Nostalgia

Looking through a collection on old New Yorker comics, Quaker of Crescat Sententia concludes that the 50s weren't all that fabulous:

I was amazed at how many of the cartoons were about marital discord and loveless marriages, etc (generally based around the trope of shrewish wife and henpecked husband, natch). If advocates of eliminating no-fault divorce and so on to return us to the halcyon days of traditional marriage, I find myself wondering if they've really thought the whole thing through.

I had an argument once with a conservative friend once, in which she contended that rates of sexual assault would have been lower before feminism (implicitly the 1950s), because back then men were taught to properly respect, cherish, and protect women. After seeing the number of cartoons in which women were explicitly treated as sex objects -- never mind the cartoon about the humor inherent in workplace sexual harassment -- I continue to be unconvinced.

Sexual harassment! Oh God, my sides are splitting.

Seriously, it's high past time we recognize that the belief that the pre-feminist era was some halycon time of respect and chivalry between the sexes is nothing but a nostalgic illusion. It never happened. As Justice William J. Brennan once wrote in Frontiero v. Richardson:

There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of "romantic paternalism" which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

That was 1973. I sincerely doubt that he was talking about the era between 1964 and 1972.