead to delusions about a mythical, magical Golden Age of the homeland, supposedly ruined by interlopers.
This too is a tactic of both the Left and the Right, especially those in more authoritarian camps. Trump did it, but in its own way this meme is another example of fairy tale nostalgia.
It’s an image I simply don’t know how to relate to, in spite of being born in the 50s and remembering a fair amount of it this many years later. I’ll start at my own home where my father worked for the fire department and would be gone for days on end—often coming home just for the weekend. My mother worked my entire life as well. She didn’t stand in the driveway waving goodbye. She had a job before and after I was born as a R.N. and went off to the hospital to work daily.
My three brothers and I had others who cared for us until Mom got home. A couple of months before my 10th birthday my father died, while my youngest brother was not yet 1 year of age. For the rest of our lives we were a one-parent family. I can look at my father’s parents, both of whom worked my entire lifetime. As far back as I can remember my grandfather worked at the steel mill and grandmother worked at Marshall Fields in Chicago’s Loop. They never owned a car and never sent their son to college.
A working mother and an aunt raised my paternal grandfather, his father was out of the picture, but I don’t know the reason.
On my mother’s side her mother worked her entire life at Carson, Piere and Scott, also in the Chicago Loop and lived in the old family home. She never owned a car and my mother worked her own way through nursing school. My grandmother’s husband left her long before I was born and moved to San Diego. My grandmother had three daughters and worked to support them. My one aunt, who never married, stayed with her and was also employed her entire life.
Working women were certainly NOT anomalies even in the 1950s. The women I knew in my family were all employed from at least the 1920s onward.
James Wetzel, writing for Monthly Labor Review, 1990, reminded readers, that individual specific memories of family life, “are seldom, if ever, an accurate depiction of the typical family. Indeed, it is fair to say that there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ family.” I believe that the myth of the typical family should be applied to badly drafted memes as well!
WOMEN AND WORK
Wetzel’s Census Bureau data showed about one in seven families were lead by a single parent in 1950 and about 11% of all households were made up of single individuals. Right there 25% don’t fit the meme’s stereotype, which depicts a well-off, suburban white family.
It should be noted these numbers were higher among African-Americans and other minorities. So what wasn’t true for the white middle-class family in the meme depicted, was even less true for racial minorities.
The Orlando Sentinel reported most people are unaware of how many women, who had been married, never had children. “In 1950 and 1960, one in five ever-married women age 45 to 49 was childless. This share was up from less than 10 percent in 1910 and 17 percent in 1940.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2000, reported: “In 1950 about one in three women participated in the labor force. By 1998, nearly three of every five women of working age were in the labor force. Among women age 16 and over, the labor force participation rate was 33.9 percent in 1950, compared with 59.8 percent in 1998.” The labor participation rate for women ages 16 to 53 was closer to 39% at any one time.
In addition, the percentage of women who worked was directly linked to household income at the time. Women in lower-income families were more likely to be employed. What the meme depicts is more in line with upper income white families than the average family. A 1952 Census Bureau report covered income for 1950. They reported in families with incomes over $10,000 per year, 14.2 percent of them included a “wife in paid labor force” but for those earning $6,000 — $6,999 per year the rate was 37.3 percent — considerably higher. They reported: “In general, the higher the husband’s income, the less is the likelihood that the wife will be working.”
They also noted the massive disparity between incomes of white families and non-white families, which the meme ignores. “As in all previous surveys, marked differences are found in the distributions of white and nonwhite families and individuals by income levels. For the country as a whole, the median income of white families and individuals was $3,100, about twice that received by the nonwhite group.” This was true “despite the fact that nonwhite families averaged more workers per family.”
The Orlando Sentinel noted labor participation rates for women increased throughout the 1950s, in spite of the image presented by this meme.
Even in the 1950s, about one-fifth of mothers had paying jobs. In 1950, the work-force rate for married women with children age 6 to 17 was nearly as high as that of married women without any children — 28 percent, compared with 30 percent.
By 1960 the rate for married mothers with school-age children was even higher than for childless wives — 39 percent vs. 35 percent.
Married women with preschoolers also increased their labor-force participation during the 1950s, from 12 percent to 19 percent.
This means, at the very minimum, one third of women were not babysitting the kids and acting as a maid for a hard working hubby. Ozzie and Harriet was television, not history. And for those where it was true they were more likely to be upper-income whites. The meme is far more racist that it appears at first glance.
HOME OWNERS IN UTOPIA AND SINCE
As for home ownership the Census Bureau reported ownership rates have risen each decade except the 80s where it held steady, but ownership in 1950 was 55% compared to the current rate of 65.6%. The Census Bureau reported: “Generally, homeownership rates rose in each decade since 1950, except in the 1980s when it remained unchanged increasing from 55 percent in 1950 to 66 percent in 2000.”
Not only have home ownership rates increased since the 50s but homes today are substantially larger. A head to head comparison that doesn’t take into account what is being bought is inherently misleading. It’s like claiming that Miss B paid $3.00 for some hamburger but Mr. C paid $6 for his hamburger. That sounds unfair until you realize Mr. C bought twice a much.
National Public Radio reported what sold as a family house in 1950 was substantially inferior to what was being purchased half a century later. Not acknowledging that is deceptive on the part of the meme. But, of course, the meme can’t do it. Which is one of many problems with getting your information from such an inferior method of fact checking. NPR reported:
The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet. Whether it’s a McMansion in a wealthy neighborhood, or a bigger, cheaper house in the exurbs, the move toward ever large homes has been accelerating for years.”
In August of 1955, the median home price was $18,437.24, which sounds much cheaper but then you aren’t taking into account wage differentials. In August 2004, the median home price was $187,121.91. Of course, what was being bought in 1955 was very different from what was purchased in 2004. If you are buying twice as much house in 2004 you need to adjust and see how it affected costs on a per square foot basis.
The typical 1955 new house was only 983 square feet on average, which is $18.75 per square foot of living space. In 2005 the average new house was 2,349 square feet making the cost per square foot $79.66. That sounds higher but there is one more factor to take into account — hourly wages. The money workers were paid in 1955 isn’t the same as the money paid in 2004 thanks to inflation. If someone in 1955 were earning $1 per hour, it would take 18 hours and 45 minutes to buy one square foot of house. If the 2004 buyer earned $30.00 per hour it would take them about 1 hour and 39 minutes to buy one square foot of house — which is substantially cheaper.
The most affluent households were those with a male breadwinner and white, those depicted by the meme. According the U.S. Department of Labor the median family income for a white family in 1950 was $3,445. That’s $66.24 per week or $1.66 per hour. The amount of labor necessary to purchase one square foot of house in 1950 was 11 hours and 20 minutes. —
If we look at 2019 figures we find the average white median household income was $76,057, or about $36.56 per hour. The median size of the new house was 2,322 square feet making it $138.45 per square foot, or 3.8 hours of labor, which in terms of actual work is about one-third the price it was in 1950.
KIDS AND COLLEGE IN THE 50s FAIRY TALE
If families could afford a house, a car and sending their kids off to college they certain weren’t doing so. The reason was simple, the income of the average family in 1950 didn’t allow it. That claim is a total falsehood.
Very few 50s families sent a kid to college at all and those who did attend were generally males. In 1957 only 9.6% of males had finished college and 5.8% of females. By 2019 it was 35.4% of males and 35.6% of females. If the 50s were the utopian years this meme depicts college graduate rates don’t show it.
If we look at tuition costs compared to median income we may see a reason for the dramatic growth in college enrollment in recent years, compared to the lack of enrollment in the Utopian 50s.
The University of Pennsylvania says the cost of attending college in 1950 was $600 for tuition, $25 for fees and $690 for room and board. The total was $1,315, which is just over 38% of the total household income of the more privileged, white households. In 2019 similar households had an average household income of $76,057 but tuition, fees plus room and board, was $24,623, which is 32% of the total household income. In terms of actual labor required to pay university costs for one student they have gone down since 1950, not up. It should also be noted that the average number of children per family declined over that period, so each family had fewer children to send to university.
Now, college fees haven’t gone down as much as the cost of cars or housing since the 1950s but then we haven’t had massive government efforts to make houses and cars cheaper. It should also be noted that since the 1950s state regulators have made huge efforts to use zoning and building regulations to intentionally push up the price of housing by making it more scare relative to demand.
In spite of massive efforts by the political manipulation of housing, prices still have fallen relative to labor required to purchase a house.
THE CAR CULTURE
As for car ownership, rates have gone up dramatically since the 50s. In fact more households now own multiple cars. The chart I found for that covers from 1960 to 2013, other charts go later but start later, all show an upward trend, not a decline as insinuated in this meme. In 1960 about 22% of the US population did not own a car. By 2013 it was just over 9%. Approximately 38% of households now own two cars, where in 1960 it was about 19%.
In 1955 there were 51.96 million registered automobiles in private or commercial ownership, which is one vehicle for every 3.19 people. By 2020 there were 281.4 million registered automobiles, which is one vehicle for every 1.17 people.