One thing about this film is the way it showed the narrowness of the worlds of young women in the U.S. of the 1950's. Except perhaps for the young woman with a taste for murder mysteries,life for them revolved around dreary jobs and male attention. (Of course the murderess was the unluckiest. )Caspary was a little more generous with female lives when it came to the heroine in Laura. What Lang thought..is unknown.
shareThings haven't changed for women, have they? The majority still deal with jobs they might not like and had dreams of finding companionship. All around, people don't change an awful lot.
One thing: Women have more job opportunities than back then. I used to write a "Looking Back" column for our city newspaper, meaning that I had to look through old papers to find interesting items. I noticed that, in the Fifties and through most of the Sixties, want ads were divided into "Men's Jobs" and "Ladies' Jobs". The latter generally included waitress, receptionist, and nurse.
Actually, people likely were, on average, happy with their lives, more content. No, they weren't drones or mindlessly devoted to simple lives. However, in relatively recent memory, they had World War II and the Great Depression. Then, there was the Korean War and, later, the beginnings of the conflict in Vietnam. The Baby Boom had gotten underway in 1946, and the returning vets meant a boom in building. I'm just saying that "depressing lives" isn't really accurate at all when describing the time period. For one thing, women were headed toward greater independence, having sampled being in more-unusual workplaces during the war years (factories, for example).
~~MystMoonstruck~~
Things have gotten worse for women imo. Or should I say we have allowed it to get worse. You would think with all of the education possibilities and jobs that are opened to us and women graduating from college in higher rates then men women would not still think of ourselves as objects simply here for the pleasure of man. I believe our self esteem is at a all time low and seeing how young ladies who are coming up behind us it is even worse. Abusive teenage relationships are running rampart. Something that was rare when I was a teenager in the 70's There has never been so much plastic surgery being done in quest of staying young and attractive to men. But even teenage girls are opting for plastic surgery too. We allow men to call us bitches and any other name in the book. It use to be very taboo to talk that way regarding women. It is no big thing to see teenage girls pregnant it is like it is part of the norm. Yes I am not a person that believes things were peachy cream in the 40's and 50's, far from it. But there is little or no excuse for women today to be in the predicament we find ourselves in.
sharemarbleann, you make some very good points. I agree with you 100 percent.
The Wire...the best series in the history of television
I second what Robbie said: marbleann is dead-on right. After all the risks we took and the ridicule we endured in the 1970s to support the cause of equality, it is depressing--at the very least-- to see women revert to the notion that their worth is based on their appearance. Young women today seem to think that "equal rights" means that women have the same right as men do to demean themselves.
Yes this is standard feminist theory - in the 1950s women had to be good housewives, today women have to be beautiful.
shareMarble - beautiful post. We must raise our daughters to respect their intellect, and refuse to accept substandard relationships.
shareI've always had the suspicion that as soon as a problem is solved, by a new invention or a change in values…new problems are created. I liked this movie very much…Norah's roommates are funny, and Raymond Burr is delicious to watch. However, it reminded me that even in my youth, decades later, date rape was still extremely common. I remember sitting with my friend in a cold bed and breakfast in London. No central heating, no sheets, just a hard bed and a thin blanket for each girl in the three bed room. It was too cold to sleep, so we told each other stories. Suddenly I asked her: Do you think it's a pity we cannot rape men? And she replied, without hesitating: I do, for sure. And she told me why. Then I complained about that now that we have the pill, every guy is automatically assuming every girl is taking it, which means they are all free game. By the way, my friend and I were both Roman Catholics. She was forbidden to take the pill by her parents, and I was intimidated by the priests. During the conversation it turned out that we both had ample experience that would explain why we wished we could rape men…and we were just 18 years old at the time.
I agree with the previous poster, girls should refuse to accept substandard relationships…but the problem is that many girls consider abusive relationships normal, because they perceive them as the norm.
You may cross-examine.
An old thread, but what a silly revisionist post.
What was so depressing about the lives of these three friends living together in their apartment? For the 50's it was a nice place, the girls had fun and they supported themselves.
Do you think men had it better?
It was not easy for veterans to reintegrate into society after fighting abroad in the war, many suffering lasting trauma and loss as a result. These guys had spent long years in an awful war and had seen their buddies blown to bits by grenades. They were often physically and mentally damaged, they came home with limbs missing and steel plates in their heads.
They were displaced in the work force, many became vagrants who couldn't really readjust to civilian life anymore.
Do you really think all men lived it up in great apartments and high-paying jobs? Opening a gas station or a hamburger joint was considered a good job opportunity for a man.
Please do at least some research before you say something so stupid.
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."