Clio would like a large, well-rotted codfish for these laydeez
The latest thing in mimsy, ahistorical, 1950s cosplay: Tradwives.
Goodness knows there is a long and tiresome tradition of women, who can afford to (or making a nice little earner off it), lecturing other women on feminine submission as the One Troo Way.*
Do I have to rehearse, yet again, how synthetic a vision this is? Very little like the actual 1950s - have just been reading the recent bio of Shelagh Delaney, and boy, it was not pretty like that. (Even if you were not living in the slums of Salford.)
In fact, do we go back to the women's writing of the period (as that book points out) a great deal of it is about escaping, or trying to, from those trad definitions of A Woman's Lot (or else going quietly mad within them).
A nice and pointed contrast is supplied by an interview with Rita Tushingham, who starred as Jo in the movie of Delaney's A Taste of Honey (it could be a better interview, but look who's doing it, he has form for being ahem less than satisfactory in interviewing women of achievements.)
*Alix Strachey, 1924, from Berlin, where she was being analysed, to her husband James (they were the first English translators of Freud): It is queer how these obviously domineering & passionate women react against their emancipation so violently. What does it mean?
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