In Part 1 I explained what life was life was like in the 1950s and '60s. Materially, it was not as good as today, but was still prosperous. Socially, it was much better in most instances. However, recently I saw how a columnist claimed that, over the last fifty years, life has become "more free" for most groups, and he singled out women, Aborigines, and homosexuals. Is that true? Let us have a look. You will see that, at best, it is merely a half truth.
Women are obviously the largest of these three categories, so we will start with them. Women have certainly moved out into many more fields than previously. However, it is a mixed blessing; they are now chained to their careers just like men are.
The first thing to understand is they didn't experience as many restrictions as you might imagine. There was nothing to stop them attending university, for example. The fact that a lot smaller percentage of women than men attended is because the former did not consider it so important. Women were required to leave the public service once they married. Employers often advertised for either male or female workers. Although they are not allowed to do so these days, if an employer wants a worker of a specific sex, he or she just shortlists out all the applicants of the wrong sex. However, the real reason for the increase in married women in the workforce was that employers wanted more staff, and encouraged them to take paid work. Ironically, that was also a period of employment contraction, and the unemployment rate increased from the low 2% to 6%, and ultimately 10%. Are we to assume that the two phenomena were completely unrelated?
Single income families are more productive, according to a Nobel Prize winning economist. It would be interesting to calculate how much of the additional women's income is taken up with expenses. Unless her career is lucrative, a high proportion will be taken up in child care and after school care, even with government subsidies. It is likely the family will require a second car. Indeed, even a stay-at-home housewife may very well require her own car, because the rise of the two car family has resulted in the disappearance of corner stores, and the growth of supermarkets at greater distances. I have previously described how the growth of the two income household has increased the price of houses. This is how events conspire to force married women into the workforce. As Helen Andrews put it:
By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else.Women, nevertheless, still possess a strong instinct to seek a good provider as a husband, and only as a last resort will marry, or even date, a man who ranks below them socially or financially. The result is that so many of them cannot find husbands. And, of course, it is well established that the higher a woman moves up the financial ladder, the more likely she is to be never married, divorced, and/or childless.
I have also pointed out that, for the last fifty years, public policy has been based on two absurd propositions: that feminine lifestyles are intrinsically inferior such that women must always adopt male lifestyles, and that men and women live separate lives when, in fact, they live together and share resources. The establishment gets upset if women are underrepresented in any field, ignoring the strong possibility that men and women, being different, might not want the same things. There is even a so-called "gender equality paradox" whereby, in countries where women have the most opportunity, they end up choosing different careers from men. Not only that, but since men and women tend to marry each other, their different career paths represent the way couples divide up their resources. The better a man is as a provider, the less likely is his wife to work full time, or at all.
But because the establishment refuses to recognize these factors, it seeks to force women into the paid workforce. Governments have resisted any attempt to support the single income family. The dependent spouse tax rebate was allowed to fall behind inflation and was finally abolished except for when the spouse required a carer - because, after all, a woman's place is in the office, not the home. Mothers of young children consistently express a desire to stay home and rear them, but the government does not subsidise them; it subsidises childcare. Worse still, it extols childcare as a way to help women stay in the workforce, thereby defining children as an impediment to a career, rather than the reverse.
Paul Collits expressed it fluently:
The dramatic move by women into the workforce has achieved many things – increased family stress, increased family costs, increasing traffic congestion in peak hour in the cities, giving grandparents unwanted second careers and causing many of them to move house (!), the ratcheting up of the cost of housing such that now a whole generation is excluded from the property ladder, jobless men, a false sense of female achievement, the birth of a new career (child-carer), the smearing of stay-at-home mothers and their appalling treatment by policymakers, [plus] searing political correctness in the workplace.No, women have not become more "free". They used to be free - to be women. Now they are compelled to bear Adam's curse as well as Eve's.
Aborigines. First of all, let us demolish one myth: that Aborigines were not allowed to vote before the 1967 referendum. Most of them were. The referendum only permitted them to be counted in the census, and for the Federal Government to make laws concerning them. Other than that, Aborigines came under state jurisdictions, and they ranged from urban mixed bloods, who were the subject of Nene Gare's classic novel, The Fringe Dwellers, to mostly full blood members in remote communities, who still maintained much of their tribal affiliations and traditional lifestyle.
The latter were essentially treated as minors, although individuals could apply for full citizenship rights if they could show they could manage their affairs properly. Otherwise, they were under the charge of administrators, or "Protectors". Since the latter possessed wide discretion, sometimes the system worked very well and sometimes it worked very badly. Children who were perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be victims of neglect or abuse could be taken into care. This has been demonstrated every time an alleged member of the "stolen generation" has taken the issue to court, and it has been left to the detailed investigations of Keith Windshuttle to establish that the central theme of the "stolen generation" myth: that there was a consistent, continent-wide government policy to remove half caste children from their families simply because they were half caste, is false.
In the interior, Aborigines lived in a symbiotic relationship with pastoralists, and there were special regulations regarding their wages. It was also illegal to sell alcohol to them and, in order to protect black women from sexual exploitation, it was illegal for a white person to sexual relations with them - hence the jibe that full citizenship meant access to "the bar and the brothel".
Of course, such policies couldn't last. Minors eventually grow up. Aborigines now have land rights, but it would be difficult to show that this has significantly improved their material situation. In the '70s and '80s there arose a campaign for "equal pay for Aborigines". When it succeeded - surprise, surprise! - all too often the Aboriginal stockmen lost their jobs. Some of them formed their own businesses, or "outstations", which is itself a good thing, but their income tends to be no better than when wages were unequal. Billions of government dollars are poured into Aboriginal welfare, but those in remote areas see little of it. It is mostly creamed off by white public servants and white people with some distant Aboriginal ancestry.
Meanwhile, "the bar and the brothel" have done their worst. Unemployment is the norm in the remote communities because, basically, they are too far from industries. Aboriginal communities are being destroyed by alcohol, pornography, and welfare, which they call "sit down money". Children are not going to school. They are not being fed. They are being taken into care, but not nearly as often as they should be, for fear of creating a "second stolen generation". Traditional society was violent, and women were treated as a lower form of life, but the level of violence is remote communities is so horrific it is hard to contemplate - along with the sexual abuse of children, which was rare in the old days. I don't know of anybody who denies these facts.
No, a return to the policies of the 1950s and '60s is neither possible, nor desirable. But let's not pretend they are better off.
Homosexuals. It says a lot about the way some people's minds works that they should treat a category of behaviour the same as physical categories such as sex and race. They are labelling a person's temptations, or mental disorder, as the core of his identity. In the old days, homosexual acts were illegal. Even so, due to the law's inability to intrude into people's homes and bedrooms, this usually meant acts which would have been considered public indecency if performed by a man and woman. While they no longer face the possibility of jail, it is still a horrible lifestyle, with soul-destroying promiscuity, physical damage, and venereal disease, including AIDS, which can only be held at bay by expensive drugs. They are subject to much higher levels of mental illness and suicide, even in countries where their activities are largely tolerated. The trouble is, these days the lifestyle is being actively promoted.
Three of my boyhood friends were homosexual. One gave himself over to the lifestyle, and I have lost contact with him. Another decided to remain celibate, and thus was saved from the many negative effects of the lifestyle. That's something you don't hear much of these days: it is not necessary to follow every sexual urge and, in fact, necessary not to. If you can't live a normal lifestyle, it is bad policy to adopt an abnormal one. The third friend, who had a crush on me, has since been married - to a woman - for forty years. That's another secret: same sex attraction is a phase which more than half of affected teenagers grow out of if left to their own devices.
How do you think these vulnerable young people would have fared if they had been exposed to the grooming which goes under the rubric of "sex education" and "safe schools" these days? (Don't forget to scroll down to the comments on the second link, as they provide even more information.)
There is a determined effort these days to corrupt the sexual morals of children. This is another reason why growing up is so much more now, as I shall explain in Part 3.
