"they wanted to hire people who had fought in the war, who were then coming back from World War II and wanted jobs. I think you could understand that, and people did understand that at the time."
So, it was really affirmative action (for veterans)!
This reminds me of a comment from Richard Hamming, who worked at Bell Labs following the war:
Q: But what I sense among the young people these days is a real concern over the risk taking in a highly competitive environment. Do you have any words of wisdom on this?
A: Ed David was concerned about the general loss of nerve in our society. It does seem to me that we've gone through various periods. Coming out of the war, coming out of Los Alamos where we built the bomb, coming out of building the radars and so on, there came into the mathematics department, and the research area, a group of people with a lot of guts. They've just seen things done; they've just won a war which was fantastic. We had reasons for having courage and therefore we did a great deal. I can't arrange that situation to do it again. I cannot blame the present generation for not having it, but I agree with what you say; I just cannot attach blame to it. It doesn't seem to me they have the desire for greatness; they lack the courage to do it. But we had, because we were in a favorable circumstance to have it; we just came through a tremendously successful war. In the war we were looking very, very bad for a long while; it was a very desperate struggle as you well know. And our success, I think, gave us courage and self confidence; that's why you see, beginning in the late forties through the fifties, a tremendous productivity at the labs which was stimulated from the earlier times. Because many of us were earlier forced to learn other things - we were forced to learn the things we didn't want to learn, we were forced to have an open door - and then we could exploit those things we learned. It is true, and I can't do anything about it; I cannot blame the present generation either. It's just a fact.
My mother tells of that time. Women, who had been an industrial force during the war, were admonished that their place was in the home, and they need to get out of the work force and marry returning veterans.
Vietnam-era veterans are privileged from a non-discrimination perspective in private industry.
Veterans and service-disabled veterans are federally (and in some states) given privileges in contracting and some employment (police, civil service, etc.).
It's not privilege because it's not undeserved. They paid a price that affected their ability to compete in the workplace when they got back home. It's a form of social compensation.
Some people think males are automatically privileged, and veterans (especially back then) are and were overwhelmingly male.
I think that's a misunderstanding of the concept (that is, an idea that applies to a group does not automatically apply to every individual in that group) but there you have it.
> Affirmative action is not when you fire someone to make way for a privileged class.
What's the difference? In one case the less-privileged person had a job for a while and made some money, in the other case they never got a job in the first place.
Actively firing a qualified employee because of bigotry versus never hiring a qualified employee because of bigotry? They're both terrible, but that poster was just clarifying the terminology.
Firstly, the feminist bullshit you linked to doesn't support your point, because it lists women's occupations like "governesses" and "middle-management" - is that supposed to be blue collar?
Secondly, the period referred to in the original post was like a century later than that referred to in the feminist bullshit.
Thirdly, the feminist bullshit is trying to "put to bed" the "myths" of the nuclear household, non-working woman and the child-devoted mother. You try telling the matriarchs in my family that these are "myths".
And fourthly, even if the feminist bullshit were true, you still didn't address my point that the returning soldier 70 years ago couldn't get away with being a house husband. Hell, I doubt you could get away with that now.
I admire how you managed to squeeze so much wrongness into just two lines of comment.
Your assertion was that "In those days the men worked, and the women stayed home to take care of the children." As the link makes clear, this has historically, in the 1950s, and in the present day only been true of upper middle class families, where the man's income was sufficient to support the entire family. Everybody else, man or woman, had to work together to scrape together enough income and outsource childcare in some form or another.
You appear to be wilfully ignoring the context there, so let me quote it for you:
In the beginning of the 20th century, women were regarded as society's guardians of morality; they were seen as made finer than men and were expected to act as such. Their role was not defined as workers or money makers. Women were expected to hold on to their innocence until the right man came along so that they can start a family and inculcate that morality they were in charge of preserving. The role of men was to support the family financially.
In other words, the idealized (upper-middle-class) role was that men should be able to support their family financially, but obviously not all of them actually did.
No, you are ignoring things. Namely that the article doesn't say that this was for the upper class at all.
Let me clue you in on some basic history.
Way back when, it wasn't just the women but the whole damn family who were working, in horrible dangerous conditions down the coal mine.
Social reform led to the children being pulled out of the mine and put in school. And it became a normative thing. The children were expected to be in bloody school. And this was an excellent result.
Slower than it should have happened, women got dragged out of the mine and put in the kitchen. And it became a normative thing. Women were expected to be in the bloody kitchen. And this was an excellent result.
Finally, men increasingly got dragged out of horrid, dangerous jobs like coal mining and sewage-toshing, and more into safer, more lucrative jobs like manufacturing or trucking or even (gasp!) office jobs. With their children safely in school, and their wives safely at home, men were expected to be the bloody breadwinners. And this was an excellent result. A massive, hard-won 20th century social advancement over what came before.
Then, a bunch of Joan Collins shoulderpad-wearing idiots out of the Women's studies department decided that this advance was "Oppression" and "Male privilege", completely missing the unbalanced expectations on men.
And since the 1970s these harpies have been putting out the kind of garbage that you linked to, trying to undermine the massive social advance that was the "1950s" family norm.
Note that the fight to get women and children out of the mines and mills was all about the working classes and never about the rich, because the rich didn't need to go down the mine anyway.
So women are "harpies" if they want to have a job or career instead of being "expected to be in the bloody kitchen"? The 21st century must be a bewildering place for you.
Out of curiosity I had a look at your comment history and seriously: tone down the insults and anger will you. It doesn't help.
The harpies are the ones who claim that women would have had careers if only they weren't expected to be in the kitchen. In reality, they would have been in the proverbial coal mine if they hadn't been expected to be in the kitchen.
So, it was really affirmative action (for veterans)!