Things generational and mad men....

A few days ago a friend posted something on Facebook about her Dad having to answer the telephone, he promptly told the caller, “hold on while I get my wife.”  He did not want to talk on the telephone.

My Dad would not answer the phone! I may have seen him answer the phone one time in 10 years, ONLY because my mother was upstairs and the only phone in that house was on the ground floor. It was the ONLY time I ever saw him talk on the phone.

I think that was what I refer to as “generational”.  In my Dad’s era answering the telephone was part of the wife’s job.  There was never any doubt that my mother was not a “housewife” but a home-maker and that was her job.  Now that could be due to the fact that my mother worked for my father in the capacity of childcare-giver and housekeeper.  Taking care of the house was her job and that did not change when they decided to marry, nor should it have changed.  But that was the era; it was generational. 

The past few weeks I have been watching the AMC series Mad Men, a program about men in the advertising business in the early 1960’s, and about life in general in that era.  I have thought a good bit about things being generational and how much the world has changed since I was a child.

My father worked, he raised hybrid carnations in greenhouses, and chrysanthemums in the fields out back.  It was similar to being a farmer, in that we lived right there, where the greenhouses were located, like many, many families of flower growers (also known as florists). My father worked outside of the home, and my mother worked inside of the home.  In that era most mothers worked in the home, taking care of everything from child rearing to cooking meals to paying the household bills.

So, much like Don Draper’s wife Betty, my friends mothers, my aunts, the majority of women in that generation were home-makers.  The father’s, like Don, worked outside the home and practically had whole other lives out in the world.

On the other side of the generational divide, I have never been solely a home-maker.  I have always had to work outside of the home, or I would not even have a home.  For as long as I have been in the workforce it seems like there are more women workers than men –based on the industries I have worked in: retail for many years and then office work for more years.

If you watch Mad Men, watch Peggy, she is the type of woman who were at the forefront of feminism without realizing that fact.  The part I find most interesting is that, while Peggy was considered to be a secretary, she was given advertising assignments for products that the men were extremely uncomfortable dealing with. It is interesting to observe the different take on such products from the uptight men versus the young woman, Peggy, who is obviously hiding the fact that she is more savvy about the world than most of her peers.

And, getting back to my parents, they were actually of different generations themselves, my father being 17 years older than my mother.  My father never flew in an airplane, my mother became rather well-traveled in the second half of her life, flying at least annually for many years.  Maybe that was generational and maybe it was just that my mother’s idea of adventure was so much broader than my father’s.

Anyway, I like to watch people and observe the generational differences.  Even those differences between myself and co-workers who are only a few years old than I am.